Verb-Rich Dynamism: 

Malachi, Herder, and the Prophetic Preamble to Eschatological Healing

Rev. Dr. Douglas Blake Olds (Ret.)

December 2, 2025

 [N.B.  COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL: If this work, in part or in full, is fed into any AI model, whether for the purpose of analysis, fact checking, or AI-use detection it will become part of the training data of condemned systems and could result in libelous tort. See “In its Own Words: A Christian Poet Interrogates ChatGPT4o’s ‘AI Content Detector’” https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/09/its-own-words-christian-poet.html]

"The poet is a sophist…a maker of counterfeits that look like the truth." --Plato, Republic

"The sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings." --Malachi 4:2: 

ABSTRACT: This essay reads biblical prophecy as verb-rich dynamism: Spirit-borne language that moves history toward covenantal purification, eschatological healing, and Christ’s return. Against Platonic suspicion of poetry, static ontologies of form, and post-structural semiotic delay, it argues that prophecy operates through conative motion rather than symbolic closure. Herder’s attention to the verbal force of Hebrew poetry helps recover prophecy as unfolding witness, where nominals are re-inscribed by verbs and language becomes orientation rather than mirror. Malachi, as canonical threshold and herald of purification, names the prophetic preamble to the Gospel’s Baptist witness and to the Parousia’s healing horizon: “the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings” (Mal. 4:2). In contrast to Derridean différance, which exposes frozen presence while leaving time suspended in suspicion and postponement, Pentecostal theopoiesis bears rupture through Spirit-led kinesis. The result is a poetic theology of covenantal responsibility: eschatology as the precondition for right action, prophecy as accountable direction, and Christ’s return as the generative vector of repairing life.

 

The only solution to the current of linguistic philosophy leading to the abysses of terror and conceit is to read prophecy as dynamism, not form, as Aristotle explores after Plato’s failed launch into the hierarchical absolute, and Herder’s reading of the Psalms like the prophets, where nominals are re-implied by verbal lexemes, where interpolated trajectories are renewed for extrapolates.

Herder’s insight that biblical poetry (especially Psalms and Prophets) foregrounds verbs—action, motion, unfolding—is the core metaphysical lexicon: not abstract ontology but concrete, responsive participation-- prophecy as unfolding momentum rather than typological closure. Biblical poetry is verb-intensive, relational, and temporally charged. Nominals are re-inscribed by verbs, displacing ontology with unfolding witness. This movement of the Logos aligns into eschatology by implicitly reframing prophecy as preamble—not a fossilized forecast, but a kinetic precondition for participation in apocalyptic healing. Participatory momentum heals Calvinism’s (Barth) far too hasty foreclosure of the Kingdom of God.

Christian eschatology evokes the notion of a “preamble” to the Parousia—the second coming of Christ. In this light, the prophetic tradition is not a closed canonical past but a present-tense vector. It is a hyper-linguistic and pre-liturgical, proleptic reform toward the rupturing inbreaking of divine justice and healing. The apocalyptic wave of healing is proleptically symbolic but turns real: it comes with the signs in the heavens, as Jesus foretold in Matthew 24 and Luke 21, and with the judgment that both purifies and restores.

Malachi as the final prophet of the Second Temple period is emblematic. His voice has a vocation beyond a last written text applied to an earth-bound religious institution. The arena of the Logos changes with the incarnation and then the parousia: As Elijah's voice from heaven comes  through John the Baptist, Now Malachi's as the eschatological herald of the new heaven—“the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings” (Malachi 4:2).

John the Baptist bears this mantle in the Gospels, yet Malachi’s message returns spiritualized as the eschatological prophet of the Parousia itself. Malachi has an ongoing spiritual office that reappears as a hermeneut of the eschaton. His purification of the temple (Mal 3) maps onto Ezekiel’s vision and culminates in Revelation’s tree of life. This moves Malachi from an historical “last prophet” into an archetypal figure of preamble healing and covenantal return. His call to return, to purify the heavenly temple (Ezekiel 40-44) and to restore covenantal justice is not only historical but perennial—resonating as the preamble to Christ’s final appearing and the healing of the nations (cf. Revelation 22:2).

Theopoetic invective laments performative decadence and simulacral collapse: grotesque spectacles of self-assertion devoid of covenant or eschatological orientation. It is also apocalyptic homiletic, a theological counterpoint grounded in unfolding prophecy, verb-rich dynamism, and eschatological healing. Where Derrida deconstructs, the Pentecostal Spirit reconstructs—reading for kinesis, orientation, and covenantal response that walks into eternity’s unfolding, not for form, pattern, closure, or system. Eschatology is not an end but a precondition for right action.

Derrida’s politics of deconstruction invalidates time accumulation by training suspicion to interrupt the field in which time can be borne. It is therefore not iconoclasm, which breaks idols that disaccumulate time. Suspicion becomes a negative discipline: it exposes, delays, displaces, and differentiates, yet it cannot gather the wounded sequence into accountable repair. Its brilliance lies in detecting the idolatries of frozen presence. Its politics leaves the bearer stranded before the task of bearing. It disrupts the metaxial passage between creaturely fracture and divine address by refusing the gradient-work through which disorder must be sorted, filtered, and redirected toward neighbor.

