A prophet is a voice, a man that becomes a word, whose message has the power to transform, reveal, destroy, and ultimately, re-imagine our perception of just who we are and why we are here. Arnold writes, the prophets were "instruments a revelation through which God discloses his will to the people" [Arnold one hundred forty seven]. They were "gifted" with the power to conceive of and then express a point of view, an alternative consciousness in contrast to the ideologies and cultural beliefs dominant within human society [Arnold one hundred forty seven]. The prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible provide us with a window into the realm of divine inspiration. They narrate the course of human history, becoming actively engaged in the repeating cycles of creation, destruction, redemption and rebirth that define our conscious experience of reality. The prophetic imagination describes a process of creation and transformation that intends to open the minds and hearts of its readers to the "creative power of the human consciousness" [Martz, eight].
[...] Jeremiah's role as a prophet was to challenge his readers, to engage them in conversation with the divine imagination to inspire and then create the possibility for change and transformation. It is only through this process of translation and interpretation that we realize a greater awareness not only of ourselves but of the interdependent and dynamic relationship between the author and the reader, the creator and the created. It is through conversation that a story realizes its presence; it is through discourse, the passion and tension of two minds coming together in a tangled mass of words, ideas, and emotions that meaning is created, destroyed, and re-imagined over and over again. [...]
[...] When we read and interpret a work, we are in actuality reading ourselves: speak of the meaning of the work is to tell a story of reading” [pmb sixty three]. Words provide us with a window through which we can see ourselves seeing, or rather, read ourselves reading, constructing the truths that order our experience of reality one sign at a time. It is through reading then that meaning is constructed; and so, it is then by reading that pre- established structures of meaning and knowledge can be deconstructed to allow for new possibilities and interpretations. [...]
[...] The fire of Jeremiah's words is a metaphor for both destruction and creation; they destroy in order to purify, creating a new covenant and a new beginning for Israel. The book of Jeremiah then forces us to turn our eyes inward in self-reflection, to question accepted truths, and to collapse traditional structures of knowledge we read and write through. From the opening lines, the book of Jeremiah intends to deconstruct and undermine our understanding of identity, drawing us into conversation with the forces of destruction and creation that define human existence. [...]
[...] Reading a Reader: An Introduction to Postmodern Biblical Criticism reading is intertextual, an endless juxtaposition and interchange of texts, a kind of translation” [ P.M.B. one-twenty-nine]. According to postmodern thought, language is the foundation human reality. Our world is ordered by a series of discourses, of signs and metaphors, through which we translate our experiences into communicable and thus knowable forms and mediums. The meaning which we ascribe to these forms, however, is not absolute. It is, rather, created in an unceasing process of translation drawn through the man-imagined scales of binary opposition. [...]
[...] Borne from the musings of philosophers and theorists, including Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Bakhtin and Kristeva to name a few, these thoughts on self and culture challenge traditional ways of reading to open our minds to new possibilities and perspectives. In this way, the theorists of postmodern studies force us to question, challenge and ultimately, conceive of new ways of both seeing and being in the world. Postmodern biblical studies deconstruct, provoke, and create. It shifts our focus back to ourselves, exploring how meaning is constructed to then create new ways of seeing and being in the world. [...]
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