Posts Tagged preaching

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 15 April 2012 (Second Sunday of Easter, Year B)

Acts 4:32-35  • Psalm 133  • 1 John 1:1-2:2  • John 20:19-31

Until I studied rhetoric, I was vaguely fuzzy on what Christian preaching was good for.  My own sense of duty made me think that I should be present when it happened, but since, in my own tradition, the worship service derives its form to some extent from nineteenth-century revival meetings, it seemed somewhat strange that I should be present, week by week, as the call to “return home” was given.  After all, once I’d returned home once, that should be enough, I figured.

Now that I’ve spent a few years intensively studying what rhetoric is for in the ancient conception, and how Christians appropriated that and saw its fulfillment in the life of the Church, I appreciate the sermon, both as I preach ‘em and as I’ve heard ‘em.  The main goal, I realized, is not to get people to “walk the aisle” (no matter what the old-timers who remember fondly their “week-long revival” days say) but to shape the desires.  That’s what Plato got me to see in the Phaedrus, and that’s what Augustine picks up on On Christian Teaching.  The kosmos (in the Johanine sense, not the Carl Sagan sense, but that’s part of the point) constantly works on us, believers and unbelievers alike, drawing us towards certain objects, setting before us relationships among things-in-the-world and suggesting, not always verbally, a picture of how all of those things fit together.  The “world” of nationalism and the “world” of consumerism and the “world” of historical progress all do such work on us, the work that rhetorician James Berlin calls “epistemic” work, the sustained rhetorical suggestion that each “world” and the reality it assumes is in fact what is “natural” and right.  The Christian sermon is one means (not by any stretch the only means) by which God sets forth a counter-rhetoric, situated more successfully or less successfully in the congregation’s historical moment, by which the Spirit (I do take a high view of preaching) reaches out to the gathered congregation and sets forth a new way to “see” reality, a way that de-naturalizes what is fallen and holds forth the hope that God’s forgiveness, through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, does in fact make possible what was impossible in our own sins.

Such is what 1 John does in its opening chapters: through the repetition of the word “proclaim” and its cognates, the text reminds hearers (and readers) that the kosmos is not itself eternal, that God can vanquish and has vanquished the powers that bind, the forces that keep us from eternity.  The words “life” and “fellowship” that 1 John repeats stand as calls out of the death and the isolation that the kosmos constantly threatens, whether through execution or exile, through neglect or the market’s ostracism.  The salvation that Jesus brings is not in an atomistic sense a rescue of the individual believer out of the world but approaches because Jesus died “for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2 ESV).  We can live faithfully because the redeemed life is the true life, the one that does not ignore the metaphysical change which the resurrection hath wrought.  Because the world’s sins are now died-for sins, the world stands open to the work of God, and the Christian’s proclamation is a call to that world: You who were dead, arise!  You who knew no life, be alive!

Such is the work of the Christian sermon: where consumerism cries “scarcity,” Genesis 1 says, “It is good.”  Where nationalism says, “We must destroy our enemies,” the Sermon on the Mount declares that the faithful pray even for those who persecute the faithful.  Where historical progress would have us discard those symbols and stories and teachings that offend this week’s cultural sensibilities, Jude tells us faithfully to hand down what we have received.  The counter-rhetoric of the sermon, in the days of 1 John and in ours, offers an alternative shape to human desire, a way to see that the kosmos would forget, ignore, destroy.  Such is why we preach.

May our words and our works all proclaim the life eternal, and may the ears of those who hear, by grace, stand open.

Yes, I know we’re stretching now.  And the title is all Nathan Gilmour’s fault.

