NOTES

Introduction

1. Conversations with Barth on Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006) and Who Will Be Saved? (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2008). Thanks to my Abingdon editor, Dr. Robert Ratcliff, for his encouragement of the continuance of this conversation and for his wise editorial guidance. Thanks also to Drew Clayton, Stanley Hauerwas, Matt Fleming, Jenny Copeland, Tom Long, and Timothy Whitaker for their help with the manuscript.

1. New

1. Fred B. Craddock, Overhearing the Gospel (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002).

2. See the first half of S.K.’s Philosophical Fragments, trans. David Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962).

3. Looking back, the most important popular theological instigation of this ecclesiastical cult of the new was a decidedly anti-ecclesiastical book—Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (New York: Collier Books, 1965 [25th anniversary edition], 1990). Insouciance toward tradition, at least in the time of my own ministry, has its roots in this book’s influence on my generation of mainline seminarians.

4. Having surveyed much of the past two centuries of homiletical thought, and a good deal of systematic theology of the same period, I find therein almost no interest in the chief concern of this book. “Again?” appears to be a problem solely for us contemporary preachers. That for the first time in the history of the church reiteration of the truth should be a problem for us is a commentary upon us.

5. Quoted by Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 9. I am indebted to Hughes for this material on the birth of the modern world (9–41).

6. That quintessential modern man, Mao Zedong, in one of his most famous poems, after noting that all the old Chinese emperors are dead, explains “only today are we men of feeling.” We are the first generation to feel! Mao’s feelings did not get in the way of his extermination of millions of Chinese. See The Poems of Mao Zedong, trans. Willis Barnstone (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 78.

7. See Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990).

8. Most of my ministry has been in a university setting. Throughout most of the history of the university, all professors, no matter which subject being taught, were historians. They felt obligated to pass on to the young what humanity had learned in order that the young, having learned what knowledge we have accumulated, could then advance knowledge. In recent years universities have become mostly adversaries with the past, generators of new trends. They are no longer the purveyors of the collective wisdom of others but rather the originators of fashion. C. John Sommerville says that today universities serve “the news,” sell new ideas and information to their customers (students), much like newspapers. See C. John Sommerville, The Decline of the Secular University (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

9.​ Apollinaire’s fellow writer Guy de Maupassant hated the Eiffel Tower, pronouncing it an ugly contraption of ladders and beams. He said that the tower ended in a ridiculous slender point that looked as if it ought to bear the statue of Atlas, though it basically ended in nothing. In a way, this huge finger pointing into nothingness was a fitting symbol for the modern era.

10. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2007). A curious aspect of Dawkins and Hitchens is that they present their critique of theism as something fresh when their arguments are mostly rehash. If godlessness is such a sure sign of human advance, one would think that God would have been long dead at the hands of Nietzsche and Voltaire. Why enlist a writer for Vanity Fair to do what some of the greatest minds of the age failed to do?

11. David Tracy warns—or at least I suppose it to be a warning—that modern theologies “were principally determined not by the reality of God but by the logos of modernity” (On Naming the Present: God, Hermeneutics and Church [Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1994], 41). There is no way a book about “keeping preaching fresh” would have been written by John Wesley. “Fresh” would surely be called “heresy.”

12. Ted Smith, quoting Walter Benjamin, notes that the idea of progress is particularly fallacious when applied to “the historical process as a whole.” It may be accurate to speak of progress, but only in certain carefully limited situations. We can thus speak of progress in medicine or even in race relations in the United States but it would be ridiculous to say that America is “making progress” (Ted A. Smith, The New Measures: A Theological History of Democratic Practice [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007], 261–63). Christians don’t believe in progress; we believe in redemption that comes in spite of our efforts.

13. For a definition of “Progressive Christianity” see http://www.tcpc.org. The website lists the “Eight Points of Progressive Christianity.” There is also a magazine, Progressive Christian, which can be found online at tpcmagazine.org. As best I can discern, “progressive” in the context of this book is to be taken to mean the last gasp of nineteenth-century, social gospel liberalism.

14. Theology tends to be a bit like art in that there is no real “progress” in theological investigation. Art can be good, bad, tacky, trivial, or derivative but it can’t really be “progressive.”

15. Augustine, Confessions 11.14, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin Books, 1961), 264.

16. James W. McClendon, Jr., Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1986), 17.

17. John Howard Yoder, The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecumenical and Ecclesiological (Scottsdale, Pa.: Herald, 1998), 56, 55.

18. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1051b, 29–30.

19. William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 222–23.

20. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).

21. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III, 2, trans. T. H. L. Parker, et al. (Edinburgh, Scotland: T & T Clark, 1957), 522.

22. From “The Emptiness of Existence,” in Essays of Schopenhauer, 2004 (retrieved March 6, 2009, from eBooks@Adelaide, ebooks.adelaide.edu.au).

23. Barth, Church Dogmatics, III, 2, 632.

24. As Barth says, the Gospel means, “we have time.” Church Dogmatics, III, 2, 521.

25. The presentation of the Trinity as harmony, peace, and community (see part 2 of Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us [San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1973]) may obscure the tendency of the Trinity to be disruptive of human appropriation of time.

26. In my church I have noted that most clergy, when they lead worship, tend to slow everything down—in their speech and movement—as if church action is always in slow motion. They tend to talk as if everyone in the congregation is either under five years old or over eighty. Is this unhurriedness a theological statement? Probably their slow pace is due to the majority of our clergy being senior citizens. Human life tends to slow down with age, even though our lives are moving more rapidly ​to their conclusion. Jesus did everything he needed to do, said everything he needed to say to save the world before he was thirty-five.

27. This is, I fear, what Reinhold Niebuhr called “Christian realism.”

28. John Howard Yoder, The Priestly Kingdom (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 136–37.

29. Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2003), 178.

30. Our time seems normal, a “fact” to which we should adjust. In Proust’s novels everything that time touches is killed by time; the wise get used to it. Death is normal. Yet as Michel Foucault taught us, in his observations of prisons, asylums, and hospitals, “normal” depends to a great extent on who has power in a society. In every society there is a “regime of truth” that determines what will be regarded as normal (Power/Knowledge, trans. Colin Gordon et al. [New York: Pantheon Books, 1980], 131). There is also a “regime of time” that declares the present as real. “Get real” is usually pronounced upon Christians by those who defend and benefit from the present order.

31. See the book by one of the heroes of the Progressive Christian movement, John Shelby Spong, Why Christianity Must Change Or Die (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998). Spong’s major problem with the God of Christiainity seems to be not only that God is old but also the Christian claim that God actually does something in time.

32. “Progress” was disposed of as a Christian idea as far back as John Baillie’s, The Belief in Progress (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951). Chesterton wrote that modern people say, “ ‘Away with your old moral formulae; I am for progress.’ Logically stated this means, ‘Let us not settle what is good; but let us settle whether we are getting more of it’ ” (G. K. Chesterton, Heretics [New York: Devin Adair, 1950], 26).

33. Marva Dawn, A Royal “Waste” of Time (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 143. How different is Dawn’s characterization of the prayer of the pastor than that of Sarah Coakley, in which she praises the “representational invisibility” of Anglican clergy who, now having no significance in English culture, have retreated to the quiet, restful, invisibility of personal prayer. “The Vicar at Prayer: an English Reflection on Ministry,” The Christian Century, July 1, 2008. I fear that Coakley is attempting to give theological justification for clerical ineptitude.

34. P. T. Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, reprint of 1916), 91 (retrieved March 6, 2009, from http://www.oldlandmarks.com). Thanks to Bishop Tim Whitaker for pointing me to this.

35. “Nietzsche says that we will live the same life, over and over again. God—I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again?” Woody Allen as quoted by Allan Hugh Cole Jr., Be Not Anxious: Pastoral Care of Disquieted Souls (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 28.

36. Kierkegaard noted that union with the God of Jews and Christians occurs not through our “elevation” but by God’s “descent” (Philosophical Fragments, trans. David Swenson [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962], 39). See in this same volume S.K.’s parable of the king who showed his love for a maiden by disguising himself and descending to her, 32–35.

37. Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), Vol. 1, 217– 18. Jenson says this in connection with an examination of the idea of time in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics.

38. “[L]iberal modernity can best be seen as an energetic reaction to a particular and problematic version of nominalist Christianity. Early modernity saw itself as a salutary response to oppressive and obscurantist strains in Christian culture, but since it was reacting to a corruption of true Christianity [that is, Fundamentalism], it itself became similarly distorted and exaggerated” (Robert Barron, The Priority of Christ: Toward a Postliberal Catholicism [Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2007], 13). Michael Pasquarello III demonstrates the ways in which much so-called Evangelical Christianity is liberal modernity redone. See Christian Preaching: A Trinitarian Theology of Proclamation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006).

