God’s Word and Our Words

Preaching from the Prophets to the Present and Beyond

W. Hulitt Gloer, Shawn E. Boyd, W. Hulitt Gloer, Shawn E. Boyd

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781532646096
  9781532646102
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532646119
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Written by nationally and internationally known homileticians and preachers, this book offers a fascinating survey of the significant developments in preaching, beginning with the Old Testament, moving through the history of preaching, and concluding with a look into the future, all while offering practical suggestions for meeting the challenges that lie ahead. In a unique way, it addresses both the academic issues raised during each period and the practical implications for preaching today and in the future.

Chapter One

The Preaching of the Prophets

Holy Intrusions of Truth and Hope

Walter Brueggemann

The work of the prophets in ancient Israel involved delivering a truth-telling, hope-evoking word in a society that wanted neither the truth that was too hard to bear nor hope that was impossible to entertain.

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The world in which these ancient prophets did their work was one of concentrated power and wealth that sought a monopoly on technology and imagination. The purpose of that wealth and power, on the one hand, was to control all technology in a way that ensured military domination and economic mastery. On the other hand, the purpose of wealth and power was to control all imagination, a control accomplished by liturgic hegemony in the performance of the temple. The royal hegemony intended to create a comprehensive world in which nothing was thinkable, imaginable, sayable, or doable outside the confines of that control. The best word for such an all-comprehensive system that I know is “totalism.” I appropriate the term from Robert Lifton, who over time has studied some of the great totalisms of the modern world, including the cult of National Socialism in Germany and the war machine in Japan.1

The totalism of the royal period of the Old Testament is embodied in the Jerusalem establishment of king, temple, and scribal culture founded by Solomon, which lasted for four hundred years. Thus, all of life became contained within and defined by the categories of the regime. Consequently, the regime could readily think of itself as an absolute match for the will of God, with the priests on the royal payroll having ready access between the earthly domain of Solomon and the heavenly domain of YHWH.

The extended historical narrative of the Davidic dynasty is the defining example of totalism in ancient Israel. It is, however, only one of a series of totalisms in the memory of Israel, each of which could pretend to absolutism—thus, Pharaoh’s Egypt, Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon, Cyrus’s Persia, and on to Alexander and Rome. The Roman Empire entailed totalism in the midst of which the Jesus movement had its inception. We are aware of the way in which Roman military, judicial, and tax-collecting power permeated even the remote territory of Galilee. Each of these totalisms in sequence operated in roughly the same way. When necessary, the regime used raw power, but it preferred softer persuasion to establish the legitimacy and necessity of the regime. In order to maintain this claim and practice, it was necessary to refuse and resist any thought, imagination, utterance, or action to the contrary.

Of course, some of them did not subscribe to the dominant ideology and benefit from the concentration of wealth; instead, they engaged in alternative thought and action of a subversive nature. Moses embodies such a force that Pharaoh must first restrain and then finally, in desperation, expel. The memory concerning the regime of Solomon is not different. From the outset, the regime had to constantly be on guard against those who dared to imagine that life possibilities existed beyond the sphere of the regime. Solomon’s violent seizure of the throne, according to the narrative, required him to forcibly eliminate opponents: Adonijah, Joab, and Shimei. But then, as recorded in 1 Kgs 11:29, the prophet Ahijah the Shilonite evoked in Jeroboam a thought about leading a revolution against the house of Solomon, which came to fruition in the next chapter (1 Kgs 12:1–19). In the subsequent royal narrative, we know that Ahab and Jezebel, in the northern kingdom, regarded Elijah and Elisha as enemies of their regime and killed many prophets (1 Kgs 18:4, 13). Moreover, Amaziah, the priest in the royal sanctuary of Bethel, banished the prophet Amos (Amos 7:10–17). Manasseh contradicted the commands of Moses and “shed much innocent blood” (2 Kgs 21:16), and King Jehoiakim sent a posse to arrest Jeremiah (Jer 36:26).

A totalizing regime cannot tolerate dissent or subversion. Thus, as is necessary, totalizing regimes must silence dissent, prohibit subversion, control artists, banish poets, and when necessary, kill prophets. Such brutality is required because dissenters, subversives, artists, poets, and prophets invite thought that the regime is not absolute, its claims to legitimacy are not ultimate, its policies are not beyond criticism, nor its practices beyond destabilization.

Do I need to alert you, before I move on, that it is increasingly in such a totalism of military consumerism, endorsed by uncritical exceptionalism, that we now live? As a successor to Rome, the U. S. Empire prefers the soft legitimacy of liturgic imagination (NFL), but when necessary, will resort to coercive practices. Take a knee during the national anthem, and you’ll end up unemployable! Witness our public ambiguity concerning torture! Closer to home, witness the silencing vigilance of adherents to the totalism in our own communities and congregations!

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It is important that the regal timeline of the Davidic house in the Books of Kings is not given to us in a royal chronicle. It is rather given to us in a theological commentary that footnotes the royal sources (1 Kgs 11:14; 14:19). That theological commentary is commonly termed “Deuteronomic” because behind it is the book and tradition of Deuteronomy. It is clear that in the final form of the text, the prophetic sequence over the centuries of the royal house in Jerusalem cannot be understood apart from the book and tradition of Deuteronomy, which provides interpretive categories and evokes the imagination of the interpretive community.