• Eight decidedly rotten sermon introductions
• Yet another insightful lecture on political philosophy from Patrick Deneen
• Chris Gehrz gets his props from James K.A. Smith (and here’s why)
• A disturbingly enthusiastic encomium for Google chat
• The sage Michael Austin (his Reading the World: Ideas That Matter is an excellent Comp I reader in the “big ideas” tradition, if you’re in the market for such a thing) discusses why the opposite of Intelligent Design is not Evolution.
• Is there honor among hackers?
• 

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 4 September 2011 (12th Sunday after Pentecost, Year A)

Exodus 12:1-14 and Psalm 149  • Ezekiel 33:7-11 and Psalm 119:33-40  • Romans 13:8-14  • Matthew 18:15-20

That I knew the phrase from Ezekiel as a book title (one which I wrote about recently) before I knew it as a phrase from Ezekiel makes me sad, but I don’t think that such skewed priorities are uncommon.  After all, just last school year I had the distinct pleasure of doing a close reading of the Biblical book of Job with a group of honors-program freshmen, then sitting with a small group of the same freshmen and noting the profound change of context in a happy-clappy, electric-guitar-heavy praise chorus that used the phrase “My redeemer lives.”  Chatting with them after the service, I could tell that they were stepping into a new way of relating to church music, and just in case  you were worried, I did encourage them to “read” such songs through the lenses of sensus plenior, the doctrine that the death and resurrection of Christ did in fact open up new meanings for Old Testament texts, meanings well beyond the intellectual horizons of the mortal authors.

But Ezekiel 37, as far as I know, isn’t the stuff of any praise chorus, yet the moment in the story of Israel could easily translate there.  After all, this oracle is the sort of meta-revelation that contemporary Christian song thrives on, the sort that doesn’t directly sing of God’s love but tells anyone within earshot that those singing could sing of God’s love forever, given the vocal endurance and days off of work.  This one, though it doesn’t lend itself quite as well to interminable key changes and repetition, nonetheless has the same potential for meta-song, perhaps as a slightly less-catchy course:

God sent me to warn the people

So my words the air will burn

How can we live with our sins, they cry out,

And I say, the LORD says, “Turn!”

Alright, so perhaps I should keep teaching English and leave the catchy praise choruses to those who are good at them.  The point here is that this Ezekiel text has an unappealing side, not unlike the less-happy reality that Job most likely wants a redeemer (a word that has connotations of retributive killing in significance of the Old Testament) because he wants revenge on whatever invisible power is oppressing him or at least someone to proclaim his (Job’s) innocence in public places once God has killed Job off.  In Ezekiel’s case, the unappetizing part of the passage is the long string of conditionals.  The last pair is familiar enough, speaking Biblically, not to warrant too much attention: if the people turn from their wickedness, they will live.  No biggie.  Such comes across in places as diverse as the Sodom and Gomorrah story, Deuteronomy, and even sometimes in the sayings of Jesus.  What’s shocking is the set of conditionals directed directly at the prophet, stuff that decidedly wouldn’t make it into any praise chorus that I could imagine: if you keep silent, you will die.  If you speak, but the people don’t turn, you live, but the people die.  Such is not the way of the praise-chorus deity, but there it is in the Bible.

Such a stark and sad job for the sent messenger is not unique either, of course.  With a bit of familiarity with the text, one can easily enough remember Isaiah’s bittersweet call to proclaim until ears go numb and Jesus’s rationale for using parables that quotes the same passage: sometimes God speaks in mixed crowds, and not all among them will turn.  Such is the harsh reality of the Parable of the Sower, and such is the relationship between proclamation, hearing, faithfulness, and witness that makes intelligible Paul’s great teachings on the Church as the new Israel, the true Temple, and the body of the King constituted wherever we gather.  We are at once the Israel who hears and the prophets who proclaim, and neither of those roles in the story is always a happy one.  Sometimes indeed we come across those who want to know “how should we then live” (an Elizabethan construction that indicates means of survival more than ethical ordering of life), but perhaps even more often we come across those for whom the cross is scandal and foolishness.  Such is the life of the people of God.

May our LORD grant us the fortitude to proclaim and the endurance to proclaim once more.

Telling God’s Story: Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation

by John W. Wright

164 pp.  $19.00  IVP Academic

I actually became aware of this book while reading Stan Hauerwas’s Working with Words (which I reviewed here) earlier this summer.  Hauerwas, in an essay on preaching, suggested that the rhetorical character of preaching, its spoken-to-you-right-here character, was a faithful genre for Christian discourse in ways that the academic monologue cannot be.  Then, in a footnote, he suggested this book, and I figured I should check it out.

