… the work of biblical theology, vis-a-vis systematic theology, is one of tension that is honest but not quarrelsome. In practice, I suggest that it is the liturgy that is to enact the settled coherence of church faith, and the sermon that provides the “alien” witness of the text, which rubs against the liturgic coherence. (Old Testament Theology, 107)

To this tantalizing aside the following footnote is appended:

I use the term alien in a way congruent with Karl Barth’s phrase “the strange new world of the Bible.” In much church practice, liberal as well as conservative, what is alien or strange in the Bible has been lost or programmatically repressed. (Footnote #118)

We can imagine Brueggemann’s Sunday morning. People stream into the auditorium with a preparatory defensiveness. They participate in the hymn-singing, the responsive reading, the repetitions of creed and catechism with an almost combative vigor, importuning God in their liturgy. The reason for this attentiveness is fear — precisely good old, Hebrew fear of the Lord — because Yahweh’s frightening freedom, even within the bounds of the covenant they insist to recall, will be brought in all its danger to their attention every service. The sermon, no less, will be the vehicle of this freedom. That’s right. The sermon. The portion of a service frequently devoted to the reinforcement of a theo-logical cage for God, in your church and in mine.

The implied homiletics here is fascinating.

Brueggemann would exchange the Puritan sermon ideal — application that issues in conviction, instruction, and comfort — for the dangerous ideal of defenselessness.  Both ideals could be couched in the same commitment, “commitment to the text,” but their enactment would be unmistakably different. The text, then, is double-edged indeed. It seems to me that the fundamental difference of Brueggemann’s implied congregation is that it permits the God (in whose hands it confesses to be carried) to intrude with his alien presence — a befitting paradox.

My objections arise out of what I perceive to be the movement’s lack of clarity regarding the identity of the Word. On one hand, they affirm that the Word is the eternal second person of the Godhead, by whose power the world was created and is upheld, who was incarnated as Jesus the Christ. On the other hand, they identify the word, or gospel, as the message about the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Word. Sometimes they make the important point (Chapell does, p. 28) that Jesus and the message about him are a unity. Chapell even goes on to make the further important point that, “Scriptural truth is not a passive object for examination and presentation. The word examines us.” But he ruins, I think, the effect, in a sentence or two with this modification of his position, “Christ remains active in his Word, performing divine tasks that one presenting the Word has neither right nor ability personally to assume.” [Italics mine.] Here the gap appears, which gradually widens until we reach the actual practice of “expository preaching” that is supposed to have come out of this previous, robust theology of the Word.

Here is the practice, in Chapell’s own words [italics his]: “An expository sermon may be defined as a message whose structure and thought are derived from a biblical text, that covers the scope of the text, and that explains the features and context of the text in order to disclose the enduring principles for faithful thinking, living, and worship intended by the Spirit, who inspired the text.” (p. 30) A message that “covers,” “explains,” and “discloses.” Really? I suspect that Chapell may have committed an unintentional pun in that first verb “covers.”

I would like to cast my objections to this idea of preaching as a contrast between two preachers.

The first preacher is John the Baptist, bearing witness (or as Barth would say, pointing with his prodigious finger) to the arrival of the lamb of God.

The second preacher is Jesus, explaining the Jewish scriptures on the road to Emmaus, showing that all those words were about him.

Expository preachers would probably identify more with Jesus, explaining the whole Scriptures. But this is a problem. Remember, the message about Jesus and Jesus the Word are tightly bound. That’s what gives the events along Emmaus their irony: the Word is explaining that the Word is about the Word in his own Words. But this was not the gospel.  The gospel came in its full force when they realized who this mysterious learned stranger was, showing the men that this whole history and Jesus the Christ to whom it pointed was among them. Suddenly they, themselves, were put in relation to God by the living presence of Jesus—suddenly, it was as if all the revealing Jesus had performed upon the road was made relevant to them, because the object of that history stood among them.

Unfortunately for the expository preacher, congregations will never wake to see that their pastor is the one regarding whom he speaks. The gospel never comes if all the preacher does is explain that the whole Scripture is about Jesus.

