Rediscovering precritical exegesis

Taking Old Testament from Walter Brueggeman was not only an education in Israel's sacred texts. It was a schooling in a deep suspicion bordering on contempt of Greek metaphysics, not to mention the Reformed tradition. Heck, any theological tradition.

Brueggemann's literary method of interpretation absolutely refused to smooth over the rough edges of the Bible with philosophical or dogmatic sand paper. If Moses got God to repent of the evil he thought to do to his people, then that's what he did, immutability be damned! If God expresses surprise that things didn't work out the way he imagined, then God was genuinely surprised, omniscience be damned!

This was bracing stuff. I took to it like single malt Scotch. This was the way I preached early in my ministry. It disturbed some of my parishioners, thrilled others and always, always made for interesting sermons. "You made the God of the Bible sound like a Greek god," said the chair of the search committee that called me to Salisbury. At the time, I could not have been paid a higher compliment.

I'm not a good preacher, if by good you mean original. I was handed a exegetical and hermeneutical method that was guaranteed to lay bare "the strange new world of the Bible," if I may quote a theologian whom Brueggemann tolerated because he stuffed his dogmatics with exegetical fine print. And the Bible is much more interesting than me.

Fifteen years in, I have some reservations about the method, and some (most, OK, nearly all) of the stuff that's come out of my mouth in the pulpit.

The latter is natural. Preacher's remorse is an epidemic among the clergy. It strikes most Sunday afternoons. If you're a preacher who doesn't suffer from it, you may suffer from far more serious illnesses. 

But basically, at some point I decided that the main point of preaching was not to be provocative but to be edifying. I will admit that those adjectives are not inherently oppositional. And it probably remains the primary job of academics to be provocative.

But at some point I discovered that the real problem I was confronting was not an insufferably smug laity who needed their pat answers smashed by the preaching of an irascibly unpredictable Greek Yahweh.

The real problem was broken people. Victims of their own cussedness and addictions. They didn't need to hear about a God that needed someone like Moses to talk him down off the ledge, so to speak. They needed to know how to love God and neighbor, and how were they going to do that if the one before they bow is as irascible as they are when they're stressed out, had too much to drink, and their teenager mouths off at them?

Without knowing it, I was moving toward a more patristic, less post-modern literary hermeneutic. Now, the Fathers thought that the end-all, be-all of preaching was explicating the Creed and the Two Great Commandments. But if we're honest, most of the Bible isn't at all about either of those topics. It's about far more parochial concerns: the machinations of the leaders of an obscure Middle Eastern people. Who cares about that? Ask yourself, if Israel wasn't, you know, Israel, would you care a fig about how they once smote the Jebusites? The sheer irrelevance of the Bible, not to mention its poor literary quality, kept Augustine from answering the altar call for years. So the Fathers decided that the bulk of scripture must contain deeper, hidden, allegorical  meanings.

They weren't suffering from a failure of nerve, which is somehow what I concluded was the problem of everybody who would refuse to say in the pulpit that God's dealings with Saul were less than honorable, or that a God who would abandon Jesus to such a fate as he faced was a child abuser. If you read their sermons, letters and treatises they managed to be provocative, interesting and deeply committed to the formation of their parishioners in a way that, I suspect, a preacher whose fidelity to the text isn't matched by a fidelity to God as Father Almighty, i.e. omnipotent love, cannot be.

Let me be clear. This is much more about me than my teachers. It's about how someone who once eagerly wanted to amaze and provoke a complacent church was handed the means to do just that. And there is more than enough smug, trite, platitudinous preaching out there, which a course under Brueggemann renders well nigh impossible.

What I remain tremendously indebted to Brueggemann for is his insistence that the preacher go straight at what is odd, strange or difficult in the text rather than explaining it away, as both liberal historical criticism and schmaltzy Precious Moments-like inspirational messages do. He taught my how to read texts, how to pay attention to the verbs especially, and how Yahweh's verbs, in total, yield adjectives and nouns, which are the attributes of God, the meat and potatoes of the first article of the Creed. This is the preacher's pearl of great price.

I do wonder, however, if my M.Div. education had been supplemented by a bona fide Augustinian at Columbia like my current adviser, who could winsomely and intelligently explicate patristic hermeneutics, would my preaching have turned out differently. Or if I'd been assigned a lot of Anselm and Aquinas and their classical synthesis of Greek and Hebraic thought which I wasn't at Columbia but have been this time around by Union-PSCE's theology faculty.The theological faculty at Columbia certainly differed from Brueggemann's almost more fundamentalist-than-the-fundamentalists' fidelity to the text, but they were post-Barthian narrative style theologians, really in the same camp. 

Then again, maybe not. Maybe we shouldn't let anyone under 80 preach the gospel. And not just any octogenarians, but only those who've spent their entire lives learning to love and regard others as better than themselves.