I should note that, although I preached probably a dozen sermons a year when I was in seminary, I preach only four or five a year now.  In other words, preaching is not my primary public discourse by any means.  (For the sake of comparison, I teach college classes five days a week and lead faculty training sessions eight times a school year in my current professional capacity.)  That said, I’m always interested in preaching  better next time than I did last, and I agree with Hauerwas and with Wright that preaching, because of its particular situation in the life of the Church, the sermon is a moment and constitutes a practice that can shape the Christian imagination even as some in futurist circles decry the genre as obsolete.  Wright in fact names the sermon as the primary site of interpretation (31), taking a stand against theological education that regards academic biblical studies, with its monographs and articles, as the proper place for interpreting text and the sermon as a time merely for “packaging” the work that the academic commentator does.  By taking this stand, Wright articulates a particular theology of the Scriptures, holding that there is certainly a place for books about the gospel of John but that they’re always helpers to the congregation and the preacher rather than standing on their own as logically prior practices.

Much of Wright’s book is dedicated to a theology of the congregation, and his formulae stand in contrast to what he calls the North American narrative, a way of life characterized by individualism, consumerism, and a duality of mind that divides the world between the managerial/objective/scientific and the therapeutic/subjective/spiritual.  Drawing from the hermeneutical work of Gadamer, Wright lays out two visions for the homily, what he calls the comedic and the tragic.  These are not exact analogues of the dramatic genres but instead point to two relationships between sermon and the North American narrative.  The comedic sermon sets forth ways to adjust to the North American Narrative, leaving the basic structures of modern life to stand as given.  There may or may not be jokes, but what a comedic sermon never does is point to the world and say, “Sin.”  Instead, the comedy-sermon suggests small ways that one can relieve the pressure of the objective/material world by means of a temporary retreat into the subjective/spiritual. Wright holds that the comedic sermon has become the norm because of several reasons, among them the removal of preaching from the eucharistic context and its placement in revival and street-preaching scenarios; the personalization (in Wright’s terms, the diminution of the gospel from a cosmic drama) of the Christian message in the course of North American history; and pressures on preachers in a free-market context to please religious “consumers.”

By contrast, the tragic sermon disrupts the order of things by naming the soul-killing nature of the system, letting the people know that the “gods” of the marketplace are only interested in human sacrifice.  The tragic sermon thus sets up a moment for repentance rather than for adjustment-therapy and for affirming one’s place in the system–the idea is to imagine the preacher himself and the folks gathered for worship that they are in fact pilgrims and aliens, that the way the North American Narrative teaches us to imagine the “self” and the self’s “needs” are not philosophically prior to the sinfulness that pervades all historical moments and the vices that give North American life in the twenty-first century its particular flavor.  Because the congregation, as the saved people of God, is already situated within the Biblical narrative when they gather (83), the homily’s role is to remind the congregation that their minds should be renewed in accordance to the forgiveness into which God’s grace has brought them.  The “how-to” section of Wright’s book lays out a rhetoric of the homily based on David Buttrick’s concept of “moves” within the sermon but steers clear of Buttrick’s theological liberalism, which Wright holds as incapable of anything but a comedic sermon and certainly incapable of forming the people called the Church into anything but nice citizens of the liberal state.  This rhetoric of turning, as Wright calls it, starts out describing truthfully (and therefore with some appeal, but not so much that the turn becomes a sucker punch (95)) the vision of human good that governs “normal” life in North America, then moving by means of a transition paragraph into a section that sets forth Biblical alternatives to those visions.  In other words, the tragic sermon becomes a microcosm of the conversion narrative, hence the book’s subtitle.