39.​ Marcus J. Borg, The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 39.

40. Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), 6.

41. Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).

42. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Worldly Preaching, ed. Clyde E. Fant (Nashville and New York: Thomas Nelson, 1975), 125.

43. Stanley Hauerwas helped me see how progressive/evangelical Christianity, in reducing the faith to “the message” made Christianity Gnostic: “In such a ‘modernity’ Christians have found it next to impossible to avoid the presumption that Christianity is a set of beliefs necessary to make their lives ‘meaningful.’ Conservative and liberal Christians believe that they have a personal relationship with God, a relation often associated with a decisive event or experience, which may or may not be enhanced by going to church. The crucial presumption is that ‘going to church’ is clearly not at the heart of what it means to be a Christian. Therefore modernity names the time in which Christians have found it almost impossible to avoid the spiritualization of their faith. Ironically, many Christians, who identify themselves as ‘conservative,’ that is, who assume it is very important that they have been ‘saved,’ fail to understand that their understanding of Christianity shares much with ancient Gnosticism” (Stanley Hauerwas, “The Gospel and Cultural Formations,” The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God [Oxford: Blackwell, 2007], 39). Thomas G. Long has labeled Borg a “new Gnostic.”

44. I believe that much of my critique of “PowerPoint preaching” also applies to preaching without notes. In attempting to preach without reference to any premeditated “script,” the preacher tends severely to limit what is preached. The medium (the desire to appear to be speaking “from the heart,” or extemporaneously) limits the message. I just heard a preacher give a long sermon without ever looking up from his manuscript. While he might have flunked “communication,” it was obvious to everyone that what he was speaking about was hard, heavy, and demanded careful thought and consideration—a rarity in the “communication” from most contemporary pulpits. We preachers ought therefore to be reminded that sometimes we fail to gain a hearing not only because of the way we say something but also because we have so little to say.

45. Communications theorist James Carey says that a market-driven economy has accelerated our expectations for instant communication. “Communication” becomes the efficient delivery of goods across great distances to a receptive market. This modern view of communication, says Carey, “derives from one of the most ancient of human dreams: the desire to increase the speed and effect of messages as they travel in space” (Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society [New York: Routledge, 1992], 17).

46. Toward the end of his Ethics Barth notes the curious freedom that is to be found in art and in humor that releases us from “the seriousness of the present” (Ethics [New York: Seabury Press, 1981], 510). I can’t imagine how anyone who knows much history could be too serious about the present. Christians find humor in the present, refusing to take the present too seriously on the basis of our convictions about the future.

47. John the Baptist said that with the coming of Jesus, there is judgment. The axe is laid to the root of the tree (Matt 3:10/ Luke 3:9). This parable contains the only other use of the verb to “cut out” (ekkopto).

2. Time’s Thief

1. Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist in Slaughterhouse-Five, is introduced as one who is “unstuck in time,” that is, a pilgrim.

2. “Fresh Air with Terry Gross: Writers Speak,” 2004 WHYY Inc., Highbridge Company, disc 1.

3.​Erich Auerbach said that Scripture, unlike Homer, does not want to “merely make us forget our own reality for a few hours. Scripture seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history” (Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968], 15). My point is that Scripture wants to overcome not only our reality but our time as well.

4. Kierkegaard, master of the ironic, mocked humanity’s assumption (in the voice of the aesthete, Johannes Climacus) that the only way modern people would have taken notice of God is “if God had taken the form … of a rare, enormously large green bird, with a red beak, that perched on a tree … and perhaps even whistled in an unprecedented manner” (Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to “Philosophical Fragments,” Vol. I, [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992], 245).

5. Kierkegaard, once again, presciently saw the sinful evasion within our “history.” He asks, in the frontispiece of Philosophical Fragments, how “is it possible to base an eternal happiness upon historical knowledge?” later ridiculing the “Disciple at Second Hand” (ch. 5). As I write this I learn that Thomas Nelson Company has produced a “Chronological Study Bible” in which Scripture has been cut and pasted into a coherent historical narrative. I assume that if biblical redactors had wanted to produce a coherent historical narrative, they could have. Instead, they produced distinctively nonchronological narratives like the Gospel of Mark.

