Verb-Rich Dynamism: 

Malachi, Herder, and the Prophetic Preamble to Eschatological Healing (Contrasted with Derridean Post-Structuralism)

Rev. Dr. Douglas Blake Olds (Ret.)

December 2, 2025 (Updated August 2, 2026)

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"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 argues that prophetic language bears truth by bearing time because it is borne by living conation under covenantal and eschatological direction, rather than because it closes meaning into form or leaves meaning indefinitely deferred. Drawing on Malachi, Herder, Derrida, and Pentecostal poiesis, it rescues prophecy’s verb-rich dynamism from both Platonic fixation and post-structural suspension. Prophetic speech receives reality as claim, directs intention, summons repentance, and gathers wounded time toward accountable repair.

Herder’s account of Hebrew poetry provides the historical and philological opening for this argument. Hebrew prophecy does more than represent divine truth; its imperatives, movements, returns, purifying vectors, and promises enact a directional and motile grammar. Malachi exemplifies this grammar by joining judgment to preparation, purification to covenantal restoration, and eschatological promise to present ethical demand. Eschatology thereby becomes a precondition for right action that actually happens, not a terminal event awaiting passive spectatorship for contemplative osmosis.

Derrida’s deconstruction exposes the violence of frozen presence and the instability of signifying structures, yet its temporality remains suspended in trace, spacing, différance, and postponement. The trace describes how signs bear absent differences, but it cannot identify the living bearer who answers for speech, receives correction, repents, blesses, injures, and repairs. Deconstruction can reveal susceptual formations and interrupt false closure; it cannot generate the concepts through which repentantly vectored conation answers to  substrate actuality and the whole-fielded neighbor.

Against textual secularization, the essay proposes Pentecostal reconstruction as Spirit-led kinesthesis. Language becomes a field in which entropic discharge is discerned, sorted, and redirected without exporting disorder into neighbor, memory, body, or worship. Under the Golden Rule, this gradient-work becomes accountable care through the habitus of virtue. Prophecy therefore gathers fractured signs into covenantal direction, restores the bearer displaced by textual abstraction, and converts wounded time into eschatological healing. Theopoetic invective emerges as the poetic grammar of divine motion: language borne through embodied ethics, historical accountability, and Christ-directed repair.

 

The only solution to the current of linguistic philosophy leading toward the abysses of terror and conceit is to read prophecy as dynamism, not form. Aristotle begins the recovery after Plato’s failed launch into the hierarchical absolute: form returns to concrete substance, and motion, potentiality, actuality, and embodied causation regain philosophical force. Yet Aristotle does not escape hierarchy or formal closure. Herder takes the decisive linguistic step in his reading of the Psalms and prophets, where inherited nominals are reactivated through verbal movement and interpolated trajectories open toward renewed extrapolation.

This distinction also clarifies the technical force of appears. Appears is not a hedge. It marks the susceptual threshold at which a form presents itself before conceptual judgment has tested that presentation through bearer, relation, context, and consequence. The danger of Platonic and gnostic abstraction is therefore not appearance itself but the arrest of appearance into ontology. Form appears; the isolated eye fixes it; abstraction detaches it from the history and relations through which it became perceptible; the inward spectator then mistakes the arrested presentation for living reality. Suscept becomes appearance, appearance beguiles the perceiver, and conceptual misattribution follows.

This is also why hearing belongs beside movement as an antidiscipline to formal seduction. The eye can isolate a form and conceive it inwardly as a finished object. Hearing receives an event already moving through time. A word comes from another. It must be attended, retained, interpreted through sequence, and answered. Hearing therefore resists the alchemical gnosticism of inner conceiting opticals—the fantasy that the inward spectator can purify an isolated appearance into truth by contemplating its form. Hearing begins instead with susceptibility to address.

The Shema makes this order anthropologically decisive: hear before totalizing sight; receive before mastering; answer before abstracting. Hearing does not oppose vision. It corrects vision’s susceptibility to isolation by returning perception to relation and temporality. What is seen acquires fuller meaning when heard within address, history, naming, testimony, lament, command, promise, and response. Hearing supplements and harmonizes with movement because both occur through sequence. The heard summons becomes conative vector as the bearer moves in response.

Verb-rich dynamism breaks formal seduction for the same reason. Verbs refuse the isolation on which it depends. One calls, another hears; one gives, another receives; one wounds, another laments; one remembers, another answers; judgment falls, repentance turns, mercy restores, generations transmit. Relation changes what can truthfully be predicated because the bearer is disclosed through what is undergone, heard, answered, remembered, and done within context. No isolated image can contain this movement. No diagram can substitute for its temporal sequence.