The last third of the book consists of a discussion of pastoral and congregational practices that go along with the rhetoric of turning, everything from hospitality to Biblical-narrative counseling to congregational Christian education.  Along with the book’s conclusion, which is an extended commentary on Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana (the great preacher’s manual of the early Church), this finishing section gives a strong sense of the practices that make something like a sermon of turning intelligible, and together they give a strong sense, once again, of how congregational life and the shape of the sermon inform one another.  Wright warns that too many turning-sermons will wear a congregation out and that the turning-sermon should not be every Sunday’s fare (103), but he never does lay out what the other Sundays’ sermons might sound like.  Perhaps he’s setting up demand for a sequel in that omission, but it does make for a less than satisfying experience when, two-thirds of the way through the book, one realizes that one has been reading about “special occasion” sermons without any sense of how “ordinary sermons” might contrast with them.

Wright’s book therefore is not a comprehensive guide to sermon-writing so much as a theoretical exploration, but that’s precisely the sort of thing that helps many of us, myself included, to think about what the practice of preaching means.  Wright’s greatest contribution, then, is to remind the reader that there can be no truthful “how-to” without a prior ethics of the congregation and that the pastor or the priest or the elders or whoever shapes the imagination of the congregation are doing so at all moments, whether in consistent or in hypocritical ways.  Thus repentance is always a practice, the sermon is one component of that practice, and all such components must always fall under the scrutiny of the theologians (whether pastors or priests or elders) whom the congregation calls “preacher” or “teacher.”

• Stan Hauerwas on why Church is more truthful than “community” and other tidbits (HT Jeff Wright)
• Robert Woods recounts Russell Kirk’s defense of Giovanni Pico de Mirandola (how’s that for name-dropping?)
• Are you ****ing kidding me? (No, Scot, I don’t accept that rationale.)
• Andrew Webb comments on three kinds of defective sermons.
• C. Michael Patton outlines six self-understandings of orthodoxy.
• Ric Hudgens proposes an interesting way to think about the Church and the World.
• Stan Fish attempts to clarify what he does mean by “academic” as opposed to “political”
• 

“The Just One Challenge” from The Christian Standard

Perhaps this little essay will not sustain the interest of any but those who are involved with the Stone-Campbell tradition, those congregations that often go by geographical names along with “Christian Church.”  My hope, however, is that in reflecting on an anxiety within my own tradition, some interesting theological questions might arise even for those of the Christian Humanist’s readers who only know the Restoration Movement because of my participation in it.

First, let me go ahead and congratulate those of you who read through the article and found the obvious idiosyncrasies and bits of narrow vision to which my tradition is especially susceptible.  Yes, the article seems to assume that only the evangelicals in France count as Christians.  And yes, the working assumption seems to be that only Bible-college graduates are going to be in the world to communicate the particulars of the Christian faith to all those who are not Christians.  And yes, the pronouns are all masculine.  Although there’s been debate within my tradition since the 1890′s about women ministers, and even though some of our congregations have women ministers, some writers for our publications still assume an all-male clergy.

All of that out of the way, what troubles me most about this article is the assumption that the independent-Christian-church congregation, itself somewhat of an innovation of the last two hundred years, automatically stands as the form that will best sustain the preaching of the Gospel in the years to come and that, as a result, what the current members of those congregations should be most concerned to do is make sure that enough youngsters commit their higher educational careers to sustaining that model.

My first concern with such assumptions is purely empirical.  I’ve heard many an old-time preacher (and I love me some old-time preachers, most especially my own father-in-law) say that there’s a shortage of young preachers, but the (shrinking) job listings, at least within my own tradition, tell a story that differs somewhat from the scarcity narrative.  Most if not all of the listings for preachers assume that they can demand someone with church-work experience, that they can set in very precise terms what sort of education the candidates should bring, and that they can set forth at the outset what sort of intellectual/doctrinal/theological frameworks are in and which are out.  In other words, the job listings seem to proceed from a position of power, assuming that they’re not sending up a distress beacon so much as sifting through a bounty of potential preachers.

Furthermore, the “scarcity” story does not adequately describe the wildly different experiences of smaller churches or larger churches whose preachers and elders I’ve spoken with.  For the medium-to-mega-churches, any job listing that offers a living wage, so I’ve heard, will get anywhere between thirty and a hundred applicants.  And for smaller churches, whose offering plates don’t yield up enough to support a family without a second job, it’s hard to get even one, especially when the graduates of the more conservative colleges expect to make enough money to keep their wives at home on one salary.  In other words, the “shortage” might well have to do with the sizes of congregations just as much as it has to do with an absolute arithmetic lack of professionals in the field.

