LESSON16

PROPHETIC IMAGINATION

S CRIPTURE

“Moses led the people out of the camp to meet with God, and they stood at the foot of the mountain. Mount Sinai was covered with smoke, because the Lord descended on it in fire. The smoke billowed up from it like smoke from a furnace, and the whole mountain trembled violently, and the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder. Then Moses spoke and the voice of God answered him.”

~ Exodus 19:17–19

Prayer Points

J OY

“You became imitators of us and of the Lord; in spite of severe suffering, you welcomed the message with the joy given by the Holy Spirit.”

~ 1 Thessalonians 1:6

Walter Brueggemann, in his book The Prophetic Imagination, traces the lines from the radical vision of Moses to the solidification of royal power in Solomon to the prophetic critique of that power with a new vision of freedom in the prophets. Here he traces the broad sweep from Exodus to Kings to Jeremiah to Jesus. He highlights that the prophetic vision not only embraces the ordinary world of the people but creates an energy and amazement (which he calls “imagination”) based on the new thing that God is doing. Bruggemann’s position is that the kingship in Israel is a step backward from the Mosaic “revolution” and that the prophets and then later Jesus called Israel away from kingship back to the original vision of Moses, the prophetic imagination. Bruggemann writes “to address the issue of a truth greatly reduced requires us to be poets that speak against a prose world. . . . By prose, I refer to a world that is organized in settled formulae. . . . By poetry, I mean language that moves, that jumps at the right moment, that breaks open old worlds with surprise, abrasion, and pace. Poetic speech is the only proclamation worth doing in a situation of reductionism.”1

Bruggemann has his faults, but I think he says a few things that the 21st century evangelical community — especially my own community, the home school community — should incorporate into their vision. For one thing, we must maintain a prophetic, hopeful vision in a world that is embracing materialism and hopelessness. We must, at the same time, affirm objective truth in a post-modern world that is preaching subjectivity. We must not be post-modern hippies, wandering around spreading alternative communities, subversive narratives, and anti-secular sermons. Rather, as one social critic explains, “The Old Testament prophets came to announce to Israel their sin before God by going after other gods, playing the harlot to God-their-husband, revealing their liturgical and corruptions, and laying before them their sins. They were God’s covenantal lawyers bringing to bear upon Israel the lawsuit of the covenant.”2 Our social criticism must be purposeful and constructive, not destructive. For example, we disagree with post-modern morality that argues that morality should be based in one’s own subjective belief system, as long as that belief structure is sincerely held and harms no one. Our biblical, prophetic message must be that that is hog wash. Our feelings, our notions, of what is right are irrelevant unless it lines up with the Word of God.

Finally, basking in the bright light of biblical truth, we must show post-modern culture that, in Christ, and in Christ alone, there is hope and joy and a prophetic imagination.

E NGLISH

Punctuation

Punctuate these sentences as needed.

  1. England in the eleventh century was conquered by the normans.
  2. Amid the angry yells of the spectators he died.
  3. For the sake of emphasis a word or a phrase may be placed out of its natural order.
  4. In The Pickwick Papers the conversation of Sam Weller is spiced with wit.
  5. New York on the contrary abounds in men of wealth.
  6. It has come down by uninterrupted tradition from the earliest times to the present day.

Memorize

High-scoring ACT essays inevitably exhibit some quotes from notable sources. Memorize the following quotes so that you can use them on the ACT.3

Speak less than thou knowest. — Shakespeare

But for a line, be that sublime —

Not failure, but low aim, is crime.

— Lowell

Ascend the mountain! Breast the gale!

Look upward, onward—never fear!

He who has a thousand friends

Has not a friend to spare;

And he who has one enemy

Will meet him everywhere.

— Omar Khayyam

M ATH

Quadratic Equations

Several ACT math questions test whether you are able to factor. Some of the expressions you should be able to factor are:

w2 + aw = w(w + a) or w2 + wy = w(w + y)

w2 - 1 = (w + 1)(w - 1) or w2 - y2 = (w + y)(w - y)

w2 + 2w + 1 = (w + 1)(w + 1) = (w + 1)2

w2 - 3w - 4 = (w - 4)(w + 1)

What is the solution set of the quadratic equation 2a2 + 7a - 4 = 0?

  1. (-2,1)
  2. (-4,0.5)
  3. (-0.5, 4)
  4. (-6,1)
  5. (-1,8)
R EADING

Reading for Detail

The real trouble with most of the attempts that teachers and parents make, to teach children a vital relation to books, is that they do not believe in the books and that they do not believe in the children.

It is almost impossible to find a child who, in one direction or another, the first few years of his life, is not creative. It is almost impossible to find a parent or a teacher who does not discourage this creativeness. The discouragement begins in a small way, at first, in the average family, but as the more creative a child becomes the more inconvenient he is, as a general rule, every time a boy is caught being creative, something has to be done to him about it.

