Prophesize!

Prophesizing is utterly different from prediction. It is itself an effort to induce a right decision, or correct a wrong one. Prophecy is a form of struggle for the future, in order to avoid what is otherwise inevitable.

The moral demands of prophets are made first upon themselves; their credal expressions are at once bodily expressions. This union of credal and bodily motifs is in accord with the Hebrew position that soul has no existence apart from body. There are no disembodied changes conceivable to these vanguard figures. The penetration of God's new word meant that the entire structure of the body was affected. Ezekiel's visions of God were literally hair-raising (Ezekiel 8:3).

Transformative theories are total; there is no immaterial spirit, no dualism, no disembodiment as in the Greek and Christian traditions of transformations. The spirit is a force capable of acting through any of its parts. It is in this sense that the soul is "in the flesh" and that, equally, "the flesh stamps the whole of character of the soul." Moral change, for the first vanguard, is also bodily change. Corruption is never merely spiritual. "The whole head is sick / and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even to the head, / there is no soundness in it" (Isaiah 1:5-6). The Psalms regularly sing this unity of moral and biological properties (Psalms 63:1; 84:3).

- Philip Rieff, Charisma: The Gift of Grace and How It Has Been Taken Away From Us, 2007