Beyond the job listings, of course, I have my own experience.  About six years ago, when I was contemplating what to do with my life after completing my second graduate degree (one in Old Testament, one in English literature), one step I took was to apply to a number of associate and preaching minister jobs in Stone-Campbell congregations.  I worked up a good resume, wrote my share of application letters, and in all contacted twelve churches inquiring after their jobs.  (It seemed like a good number.)  At the time I had preached somewhere around sixty Sunday-morning sermons (more than a graduating Bible college senior likely has preached), I had some proficiency in Greek and Hebrew, and I had credentials from two very respected Stone-Campbell schools (Milligan College and Emmanuel School of Religion) leading off my resume.  I also had two and a half years’ teaching experience in college classrooms, a strength that I highlighted for congregations looking for a preacher who could also educate adults in classroom settings.  In the months that followed my sending out the applications, precisely one of the twelve churches ever even contacted me, and that was a two-line email to inform me that I wasn’t what they were looking for.  In the meantime I applied for and gained admission into the University of Georgia’s Ph.D in English program.  I’d like to think that such a move turned out well.

The bottom line is that, from what I’ve heard and from what I’ve seen, the narrative that this article presents, one in which opportunities for those trained only as traditional paid clergy are expanding more quickly than are the numbers of people qualified to be paid clergy, does not seem to be adequate to the realities inside of which actual churches do what they do.

I want to make two things perfectly clear.  For one, I do believe in and honor divine vocation: those whom God calls to preach must preach.  I also must be clear on a second point, namely that that the paid pastor of the local independent congregation is a new arrival on the historical scene, not something that has always been with the Church and not something without which Christ’s Church will perish. Even a cursory survey of church history will turn up Paul, who worked as a tent-maker; friars, who begged from town to town as they preached; celibate secular clergy in the middle ages, whose expenses were kept low by keeping them from (legitimately) supporting children; and the modern movement of bi-vocational ministry among evangelical Protestants.

What the old-time preachers neglect (and remember, I love me some old-time preachers) is that economic realities change over the course of the Church’s history.  The pensioned parish parson is a figure that makes perfect sense in the Church of England when and where said Church is in a place of cultural prominence, and the paid pastor still has some currency in congregations large enough to support that pastor on roughly two percent of the congregation’s income.  (And yes, I know preachers want ten percent.  I also know that the reality is closer to two percent.)  But to tell this generation of young and pious youth group kids that the only faithful course in the world is to specialize in a profession that’s becoming narrower by the year is something akin to encouraging scads of people to do grad school in the humanities.  (And I say this as someone who’s sitting in an English professor’s office and who looks at an English professor in the mirror in the mornings.)  The number of churches that can support a preacher, much less a staff of ordained clergy, is shrinking, and if people really want to reach out to human beings anywhere but in the wealthy suburbs, bivocational preachers or some kind of new-monastic life of simplicity seems to be the way to go.

I realize that the purists among the old-time preachers will likely consider me a sell-out of sorts for writing this, but I do think that Bible colleges, if they want to be responsible as they train the next generation of gospel-proclaimers, should do so by combining a rigorous education in Biblical languages, Biblical interpretation, Church history, and other practices of the theological intellect with training as English teachers, accountants, auto mechanics, and other skilled professions.  (Not all of them need start with vowels.)  And to be perfectly honest, I don’t think that one person has enough hours in a week faithfully do both and raise a family.  For that reason (and because I think it’s a good idea on other theological grounds), I do think that the future of the church will not be with one person in a suit (or a robe, if your tradition is into that) in a pulpit every Sunday morning but with a plurality of teaching elders, sharing the responsibilities of teaching as congregations shoulder the burdens as their lives allow to care for the sick, visit the lonely, and do other things that really ought to be duties distributed among the congregation rather than heroically shouldered by the dude with the Clergy pass at the hospital.

