From The Living Church-
Theologian Walter Brueggemann tells the story of Toots Shor, the famous New York saloonkeeper who died of cancer, who said just days before he died, “I don’t want to know what I have.” That’s the impression I sometimes have of our church: We don’t want to hear that we are in danger of terminal decline.
In The Prophetic Imagination, Brueggemann writes of a “royal consciousness” as he describes the conflict between the prophets and the government of Israel that had solidified royal power in Solomon. He uses Jeremiah as an example of a faithful prophet and talks extensively about the Solomonic regime, naming it the dominant or royal consciousness.
The prophets were continually calling Israel back to faithfulness. Their job was to remind the people of their death and the end of an age. They grieved the end of the age, the death of their people, and that what was so transparent to them was not so clear to anyone else.
Brueggemann describes the royal consciousness as “numbness,” “denial,” and “self-deception.” The task of the prophet is “to cut through the numbness, to penetrate the self-deception, so that the God of endings is confessed as Lord.”
More here-
http://www.livingchurch.org/news/news-updates/2010/1/8/royally-in-denial
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