Seeing the Later Prophets in Continuity with the Earlier

"In this week's prophets, there is a recognizable shift from pessimism to hope. Based on your readings, how does this shift take place? What theological justification exists for it in the texts themselves? By extension, when is hope justified today? By this I don't mean merely hope for an eternal reward/resolution of the problem, but hope in the present world. How do we articulate a theology of hope for today's church and world?"

In my mind, these later prophets are still doing the same work of the earlier prophets: interpreting their recent history and present in light of Israel’s identity as God’s chosen people. They are trying to look at what’s happening and find God there. The situation has changed and so the results of this work change with it. The exile had been interpreted by the earlier prophets as Israel’s punishment, and so the later prophets naturally interpret the return as forgiveness and restoration (in both cases this is true even if they are predicting exile or return).

It is important that not all the people interpreted these events in the same way. If, as Collins says, there were plenty of people who weren’t eager to return and rebuild the city or the temple, then it seems that hope was lacking among the people. This is in contrast to those before the exile who suffered from what might be called an overabundance of hope. In any case the main point I want to get at here is that these prophets must have meditated long and hard on a situation that didn’t appear hopeful. And I think that they wrestled hope out of the very narratives of judgment that the earlier prophets had uttered.

It seems to me that these prophets took the oracles of the earlier prophets as a sign that God was not finished with Israel. The additions we saw to earlier prophets are in line with what we see in the later prophets. The move to hope is theologically justified by their meditation on judgment and seemingly hopeless situations: they determined that judgment was a sign of God’s care and grace, and that such punishment was part of God’s plan to keep the covenant.

The question of when hope is justified today is a challenging one. In a sense, we can always be hopeful, since God’s ultimate aim involves our good. But we can also expect that along the way, grace will enter our lives in unexpected and painful ways. More specifically, we can be hopeful that God will not stand for idolatry, greed, and oppression. In that sense we can always preach hope to the oppressed, to the faithful, and to those who do justice to the poor.