It is a part of the nature of creativeness that it involves being creative a large part of the time in the wrong direction. Half-proud and half-stupefied parents, failing to see that the mischief in a boy is the entire basis of his education, the mainspring of his life, not being able to break the mainspring themselves, frequently hire teachers to help them. The teacher who can break a mainspring first and keep it from getting mended, is often the most esteemed in the community. Those who have broken the most, “secure results.” The spectacle of the mechanical, barren, conventional society so common in the present day to all who love their kind is a sign there is no withstanding. It is a spectacle we can only stand and watch — some of us — the huge, dreary kinetoscope of it, grinding its cogs and wheels, and swinging its weary faces past our eyes. The most common sight in it and the one that hurts the hardest, is the boy who could be made into a man out of the parts of him that his parents and teachers are trying to throw away. The faults of the average child, as things are going just now, would be the making of him, if he could be placed in seeing hands. It may not be possible to educate a boy by using what has been left out of him, but it is more than possible to begin his education by using what ought to have been left out of him. So long as parents and teachers are either too dull or too busy to experiment with mischief, to be willing to pay for a child’s originality what originality costs, only the most hopeless children can be expected to amount to anything. If we fail to see that originality is worth paying for, that the risk involved in a child’s not being creative is infinitely more serious than the risk involved in his being creative in the wrong direction, there is little either for us or for our children to hope for, as the years go on, except to grow duller together. We do not like this growing duller together very well, perhaps, but we have the feeling at least that we have been educated, and when our children become at last as little interested in the workings of their minds, as parents and teachers are in theirs, we have the feeling that they also have been educated. We are not unwilling to admit, in a somewhat useless, kindly, generalizing fashion, that vital and beautiful children delight in things, in proportion as they discover them, or are allowed to make them up, but we do not propose in the meantime to have our own children any more vital and beautiful than we can help. In four or five years they discover that a home is a place where the more one thinks of things, the more unhappy he is. In four or five years more they learn that a school is a place where children are expected not to use their brains while they are being cultivated. As long as he is at his mother’s breast the typical American child finds that he is admired for thinking of things. When he runs around the house he finds gradually that he is admired very much less for thinking of things. At school he is disciplined for it.

In a library, if he has an uncommonly active mind, and takes the liberty of being as alive there, as he is outdoors, if he roams through the books, vaults over their fences, climbs up their mountains, and eats of their fruit, and dreams by their streams, or is caught camping out in their woods, he is made an example of. He is treated as a tramp and an idler, and if he cannot be held down with a dictionary he is looked upon as not worth educating. If his parents decide he shall be educated anyway, dead or alive, or in spite of his being alive, the more he is educated the more he wonders why he was born and the more his teachers from behind their dictionaries, and the other boys from underneath their dictionaries, wonder why he was born. While it may be a general principle that the longer a boy wonders why he was born in conditions like these, and the longer his teachers and parents wonder, the more there is of him, it may be observed that a general principle is not of very much comfort to the boy while the process of wondering is going on. There seems to be no escape from the process, and if, while he is being educated, he is not allowed to use himself, he can hardly be blamed for spending a good deal of his time in wondering why he is not someone else. In a half-seeing, half-blinded fashion he struggles on. If he is obstinate enough, he manages to struggle through with his eyes shut. Sometimes he belongs to a higher kind, and opens his eyes and struggles.4 (Gerald Lee, The Lost Art of Reading).

The best title of this passage would be:

  1. Childhood Reading Habits.
  2. On Wondering Why One Was Born
  3. Childhood Depression
  4. Childhood Imagination and Reading

“It is a part of the nature of creativeness that it involves being creative a large part of the time in the wrong direction” means:

  1. Creative children are often confused.
  2. Creativeness involves much cognitive dissonance.
  3. Creative children are necessarily lazy.
  4. Creativity may appear, for a season, as aberrant behavior.
S CIENCE

Science Data

What can you conclude from the data below?

pg-95.ai

  1. Fall time increases as height increases.
  2. Fall time decreases as height increases.
  3. Fall time decreases as height decreases.
  4. This object falls about .25 meters every .5 seconds

  1. I
  2. II
  3. III
  4. IV
  5. I, II, IV
  6. None
  7. All

Test-Taking

Insight

Test Anxiety

Test anxiety is reduced in several ways.

• Memorize Scripture and pray Scripture during the test.

• Don’t cram the night before. The best thing to do the night before the ACT exam is to sleep!

• Try to maintain a positive attitude while preparing for the test and during the test.

• Exercising for a few days before the test will help reduce stress.

• Arrive at the test site early so you won’t have to worry about being late.

• Memorize the directions before the test.

• Be cognizant of the test numbers through the test so that you have a good idea how to pace yourself.

• Don’t worry about how fast other people finish their test; just concentrate on your own test.

• If you don’t know a question skip it for the time being (come back to it later if you have time), and remember that you don’t have to always get every question right to do well on the test.

V OCABULARY

The Sound and the Fury5

William Faulkner

The Sound and the Fury is the story of the fall of the Compson family, a wealthy Jackson, Mississippi, family in the early 1900s. The novel is divided into four sections, each told by a different character. The three Compson sons, Benjy, Quentin, and Jason Compson, and the family’s black servant, Dilsey Gibson, each have their own section in which they tell their collective story.

Suggested Vocabulary Words

  1. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn’t hear. (June 2, 1910)
  2. From then on until he had you completely subjugated he was always in or out of your room, ubiquitous and garrulous, though his manner gradually moved northward as his raiment improved, until at last when he had bled you until you began to learn better he was calling you Quentin or whatever. (June 2, 1910)
  3. . . . and I suppose that with all his petty chicanery and hypocrisy he stank no higher in heaven’s nostrils than any other. (June 2, 1910)
  4. Suddenly I held out my hand and we shook, he gravely, from the pompous height of his municipal and military dream. (June 2, 1910)
  5. . . . where only he and the gull, the one terrifically motionless, the other in a steady and measured pull and recover that partook of inertia itself. . . . (April 8, 1928)
  6. . . . all I had felt suffered without visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed. . . . (April 8, 1928)
  7. The air brightened, the running shadow patches were not the obverse, and it seemed to him that the fact the day was cleaning was another cunning stoke on the part of the foe. (April 8, 1928)
  8. . . . and suddenly with an old premonition he clapped the brakes and stopped and sat perfectly still. . . . For a moment Benjy sat in an utter hiatus. (April 8, 1928)
W RITING

Writing Description

Close your eyes. Imagine that you are traveling on a road in a forest. What do you see?

Write down images evoked by the following.

Terror Kindness Hope

“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.”6

— William Faulkner

Go to Answers Sheet