Is Silence Violence? Or, Knowing When (Not) to Shut Up [4 of 5]

The Prophetic Word

Prophecy is another much-maligned word in Christian parlance that bears on our evaluation of the slogan silence is violence. Reductionism, charlatanry, and spiritualistic naïveté have fueled the term’s misfortune.

Reductionism refers to the impoverishment of the church’s reading of biblical prophecy. Accordingly, it becomes little more than predictions of historical events. Throughout Christian history, such predictions have discarded Jesus’s own modesty about times and events (Mark 13:32; cf. Acts 1:7). Instead, they have erroneously interpreted prophecies over and over, promising the correspondence of historical events (especially wars and political upheavals) and prophetic statements. This comedy (tragedy?) of errors merits suspicion.

Charlatanry refers to the deceitfulness of so-called Christian preachers who have duped believers in the name of prophecy. It can be a fuzzy line between reductionism and charlatanry when the preachers, authors, and televangelists who scam the church are in the business of peddling the emotional freight that reductionism typically bears. But there is a difference between reductionism and charlatanry, and the tawdry record of deceit is a distinct justification for skepticism about prophecy. Those who claim to speak for God in order to serve their own ends are a disgrace as old as the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament.

Spiritualistic naïveté refers to the tendency that underlies the church’s failure to resist reductionism and charlatanry. I might be accused of blaming the victim, but I believe the church’s responsibility for vigilance, discernment, and sober judgment is real. The lust to possess special knowledge about prophetic happenings is a rot in the body of Christ. The lust for spiritual superiority that false prophets prey on is a terrible vulnerability. It is contrary to “the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of [the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory]” (Eph 1:17).

But make no mistake: prophecy is real. Both its biblical record and its current manifestations inform our decisions about whether and when to speak and what to say.

From a biblical perspective, prophecy especially bears witness to the faith of God’s people amid injustice. The weight of the prophetic condemnation of injustice falls primarily on God’s people, with an eye on others only secondarily. There is predictive prophecy in Scripture, though prediction is hardly the essential thrust of the prophetic word, and it is mostly conditional (dependent on the response of hearers). Biblical prophecy is also, as a matter of literary genre, poetic. It is almost entirely delivered in the form of beautiful, soaring rhetoric and figurative language befitting the human representation of divine speech. And biblical prophecy is often abrasive. It confronts, cajoles, and condemns.

Decisions about which biblical prophecies are conditional and which are figurative are matters of interpretation. Reductionism offers a tidy response to these difficulties, but it cannot deny its record of consistent misunderstanding. Interpretive naïveté in the service of spiritualistic fervor is another easy response, but it cannot answer the hard questions that persist, not least the church’s failures to heed the prophetic call to justice in its pursuit of predictive fulfillment.

So what can we say? What should we say?

The phenomenon of biblical prophecy teaches us that these questions have massive stakes, not only because false prophecy has dire consequences but because the divine word can be mediated through human speech. The responsibility this fact entails is terrible to contemplate. When it comes to prophecy, to say that human speech is powerful is an understatement of vast proportions.

But human speech on its own is powerful, and the ability to wield this power confuses the decision about entering the fray. Captivating rhetoric, compelling eloquence, engaging authenticity—such capacities create the impression that we are ultimately asking about the use of our own power. From this perspective, the moral calculus of speech, like so much in postmodernity, is reduced to the exercise of power. On this account, silence is violence because it is complicity with the powers that be.

From a Christian perspective, however, prophecy is an exercise of power beyond the speaker’s own. And while it’s obvious that the synergy of the divine word and the human voice involves the speaker’s own power, the point is that the biblical notion of prophecy entails a human act of submission. This submission can mean silence—the refusal to speak merely in our own strength.

Certainly, the divine word is more powerful than human speech. But what is power? What is the divine word? And what does it matter if we are willing to claim the power of that word for our own?

For Christians, all of these questions should be answered with our gaze fixed on Jesus. The power of God revealed in Jesus manifests the coming of the kingdom of God through his teaching, healing, judgment, and resurrection (e.g., Mark 6:2; 9:1: 13:26). The divine word is the message that comes from God, ultimately the message about the cross of Christ, which is itself the power of God (see 1 Cor 1:18; Rom 1:16). Jesus’s cruciform exercise of power in word and deed provides a stark contrast with and an indispensable criterion for assessing human speech.

Notably, appeals to biblical prophecy—speaking again what God has already said—are a kind of prophecy that further confuses the matter. The illusion that merely repeating the divine word recorded in Scripture sufficiently justifies the decision to speak is compelling. When is it not right to declare what God has said about, say, justice for the oppressed?

But the same problems plague this handling of the prophetic message as every other variety of simplistic biblicism. Interpretation is inevitable, and it includes the process of understanding the relationship between the past and the present. Furthermore, the mere repetition of biblical texts treats Scripture as a dead word when, in reality, the living God speaks to the church actively through her engagement with Scripture. Discerning the word of God involves an ongoing attentiveness to the Holy Spirit who leads the church into contextual obedience.

At issue fundamentally are the stakes of speaking. A couple rise to the top: transformation and witness. Whether our decision to enter the fray is really prophetic can be measured against its coherence with the transformative purposes of God in our time and place and the faithfulness of our witness to those purposes. Note that I am not saying the “effectiveness” of our speech (or silence) is at stake. Many prophets spoke faithfully in keeping with God’s purposes in their contexts but were met with indifference or hostility.

A third martyr exemplifies speaking the prophetic word in a contemporary context: Martin Luther King Jr. MLK spoke prophetically in a true sense, without reductionism, charlatanry, or an appeal to spiritualistic naïveté. His human speech combined with the divine word in sermons that bore faithful witness to the Spirit’s liberating work in twentieth-century America.

But doesn’t King’s example definitively answer the question of whether silence is violence? He has certainly been quoted endlessly to that effect in recent years. A quick search for “MLK quotes about speaking up” yields results like these (forgive the lack of references; no one online seems to think they’re necessary):

“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”

“There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”

Superficially, that settles it, if you take King’s words as gospel. And I am affirming that his preaching reflected the word of God. But on a deeper level, these quotations, heard in the context of King’s life and martyrdom, point to something far more powerful than merely speaking up: solidarity. More specifically, solidarity born of understanding goodness, friendship, things that matter, and loyalty. This understanding comes to expression through words—at times. But “silence” in King’s aphorisms stands for much more than a failure to speak. He’s not claiming everyone should play his role as a prophetic mouthpiece. He is calling his audience—and the White church is surely in his crosshairs—to stand, march, struggle, and suffer for an understanding of goodness, friendship, things that matter, and loyalty according to the gospel. This understanding of justice articulated in prophetic speech embodied in prophetic action is Christian solidarity.

The Christian martyr Martin Luther King Jr. cannot be made a shill for secular activism, much less bloodless position-taking. To divorce his preaching from his faith in Jesus Christ for the sake of “civil rights” or “social justice” strips it of prophetic force. Those who do not share his faith will surely be content with this result because their justice needs only the power of human speech. But for Christians, such a divorce removes the essential criteria by which to judge when and how to respond in word and deed—and what price to pay for that decision.