Scripture

When I told a Westminster political editor that my novel NUNC! was about the prophet Simeon and the Nunc Dimittis, he said: ‘Who? The what?’ I reminded him that the Nunc was one of the great canticles along with the Magnificat, Te Deum, etc. More blank looks. It is startling how scriptural knowledge has faded. Thirty years ago an understanding of Church worship was one of the things that bound us. Today we are expected to know about celebrities. Here the blank looks are mine. One day last week MailOnline had headlines about Sydney Sweeney, Blake Lively, Gigi Hadid, J.B. Gill, Allie Teilz and Young Scooter, ‘known for collaborations with Future and Gucci Mane’. Not known by me, he isn’t. I haven’t a clue what genders they are, even.

For over half a century, we’ve been misunderstanding Martin Luther King. Our secular minds are programmed to see him as a civil rights activist, but as another MLK Day comes and goes, it is time to see King as he saw himself: as a priest and a prophet. Today, we tend to understand prophecy as focused on prediction. The nature of biblical prophecy and the word’s classical origins have been forgotten. Pro, the prefix of the Greek word prophetes means ‘fore’, but also ‘forth’. To be a prophet is to ‘fore-tell’ but equally to ‘forth-tell’ – to be a divinely-inspired forecaster or to preach moral, spiritual and political messages. King saw his role as the latter.