Isaiah and the Kingdom of Peace

From the authors

We popularly think of prophecy as a prediction of future events. Ancient Hebrew prophets spoke in the present tense, and with good reason. They envisioned a God who was vitally interested in their own generation. To honor the ever-freshness of the divine Word, we tried to present all prophecy in this

book in the present tense, with an eye to our generation. We may not worry about Assyria and Babylon so much these days (though our relations with their present-day geographical counterparts, Iran and Iraq, are worth losing sleep over!) But the greater matter of choosing between a mindset of isolationism mixed with war, or friendship and peace, is still very relevant. Will we continue to insist that religion is one thing, and politics another? Or will we ever grant that, in a world where all are God’s children, God cares very much about the fate of every one of us?

Isaiah was, to use his own phrase, a "prince of peace." His worldview remains the most radically universal in the Hebrew Scriptures and is still rebuffed by many of us not yet willing to imagine that God loves our enemies as much as God loves us. We pray for the day when the peaceable kingdom will be more than a prophet’s lovely daydream. That kingdom must live first in us, heart by heart by heart.

Isaiah and the Kingdom of Peace was awarded a Silver Medal in Religion in the 2013 Benjamin Franklin Book Awards.