Sorry, for those who don’t know it’s one of the Veggie-songs from The Jonah Movie from which my kids like to sing. Well, they say “Jonah” instead of “Bono.” And it includes the classic echo line, “Ah-doodily-doo…”
Anyway, there’s a discussion on about whether or not Bono/U2 is a prophet/prophetic voice. Seems Eugene Petersen said something to this effect, and from the discussion just linked comes this gem:
So I’ve used the word prophet for them. Walter Brueggemann describes prophets as “uncredentialed spokesmen for God.â€? Well, I think that fits them pretty well. They don’t have any authority in the world of faith.
Right — works for me. I also recall that back in the 80’s there was a professor in a Baptist college somewhere who contended to his classes that Don MacLean was a prophetic voice with his song American Pie. This one I would agree with, per The Annotated American Pie, the definitive online interpretation of the song. Compared with what I just describes as the definitive, the prof in question had a different interpretation of the lines,
And the three men I admire most
The Father Son and Holy Ghost
They caught the last train for the coast
He contended that this is a metaphor for the fact that the church had stopped providing culturally relevant answers… which may be true but probably isn’t what MacLean was getting at. In this sense, the fact that the meaning of the message is in dispute probably clinches it as being a prophetic message ;^)
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