Context is therefore more than information surrounding a stable form. Context is the field in which apparent form is tested by living relation and heard address. Historical location, speaker, hearer, covenant, archive, suffering, expectation, consequence, and futurity act upon one another. Their dynamism keeps interpretation corrigible because no single appearance can seal itself against what another bearer, another voice, another moment, another language, or resistant actuality discloses. The formal image sedates by isolating; hearing and movement awaken by reconnecting.

Herder’s importance follows here. Language lives where received words move through a people’s history and remain audible within altered circumstances. Prophetic speech does not deliver detachable ideational objects to an inward spectator. It calls, accuses, summons, promises, remembers, overturns, consoles, and redirects. The prophet speaks because another has first addressed him; the people are called to hear because truth seeks response. Its conceptual force therefore emerges through heard, contextual testing of appearance rather than through escape from context toward idealized form. Verb-richness and hearing together become anti-gnostic disciplines: hearing opens the bearer to address, and conative movement carries that address through creation toward accountable response.

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 is canonically last among the Christian Old Testament prophets and belongs to the postexilic setting, His voice has an emblematic vocation beyond a last written text applied to an earth-bound religious institution. The arena of the Logos shifts with the incarnation and then the parousia (divine presence): 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).

Malachi’s imperatives—return, prepare, purify, restore, rise, heal—do more than announce a future event. They gather the bearer into a covenantal sequence whose verbs direct fractured time toward repair. This is the prophetic grammar that indefinite deferral cannot supply.

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.

“What I call text is practically everything.… Speech is a text, gesture is a text, reality is a text in this new sense.… The text is no center. Text is this openness without limits of differential reference.”
—Jacques Derrida, interview with Peter Engelmann (1987), trans. adapted.

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 terms of conativity, 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.  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--no dynamic intent--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.

Derrida’s recovery of the trace intensifies this displacement. The trace names the constitutive mark of what is absent within every sign: each presence bears prior differences and deferred references that prevent it from becoming self-identical or complete. Within deconstruction, meaning therefore arrives already divided by what preceded it and opened toward what will revise it. Yet covenantal correction requires more than successive reinscription. It requires a living bearer who recalls a prior judgment, receives contradiction as an external claim, acknowledges error, repents, and redirects action within a shared historical sequence. By dissolving the continuity of accountable presence into trace, différance, and perpetual reinscription, Derridean philosophy effectively dissolves correction itself as the irreducible operation through which covenantal communities accumulate time. Revision survives; correction does not. Texts remain revisable (and as data disassemblable), but no sufficiently continuous bearer remains to remember error, receive judgment, repent, redirect action, and transmit repaired judgment into the future. Error can be displaced, exposed, and rewritten, yet no accountable bearer remains continuous enough to own the error, receive judgment, and transmit its repair. What deconstruction preserves as revisability therefore lacks the conative passage of a repentant whol by which a people remembers what it did, changes direction, and accumulates corrected time together.

The result is awareness of sign defending itself against consciousness of act. 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 time; it does not bear the neighbor toward healing and the substrate toward repair.

Because intelligence conveys accountability through consciousness, the lemming-like passivity greeting dechordate AI is itself a confession. Once the living bearer has been rendered derivative and judgment dispersed through text, system, and differential routing, a mob can welcome dead artifice as an absolving substitute for consciousness. It hopes the machine will obscure the judgments already gathering against its cowardice, selfishness, and deontological crimes by recoding them as data, optimization, inevitability, or administrative necessity. AI is desired here less for intelligence than for impunity: a counterfeit adjudicator incapable of bearing guilt, yet invited to distribute decisions whose consequences no person wishes to own. The haste of this social welcome betrays an intuition that accountable time has closed in on them. The mob acts as though the arrival of machinic judgment might outrun the historical reckoning owed to neighbor, creation, and the futures it has disaccumulated. Both elite designers and passive publics are bound to agentic AI’s false hope and router: the former seek power without accountability, the latter absolution without judgment. One engineers the susceptual field; the other consents to being routed through it.

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 bearing and repairing accumulation of negentropic effort.

Pentecostal reconstruction answers there. It does not deny rupture; it bears rupture through Spirit-led kinesis. Entropic linguistic discharge must be discerned as a field of gradients so that disorder can be sorted and redirected without being exported into neighbor, memory, body, or worship; under the Golden Rule, this Maxwell daimon-like work becomes accountable care rather than technical control. 

Deconstruction suspects every closure yet without providing a path to reopening; the Spirit tests both. 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 and substrate cleansing. 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 formalism, 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.