The Scandal of Having Something to Say: Ricoeur and the Possibility of Postliberal Preaching

1. The Scandal of Having Something to Say

1 chapter one The Scandal of having Something to Say This book explores how scriptural language and sermonic language participate in god’s free act of self-communication. i begin with some theological reflections on the contemporary context that motivates this project. The Scandal of Preaching after Christendom The north american pulpit has been in decline for decades.1 of course, worries about the decline of preaching are not entirely new.2 But if this is not 1 for a classic articulation, see fred B. craddock, As One without Authority, rev. and with new sermons (St. louis: chalice Press, 2001), 3–20. originally published in 1971, craddock’s opening chapter, titled “The Pulpit in the Shadows,” names many factors motivating detractors of the pulpit in his context, including one that often escapes less astute observers: “[T]hese critics have heard us preach” (3). 2 a generation before craddock, W. e. Sangster employed the same image of the shadow to express concerns about the state of preaching at mid-century. William edwin Sangster, The Craft of Sermon Construction (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1951), 11. looking even further back, clyde fant compiled a remarkable list of nineteenth-century citations mourning the state of the discipline, and so chastised, “We do not need to dispute the very real problems preaching has today, but we do need to lay to rest once and for all the unrealistic ‘golden age’ myth and we do need to know that pulpit criticism was not born in our generation.” fant, Preaching for Today (San francisco: harper & Row, 1987), 26–27. 2 The Scandal of having SomeThing To Say the first generation of homileticians to wrestle with the challenges faced by preaching in the north american context, this cultural moment does represent a fundamentally new challenge. The indifference of the twenty-first-century mainstream north american context to christian preaching is the popular culture endgame of centuriesold intellectual developments. christianity is entering a season in which it must strive to reclaim its rightful vocation as a religion and renounce the false vocation of underwriting Western culture generally.3 The most helpful and hopeful way of framing the current crisis in homiletics is that the cultural fatigue surrounding christian proclamation is a clue about a wrong turn and an opportunity for self-correction. if christianity is finally exposed in its failed bid to supply the conceptual framework capable of exhaustively funding the many and diverse projects of Western civilization, then christian preaching is set free to explore its true vocation with new focus. claiming this freedom depends upon coming to terms with loss. however real the hostility toward preaching, forty years ago when fred craddock gamely requested his “stay of execution” for preaching,4 the Protestant pulpit in the United States was in fact a comfortably ensconced public fixture just as the church’s cultural enfranchisement was assumed. Things have changed.5 it now seems increasingly unlikely that preaching will ever again reclaim its place in the pantheon of respected north american cultural institutions. homiletical reflection now can and must work free from such privilege and distraction.6 The challenge is to claim this new freedom and trust that it is as real as the loss the church has endured. one need not regard the cultural 3 “[T]he most fateful issue for christian self-description is that of regaining its autonomous vocation as a religion, after its defeat in its secondary vocation of providing ideological coherence , foundation, and stability to Western culture.” hans W. frei, “The ‘literal Reading’ of Biblical narrative in the christian Tradition: does it Stretch or Will it Break?,” in The Bible and the Narrative Tradition, ed. frank mcconnell (new york: oxford University Press, 1986), 74. 4 craddock, One without Authority, 3. 5 mainline Protestant cultural disenfranchisement has occurred at an astonishing pace, but due to the sheer scope of such a realignment it has taken a generation. as late as 1987, William h. Willimon could characterize the situation of the church in the West as “awkward” because “having once been culturally established, [christians] are not yet clearly disestablished.” Willimon , “answering Pilate: Truth and the Postliberal church,” Christian Century 104, no. 3 (1987): 84. Willimon’s “yet” shows that he had no illusions about the trend, which has continued and accelerated since his observation. 6 Richard lischer has rightly discerned the opportunity at hand: “We cannot . . . rescue the profession of the ministry from social decline, but we can embrace our vocation. We can preach.” lischer, The End of Words...