This will require a new array of strategies for training, placing, and otherwise moving future preachers along to where gathered Christians need them, I realize, and off the top of my head, I don’t have any ideas that I’m comfortable writing yet.  But having spent time in the poorer parts of a medium-sized city with a bivocational preacher whom I still hold up as my own model for Church ministry, and having spent some time in poorer parts of non-urban America, where job listings for preachers simply do not yield many good applications, and having spent some time in congregations that struggle to make ends meet, I do happen to think that imagining such strategies should be the business of those people who research, theorize, and write books about living as the church.  And while I’m not out to get any old-time preachers fired, I do wonder just how many traditionally trained old-time preachers would go to waste twenty years from now when a new generation of truck-mechanic-preachers, store-manager-preachers, and computer-programmer-preachers could be reaching rural America, the poor sections of the small cities, and all of those other population groups that can’t really support a Saddleback or a Southeast Christian.  I’m not by any means anti-preacher; I just wonder how much better our preachers could be going forth when the demographics aren’t confining them to the suburbs.

As usual, I do welcome our readers’ feedback, both those from the Stone-Campbell movement and from elsewhere, about whether I’m missing some important reality or if my suggestion makes some sense.  What do you see as the future of Bible-college, Christian-college, and seminary education?

Once again I have Phil Rutledge to thank for an occasion to think not only about theology’s content but the ways in which I do theology.  Responding to our recent podcast on origin stories, Phil asks a battery of questions including the significance of the epithet Shaddai often appended to the Hebrew el, the effects of Clark Pinnock’s work on doctrines of divine omnipotence, and what the opening phrases of Genesis (and various English translations of those phrases) reveal about God’s nature.  I’ve realized as I’ve worked on this essay that it’s going to take a few posts to get to all of that, so please bear with me.

To start with the last question, I’m always a bit reticent to make very many declarations at all about divine nature except as a function of revelation.  (Readers who click over here for next week’s midweek post will see me wrestle with that reticence as it involves doctrines of Trinity.)  When I teach Sunday school or preach from the pulpit, I tend to stick pretty closely to the text of Scripture precisely because I’ve seen so many squirrelly things happen when theologies start elsewhere, then come to the Bible.  I have a deep and abiding respect for theologians like C. Michael Patton who are open about the fact that their philosophies of religion are prior to the text of the Scriptures (I do appreciate honesty in a theologian), and I recognize that nobody comes to the Bible as a blank slate, but I still hold that the Bible’s text has content proper to itself, and I believe that what’s intelligible about that text as encountered in prayer and in proclamation should hold an ultimate critiquing power over whatever theological constructions the Church proposes.  That’s my own take on the classical Protestant doctrine of Sola Scriptura, and although the vocabulary might be different, I do think that I’m operating within its spirit.

Prayer, Preaching, and Theology

I make note of two particular uses of Scriptures because, as anyone who’s been around the humanities in the academy is no doubt aware, just about any text can do just about any job, and the Bible is by no means immune to such things.  Acknowledging the potential for Scripture to come to all sorts of uses, I’ve come to agree with Stanley Hauerwas that theology’s most natural homes are in prayer and in preaching, and I try to let the forms as well as the content of those two pursuits inform my own answers to metaphysical, theological, and other questions as much as I can.

Part of the rhetorical moment of the prayer is that the world, which surrounds and constitutes the soul praying, stands contingent.  In other words, as a result of prayer, the God to whom the Christian prays might opt to make the world different than it would have been otherwise, and among the possible changes to that world are changes in the part of the world that the one praying calls “myself.”  In this sense a change in the faithful’s desires from avoidance of consequences to faithful facing of consequences is as much a “response” to prayer as is a check in the mail, the disappearance of cancer, or other “responses” more friendly to empirical apprehension.  The point is that, after the manner of the Psalms, most Christian prayer (I’ll refrain from commenting on other sorts) seems to assume that the world might be different as a result of the prayer.

