The Temptation of the Jeremiad

A jeremiad is a long literary work, usually in prose, but sometimes in verse, in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective, and always contains a prophecy of society's imminent downfall.

The Jericho March represented a different kind of Christian scandal—fanatical Christian nationalism. Vischer and Jethani argued that the American church needed to hear less from popular celebrities and more from courageous prophetic voices, from people who boldly seek justice and call us to turn, individually and institutionally, from sin.

The Bible is replete with the scathing indictments of those who wept over oppression. Recall Jeremiah: “Woe to him who builds his palace by unrighteousness, his upper rooms by injustice, making his own people work for nothing, not paying them for their labor” (Jeremiah 22:13); and Amos, decrying those who “trample on the heads of the poor as on the

Jesus’ language as referring to the end of the world per se,152 we may regard these warnings as threatening the end of the present nation of Israel, if they do not repent. In the sad, noble, and utterly Jewish tradition of Elijah, Jeremiah and John the Baptist, Jesus announced the coming judgment of Israel’s covenant god on his people, a judgment c

In a much more desperate time and in a much more dangerous place, the prophet Jeremiah told the people of Israel, “Seek the peace of the city where I have exiled you. Pray to the Lord for that city, because when it has peace and prosperity, you will have peace and prosperity.” Yet now a Christian movement seeks conflict. It traffics in lies. It pur

The story of judgment and vindication which Jesus told is very much like the story told by the prophet Jeremiah, invoking the categories of cosmic disaster in order to invest the coming socio-political disaster with its full theological significance.11 The ‘normal’ way of reading these passages within the Christian tradition has been to see them as