Strategic prophecy, encounter, and the hope for a shared life 7 views

This dissertation identifies and assesses "strategic prophecy,” which it describes as a problematic, uniquely modern way of understanding “the prophetic” as primarily a rhetoric and only secondarily and optionally as mediation. Through a series of historical portraits, as well as more sustained engagement with the American jeremiad (especially through Sacvan Bercovitch and Cathleen Kaveny) and the propheticism of the Argentine Movimiento de Sacerdotes para el Tercer Mundo (1967-1975), this dissertation argues that strategic prophecy is problematic both on strictly secular, political grounds, as well as on the basis of Christian theological commitments. On political grounds, strategic prophecy is the mystification of the human word, which entails obscuring that word’s human origin and, therefore, withdrawing it from contestation. It thus contributes, often ironically, to the naturalization and reinforcement of the human consensus that undergirds the prophetic word (even in the form of critique). Theologically, strategic prophecy entails the garbing of one’s own word in the rhetoric of divine authority, performing at best an indifference to any Divine Word. Thus, strategic prophecy generates a cascade of alienations that make difficult both life together and before God. In dialogue with feminist philosopher Margaret Urban Walker and the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, this dissertation proposes instead a recovery of a mediatory account of prophecy that reconceptualizes it, not as the divinization of the human word, but as the condescension of the Divine Word to become human, and to accompany humanity in its pursuit of a life together before God and across difference.

PHD (Doctor of Philosophy)

prophecy and propheticism; American jeremiad; Movimiento de Sacerdotes para el Tercer Mundo; Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Margaret Urban Walker; Cathleen Kaveny; Walter Brueggemann; Sacvan Bercovitch

English

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2026-07-31