Likewise the sermon, because a preacher speaks it to a congregation, assumes that the preacher’s act of narrating those present into the stories of the Bible, encouraging their faithful witness in the face of temptation or reassuring them of God’s faithfulness when doubt comes so easily, that act seems to assume that the act of teaching by means of oratory is itself an important action in ethical senses.  Certainly the spoken word is not magical; enough people have slept through my own sermons or (in more recent months) spent the span of time sending and receiving text messages that I’d be a great fool to believe thus.  Nonetheless, expositing Scripture on behalf of those gathered always assumes the ethical possibility that the exposition might change the minds, enliven the imaginations, or in the rarest cases alter the wills of those gathered, and that radical and dangerous contingency is what makes preachers keep writing their sermons week after week.

What lends preaching such powerful potential, I must add here, is not by any means the relative skill of the orator, though infomercials remain to remind us just how powerful a slick talker can be for getting people to part with their cash.  Rather, the God (if I must choose between elohim or theos, I’ll take both) who features sometimes as the speaker of an oracle, at other times a character within a narrator’s tale, at other times still the audience for a bit of lament poetry uses the power of those texts interpreted publicly to move the mind and the imagination and the will.  Likewise I’d deny any inherent “power in prayer” except as a placebo, but I do acknowledge that the very human practices of prayer often serve as a vehicle through which God works on the world.  I try to root my own doctrine of Scripture in what the Bible says about its own texts, namely that it’s good for instruction, reproof, edification, and other such things, and as best as I can tell, preaching and prayer are two handy avenues through which those functions can happen.

Preaching and the Nature of God

It’s those realities through which I try to look at Scripture, and although I’d grant to any Calvinist (especially Michial and David, since they’re two of the more pleasant Calvinists I know) that the divine nature might be something really quite different from the God who features so prominently in those narratives and oracles and Psalms in Scripture, and although I’d never begrudge anyone a bit of speculation about what the divine nature might be separate from those things, I do object when the working assumption seems to be that the Bible gets such central things as God’s relationship to Creation wrong on very basic levels.  That assumption can take on names like anthropomorphism, concession, and even evolution, but all of them seem to assume that the theologian, whether classical or progressive, must rescue the Bible from its own naivete.  I’m more inclined to think that such theologies have as their aim to rescue skittish mortals from a more dangerous vision of God than they’d prefer to encounter.

As I noted before, taking a homiletic and praying approach to Scripture means that certain other modes of approaching theological questions tend to take a back seat.  To give one example of what’s happened when theology-proper moves in other directions, I take the doctrine of God as Unmoved Mover as a good example.  I think that one must do some serious interpretive acrobatics to get from the discussion of movement and rest in the text of Aristotle’s Physics and the discussion of relationships between physics and mathematics in Aristotle’s Metaphysics to the god of natural philosophy that Aquinas describes in Summa Theologica.  (In other words, I consider part of the genius of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to be the systematizing of Greek discussions to answer Islamic and Jewish and Christian questions.)  In other words, what some would call a “Greco-Roman” understanding of divine stasis I read more as a Christian-era attempt to let the Greeks in even though the Greeks most often cited weren’t all that interested in Christian-era questions.  As far as I can tell, most of those inquiries happened either in monastic or university settings, and while exposition of Scripture was also going on, what bits of the Bible make it into the discussion of the Unmoved Mover tend to be one-verse proof-texts that serve (in my view, and I’m happy to read rebuttals) more often as credentials for university philosophical proofs than as interpretations of Biblical texts as the primary exhibits.

Because I think that preaching is at its roots a public exposition of the Bible, when I think of the nature of God, I turn to texts like Exodus before I go to Aristotle or even Aquinas.  And when I read a text like Exodus 4 (which was on one Sunday morning in the late Clinton years my lectionary text to preach), if I allow the Bible as it seems to want to be preached to critique the systems of Aquinas and his successors, I note that something happens in Exodus 4 that gives me a starting point for doing theology that insists upon reflection: in verse 14, God gets angry.

