Embracing the Prophetic Moment with Prof. Gregory Mobley

by Kathy Czepiel

 “Strange things have happened of late and are still happening. Some of these tend to dim the luster of the American name, and chill the hopes once entertained for the cause of American liberty,” Frederick Douglass told Washington, DC’s Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1894. “He is a wiser man than I am, who can tell how low the moral sentiment of this republic may yet fall.”

Douglass, whose words continue to resonate today, began speaking truth to power two decades before the Civil War and didn’t stop until his death in 1895. Two of his most famous orations—“The Lessons of the Hour,” quoted above, and “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”—are among the readings in Visiting Professor Gregory Mobley’s fall course, “Past and Present Tense: Classic Biblical Prophecy and the African American Prophetic Tradition.”

Mobley has taught a course on the Hebrew prophets a dozen times over the past 25 years, but this semester called for more—not just Amos and Isaiah and Jeremiah, but Frederick and Martin and Malcolm. “You want to understand the Bible?” Mobley asks. “Open your eyes. It’s being enacted right in front of us.” Some contemporary prophets, King included, were already on the syllabus, Mobley says, but the nation’s “reckoning with 400 years of abuse and neglect of African-American bodies” compelled him to plan a deeper study of Black prophets beside their Hebrew counterparts. The course covers 12 prophets in all, organized in chronological pairs.

A native of Kentucky with roots in Appalachia, Mobley thinks of the Hebrew prophets as the first singer-songwriters, balladeers whose poetic lyrics have survived, though their music is lost. The words of the African-American prophets are descended from that poetry, he says, guided by it and “rooted in the aurality of the African-American church.”

Standing with these ancient poets and modern heroes is a third group that will play an important role in “Past and Present Tense”: African-American ministers leading the work today, who serve congregations in Miami, Louisville, Boston, and New Haven. Thanks to technologies forced into the classroom by the pandemic, they’ll be able to give guest lectures.

The popular course, with a full enrollment of 20 diverse online students and a long waiting list, provides an opportunity for Mobley to learn as well; these seminarians are more conversant in critical race theory than their professor. Nevertheless, Mobley says, as people of faith, we must learn to answer our nation’s most pressing questions with our own thematics and texts and images, which have withstood the test of time. He quotes the prophet Amos: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream,” leaning with dramatic emphasis on “everflowing.”

“An everflowing stream is not a creek bed that is filled with water during rainy season,” Mobley says. “It is a stream that’s there year-round... The problem is to make justice an everflowing stream… And that will require structural changes.” What can we do to make it so? Embrace it, Mobley says, “like first responders who move toward the emergency.” He hopes “Past and Present Tense” will be “some small thing done in the name of Jesus, some small thing done in the name of justice, some small thing done in the name of the prophets.”

Time will tell whether that “small thing” has made any difference. “The grades for this course for the teacher and the students are going to come ten years from now,” Mobley says, “when we see if all of us are engaged in this everflowing, perennial struggle.”