Eugene Peterson Explains How U2’s Work is Prophetic

Eugene Peterson, author of The Message, and one of my heroes because of his books on pastoring, says U2 has a prophetic voice. We often say that biblical prophets were more about "forthtelling" than "foretelling." Prophets are also poets and a bit rough around the edges. But they tell us what we need to hear. Below I have put some of my favorite quotes from the article. See the full article here.

"Is U2 a prophetic voice? I rather think so. And many of my friends think so. If they do not explicitly proclaim the Kingdom, they certainly prepare the way for that proclamation in much the same way that John the Baptist prepared the way for the kerygma of Jesus…Amos crafted poems, Jeremiah wept sermons, Isaiah alternately rebuked and comforted, Ezekiel did street theater. U2 writes songs and goes on tour, singing them."

U2 doesn’t seem to be calculated in what they are doing. It just comes out of who they are, and maybe that’s why people respond to them, because they are so unconventional in the rock music world. And then there is the social passion they have evidenced in the African world, and the effort that they go to to speak to people of influence in order to try to convince them that pain and suffering and impoverishment are the responsibility of those who are in positions of influence and power — such people are not to just make war and do public relations and win elections and develop strategies to get people to be better consumers.So I’ve used the word prophet for them. Walter Brueggemann describes prophets as uncredentialed spokesmen for God. Well, I think that fits them pretty well. They don’t have any authority in the world of faith.

I think they started out pretty confused and were kind of just messing around. I think they must be as surprised about this — that people like me are calling them prophets — as maybe as I am. But doesn’t that happen a lot? When we’re living with any kind of authenticity, we don’t know what we are doing until, suddenly, moments come of clarification — catalytic moments — and we see suddenly this is what I am, this is what I’m doing. But in the spiritual life, calculation doesn’t work.

I don’t have a whole lot of respect for popular culture — too much of it seems to me to be reductive, escapist, and trivial. But none of those adjectives fit Bono and U2 as far as I know.

There’s something very refreshing about U2. It’s honest music. There’s an honesty and that’s why I think the word prophetic is accurate for them. They are not saying things that people want to hear to make them escape from their ordinary lives. They push us back into the conditions in which we have to live.