6. I fear that’s one thing that Kierkegaard missed in his exploration of boredom as the great modern curse. S.K. usually recommends some form of self-renovation, self-awareness, or self-modification as the means of overcoming boredom. I believe that boredom is the inevitable result of a world bereft of God and that its only cure is a living, surprising God.

7. Walter Benjamin says that the modern world invented “homogeneous, empty time” in which time, no longer something determined by God’s providence, was conceived of as a matter of unvarying linear progression. See Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 263– 64. I wonder if medieval people got bored? Perhaps boredom is a peculiarly modern malady, a byproduct of a world in which there is no God to make even our times of inactivity interesting?

8. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, III 737n, VI 68.

9. Cited in note number 1, frontispiece.

10. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV, 3, trans. T. H. L. Parker, et al. (Edinburgh, Scotland: T & T Clark, 1957), 327.

11. Barth, Church Dogmatics, I, 1, 464.

12. This is Robert Jenson’s wonderful way of putting the matter. Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, The Triune God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 42–44.

13. Pope Benedict opened his second encyclical with the claim that “a distinguishing mark of Christians is the fact that they have a future” (First Things [February 2008]: 55).

14. Barth speaks of Jesus’ resurrection as an “eternal” event that is contemporary with each believer, so much so that we can no longer ascribe the resurrection to a temporal timeframe. Past, present, and future have little meaning when speaking of an event like the resurrection, which obliterates such humanly constructed distinctions (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I, 291, 308).

15. Karl Barth, Theology in Church (New York: Harper and Bros., 1962), 61.

16. Ibid.

17. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, Ch. V.

18. See chapter 1 of Franz Overbeck, On the Christianity of Theology, trans. John E. Wilson (San Jose, Calif.: Pickwick Publications, 2002).

19. Karl Barth, “The Strange New World within the Bible” (1916), Word of God and the Word of Man, 28–50.

20. Early in Romans, Barth dismisses “history” as “the display of the supposed advantages of power and intelligence which some men possess over others.” Then he says, “The judgment of God is the end of history” (77). English translation by Edwyn C. Hoskyns, Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 77.

21. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV, 3, 338.

22.​Barth, Church Dogmatics, III, 2, 552.

23. Ibid., 456.

24. Barth, Church Dogmatics, II, 2, 516.

25. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV, 1, 505. Ernst Troeltsch had argued that history should be “democratized,” that Jewish and Christian history must be made analogous to all other history in order to be studied as history in the modern German university. Thus Jewish and Christian history could not be studied by modern historians until God was rendered mute and inoperative as an agent in history. See the essay by Scott Bader-Saye in Rand Rashkover and C. C. Pecknold, eds., Liturgy, Time, and the Politics of Redemption (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 94–95. Barth, writing in the aftermath of Troeltsch, argued the opposite: you can’t understand anything about what’s going on in history until Scripture teaches you that salvation history is “related to world history as a whole. It is the center and the key to all events” (Barth, Church Dogmatics, III, 3, 186).

26. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV, 2, 471.

27. Ibid., 473.

28. Barth, Church Dogmatics, III, 4, 587.

29. Barth, Church Dogmatics, II, 1, 616.

30. Barth, Church Dogmatics, I, 2, 45–55. Also, Barth writes beautifully, in Romans, of Jesus Christ as the point where eternity and time intersect: “In this name two worlds meet and go apart, two planes intersect, the one known and the other unknown. The known plane is God’s creation, fallen out of its union with Him, … the world of men, and of time, and of things—our world. This known plane is intersected by another plane that is unknown—the world of the Father, of the Primal Creation, and of the final Redemption. The relation between us and God, between this world and [God’s] world, presses for recognition, but the line of intersection is not self-evident. The point on the line of intersection at which the relation becomes observable and observed is Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus” (Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. E. C. Hoskyns [London: Oxford University Press, 1933], 29).

31. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV, 2, 544.

32. Karl Barth, The Christian Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), 236.

33. Barth, Romans, 145–46.

34. Barth, Church Dogmatics, I, 2, 55.

35. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV, 3, 362–63.

36. Barth, Church Dogmatics, III, 2, 477. The resurrection is such a rebuke to the notion of “history” or “fact of history” that historical details of the resurrection “are irrelevant” says Barth in Romans (204). Preoccupation with historical questions, related to the resurrection, are for Barth “seeking the living among the dead” (205).

