The Word That Redescribes the World: The Bible and Discipleship

1. A Text That Redescribes

A Text That Redescribes It is more or less a given, by convention if not by conviction, that one must have a biblical text for a sermon. Sometimes the text is more than that, utterly absolutized. Often it is a lot less than that, a text read but not taken seriously.The text is a given, nonetheless, in the churches of the Reformation . It is a given that requires, in our time, a fresh consideration. The Dominant Script A fresh reconsideration is a requirement (1) because of our awareness, fresh awareness, of the problematic of the text with reference to historical questions ; (2) because the text is seen to be laden with deep ideological force that is dangerous; and (3) because our church situation is now so greatly pluralized that the claim for this particular text—even in the church—is not obviously normative, as the slippage between text and gospel seems wide and gaping. The text is problematic enough—historically and ideologically—that we might do better to leave off the text and go with “experience,” what George Lindbeck terms “experiential-expressive” modes of discourse.1 Except that it readily becomes obvious that when the church works from its experience—or, worse, from the experience of the preacher—things very quickly become thin, boring, predictable, and perhaps too congenial or, alternatively, too angry and coercive, depending on the preacher’s “experience.” Any large vision of saving transcendence, moreover, devolves into the family or tribe, either in blasé comfort or in militant crusading, either way with a very low ceiling.The failure of such thinness makes clear that we need a text that addresses us inscrutably, from beyond us, beyond the low ceiling of the congregation and the short horizon of the preacher. If we cannot get along without a text, should we not be candid enough to say that we already have a text? We already have a text that we bring to 3 chapter one 4 D The Word That Redescribes the World church and carry home with us. We may characterize that hidden, powerful , authoritative text in various ways, here all critical if not polemical. It is the text of the Enlightenment, of modernity, which received its decisive articulation within decades of the final edition of Calvin’s Institutes. The turn from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century—in Hobbes, Descartes, Galileo, and Locke—worked an incredible gain of emancipation in Western culture—a knowing revolt against superstitious traditionalism in the church, a rejection of the kind of absolutism that still operates in the “religious wars” of our own time— and produced the Thirty Years War, rendering Europe bloody. This new, emerging text, culminating in the immense rational powers of Immanuel Kant, was perhaps a gift from God and was received as such by its formulators. That text has become an unquestioned, normative narrative that has permeated Western consciousness, for believer and nonbeliever alike, with reasonableness and autonomous freedom. It is, however, a huge leap from the reasoned intentionality of the formulators of that text to the presenttense derivations and extrapolations now so forceful among us: Its undisciplined extrapolation shows up • in the assumption that there is a reasonable, technical solution to every problem, so that “research and development” are the order of the day. • in the self-worship of media idols in which human quality is reduced to sexual emanations. • in professional sports, where physical strength is traded for bigger salaries, and macho images show powerful people who are unbridled by normal social restraints and expectations. • in the piped-in, televised liturgies of consumerism that offer always one more “Elemental Helper”—offers that are interrupted only by occasional episodes of numbing entertainment. • in systematic violence within the U.S. that is fostered by the gun lobby, which relies upon a constitutional amendment, itself an Enlightenment statement of autonomy. • in endlessly developing military capacity of technique given over to violence, whether of Auschwitz or, currently, the U.S. imperial machine of war. A Text That Redescribes d 5 Do I go on too long with this? Do I overstate? I take so much time, because I believe this text that we already have—which is dangerous to criticize in public—is deeply embedded in the church and in our listening apparatus. The power of this text shows up in an excessive theological conservatism that has transposed fidelity into certitude and believes that if we go...