The Word Militant

Preaching A Decentering Word

Walter Brueggemann

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780800697655
• eBook ISBN: 9781451419771
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Against the easy assurance of a too-enculturated religion, Walter Brueggemann refocuses the preaching task around the decentering, destabilizing, always risky Word that confronts us in Scripture – if we have the courage to hear.

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Preaching as Reimagination

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In what follows, sixteen theses are set forth and developed, suggesting that evangelical preaching finds itself now in a quite new cultural, epistemological context.

(1) Ours is a changed preaching situation, because the old modes of church absolutes are no longer trusted.

It is not that the church’s theological absolutes are no longer trusted, but that the old modes in which those absolutes have been articulated are increasingly suspect and dysfunctional. That is because our old modes are increasingly regarded as patriarchal, hierarchic, authoritarian, and monologic. The mistrust that flies under all these adjectives, however, is due to a growing suspicion about the linkage between knowledge and power. The mistrust of conventional authority, now broad and deep in our society, is rooted in the failure of positivism, positivism that is scientific, political, or theological. Many are increasingly aware that “absolute knowledge” most characteristically means agreement of all those permitted in the room.¹ Such “absolutism” in “truth,” moreover, characteristically has pretensions to “absolute power” as well, surely an adequate reason for suspicion. Those at the margins of dominating knowledge will no longer permit the practitioners of dominating power to be supervisors of absolute knowledge.

(2) Along with the failure of old modes of articulation, we now face the inadequacy of historical-critical understanding of the biblical text as it has been conventionally practiced.

I do not say the failure or bankruptcy of historical criticism but its inadequacy, for historical criticism has become, in Scripture study, a version of modes of absolutism among the elitely educated. It is increasingly clear that historical criticism has become a handmaiden of certain kinds of power.² This not only refers to the control of the agenda through academic politics, but it also recognizes that the rise of criticism is deeply related to the banishment of the supernatural and to the dismissal of tradition as a form of truthfulness.³

One can note that in academic circles, where methodological discussions are conducted, there is a growing tension between old-line historical criticism, which serves to distance the text from the interpreter, and the emerging criticisms (sociological, literary, and canonical).⁴ A generalization can probably be made that critical scholars who most resist change and who regard the transfer of social power and influence as only modes of political correctness cling most passionately to older modes of historical criticism, whereas scholars who advocate and benefit from redistributions of interpretive power engage in sociological and literary criticism. Indeed, old-line historical criticism is our particular form of positivism to the biblical, interpretive guild and so receives its share of the suspicion I have more generally noted in thesis 1. I am aware that moves away from historical criticism are easily judged to be obscurantism, advocacy, or ideology, but those labels have lethal connotations only in the context of self-satisfied positivism.

(3) A great new reality for preaching is pluralism in the interpreting community of the local congregation.

All but the most closed and sheltered liturgical congregations are indomitably heterogeneous.⁵ That emerging pluralism, moreover, can no longer be overcome by absolute assertion. For such absolute assertion, whether by strong pastoral authority or by denominational dictum, can only serve to excommunicate those who see and take and experience reality otherwise. The more frantic our zeal to maintain the oneness and wholeness of “our truth,” the more divisive does such practice become.

An honest facing of pluralism can be pastorally and usefully engaged only by an open-ended adjudication that takes the form of trustful, respectful conversation.⁶ Such a conversation is joined with no participant seeking to convert the other and no participant knowing the outcome ahead of time but only entering with full respect for the good faith of others and the willingness to entertain the troublesome thought that new “truth” received together may well be out in front of any of us. While such an approach sounds like relativism, an answering objectivism is destructive not only of the community but of any chance to receive new truth together. Preaching thus must be conducted in a context where one makes proposals and advocacies but not conclusions.⁷

(4) Pluralism as the perspective and orientation of the community that hears and interprets is matched by an emerging awareness of the polyvalence of the biblical text.

Texts are open to many meanings, more than one of which may be legitimate and faithful at the same time. This is evident, in its most simple form, in the awareness that many preachers on any given occasion preach many sermons on the same lectionary texts. While not all such sermons may be legitimate and faithful, many of them would qualify as such, without mutual exclusiveness. Notice that such a polyvalence flies in the face of old-line historical criticism, which tried to arrive at “the meaning” of the text.⁸

The claim of polyvalence is an invitation for Christians to relearn from Jewish interpretive tradition.⁹ Indeed, Jewish interpretation does not seek to give closure to texts but can permit many readings to stand side by side, reflecting both the rich density of the text and the freedom of interpretation. Such a way of reading reflects the mode of midrashic interpretation, a Jewish affirmation that the voice of the text is variously heard and is not limited by authorial intent.¹⁰

It is now suggested, moreover, that midrashic interpretation is strongly, even if unwittingly, reflected in Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis and in his practice of dream interpretation.¹¹ Freud understood that dreams are endlessly open to interpretation. In this regard, the reading of dreams is not unlike the reading of texts. At the same time, it is important to note that dreams are no more unreal fantasies than are texts but contain a profound truth that is available only upon a rich reading. It is unhelpful for the text interpreter, and therefore the preacher, to give heavy closure to texts because such a habit does a disservice to text and to listener, both of which are evokers and practitioners of multiple readings.

(5) Reality is scripted, that is, shaped and authorized by a text.

Paul Ricoeur has done the most to show us that reality lives by text.¹² By “text,” Ricoeur means written discourse that is no longer in the control of the “author” but makes its own testimony and insists on interpretation. Interpretation, moreover, is “to appropriate here and now the intention of the text.”¹³ But such intention is derived not from the “author” of the text but from the work within the act of interpretation.