37. Barth, Church Dogmatics, III, 2, 465.

38. In college I was made to read Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (translated by Joan Stambaugh [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1953]). I remember even then being stunned by the recognition that my being—my actually existing in time—was something that was not given. It was something that must be achieved, wrought by me in time. This was too great an assignment for a college sophomore. Yet it did raise the question of time and its significance, a question that I’m pursuing forty years later. My pursuit is a reminder that the human psyche is rarely over and done with ideas once one has them. To have an idea as a sophomore in college sometimes requires patience in waiting to really “have” the idea until one is sixty! I think this is relevant to the discussion of this book. Some ideas are good enough to take at least forty years before they are ours.

39. Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, trans. K. Grobel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951), 22.

40. As Bultmann noted, modern people believe that they are “self-subsistent” and “immune from the interference of supernatural powers.” This is not only a challenge to the notion of eschatology, which is a dramatic instance of “interference of supernatural powers” but also a challenge for preaching. The challenge of Christian preaching in modernity, taught Bultmann, is to submit preaching to ​the standards of modernity in the hope that something can be retrieved that can be received by modern people. See Rudolf Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate (New York: Harper and Bros., 1961), 7.

41. Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, 130.

42. By switching from the Jewish, incarnate, historical rooting of the gospel to the existentialist, rather Gnostic distortion of the gospel, Bultmann had granted Gotthold Lessing’s “ugly, broad ditch” between faith and history that “Accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.” See Gotthold Lessing, “On the Proof of the Spirit and Power,” Lessing’s Theological Writings, trans. Henry Chadwick (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957).

43. In his book, A Theology of History (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), Hans Urs von Balthasar notes that for an act to have any real ethical significance, it must occur in real time. When one attempts to look at history in a timeless fashion—such as occurs in Marx—real human agency is undercut. Therefore, when Bultmann presents the Christian faith as needing demythologizing, he is talking about lifting the Christian faith out of time, defeating Christianity’s time-bound quality. But the result is to destroy utterly the human agent, because the human agent can only have significance in history, in time. Plato is a difficult mistake to overcome, in this regard.

44. Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1993), 60.

45. Karl Barth loved this text, “wait for and hasten.” He preached numerous sermons on this text and referred to it frequently in Romans. In a 1917 sermon (April 29) he calls this phrase, “hurry up and wait for” “unapproachable, a jubilation as if sung by angel choirs, … a great rumble as if from a far off thunderstorm.”

46. Tom Long, “Imagine There’s No Heaven: The Loss of Eschatology in American Preaching,” Journal of Preachers (Advent 2006): 26–27.

47. This point is worked so well by Reinhard Hutter in his contrast of “utopian” and “pneumatic” eschatology in “Ecclesial Ethics, the Church’s Vocation, and Practice,” Pro Ecclesia 2, no. 4 (Fall): 435. Karl Barth repeatedly rejected “natural theology” as inadequate for the radical disruption of nature in the Atonement. I am arguing here that a sense of time as “natural”—tied to the cyclic passage of the seasons, is inadequate to account for what has happened to our time in Jesus Christ.

48. I wonder if part of the appeal of “narrative homiletics,” in which the connection between preaching and narrative was stressed (Aristotle defined a story as having a beginning, middle, and end) was yet another attempt on the part of us preachers to stabilize God’s eschatological time into a more tamed and orderly experience of time. Eugene Lowry’s Homiletical Plot (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1980) notes how good sermons move through time. But Lowry’s is ordered, sequential time. Note that Scripture often begins its narratives without context, introduction, and often ends without tidy conclusions. Encouraged by Scripture, I believe that sermons ought to have a beginning, middle, and end, but not necessarily in that order. James W. Thompson charges that not only does narrative homiletics (such as Lowry fostered) erroneously assume a Christian culture but also aims at the listeners’ affirmation rather than transformation, has little ethical content, and fails to form Christian community. See James W. Thompson, Preaching Like Paul: Homiletical Wisdom for Today (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 9–14.

49. So Robert Jenson says that the main difference between a living God and a dead one is that a living God can still surprise you. In these last paragraphs, I’m heavily indebted to Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: The Triune God, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), especially 194– 227.

50. Karl Barth, Prayer According to the Catechisms of the Reformation, trans. S. F. Terrien (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1952), 236.

51. I suspect that one reason we attempt to “spiritualize” Easter, making it into a religious phenomenon rather than to receive Easter as the political fact that the gospels claim it to be, is as an attempt not to change our intellectual paradigms. We attempt to think about the resurrection using modern ways of thinking. Yet modern ways of thinking were born, in great part, out of an attempt to exclude the resurrection from the realm of truth. Modern paradigms of knowledge tend to be ​subservient to the present political order. So we can’t think about Easter without conversion of our politics and our ways of thinking. We Easter preachers really have our work cut out for us.