The Book of Deuteronomy offers the classic structure of the covenant, through which the prophets can be understood. The defining point is that “Moses” traffics in the defining “if” of Sinai: “Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples” (Exod 19:5 NRSV).

The “if” is a statement of conditionality that substantively amends (corrects?) the unconditional promise of YHWH to Abraham, which becomes the grounding of the Davidic covenant. The “if” that permeates Deuteronomy binds future blessings and curses to the obedience or disobedience of the commandments (Deut 30:15–20). Obedience to the Torah determines whether Israel will live long in the land. Conversely, disobedience to the Torah will lead to land loss, the abrogation of the promises, and the disappearance of Israel, which will become absorbed into the Canaanite culture.

Two commandments in particular may be noted in this regard. First, in Deut 17:14–20, the only commandment in the Torah concerning monarchy, the acquisitive capacity of the king is curbed so that he is not free to pursue the accumulation of horses, chariots, gold, silver, or wives—five commodities that occupied the acquisitiveness of the urban establishment of Jerusalem. Second, in Deut 15:1–18, Moses preaches “a year of release,” during which debts are cancelled, most particularly debts held against poor people. This tradition is determined to prevent any permanent economic underclass in Israel.

With this general imperative for holiness and justice, the tradition of Deuteronomy asserts that the future wellbeing of Israel does not depend upon wealth (gold and silver), power (horses and chariots), or sexual predation by the powerful, but upon a viable neighborhood that requires inconvenient attentiveness on the part of the powerful—that is, the ones who occupy and benefit from the urban establishment of Jerusalem. Thus, the covenant articulated in Deuteronomy is demandingly counter-intuitive for those who know how to take advantage of commercial dealings. The “if” of Moses is uncompromising.

From that tradition, we have a theological presentation of the royal history of Jerusalem in 1 and 2 Kings from the time of Solomon to the period when the city is destroyed. In his classic study, von Rad observes that this narrative recital of kings is an ongoing contestation between the claims of the royal covenant taken as an unconditional blank check by David and the Torah “if” of Deuteronomy.2 The narrative constructed according to the royal timeline nevertheless includes particular interruptions of prophetic assertion. In this “if-then” horizon, the future of Jerusalem depends on Torah obedience. Moreover, the writer ends the narrative with the destruction of the city, taken as a vindication of the Deuteronomic claim.

The tradition of Deuteronomy represented by the Torah and Deuteronomic royal history of 1 and 2 Kings together constitute the ground through which the role of prophetic preaching can be understood. The royal history presents a totalism of power, wealth, technology, and imagination. But the narrative allows for episodic intrusions that disrupt the totalism. I shall suggest in what follows that it is the burden of prophetic preaching in ancient Israel to make intrusions into the royal totalism in order to interrupt and subvert the illusion of ultimacy in Jerusalem. I intend to imply that this intrusion continues to be the test of prophetic preaching. The marks of holiness and justice expose the illusion of absolutism in a self-satisfied system of easy self-sufficiency. As a child of Deuteronomy, that is what Jesus does amid the Roman Empire, sustained by Jewish collusion. And it continues to be the test for every instance of contemporary totalism.

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Because the totalism wants to silence, banish, or eliminate every such unwelcome intrusion, the tricky work is to find standing ground outside the totalism, from which to think the unthinkable, imagine the unimaginable, and utter the unutterable. The proponents of this totalism would have us think that no such possible standing ground exists outside of it, so that the claim of these ancient prophets involves speaking a word that comes from elsewhere without the approval or consent of totalizing authority. It consists of making a claim of authority that will not be contained within the totalism, an authority that dissents from and contradicts the absolutism of the totalism.

Two quite familiar formulae asserting prophetic authority do not seek to receive any endorsement from the totalism. First is the formula, “The word of the Lord came to me.” The formula, in fact, explains nothing. Behind the formula is the imaginative, poetic, mythic claim of having been in the very presence of God. The mythic device for this claim is a “divine council,” a meeting of the gods over which YHWH, the high God, presides.3 When the council of gods makes a decision, dispatched messengers—variously angel-messengers, but also human agents who have been in the council—now bring the divine decision to earth. The tradition thus insists that the word spoken by the prophets is not the prophet’s own word, but a word given by God outside the totalism. It is from elsewhere! It cannot therefore be dismissed but must be heeded.

The second formula operates to ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Preaching of the Prophets
• Chapter 2: The Preaching of Jesus
• Chapter 3: Paul the Preacher and Preaching Paul
• Chapter 4: Preaching in Pre-Nicene Christianity
• Chapter 5: Preaching from Augustine to Aquinas
• Chapter 6: Preaching and the Reformation
• Chapter 7: Preaching in the Victorian Era in England and Scotland
• Chapter 8: Preaching in Early America
• Chapter 9: The African American Preaching Tradition
• Chapter 10: The Preaching of the Great Evangelists
• Chapter 11: Preaching in Mainline Protestantism
• Chapter 12: Preaching in American Evangelicalism
• Chapter 13: The Significance of the “New Homiletic”
• Chapter 14: Prophesying Daughters (Acts 2:17)
• Chapter 15: Predicting the Next Trends in Evangelical Preaching
• Chapter 16: The Future Shapes of Preaching
• Symposium Sermons