That text may be recognized or invisible. It may be a great religious classic or a powerful philosophical tradition or a long-standing tribal conviction.¹⁴ It is an account of reality that the community comes to trust and to take for granted as a given that tends to be beyond reexamination. This text describes reality in a certain way and shape. In a world where there is more than one text, that is, a world of plurality, a given text may describe, but if another text intrudes, it is possible for that text to redescribe reality.¹⁵

It is important, on the basis of this thesis, for the preacher to recognize that there are no “textless” worlds. Such an assertion may be much disputed; at a practical level, however, it is no doubt true. People come to the preaching moment with texts already in hand that describe the world. The preacher who interprets the text, who “appropriates here and now the intention of the text,” does not act in a vacuum. There are always rival and competing texts, in the face of which the biblical text may be a countertext that does not primarily describe but subversively redescribes reality.

(6) The dominant scripting of reality in our culture is rooted in the Enlightenment enterprise associated with Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau, which has issued in a notion of autonomous individualism, resulting in what Philip Rieff calls “The Triumph of the Therapeutic.”¹⁶

It is difficult to take in the radical shift of assumptions in “world making” that occurred at the beginning of the seventeenth century.¹⁷ The collapse of the hegemony of medieval Christianity, hastened by the Reformation, the Thirty Years War, and the rise of science, produced, as Susan Bordo has made clear, a profound anxiety about certitude.¹⁸ It was clear that certitude would no longer be found in “the truth of Christ,” for confessional divisions had broken that truth. Believers henceforth could appeal only to reason guided by the spirit, or the spirit measured by reason, clearly a circular mode of truth. Indeed, Descartes introduced his massive program of doubt as an attempt to link the new truth to the claims of Christianity. What emerged was the individual knower as the decontextualized adjudicator of truth.¹⁹

That autonomy in knowledge, moreover, produced autonomy in action and ethics as well, so that the individual becomes the norm for what is acceptable. The end result is a self-preoccupation that ends in self-indulgence, driving religion to narcissistic catering and consumerism, to limitless seeking after well-being and pleasure on one’s own terms without regard to any other in the community.²⁰

While this scripting of reality has profound critical thought behind it, the practice of this script is embraced and undertaken by those in modern culture who have no awareness of the text, its rootage, or its intention.²¹ Thus, it is clear that very many folk in our culture who come to preaching events are reliant on this “text of reality” that is permitted to describe the world. The preacher perforce preaches in a world shaped by this text.

(7) This scripting tradition of the Enlightenment exercises an incredible and pervasive hegemony among us.

(a) In economics, this text-generated ideology issues in consumerism, which operates on the claims that more is better, that most will make happy, and that each is entitled to and must have all that one can take, even if at the expense of others. Such a value system, of course, must discredit the claims of any other who is a competitor for the goods that will make me happy. Television advertising is a primary voice in advocating this view of reality, and television is closely allied with spectator sports, which move in the same direction.²² Witness the “show contracts” of college coaches.

(b) In political affairs, this same ideology is rooted in the privilege of European superiority and colonialism, although in recent time that political dimension of the text has found its primary expression in the notion of Pax Americana. That ideology assumes that the world works best if the United States adjudicates from a position of dominant power which, in turn, guarantees and endlessly enhances the privileged position of the United States in terms of prosperity and standard of living. Thus, the public administration of power guarantees the private capacity to consume without limit. The deepness of this claim is evident in the political requirement of a commitment to a strong America.

In political affairs, this vision of political hegemony perhaps was given authoritative voice by Elihu Root, Secretary of State under Theodore Roosevelt, and his expansionist notions. Root, in turn, was the mentor to Henry Stimson, who moved the United States, almost single-handedly through his advocacy and political machinations, to take responsibility for the world.²³ Stimson, in turn, was the patron and mentor of the “Wise Men” who guided foreign policy, produced the Cold War, and finally overreached in Vietnam.²⁴

But of course the end is not yet. The United States, as the remaining superpower, can have it all its own way, so it thinks, finding itself most often on the side of the old colonial powers and allied with the forces of reactionism in order to preserve the old hegemony that goes unexamined.

(c) The Enlightenment text, as practiced in the Euro-American world, thus provides an unchallenged rationale for privilege and advantage in the world in every zone of life. This not only means political ascendancy and economic domination but also makes its adherents the norm for virtue. In turn, this shows up even in the church, where it is assumed that the Western church is the privileged norm by which to test the rest of the church. In the end, even truth is tied in some way to Western virtue.

(d) This defining text of the West is exceedingly hard on and dismissive of those whose lives do not measure up to the norms of competence, productivity, and privilege. This text has resulted in a kind of social Darwinism in which the fast, smart, well-connected, and ruthless are the “best” ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: At Risk with the Text
• 1. Preaching as Reimagination
• 2. The Preacher, the Text, and the People
• 3. Ancient Utterance and Contemporary Hearing
• 4. An Imaginative “Or”
• 5. That the World May be Redescribed
• 6. The Social Nature of the Biblical Text for Preaching
• 7. The Shrill Voice of the Wounded Party
• 8. Life or Death: De-Privileged Communication
• 9. Preaching to Exiles
• 10. Preaching a Sub-Version
• 11. Truth-Telling as Subversive Obedience
• Notes
• Index of Passages
• Index of Names and Subjects