Communicating the Faith Indirectly

Selected Sermons, Addresses, and Prayers

Holmer, Gouwens

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621894810
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Volume 3 The Paul L. Holmer Papers: Selected Sermons, Addresses, and PrayersIn his teaching and his writing, Paul L. Holmer (1916-2004), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota (1946-1960) and Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale Divinity School (1960-1987), not only made important contributions to recent American theology, but was also much in demand as a public speaker and preacher. Following his death, the Holmer family in 2005 donated his papers to the Yale Divinity School Library. In this, the third volume of The Paul L. Holmer Papers: Communicating the Faith Indirectly, the reader will see Holmer's deep concern with the problems and possibilities of the sermon, liturgy, ministry, and spirituality. Inspired by Soren Kierkegaard's reflections on indirect communication, and by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Holmer not only reveals his strenuous reflection on the sermon, but also gives concrete examples of his own efforts to communicate, enabling his hearers and readers to make sense of their lives. In the first part of this volume, Holmer reflects upon Kierkegaard's indirect communication, a communication not of knowledge but of human capacity. In other pieces Holmer turns to liturgy, ministry, and spirituality. In the second part of this volume, the reader sees Holmer's own challenging, uncompromising practice of religious and Christian communication, in a selection of his sermons, addresses, and prayers. For anyone concerned with sermons, liturgy, spirituality, and the challenges of ministry, Holmer's essays and addresses will prove indispensable.This is the third volume of The Paul L. Holmer Papers, which includes also volume 1, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, and volume 2, Thinking the Faith with Passion: Selected Essays.

part one

Holmer on the Sermon, Liturgy, Ministry, and Spirituality

one

Indirect Communication

Something about the Sermon

(With References to Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein)

I

Kierkegaard said that it was a venturesome thing to preach. Of course, Kierkegaard knew, as almost everyone else who preaches must know, that though preaching was a matter of talking it could not be chatter. After all, Kierkegaard was no fool—he neither indulged idle palaver in others nor tolerated it in himself. So, the talking that could make a sermon was not just a spate of words, even ostensibly religious words. It surely could not be like that trickster in the carnival who draws rope out of himself except that now it is free speech that pours out. When it gets so long, it is cut off and, lo and behold, one then has a sermon. Neither was a sermon a crafty use of words as stimulants to action, tears, or feelings. Words in the sermon are not like words of the successful actor—loud here, soft there, said with feeling here, but always with the aim of getting something originally said by another appropriately transmitted.

Certainly there is venturesomeness in standing in front of others and daring to speak in their presence. There is a kind of danger in stepping out and having all eyes fixed upon one. So, as a student I once introduced Bertrand Russell to an audience of thousands. He saw that I was not relishing the prospect of all those eyes upon me and then said in a comforting way that he was always nervous before audiences, but that he had a way of handling the difficulty. As he gripped the podium, he confessed, he always asked himself: “Bertie, how would this appear in a hundred years’ perspective?” And then his fear was gone. “Of course,” one is likely to say; for obviously enough, one gets used to those eyes, to those critical listeners, and one does acquire a long-term perspective. The venturesomeness is soon gone and one gets accustomed to critical listeners and the hazards of public performance.

Or it may be that a kind of venturesomeness is also created by the fact that one is not quite sure whether he knows enough about his subject. One can easily think about sermons like that, as if God, Jesus, the Christian life, or even Christianity were really the subject matter and the sermon were the talk “about” it or them. Then one might be rather diffident in speaking about something if one did not have the requisite knowledge and the command of the subject. Just as one might be shy in discoursing about the history of languages before an august world council of linguists, one might be reluctant to talk about God if one’s knowledge were not yet firmed up and already well attested. Besides, God, because of His invisibility, if nothing else, poses special problems. He might require special skills, maybe Hebrew, Greek, or even German, and one might lack those skills. Then indeed it would be venturesome to give speeches about Him, seeing that one lacks the fragile tools by which to lay hold of one whose ways seem perilously close to being past finding out.

However, was it really like that? An odd thing about Kierkegaard’s literature and worthy of much reflection is the fact that it is not really “about” Christianity in that somewhat pat way noted above. Apparently, too, neither Christianity nor God is, for Kierkegaard, a subject of discourse in the sense that one might say that dwarf stars and Hindu grammar are such subjects. Besides, Kierkegaard thought that he knew what Christianity is and that he did not have to get clearer on that. Perhaps it was like getting clear on making change in a foreign currency—when one understands it, that’s the end of it, and one has no need for further disquisitions. Sermons, therefore, are not aiming to cover the subject of faith. So it is wrong to suggest that a sermon tells one what Christianity is in a direct and ordinary way, almost as an answer to the question, what is it anyway? There is no telling in quite that way. Therefore, Kierkegaard rather blatantly says that the topic of his writing is how one becomes a Christian, not what Christianity is. But to say that much is to get a little closer to just why a sermon is a venturesome thing. For it does not quite fit a general pattern of descriptive literature, being differentiated only by the hiddenness of God.

