Preaching After God

Derrida, Caputo, and the Language of Postmodern Homiletics

Snider

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621894049
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Even though the postmodern return of religion is dramatically shaping the future of twenty-first-century theology, its riches for preaching are rarely mined. Preaching After God highlights the trajectories of the postmodern return of religion by introducing readers to the positive theological themes stirring in the work of influential philosophers like Jacques Derrida, John Caputo, and Slavoj Žižek. Phil Snider shows how engaging their thought provides possibilities for preaching that highly resonate with postmodern listeners. Preachers familiar with the postmodern return of religion will appreciate its homiletical appropriation, while those introduced to it for the first time will discover just how much it is helpful for the preaching task. Six lectionary-based sermons are included as examples.

Part I

The Modern Homiletical Crisis and the Postmodern Return of Religion

1

The Domestication of Transcendence1

Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

—Friedrich Nietzsche2

God is not humanity said loudly.

—Karl Barth3

I’ll never forget the palpable silence I once felt while sitting in a room full of preachers. We had gathered for a continuing education class on preaching, and our instructor was telling us that we could only preach what we’d personally experienced. It was necessary, he said, to locate the ways that God had acted in our own personal lives before we could even begin to proclaim the ways that God might act in the lives of others.

After sharing this advice, our instructor lifted his eyes from his lecture notes, looked up at us, and asked what seemed to be, at least on the surface, a very simple and direct question: “Can you share a few examples of the times that God has acted in your own personal lives?” Given the fact that his question was directed at a room full of preachers, it should have been an easy one to answer. After all, we attempt to speak of God on a weekly basis. Yet none of us—none of us—could offer concrete examples of the ways in which God’s agency had been exerted in our personal lives.

Since no one ventured a response, our instructor rephrased his question, this time with much more urgency and curiosity in his voice: “Surely you can tell me about some of your experiences with God, can’t you?” Another pregnant pause followed, until finally a couple of courageous hands went into the air. One pastor shared about a time she needed financial assistance to help her get through a rough period in life, and her friends from church stepped up to the plate. “I felt God’s love through their actions,” she reflected. Another pastor told us about the time he was recovering from unexpected surgery in the hospital and some of his friends came by to extend the love of Christ to him: “I felt God’s presence through their lives,” he said.

No doubt about it, the incarnated love of Christ embodied in each of these stories is reason for celebration. Without such love, I hesitate to think about where I’d be in life. But I must also confess that, as the pastors around me continued to share about the times God had personally touched their lives, I couldn’t help wondering why the activity of God, in every single example, was restricted to the actions of human beings. Shouldn’t the activity of God be beyond human manufacture?

While I didn’t brave a response to the instructor’s question, it did make me start thinking about tendencies in my own preaching. Things quickly got more personal—not to mention more uncomfortable—than I would have liked. Why did so many of my own sermons focus more on the activity of human beings than on the activity of God? Why did the vast majority of my own sermons end with finite moral exhortations such as “Let us” or “May we” as opposed to more infinite proclamations such as “God has” or “God will”? Why was the focus of most of my sermons on following the example of Jesus—on what we must do? Why was Jesus always the moral exemplar par excellence—in line with Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi—but never the saving Christ? Of course God’s action is a mystery, but shouldn’t Christian proclamation be more about God than ourselves? Or is God nothing other than humanity said loudly? I feared that my own sermons had become proclamations of veiled humanism, for they were rooted much more in human behavior than in the activity of God.

I also started to wonder if those who heard my sermons on a regular basis got the impression that God can only exert agency through our actions, which of course carries with it the quite clear implication that, when this is the case, God’s activity in the world must be manufactured by human beings. Like several other preachers at the continuing education event that day, my discourse about God is all too often relegated to either (1) the compelling ethical vision of Jesus, or (2) the ways we experience God’s love through the ethical actions of others.

I’m certainly not alone. When it gets down to it, an alarming number of sermons delivered in mainline congregations place hope on the ethical agency of human beings much more than on the activity of God. Consider the standard admonition that, in varying form, accompanies no small number of progressive sermons: “And now, let us think about the ways we might partner with God in the building of the kingdom.” This is an important statement that should be taken with utmost seriousness—our partnering with God in the work of the kingdom should be at the forefront of our faith. But, realistically speaking, how many progressive Christians who hear and heed such affirmations actually expect God to exert agency in this process? When we get past such rhetorical veneer, don’t we usually figure that, in the end, the building of the kingdom is up to us much more than it’s up to God?

