Recovering the Prophetic Voice for Today

BooksOPTalks
Written By Open Plaza

Dr. Jean-Pierre M. Ruiz talks to Dr. M. Daniel Carroll Rodas about his new book The Lord Roars

Tomb of the Prophets, believed to be the burial place of Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, the last three Hebrew Bible prophets. Jerusalem, Israel, 2009. Photo: Corinna Hann, William & Mary 

 
 

Can the biblical prophets speak into our world today? In The Lord Roars: Recovering the Prophetic Voice for Today (Baker Publishing Group, 2022), Old Testament ethicist Dr. M. Daniel Carroll Rodas demonstrates that learning from the prophets can make us better prepared for Christian witness.

In this episode of OP Talks, Dr. Jean-Pierre M. Ruiz—a Catholic—talks to Dr. Carroll—an evangelical—about the role of prophets in Christianity. A self described “Old Testament guy,” Dr. Carroll Rodas explores prophets as “ethical resources,” hoping that the book serve as a guide to the ethical material of Old Testament prophetic literature. The Lord’s Roar highlights key ethical concerns of the three prophets most associated with social critique—Amos, Isaiah, and Micah—showing their relevance for those who wish to speak with a prophetic voice today.

“The Old Testament prophets are powerful literature,” says Dr. Carroll Rodas. He wrote the book in appreciation of “the punch of what [prophets] are saying, [of which] you need to get at the rhetoric… and talk about their ethical concerns, which are kind of timeless.” This conversation includes introducing the prophetic voice to readers as literature. "A lot of the Old Testament prophets are poetry,” he says. “No one even reads poetry anymore. So they don’t know what to do with it.” 

 

“The Lord Roars has helped me see how the prophetic imagination in the canonical biblical text can orient my motivations to see theologically and work ethically toward a better world. From a hermeneutic of trust, Carroll invites the reader to carefully consider what the word of God offers as a witness to a more just and less violent world conceived through theo-poetic justice. Manifestly, Carroll's proposal challenges today's Westernized Christian visions of a world trapped in left-wing and right-wing political ideologies."

Oscar García-Johnson
Associate Professor of Theology and Latinx Studies; Chief of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion;
Fuller Theological Seminary

The Lord Roars: Recovering the Prophetic Voice for Today by M. Daniel Carroll Rodas (Baker Publishing, 2022)

Open Plaza Exclusive Excerpt
The Lord Roars—“Prophetic Critique: Deconstructing the Unacceptable” (Ch. 2) and “‘Let Justice Roll Down’: Worship and Social Responsibility” (Ch. 3).

 
 
Featured
Jean-Pierre Ruiz

Dr. Jean-Pierre M. Ruiz is Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow in Theology and Religious Studies in St. John's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He holds STL and STD degrees in Biblical Studies, and an STB in Theology, all from Pontifical Gregorian University. A Past-President of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS), Dr. Ruiz maintains an active program of research in biblical studies. His particular interests are in the prophetic and apocalyptic literature, and with a special focus on the relevance of the Bible to contemporary concerns regarding immigrants and refugees. This was the focus of his book, Readings from the Edges: The Bible and People on the Move (Orbis Books, 2011), the winner of a Catholic Press Association Award. A contributor to the New Oxford Annotated Bible and to the Anselm Academic Study Bible, he is widely recognized as an authority on the Apocalypse of John. Dr. Ruiz has served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Hispanic / Latino Theology and as associate editor of the Catholic Biblical Quarterly. He is a consultant on teaching and learning with the Lilly Endowment-funded Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion. Dr. Ruiz serves on the Religion and Foreign Policy Working Group of the U.S. Department of State, and he was a participant in the nationally broadcast Bill Moyers series, Genesis: A Living Conversation.

Featured
Daniel Carroll Rodas

Dr. M. Daniel Carroll Rodas is the Blanchard Professor of Old Testament at the Wheaton College Graduate School. He holds a ThM from Dallas Theological Seminary and a PhD from the University of Sheffield, both degrees in Old Testament. Dr. Carroll Rodas is half-Guatemalan (his mother was Guatemalan) and was raised bilingual and bicultural. In his youth he spent many summers in Guatemala and later taught many years at El Seminario Teológico Centroamericano in Guatemala City. He has taught Old Testament at Denver Seminary, where he founded a Spanish-language lay training program. At Wheaton, he hopes to model a commitment to connecting careful biblical scholarship with the mission of the church as it engages today’s complex realities. Dr. Carroll Rodas is the author of The Lord Roars: Recovering the Prophetic Voice for Today (Baker Publishing Group, 2022), The Bible and Borders: Hearing God's Word on Immigration (Brazos Press, 2020), and The Book of Amos (New International Commentary on the Old Testament) (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020).

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