John the Baptist, however, pointed. He bore witness with his words and baptism to the coming of Christ. He is different from Jesus, as a preacher, in that his response to the listening ear was not give himself but to point to Christ.

What’s the point of all this? Simply this: when Jesus preached, he gave himself, he was the Word, but when John preached he was not the Word—instead, he bore witness to the Word. This can also be seen in Peter’s sermon, in the teaching of Paul, etc.

What role does the preacher have in the work of the Word? A tradition as preaching-centered as the Reformed tradition (which most embraces expository preaching) should critically ask itself this question from time to time. Wrong answers can lead to practices that seem to support an identification of the preacher with the Word. When this falsehood is commonly believed, suddenly one of the great themes of the Reformation (to bring individual Christians back into contact with the Word of God) has been lost. People come to think and act as if the Word required a preacher to “activate” it.

On the other hand, expository preaching can carefully distinguish the authority of the preacher and the power of the Word such that preaching becomes chiefly a weekly exercise in public exegesis. I think this is common. To me this seems a massive fail because it completely neglects the necessity of the Witness, to whom the activity of preaching is essential for its finger-pointing power, and it treats the Word to all intents and purposes as if it were dead.

Take Chapell’s three verbs. He urges preachers to “cover” the scope of their text. He could not have implied the deadness of the Word better if he had tried. The very idea that any men, however holy, of whatever vast education and acute skills, could come to perceive (much less reformulate) the “scope” of any portion of Scripture defies its power to come with contemporary force as the present word of God to the church in any age. The scope of the text increases like the capacity of gmail: the scope of the meaning of the text is extended every instant because every instant it possesses the power to place the people of God who hear it into relation with the Grace and Judgment of God. He also urges preachers to “explain” their texts. With this verb I have less issue, except when, as so often, it is understood to mean that the role of the preacher is actually to relieve his listeners of any relation to the text. What comes in Scripture as the burning words of an inspired writer from God, can be turned into the historical curiosity of one historical party addressing another historical party, from which we can only learn by drawing moral lessons or searching for deeper principles. Finally, he urges preachers to “disclose” the “principles” that are, let’s be honest, hidden (as far as he is concerned) in the text. Why are they hidden? For the same reason that they need to be explained. Because they are assumed to be chiefly historical curiosities to be investigated (albeit well-chosen, even “inspired” historical curiosities).

What such an “expository” preacher very frequently ends up doing is wresting verses to fit a theology nowhere found in Scripture because it has been devised with the procrustean intent of “explaining” the otherwise uncomfortably jagged and powerful words of Scripture.

It should be noted that I am not objecting to exegesis, to historical understanding and criticism of the text of Scripture, or anything as anti-intellectual and un-literary as that. Instead, I am suggesting that these techniques simply do not achieve the purpose of preaching when they, by themselves, are put on display every Sunday. They should occur in every preacher’s study—and in every lay-person’s bedroom—in the study of Scripture. But when the witness stands to point his prodigious finger in the direction of the Word, something other than study is occurring. At that time, the people of God should be called to hear the Word as spoken to them, not as an historical discourse between now dead parties. In study, portions of Scripture must be read and interrogated as, for instance, a national epic written by Moses for the preservation and national self-consciousness of the nation of Israel. But in preaching, every portion of Scripture must come as from God to the people in the pews. This, and only this, bears witness to the living person of the Word, Jesus Christ, putting listeners into relation with that reality.

I respect expository preaching in terms of the enemies by which it defines itself. I, too, hate preachers who feel as if their purpose is to share their feelings about this or that passage of Scripture, or preachers who take as the theme of their sermons pop-psychology and political ideologies (like conservatism, for example). On this front, expository preaching wonderfully represents itself as rooted in Scripture, expository preachers as “servants of the Word.” But when such preaching becomes a vain-glorious “covering,” “explaining,” and—horror of horrors—”disclosing,” rather than a witnessing, a pointing, a tearing away of the veil that hides us from the face of God, then I add my voice to Kierkegaard’s cry, “kill the commentators!”—and, I add, “the weekly public commentators who pretend to be preachers!”