The Witness of Preaching

by Thomas G. Long

The idea is that a story listener cannot be passive but must participate with the narrator in creating the world of the story.

I do not want to pass on knowledge from the pulpit; I want to take part in an experience of God’s living word, and that calls for a different kind of research.

The storytelling image, as we have seen, grows out of a conviction that the fundamental literary form of the gospel is narrative. “I

It balances the concern for the objective truth of the gospel with a passion for religious experience.

In listening to stories and participating in images we are willing, to an extent, to suspend our own concerns in favor of the experience we are having together.

First of all, it tends to underplay the nonnarrative dimensions of Scripture and to narrow to a single method the communicational range of preaching.

Even if the basic narrative shape of the gospel is always standing in the background, there comes a time when preaching must speak in another voice, drawing out concepts, singing songs, speaking of the logical character of belief, talking about practical ethics, and so on. These tasks of preaching may rest upon a narrative base, but a narrative form is not necessarily the best means to accomplish them.

The danger, of course, is that this process gets reversed, and the lesser story erodes or replaces the gospel story.

A woman once complained, about many of the sermons she heard, that they sounded like “National Public Radio essays,” lovely and interesting, but without urgency or claim.

because of rank or power but rather because of what the preacher has seen and heard.

What it does mean is that the preacher is the one whom the congregation sends on their behalf, week after week, to the Scripture.

The authority of the preacher, then, is the authority of ordination, the authority of being identified by the faithful community as the one called to preach and the one who has been prayerfully set apart for this ministry, the authority that comes from being “sworn in” as a witness.

An unreliable witness does not make the truth any less true, but the community’s quest to encounter the truth is undeniably damaged by false or unreliable witnesses.

Effective preaching has an invested local flavor because the preacher as witness participates in the mission of a specific community of faith, goes to the Scripture on behalf of that community, and hears a particular word for them on this day and in this place.

Though it is not always apparent, the worship of the church is a dramatic enactment of a great and cosmic trial in which the justice of God is poised against all the powers that spoil creation and enslave human life.

Biblical preaching happens when a preacher prayerfully goes to listen to the Bible on behalf of the people and then speaks on Christ’s behalf what the preacher hears there. Biblical preaching has almost nothing to do with how many times the Bible is quoted in a sermon and everything to do with how faithfully the Bible is interpreted in relation to contemporary experience.

Throughout its history, the church has discovered that when it goes to the Scripture in openness and trust, it finds itself uniquely addressed there by God and its identity as the people of God shaped by that encounter.

and the scribe is confident that this same God will act again “through the scribe’s re-performance of the text.”7

Because biblical texts have the power to release what Brueggemann calls a “counter-imagination,” a way of seeing the world that is an alternative to the consumerist, militaristic, death-obsessed imagination of the culture.

The preacher comes from the community of faith, a community with its own theological traditions, social location, and prior understandings of the nature of both the Bible and the Christian gospel.

Anti restorationist

This means that the church must not only listen obediently to the words of the Bible; it must also interpret those words as the human products of their own age.

Every text is a product of a particular time and place and reflects cultural attitudes and assumptions that are not necessarily the gospel.

Not everyone can accept this

conditioned admonitions about submission of slaves and women to the rule of men

Are these the same?

In Ephesians this claim modifies the institution of slavery, and eventually the truth of this claim destroys that institution.

The point is, texts that scream cultural bias are also gospel texts, and texts that shout the gospel are also culturally conditioned.

Hearing the claim of God in and through a biblical text demands an act of faithful imagination, a refusing to let a text go until it has blessed us.

This is beautiful but again generally rejected in a restoration heritage.

They all share a basic commitment to the Christian faith, but they have different patterns for “seeing it whole,”

Preachers go to the Bible, then, not as “universal Christians”

Or as NT only Christians

We may wish that we were free of these theological presuppositions so that we could go to a biblical text with a completely fresh and open mind, but not only is this not realistic; it is actually not desirable.

Coming to a text from a theological tradition, the interpreter arrives not as a disoriented stranger but as a pilgrim returning to a familiar land, recognizing old landmarks and thereby alert for new and previously unseen wonders.

A theologically informed interpreter is also steered away from the distortions of the gospel that can result when a single text is heard in isolation from all others.

The Bible itself invites such quarrels, Bartlett says, because there are disagreements in the Bible itself.

Perhaps your struggle will lead you to acquiescence, or perhaps your struggle will lead you to some adaptation, or perhaps your struggle will lead you to outright rejection, which is itself a form of faithful transformation.

But doesn't this make us judge over the text if I can outright reject it?

But there is a shadow side as well, and theological traditions can mislead us, too.

gospel whole, but they do not see the whole gospel. This is why ecumenical conversation, dialogue among the various traditions in the larger church, is so crucial.

Theological traditions can also become hard-of-hearing, fixed systems no longer open to listening to any new claims of Scripture.

Whenever a church or a preacher hears in Scripture only that which has been heard before, finds there only a confirmation of what is already known and believed, be assured that the theological tradition has ossified and is being employed not as a means for hearing the living word of Scripture but as a replacement for it.

These preachers almost always start with human brokenness, with the negative and painful aspects of life such as anxiety, meaninglessness, or guilt, and then look to God (and to Scripture) for the answers to human despair.

My homiletical approach does this currently.

Only when we have dug underneath the mottoes of our tradition and grasped the historical and theological forces that gave them birth can we claim to know our own heritage.

When we go to the Scripture seeking not what “the people ought to hear” but hungering ourselves for a gospel word, we will hear a word for them too.

Through such Spirit-born conversation, God is at work transforming memory into presence.

overconfidence in objective exegetical methods can end up muting the voice of Scripture, turning biblical interpretation into an autopsy of a dead text rather than a hearing of the lively and active word of Scripture.

On those occasions, we are compelled to go to the place of preaching and simply speak what we know about the scriptural passage, praying like mad that the Spirit, so silent in the study, will nevertheless speak in the moment of proclamation.

so even the best translations involve hermeneutical decisions and approximations of meaning.

we are trying to knock the barnacles off our assumptions about the text so that it can speak to us anew.

When we preach this text, then, our fingers may point for a moment at ourselves and our sinfulness, but ultimately the magnetic north of the text will swing the compass toward the gracious and righteous God.

Preachers cannot, and should not, presume to know how all these people would respond and must therefore always be reading, studying, and listening to voices of people unlike themselves.

Ask the text questions they would ask. Ask, on their behalf, the questions they may not dare to ask. Be their pastor—their advocate—and then listen to the text, hoping for a word for them.

So we listen to the

Bible faithfully, but if we do so uncritically, we will often mistake the whispers of our own inner voices for the biblical word.