The Case for the Prophetic Office

When we think of a prophet, we might well imagine a bearded and eccentric biblical seer delivering God’s judgment on his people. But the prophetic office did not end with the sealing of the biblical canon. Thomas Aquinas said that God would always raise up new prophets for the reform of the Church. Inspired by the biblical prophets, figures from Joan of Arc to Martin Luther King have claimed to deliver a divine message of judgment on their contemporaries. If not truly prophets, these courageous naysayers could be said to exercise a prophetic office.

The volcanic moral passions that periodically upend our politics usually stem from some prophetic condemnation. We may get the language of our politics from the ancient Greeks and Romans—as reflected in words such as democracy, tyranny, citizen, demagogue, constitution, and even politics. But we get our moral crusades—against slavery, against alcohol, against Jim Crow, against abortion—from the example of the biblical prophets. No one doubts that Savonarola, Joseph Smith, and other self-proclaimed prophets changed history, we just don’t have good theories about how they did so.

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