3. Repetition

1. In some ways, this text is the whole argument of this book. By the way, is it significant that Jesus says the faithful scribe first brings out what is “new” before bringing out what is “old?” Our usual order is “old,” then “new.” Jesus, on the other hand, recommends getting the new out of the way first so we can move to the substantive old.

2. Father James Lindler overheard one of his young congregants reporting his most recent sermon: “It was just like all of Father Lindler’s sermons, ‘Blah, blah, blah, love.’ ” Lindler took this as a compliment. (Sermon recorded on Day One Podcast, May 17, 2008.)

The cumulative effect of preaching is but one of the reasons it is important for pastors to be stationed in a church long enough for their preaching to burrow into the souls of their listeners. Gospel preaching takes time. John Leith says that Protestantism began not only by asking, “How can I find a gracious God?” the typically Lutheran account of the Reformation, but also by asking the more Reformed question “Where can I find the true church?” If the church is constituted by preaching, we must have preachers who are willing to locate, commit, and preach to a congregation enough Sundays until a faithful church has time to be gathered around the Word. See John Leith, From Generation to Generation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1990), 55.

3. Walter Brueggemann, Reverberations of Faith: A Theological Handbook of Old Testament Themes (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 222.

4. Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 167, emphasis is original.

5. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Boston: Small, Maynard, & Company, 1905), 78; see also T. S. Eliot’s thoughts on repetition in “Four Quartets: East Coker,” III, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962).

6. Two management consultants have told me that one of the weaknesses in my leadership style is that I don’t “stay on target.” I have difficulty “staying focused,” “sticking with the message.” My fourth-grade teacher could have told me as much. My mind wanders. My tastes are catholic in nature. I’m interested in too many different things. The consultants were telling me that, in service to the organization I’m attempting to lead I must submit to the needs of the organization. In short, I must be willing again and again, to repeat myself.

7. Roughly equivalent to Louis Armstrong’s statement about jazz: “If you have to ask, I can’t explain it to you.”

8. Kierkegaard noted that for Plato “Truth is not introduced into the individual from without, but was within him.” Truth behaves exactly the opposite in Christianity, coming within from without. As John says of Jesus, “He came unto his own and his own knew him not.” See Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, trans. David F. Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 11.

9. Stanley M. Hauerwas has long stressed that one of the characteristics of distinctively Christian speech is that it is “habituated”—formed in us through habits over time and that one of the chief roles of the pastor is to teach us good habits in our use of speech: “To learn to speak Christian, to learn to speak well as a Christian, is to be habituated. Thus we are told we must speak the truth in love. The love that we believe necessary to make our words true is not a subjective attitude, but rather, is to be formed by the habits of the community necessary for the Church to be a true witness” (“Carving Stone or Learning to Speak Christian,” The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God [Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007], 120).

10. Norman Mailer, with Michael Lennon, On God: An Uncommon Conversation (New York: Random House, 2007), 122–23.

11.​Bruce F. Kawin, Telling It Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Film (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972), 4.

12. For a wonderfully illustrated discussion of repetition and aesthetics, see especially Maria H. Loh’s Titian Remade: Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art (Los Angeles: Getty Publication, 2007).

13. Most of my information on rhetoric comes from Edward P. J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), “Figures of Speech,” 424–62.

14. The following list of terms from the classical study of rhetoric come from Dr. Gideon Burton, of Brigham Young University: http://rhetoric.byu.edu/.

15. Richard Lischer’s The Preacher King: Martin Luther King and the Word That Moved America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) has a wonderful rhetorical analysis of King’s preaching that stresses his use of the various figures of speech of repetition. See chapter 5.

16. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: Repetition, trans. Howard V. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

17. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Vol. 1, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1959), 70.

18. I think he was pointing to the truth of Heraclitus’s we-can’t-step-in-same-river-twice.

19. Kierkegaard, Repetition, 131. I am told that in Danish, the word repetition (gjentagelse) means not simply “to repeat” but also “to take back.”

