League of Questioneers: On Prophecy

The focus of the League of Questioneers is to be able to construct good questions of the Bible. We're like engineers of questions: we're questioneers. We've been asking question since we got started and found that a lot of the questions orbited around prediction, prophecy, and predestination. Since then, we've been tracing Bible stories about prediction, prophets, and prophecy in roughly canonical order (the stories come in books-of-the-Bible order). It has been fascinating to see different perspectives on prophecy and understand where prediction fits in.

One thing we've learned is that prophets are prophets because the Spirit of the Lord is upon them. When God takes some of the Spirit that was on Moses and puts it on the seventy elders, they begin to prophesy. Another thing we've started to notice is that Prophecy is more about perception than prediction. Amos says that the northern kingdom of Israel will be overrun by armies from the north because they do not treat widows and orphans and the poor and sojourners among them with justice. This is not so much "seeing the future" by prophecy as seeing society the way God sees it, knowing that God does not like it, knowing God and how God will react to things that God does not like. It's like a kid who does something wrong and their sibling saying "Mo-om's gonna be maa-ad when mom gets home! You're gonna get it!" That kid is not predicting the future so much as knowing how things are and how mom is and how mom is going to react.

We meet Tuesday nights from 5:30pm to about 7:00pm. Currently we're meeting in "the manse" living room (a manse is a house owned by a congregation for their pastor to live in). The manse is right next door to the church (and across the street from the Methodist church) at 204 W. Bradley Ave. Come on in the front door. We look forward to asking good questions of the Bible with you.

--Chas