This is no doubt one of those stories that Plato would have excised had his Athens learned about heavenly beings from Exodus rather than Iliad.  After all, as Plato argues in in Republic, to change means to change either from worse to better or from better to worse.  If a being becomes better, that being wasn’t a god in the first place, and if the being is susceptible to becoming worse, that vulnerability means that the being is not a god.  (Incidentally, I think this is a much more compelling argument, as far as arguments go, than are Aristotle’s passages about motion and mathematics.)  Yet Exodus, held universally (that is to say by Pharisee and Sadduccee, by Rabbi and Priest, by Protestant and Catholic, though not by Marcion) to be Holy Writ, does not seem to waffle on that, and when I preach that text, I do tend to take the basic relationship between Moses and YHWH that the text relates to be right.  Moses refuses commission, and YHWH’s anger burns against him, and YHWH commissions Aaron to serve as helper.  In other words, events in the part of the world that we call Moses affect YHWH in ways that divinely inspired text sees fit to call burning anger.

Of course I’m not the first to encounter this text.  In order to preserve a medieval-systematic view of things, Aquinas compares God to a stone pillar with faces etched various faces: the pillar itself does not change at all, but when one travels around the pillar, one might see a calm face or an angry face.  And later, Hegelian-flavored criticism of the passage hold that the “anthropomorphic” angry-god is nothing more than a primitive, tribal understanding of the Ground of Being.  Some especially clever readers have even speculated that God is eternally angry at Moses in that moment, that there’s a core of immutable Being behind the facade that Moses sees.  As should be evident, all of these ways of reading Exodus 4 discern the “nature of God” in the passage, but that’s only the beginning of the discussion: what comes after we all look at the text together makes for the really interesting stuff.

When I think about the passage in terms of how to preach, I know that I’m relating the story to people who likely have never had the sort of weird encounter with God that Exodus describes.  (To be fair, I’ve only preached at my Pentecostal college once, and after a semester and a half there, I get the impression that my students would claim far more such experiences than do my fellow-congregants at Athens Christian Church.)  But I always talk about that encounter as happening after Moses flees Egypt and before Moses returns, and I did note when I preached the text that God, if I understand subjects and verbs right, does become angry as a result of the discourse at the burning bush.  Broadening my angle a bit, I note that the pattern wherein God becomes angry is not uncommon in the Bible, and it’s almost always a result of something that mortals do.  So while I’ve not up to this point speculated about what God looks like from the perspective of an angel or from the security camera in Heaven’s throne room, I do make certain assumptions about the divine nature based on the fact that I’m trying to get the narrative across.  When one is concerned with getting the narrative right, one can point to the moment before God speaks and to the moment after God speaks; to God’s relationship with humanity in certain moments and say that God’s anger burned against them; and to those stories as the contexts within which most (not all, but most) assertions about God’s nature in Scripture happen.

In other words, although I’ve not said much (if anything) about what God’s nature is as separate from moments of revelation, the forms of that revelation point me towards treating God-and-humanity (because neither happens without the other in the Bible) as something that changes, something that requires covenants on the parts of both parties and reminders by prophets (on God’s side) and lament Psalms (on humanity’s side) to reinforce those covenants.  I believe God when God says that God will be faithful always, and it means more, not less, because the world that Scripture creates is one in which any moment could be a moment of unfaithfulness.  I also believe the Psalmists when they sing lament Psalms that call on God to remember those promises–there’s a confidence that God has the ability and the faithfulness to follow through, but there’s also an unflinching awareness that the world has become a treacherous place and that God needs to do something about it.  (If you’re hearing echoes of Exodus in both sides of that, perhaps my point is sinking in.)  Perhaps more than anything, I believe that when I preach I preach to those who are continuing those stories in the present moment, and when I pray I pray as someone who is still in significant ways inside that story, and looking at such things from inside, the narrative makes a fair bit of sense even when one lets its subjects be subjects and its verbs be verbs.

Since I’m now beyond the scope of a brief post, I’m going to put off until my next mid-week essay (which will actually happen in two weeks since I’ve got to get a book review online sooner rather than later) a discussion of Pinnock and of divine power.  As always, I don’t think that mine is the only way to make sense of revelation, and I welcome any comments and questions that folks would send my way.