20. Søren Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 371–77.

21. I take issue with S.K. in his urging us to will ourselves into the Christian story—God in the power of the Holy Spirit wills us to be part of the Christian story—we don’t have to want very much to understand the gospel in order to be given the gift of the gospel. I am routinely impressed by those people in my congregation who aren’t particularly earnest about hearing God speak to them who have God speak to them.

22. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, II, 1, trans. T. H. L. Parker, et al. (Edinburgh, Scotland: T & T Clark, 1957), 250. The young Barth was greatly influenced by Kierkegaard. I cannot determine that Barth was influenced by S.K.’s Repetition, though the similarities between this theme in Barth and in S.K. are striking.

23. Stanley M. Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001), 173–74.

24. In Church Dogmatics, IV, 1, 3, Barth introduces the metaphor of a circle to depict the complex structure of Church Dogmatics as unified whole.

25. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV, 1, 281.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., 76.

29. Ibid., 295–96.

30. Karl Barth, The Doctrine of the Word of God, Church Dogmatics, I, 1, trans. G. T. Thompson (Edinburgh, Scotland: T & T Clark, 1936), 57.

31. Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1989), 25.

32. Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1961).

33. Barth, Church Dogmatics, II, 1, 250.

34. Is the recent interest (following Aristotle’s concern for ethos) in the character of preacher an aspect of a homiletics that has become less interested in the Agent of preaching (God in Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit)? The most interesting (and troublingly difficult) character in preaching is the Trinity. The character of preachers is mainly of interest in how the curious character of God impacts the preacher’s character. We preachers are never as interesting as the God whom we preach.

35.​N. T. Wright, New Testament and the People of God (London: SPCK, 1992), 140.

36. Wittgenstein said, “You can’t hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed.” Scripture is not really God’s word, lying on the printed page. It is God’s word as address, summons, vocation, a dynamic that is most likely to happen in preaching. When generalized, abstract “God’s Word” becomes God’s address to you, that’s truly “God’s Word” (Wittgenstein as quoted by David B. Burrell, Deconstructing Theodicy: Why Job Has Nothing to Say to the Puzzle of Suffering [Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2008], 49).

37. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV, 1, 648.

38. Ibid., 608.

39. Karl Barth, Homiletics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991), 44.

40. “Four Quartets,” T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962), 188–89.

41. Scripture makes Jesus’ encounter with hometown sickness and death an even greater challenge: the little girl is dead. Levitical law says that the dead are not to be touched, for the dead defile (Lev 21). As for the good-as-dead anonymous woman with the discharge of blood, Scripture suggests that she is in this fix because she must have failed to be righteous. She wouldn’t be sick if she had not done something wrong, so she is probably an outcast from the faith community, that is, us (Lev 15:25-30).

4. Time Disrupted

1.God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 34.

2. John Calvin, “The Sense of Deity Found in All Men,” On the Christian Faith: Selections from the Institutes, Commentaries, and Tracts, ed. John T. McNeill (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 9.

3. See chapter 1 in Arthur Waley, The Way and Its Power: A Study of the Tao Te Ching and Its Place in Chinese Thought (London: Allen … Unwin, 1934; New York: Grove, 1958).

4. Bonhoeffer speaks of the way Scripture reads us into the gospel: “They [the biblical books] set the listening fellowship in the midst of the wonderful world of revelation of the people of Israel with its prophets, judges, kings, and priests, its wars, festivals, sacrifices, and sufferings. The fellowship of believers is woven into the Christmas story, the baptism, the miracles and teaching, the suffering, dying, and rising again of Jesus Christ. It participates in the very events that occurred on this earth for the salvation of the world, and in doing so receives salvation in Jesus Christ… . It is not that God is the spectator and sharer of our present life, howsoever important that is; but rather that we are the reverent listeners and participants in God’s action in the sacred story, the history of the Christ on earth.” Preachers attempt to do what Scripture does. See Bonhoeffer, Life Together (New York: Harper and Bros., 1954), 53–54.

5. Calvin, “The Sense of Deity Found in All Men,” 17.

6. Wallace A. Bacon, The Art of Interpretation (New York: Holt, Reinhart … Winston, 1979), 38, as quoted in Jana Childers and Clayton J. Schmit, Performance in Preaching: Bringing the Sermon to Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 31.

7. John Calvin, On the Christian Faith, ed. John T. McNeill (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 23.

8. So Barth said that preachers “realize how impossible their action is, but they may still look beyond its uncertainty and focus on the fact of revelation. This will give them confidence that the revealed will of God which is at work in their action will cover their weakness and corruptness… . Knowing the forgiveness of sins, they may do their work in simple obedience, no longer then, as a venture, but in the belief that God has commanded it” (Homiletics, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Donald E. Daniels [Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991], 69–70).

9. Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (New York: Picador, 98), 230–31.

10. Barbara K. Lundblad, Marking Time: Preaching Biblical Stories in the Present Tense (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2007).

11.​Sixth note from the “Notes on the Translation of Greek Tenses,” just after the preface to The New American Standard Bible, New Testament (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Company, 1960).

12. John Calvin, On the Christian Faith: Selections from the Institutes, Commentaries, and Tracts, trans. John T. McNeill (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 17.

13. Here I’m being instructed by Gerhard Ebeling, God and Word, trans. James W. Leitch (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), particularly 17–19.

14. As Charles L. Campbell says, “Not only is the preacher’s message shaped by the story of Jesus … but the very act of preaching itself is a performance of Scripture, an embodiment of God’s reign after the pattern of Jesus… . Preachers accept a strange kind of powerlessness, which finally relies on God to make effective not only individual sermons, but the very practice of preaching … the preacher’s words must be ‘redeemed by God’ ” (Preaching Jesus: New Directions for Homiletics in Hans Frei’s Postliberal Hermeneutic [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997], 214, emphasis in original).

15. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Penguin, 1985).

16. “The Vacation,” Wendell Berry, The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint, 1998), 157.

17. “As the church speaks and hears the gospel and as the church responds in prayer and confession, the church’s life is a great conversation, and this conversation is none other than our anticipatory participation in the converse of the Father and the Son in the Spirit; as the church is enlivened and empowered by this hearing and answer, the inspiration is none other than the Spirit who is the life between the Father and the Son” (Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: The Triune God, Vol. I [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997], 228).

18. Quoted by John W. Wright, Telling God’s Story: Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2007), 23. I am indebted to Wright for much of the discussion on hermeneutics that follows.

19. Quoted by Wright, Telling God’s Story, 29.

20. What I am claiming for homiletical repetition of texts is close to what Walter Brueggemann has said: “The text lingers. Out of that lingering, however, from time to time, words of the text characteristically erupt into new usage… . What has been tradition, hovering in dormancy, becomes available experience” (Walter Brueggemann, Texts That Linger, Words That Explode: Listening to Prophetic Voices [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000], 1).

21. Written with Rowan Greer, Early Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986).

22. My stress on divine agency is, of course, indebted to Karl Barth whose The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (New York: Harper and Bros., 1928) recovered for modern theology a sense of the Word of God as active and fecund.

23. As quoted by Gardner Taylor in Don M. Wardlaw, Preaching Biblically: Creating Sermons in the Shape of Scripture (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983), 137.

24. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (New York: Harper and Bros., 1954), 44.

25. In Romans 10:14-21.

26. Barth’s conviction of the primacy of preaching is discussed well by Stephen Webb, The Divine Voice: Christian Proclamation and the Theology of Sound (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004), 176–78. James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007) shows that evangelical Christians made a mistake in privileging the written over the oral word, in allowing print to dominate their encounters with Scripture. Print, by its nature, excludes, circumscribes, and limits what is communicated to itself. The embrace of the “literal sense” of Scripture led to modern Fundamentalism and its problems, a sort of a-theistic reading of Scripture. As Simpson says, “only oral or unwritten context made sense of written texts.” In other words, Scripture—printed and static—must have preaching to make it make theological sense.

27. Walter Brueggemann, Texts That Linger, Words That Explode: Listening to Prophetic Voices, ed. Patrick D. Miller (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 41.

28.​David Buttrick, “The Language of Jesus,” Theology Today, Vol. 64 (2008): 423–44.

29. Paul Berliner says that boredom is a major impetus for artistic creativity. A jazz composer like Thelonious Monk constantly improvises because of “the monotony of repeated performance routines.” Singer Carmen Lundy says, “After you have sung a song one hundred and fifty times, the chances are that you are going to begin doing little, different things with it” (Paul F. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology, 1994], 96). Thanks to Drew Clayton for pointing me to Berliner’s book.

30. Why was this fecund story omitted from the Revised Common Lectionary? I can only surmise that the reason for exclusion was political—the Lectionary Committee was mostly Republican.

31. I love the way the old Revised Standard Version rendered this Greek phrase as “The Word grew and multiplied”—like rabbits, God’s Word proliferated.