The title of Prophet has several big advantages over that of Genius. First of all, you don’t have to be smarter than everybody else to be a prophet. I am sure someone has made an IQ estimate of each Biblical prophet, but it is not among the foremost considerations.
Jesus went out of his way to tell stories based on what everybody KNEW.
A prophet does not need to know everything. No one can say whether Socrates, Plato or Aristotle was the smartest. But Socrates would have been forgotten without Plato.
Those who insist that Jesus was “a good man” don’t like to remember that that was not what he claimed. Yes, he was A prophet, but what he said is THE Savior. Back to CS Lewis, “Jesus IS God or he WAS a madman.” Modern Religion HATES that idea.
Even if the tale of the young Jesus in the Temple is literally true, it would be a toss-up whether he had more actual book learning than Paul. With Peter versus Paul it is not even close. A prophet is not made by book-learning and he is not made by his IQ.
What a prophet does is to apply simple truth to ALL realities. There are at least ten million people who are convinced they are Intellectuals and Idealists. Maybe it’s my Bible Belt background, but just a suspicion that I may be an actual PROPHET beats the hell out of any such claim for me.
It should be remembered that when Moses gave the Ten Commandments out, he did NOT say that he, Moses, was doing anything original. The actual rules came from God, not from a prophet. He was not even able to get the Tablets down to the people without breaking them the first time, which sounds a lot like Ole Bob to me.
Modern Religionists who quote Christ and Buddha have not the slightest idea where either of them was coming from. Buddha, like Christ, may have claimed to be prophet, but that was his LESSER claim. After his Enlightenment, Gautama declared that he was “a perfect Buddha.” This is far above a human being, prophet or not.
Even The Prophet only claimed, like Moses, to be God’s writer. I don’t know whether they called him The Prophet, putting him above Moses, but he made it very clear that he was A prophet.
Buddhism has no God. Buddha, one in whom the Truth dwells, is as high as that hierarchy gets. Neither Jesus nor The Prophet nor Buddha worried about whether they knew more facts or had a higher IQ than those around them. Each of them delivered what he insisted was the truth, not because they were at the head of the Smart Table in school, but because they were repeating the truth as they, and ONLY they, knew it from a higher authority.
Neither Jesus nor Buddha not The Prophet ever claimed to be ONLY prophet. Nor did every prophet say exactly what they revealed to be Final Truth.
As I say, none of the Great Religious Founders said that a prophet had to be smart or knowledgeable or, for that matter, even religious. Jews recognize Jesus as a prophet, at least publicly, and the Catholic Church declared Buddha, despite the fact that it looked at him as an adherent to that strange “religion without God” as a prophet.
But NOT as a Saint.
Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the Hellenic Trio were recognized by the Hellenic Church as prophets, but definitely not saints.
A prophet does not ORDAIN other prophets. Like the Wizard of Oz said, Intellectuals ordain Intellectuals with a piece of paper. If you have a doctorate who you are or how smart you REALLY are makes no difference whatsoever.
But there is no paper one can carry to make a person a prophet in his own time. He must apply the rigid truth as he sees it fearlessly in his own time. He has a lot of foresight, but not necessarily because he is holy. He APPLIES what I see as the simple truth rigidly and insists that others do the same:
“Prophets do not come among us to declare NEW truths. They come to remind us of the old ones.”
I am not the smartest. I am not the most informed. What I do claim is that I always try to start out right back at the simple truth and go on from there. A prophet teaches others to do the same thing.
Nothing else.
Am I a prophet? Unfortunately, like artists, real prophets are seldom recognized in their own time.
But for an old Bible Belter, it’s a title to shoot for.
Besides, what other title is there for me to shoot for? If the Intellectuals or the Idealists were to claim me as one of their own, I would be shamed.
#1 by Dave on 06/09/2010 - 10:04 am
The world is a sink for injustice. You had better be careful.
Crimes do not simply drift off into the ether. To the contrary, they sink into the very molecular fabric of the world where destiny and its reckonings are forged.
And since awareness is by necessity limited, the question becomes who is empowered and who is not. The question becomes who really carries the mantle of authority.
If the mantle of authority is authentic and if you know it to be authentic, you are seeing clearly.
And seeing clearly brings us back to the subject of reckonings, and who is in actual authority and who is not. It matters that crimes are not ignored and that people are held to account.
And the subject of holding people to account is where Mantra thinking actually leads and what makes Mantra thinking important, actually and genuinely important.
Mantra thinking is about holding people to account and the prophet (not Prophet) Robert Whitaker is a means to that end.
Somebody has got to do that job.
#2 by BGLass on 06/09/2010 - 12:47 pm
Prophecy’s the thing to shoot for, imo, also. A good prophet can sermonize on just about anything, and reveal the eternal in the most mundane things, so it can be less application of eternal principle than the place where the personal and eternal simply intersect and ARE THE SAME.
Like, when Jesus “talks in parables”—maybe they weren’t really parables TO HIM. They were just parables to the people who couldn’t understand them. Therefore, they appeared as a code or a secret.
But Jesus knew exactly what he was saying. Which is why poets and prophets get lumped together, and in books like Daniel there’s that business about “being able to read the writing on the wall,” and sealing and unsealing books. The writing on the wall is literal there, but we still use the expression, figuratively.
So, prophecy is the vision unclouded by sin and self-interest that allows cause-and-effect Reality to be seen and heard. And if you can sum things up for what they are, you most probably can see the future, too.
There’s a place where metaphor ceases, and it’s not a code or a secret, or a cryptic special symbolic way of saying— but poetry or prophecy, where the personal and eternal are simply the same. So lilies of the field ARE lilies AND eternal principle, not even so much an example of something.
Ministers imitate this all the time by using personal stories–but to illustrate politically social messages in agreement with whatever the government currently wants. But pc isn’t Eternal and pews are empty. I’ve no idea what Jesus meant by “Eternal Life,” but he may have meant that one has the eternal in the PRESENT here-and-now— if they shoot for prophecy.
He also said you’ll never be heard in your own country. The prophet bears the sins of the whole Nation—and reveals them. So, it usually means jail time.
#3 by BGLass on 06/09/2010 - 12:52 pm
So, Prophets and Poets can go on and on and on about Lilies, and not get why the others can’t get what exactly they are saying. —b/c it should be so Evident.