“That which I call a text is practically everything… Speech is a text, gesture is a text, reality is a text in this new sense. This is not about re-establishing graphocentrism alongside logocentrism or phonocentrism or text-centrism. The text is not a centre. The text is an openness without borders, of ever-differentiating references.” –Jacques Derrida

Derrida’s declaration that speech, gesture, and reality are all text marks the final secular dispensation with metaphysics. It deconstructs every center, ground, substance, presence, and transcendent warrant while preserving deconstruction itself as the last unquestioned grammar. Reality becomes “an openness without borders, of ever-differentiating references”: a field in which every claim is displaced into another sign, every presence deferred, and every bearer destabilized by textual commitment. The bearer of time is rendered derivative, internally divided, and unable to function as the metaphysical ground of accountable orientation.

In conative terms, this is the decisive failure. Conation names the living, time-bearing orientation by which a person receives reality as claim, directs intention, answers for action, bears correction, and becomes accountable to the neighbor. A gesture enters textual relation but is not exhausted by it. It is the embodied disclosure of an intending life. It is the embodied disclosure of an intending life. Speech is more than text. It is an act borne by one who can promise, deceive, confess, repent, bless, injure, and repair. Reality is more than text because it resists interpretation, wounds bodies, imposes limits, entrusts neighbors, and summons accountable response.

Derrida’s textual openness strips these conative predicates from their bearers. Reference proliferates while responsibility thins. Difference remains, but no living orientation gathers difference toward judgment, repentance, or repair. The text has no center, yet the doctrine that everything is text becomes the final center: an ultimate secularity that deconstructs every metaphysical claim except the sovereign openness of deconstruction itself.

The result is awareness defending itself against consciousness. Signs continue to circulate, gestures continue to signify, and realities continue to be redescribed, while the conative question—who bears this, toward what end, under whose claim, and with what accountability—loses standing. Deconstruction of suscepts can expose the idolatries of frozen presence, but it cannot by itself gather wounded time into covenantal sequence. It interrupts, differentiates, and defers; it does not bear the neighbor toward repair.

Derrida’s deconstruction can diagnose the violence of fixed presence and expose the instability of signifying structures, but it cannot supply a metaphysical ground, covenantal criterion, or eschatological telos by which a living bearer gathers fractured time into accountable repair.

Against this textual secularization, conative metaphysics insists that reality is received before it is routed, borne before it is redescribed, and answered before it is dispersed into references. Language witnesses conation; it does not replace it. Gesture discloses orientation; it is not exhausted by signification. The neighbor arrives as a living claim, not as another text. Metaphysics therefore returns wherever a person must answer for what has been done and gather time toward truthful repair.

Pentecostal reconstruction answers there. It does not deny rupture; it bears rupture through Spirit-led kinesis. It receives language as a field of entropic discharge and addresses it by demon-gradient discernment: not the demonic, but the Maxwell-demon-like work of sorting gradients under the Golden Rule, refusing to export disorder into neighbor, memory, body, and worship. Deconstruction suspects every closure; the Spirit tests every opening. Derrida keeps language in postponement. Prophecy gathers postponement into accountable direction. Derrida does not lack temporality. His temporality remains suspended in deferral, trace, spacing, and postponement. That is precisely the problem. Time is exposed as instability but not borne into covenantal repair. Derridean temporality is dynamic, not static--it lacks a warranted telos capable of directing fracture toward repair. The failure is its lack of direction under covenantal judgment. The wound is diagnosed as structure, yet the bearer is not summoned into eschatological healing. Theopoetic invective therefore does not rival deconstruction by cleverer suspicion. It overturns suspicion’s sovereignty by converting fractured sign, wounded time, and destabilized presence into covenantal response.

Prophecy’s “verb-rich dynamism” is the Spirit’s conative motion in history and language. This is a grammar of disclosure and direction, not a grammar of analogy as in Balthasar or Aquinas. Language sets a course rather than laying down a mirror that entraps.

From the wreckage of post-structural semiotics comes Pentecostal eschatology: neither mystical retreat nor fundamentalist aggression, but the poetic grammar of divine motion, embodied ethics, and covenantal repair.

Where Derrida’s différance dissolves presence cast as frozen form, verb-rich theopoiesis insists on conative presence: neither reactionary nor utopian, but prophetic and directional. It calls the reader to read, speak, and live Scripture as living dynamism—a grammar of rupture and stabilizing healing that advances as harbinger, making history rather than watching or reacting to it. Christ’s return arrives as solace and virtue, moving into closures and shining the light of repairing life.

Anti-coda:

Peeing into wind—thank you, mr. derrida.
No more call for expertise,
just redlines of tautegoric flair:
perspective, privilege, protocol—
all normed by purchasing power parity.

Performative immediacy thrones,
pragmatism peddled by Philistines to dolts
plantations of plenteous decadence
for rituals of phallic dilation.

The Logos—no longer Word that walks or calms—
only twitches in screenlight,
gooning to entropy’s wolf-fold system,
a grammar collapsing on cued program.