For a simple example, consider the way that progressive sermons on Jesus’ miraculous feeding of the multitude often unfold. We are told that the disciples and the gathered crowd are tired and hungry, and there isn’t enough food to go around. The fish and loaves are brought to Jesus, and he wondrously multiplies them to the degree that there is not only enough for everybody, but there is plenty left over. It is an act that defies both common sense and (as many understand them today) “natural” laws. However, after describing Jesus’ miracle (and reminding listeners that there are lots of “true stories in the Bible that never happened,” which is something I heartily agree with), the progressive preacher usually moves to the primary emphasis of the sermon, which goes something like this: If we will do our part to share what we have (especially as privileged first-world Christians), then there will be enough food and drink to go around for all the world’s hungry people. This is an ethic that I am certainly a fan of, and it is one that I wish to follow. But I wonder why the primary focus of the sermon almost always minimizes the activity of God and replaces it with the activity of human beings.4

I am hardly the first person to voice these concerns. Contemporary homileticians consistently point out that on the heels of the Enlightenment, in which the role of religion was largely reduced to ethical categories, the activity and agency of God in Protestant liberal pulpits is often replaced by the activity and agency of human beings. In many cases—and here my sermons can be viewed as Exhibit A—the soteriological import and transcendence of God are given lip service at best and are ignored at worst. Since Protestant liberalism as a whole has yet to overcome the problems posed by the Enlightenment—particularly modernism’s suspicions concerning supernatural conceptions of God—preachers aren’t sure how to speak of God’s activity in ways that might be considered transcendent, which is to say in ways that might be rendered as “other.” Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas once said that the history of Western philosophy can be viewed as a destruction of transcendence,5 and nowhere is the destruction of transcendence more evident than in the inability of progressive Christians to speak of God’s activity in ways that are beyond human manufacture.

Paul Scott Wilson states that contemporary preachers frequently “omit from their sermons significant discussion of God and focus instead on human action,” and from this “the gospel message becomes dos and don’ts that have an anthropocentric flavor.”6 Pablo Jiménez notes the way mainline Protestant preaching “has perfected the sermon that barely mentions God, stressing either the psychological dimensions of pastoral care or the social responsibility of the church.”7 When Susan Hedahl reflects on most of the sermons she hears as a professor of homiletics, she wonders why the presence of Jesus Christ is so often absent: “One hears much about mission: what people must do, figures to imitate (e.g., Mother Theresa), local soup kitchens in which to participate. The problem is that often these approaches tend to be standalones. Where is the accompanying reflection on Jesus Christ, who is to inspire and elicit the listeners’ actions in response to the Gospel? Often there seem to be few connections made between the sermon’s proposals and the Lord who is to inspire them.”8

Thomas Long makes this point most strongly when he describes the way that mainline sermons are consistently rooted in a “functional atheism” in which the “God who intrudes upon the closed system of the present tense is the most missed of all missing persons.”9 Oddly enough, he observes, even though preachers are charged with speaking clearly and boldly about what “the God we know in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit has done, is doing, and will do among us,”

this is the language that seems most missing from much current preaching. Yes, there is plenty of God-talk and religious chatter in the pulpit today, but what seems absent is the vibrant sense of the living divine reality . . . Perhaps this is an overly harsh judgment, but listen to sermons being preached these days in the broad mainline churches, and see if they do not often have the hollow sound of an old oak whose living center has died and rotted away. Yes, yes, there are sincere words about God and the “power of our faith,” that sort of thing, but frequently it all seems to come as an act of nostalgia, with a cool detachment from the possibility that the sermon itself might be caught up in the event of revelation, and accompanied by the tacit admission that, really, when we get down to it, whatever good there is in life is the product of our own industry and intention, that when all is said and done, this world is all we have and we are the only ones in here.10

Long doesn’t think this “lack of attention to the presence of God” is due to a willful neglect or lack of faith on the part of most preachers, but rather is the result of a sort of cultural accommodation in which pulpit talk is viewed as a domesticated habit of speech. Our culture, he says, uses religious language “as holy sounding talk with all the edges filed away, so that it refers not to the wild, undomesticated presence of the living God, but only to us, to our sincere hearts, spiritual intentions, and our desire to do good things in life. In other words, ther...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Modern Homiletical Crisis and the Postmodern Return of Religion
• Part 2: Preaching After God
• Bibliography