Sacred Matter

Material Objects, Prophetic Performance, and Sacramental Imagination

9781626005228

170 pages

Marquette University Press

Hardback $18.00

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Overview

It is common to think of prophecy as a matter of words, and biblical literature frequently portrays and presents prophecy as precisely that. Yet biblical narrative also frequently portrays prophets interacting with the material world. Within that broader nexus of interactions, this book focuses on prophetic interactions with material objects, or things. Things feature prominently in prophetic acts of power and symbolic actions. In these acts, things are more than tools or props. They exercise agency. They mediate and reveal. A focus on the mediatory, revelatory, responsive, and transformative agency of things introduces a wider set of actors and partners and thematizes the entangled agency of prophet, God, and material world.

Undergirding biblical understandings of the mediatory agency of things is a symbolic imagination that is shared between biblical prophetic literature and Christian sacramental theology. Applying the concept of performance to prophetic symbolic actions further illuminates these commonalities.

A framework for the analysis is developed that is drawn from four fields of discourse: 1) modern theology; 2) prophetic visionary discourse; 3) new materialism; and 4) performance studies and biblical studies. Braiding together these seemingly disparate threads allows us to develop an integrative approach to the mediatory and revelatory agency of things that is both interactive and relational.

The biblical book of Jeremiah is used for a case study on the revelatory capacity of things in prophetic symbolic imagination.

Finally, recent work in performance studies and biblical studies helps us perceive the function of things in prophetic symbolic actions as a relational symbolism-in-action that is also efficacious and participatory.

Author Bio

Anathea Portier-Young is Professor of Old Testament at Duke University Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina. She is an acclaimed scholar, teacher, speaker, and preacher whose groundbreaking work in the study of Jewish apocalyptic literature and biblical prophetic literature has garnered international recognition. She is the author of two award-winning books. Her influential first book, Apocalypse against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (Eerdmans, 2011), won the Manfred Lautenschläger Award for Theological Promise. Her second monograph, The Prophetic Body: Embodiment and Mediation in Biblical Prophetic Literature (Oxford University Press, 2024), has been hailed as “category-shattering,” “stunningly erudite,” and “monumental” and received the Borsch-Rast Book Prize from the Graduate Theological Union. With Gregory E. Sterling she co-edited the volume Scripture and Social Justice: Catholic and Ecumenical Essays. She is the author of more than a dozen journal articles, twenty book chapters, and eighty short essays, dictionary articles, and reviews.