Or is it that preaching is venturing a hypothesis where the weight of evidence is still against you, where you have to dare to speak up in the face of placid authorities racked against you? Is preaching venturesome precisely to the degree that the person must mouth unlikely prospects and discern the future—thus venturing beyond probabilities? Is the venturesomeness of preaching to be destroyed in virtue of placing one’s all, even one’s reputation, on the projection of an unknown future? If so, then the venturesomeness would probably disappear altogether when the future bore you out a bit or when you got used to being so far in advance of your age that there was little prospect of your being caught up by the facts.

It might be venturesome to preach, too, if you were admonishing policies that were far to the left or to the right, so that the solid and respectable middle might think you odd and an extremist or a downright fanatic. Then every Sunday would be an adventure and venturesomeness would have a kind of statistical message. Being a minority of one, guarded only by your sense of speaking for justice in a world of compromise and complacency, might indeed be dangerous. The history of men and institutions might even bear you out on the thought that on matters of taste, of morals, of truth, the majority is invariably wrong. Certainly it is not a giant step to saying that so, too, is it in religion. Witness the daring it took to be a Daniel, the extremities traversed by the prophets, the lonesomeness of preaching. The majority does not want to hear that truth, and yet one dares to say it. So with lisping and stammering tongue those uncompromising words are still spoken, even though one knows in advance that they will not be immediately acceptable.

It is with notions like these that we can make a case for saying that it is a venturesome thing to preach, but it is not exactly Kierkegaard’s case. Not that he would deny that such instances might occur, as we have noted, or that one might be said to be venturing something by preaching in certain circumstances rather than in others. But what he had noticed about these matters seemed to him to invite more than circumstantial remarks, something different from observations on the peculiarities of preaching granted the pastor’s immaturity, his relative ignorance, his idealism, his moral enthusiasms, and the faults of the present generation. Instead there were, he thought, some things that could be said almost in the manner of Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric, but only in the manner of, and not quite an extension of that piece of writing. “A new science,” he says, “must be introduced: The Christian art of speaking, to be constructed admodum Aristotle’s Rhetoric.”1

Aristotle took some pains to show the public speaker that there are indeed ways of speaking and that by being clear about some very general facts about people—for example, that they all want happiness—and some rules that describe specific kinds of speaking, one might be able to speak more aptly and better himself. Aristotle wrote a handbook for would-be speakers, and in it argued that differences between kinds of speaking, even kinds of speeches, were discernible and that certain rules were then stateable. Kierkegaard read that book and pondered it long and hard. In his day it was most fashionable to write and to ponder language in general, as if what many words in any context had in common was much more important than what one did with those words in a specific time and place. There was a philosophy of language in general aborning, and it attracted him greatly.

With Aristotle, however, there was great concreteness, a host of specific cases, kinds of speaking—dramatic, persuasive, pedagogical and more—that were discussed. The discernment was very rich on the interweaving of style, of grammar, of the speaker’s very manner, with the words he was using. Furthermore, what was being said and to whom it was being said and by whom it was being said began to loom up as Kierkegaard read Aristotle. All of these considerations mattered. This was the kind of specificity that Kierkegaard needed almost as an antidote to the generalities of the philosophical culture that otherwise nurtured him. He read Aristotle, not as a scholar forever remembering what Aristotle had said, but as his real teacher who became an occasion, and a vanishing one at that, whose pages caused him to see something for himself.

What about the sermon? Was it to be subsumed under Aristotle’s categories as one more instance of persuasion, or did it need a closer look and better characterization? It was surely the latter. And this is how those striking things about “indirect communication” can be understood. That expression is designed to make one see the differences between lecturing and preaching, ordinary talking and preaching, even between a bit of reflective prose and a homily (either moral or religious). And that remark, “indirect communication,” is very much in the manner of what Wittgenstein called a grammatical remark. It forced one to think about the way a sermon hung together, how it worked and just what the aims and purposes, therefore, could be. Neither a general philosophy of language, even if it included a theory about how every word “meant,” nor a commodious scheme of kinds of rhetoric would quite do the job of showing one the differences that made a sermon.

But many considerations had to be woven together to make the fact that preaching was venturesome something besides an incidental remark. We will turn to a few of these herewith.

