Prophecy as a genre of revelation: Synergisms of inspiration and imagination in the book of Isaiah

This essay attempts to reconceptualize prophecy in the wake of the recent theological turn in phenomenology. It stresses how prophecy continues and intensifies the process of actualizing revelation in present acts of interpretation that mythic and historical imagination in their different ways inaugurate in biblical tradition. Revelation in this sense turns on the present dimension of the interpreters' lived experience, in which the event of revelation occurs - or rather recurs - as fully actual in new cultural contexts and existential situations. The role of poetic language turns out to be key for this paradoxically original experience of revelation as prophecy.