II

Wittgenstein said to a friend: “And this is how it is: if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be—unutterably—contained in what has been uttered!”2 These words were written during the First World War. “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest.” Here, of course, he was talking about very confounding matters, about “the problem of life,” apparently also the sense of life, about what makes for the differences between the world of the happy man and that of the unhappy man. It is tempting for all of us to believe that there must be some facts that can be known that resolve the riddle of life. But here Wittgenstein says no. Here one comes to the very limits of language itself. The task is “. . . whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions.”3

Wittgenstein thought with dogged care and a consuming passion on some questions that were very close to Kierkegaard too. Language and reality, words and the world, what can be said and what cannot—that large range of questions was never long alien to either thinker. And against the highly generalized views of Hegel and his followers, Kierkegaard began to piece together some criticisms of the ontological philosophy, of the new logic, of the notion that all the kinds of human endeavor (religion, art, even politics) were like approximations, good tries, in the direction of a truth that could only be stated in purely philosophic concepts. He, therefore, had to think in a new and cryptic way about words, concepts, logic, reality questions. He described that odyssey variously as out of the complexity, into the simple; out of the aesthetic, through the ethical, into the religious; out of the manifold, through the philosophical, into the simple again. But he did all of this because things religious were so malformed, so mistreated, and so mimicked in the new profundities. Historical learning frequently was combined with mistaken logical and conceptual rubrics to give a learned gloss to deeply personal and strenuously Christian matters.

Though one must beware of tugging Wittgenstein into line—he like Kierkegaard resists our pedagogical wishes—there is at least something that goes on in the reader of Wittgenstein that reminds one of the effect of Kierkegaard. He makes one see differences. He does not let you lump things and then believe that you have understood. The more one reads him, the more appreciation you have for the struggle he had in getting in and out of deep and taxing perplexities. Thinking was not a trivial and cheap matter with him—it was not a matter of clever tricks, nor was it something you did for others to save their labor. The point of departure included some of those same general concerns, but the polemical thrust was not against Hegel so much as it was against a very subtle and highly refined reconstruction of language, a new kind of philosophizing, even his own.

Thus those quotations from his letters and from the Tractatus are not only admissions of a kind of indirectness—something that cannot be uttered yet being unutterably present—but they force one to get clear on just when and for what reason we might want to say that the communication is indirect. Wittgenstein thought that language sometimes showed you something that strictly speaking was not, and could not be, said. And so, he says, “It is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics,” and “It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words.” Apparently a kind of reason for this is that ethics goes beyond the limits of proper speech—it is, in that sense, transcendental.4 But ethical words, laws, norms and those apparent propositions of something higher, have to be understood differently. They do not express nor describe a higher range of fact, as that thinker might say who wants to save the transcendental and the distinctly different ethic by providing knowledge, or at least a proposition, about the transcendent. Not so, says Wittgenstein; it is not a new range of facts that can be discerned, not a realm of values above the facts. That strange array of language can be largely pruned away—but the world of the ethical man, of the deeply happy man, becomes for him a different world.

So, Wittgenstein, who knew so poignantly the importance of finding “the sense of life,” was pushed to saying that because propositions of natural science were all that could be said, then about these other matters one should be silent altogether. But there is a sense of life to be sought and to be found.

It is as if only a kind of tragic impropriety will allow one to speak in an “about” mood and still in a deep way, even ethically and religiously. But then the kind of world one has come to live in and the quality of life, one’s happiness and unhappiness, will (indirectly) bear one out. Justice cannot be seen like one more fact, and ethical punishment and rewards cannot be events in the world of facts; but Wittgenstein is convinced that there must be a deep pleasantness that is your reward in the right action just as there will be a deep unpleasantness as your punishment in doing wrong. However, this difference is not something marked by language; it is marked by one becoming a happy man. Words, at least in the “about” mood, do not help here when the sense of life is achieved by becoming happy. Then the problem—the question—disappears.

So, it looks something like this: Wittgenstein notes that we do frame the issue of the sense and meaning of life in language and in such a way that it seems as though there must be an answer. One can suppose, I assume, that those answers are often those erstwhile “theories,” maybe metaphysics and theology of a certain kind. But these are frequently treated as if they were factual accounts; they are construed as if they were about another mode of existence, another level of being, a reality beyond the appearance, a deeper kind of truth than the sciences can provide. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is startling because it does take very seriously indeed those needs for light on the sense of life; and the Notebooks and the letters to Engelmann bear out these passages in a very rich way. But what is also surprising is that the Tractatus forces the reader to the thought that language is really made for facts—these it can directly picture; but it cannot picture its own features (namely, the logical form of the language that pictures) and it cannot picture whatever gives sense to life. Seemingly, then, the language when it works well “shows” you the logical form but does not picture it; and perhaps, too, a happy life with its intrinsic reward shows one the sense of life. Language does not do everything. Here it is as if one must be quiet while the happiness of one’s life bears out the sense.

But nothing silly is being said here. Moral and religious language (I take it of a deep sort—e.g., like that of a psalmist, of the Bible, the Commandments, “Don’t do anything against your conscience”—not just philosophical disc...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Editors' Preface
• Part 1: Holmer on the Sermon, Liturgy, Ministry, and Spirituality
• Part 2: Sermons, Addresses, and Prayers
• Afterword
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Scripture Index
• Index of Subjects