Proclaiming the Gospel,Preaching the Public

When does preaching become public witness? Part of the answer must be this: preaching becomes public witness when its Gospel message regards a public matter, a matter of public concern or responsibility. But what does this mean? And what problems emerge when public witness regards a matter that belongs to a democratic citizenry?

In what follows I address these questions in a somewhat roundabout way. I begin in another field altogether, in what I suppose we might call political sociology, and I explore what it might mean to speak and act with a multiply hyphenated political identity. My assumption is that Christians have an identity of precisely this kind and that taking note of this fact will help bring into focus the public character of public witness.

Begin with Michael Walzer’s marvelous little book, What It Means to Be an American. ¹ America is an immigrant society. Most of us came here from somewhere else or have ancestors who did, and thus many of us have hyphenated political identities and live on both sides of the hyphen. ² A portion of who we are expresses the habits, customs, and instincts of some other place, some other nation, and another portion expresses our distinct American identity and political mores.

The hyphen does not divide public from private. If you are, say, an Italian-American, you are not an Italian at home and an American in public. Rather you have a mixed identity and you carry that mixture wherever you go. Those aspects of your identity that follow from the fact that you are an American—a citizen of this particular political community—will influence how you speak and act back home among your fellow immigrants. You will speak, not simply as someone who happens to come from Italian stock, but as one who comes from that stock and who is also an American.

So too, those aspects of your identity that follow from your family’s ties to the political culture of some other nation will influence how you speak and act in public among your fellow citizens in this country. I grew up in Minnesota during the 1960s and 1970s where many of the leading politicians were Scandinavian-Americans whose public speeches and deeds were inflected with the habits and instincts of the political culture that their parents had left behind in Europe’s grey and snowy North. Those speeches and deeds expressed a widely shared collection of political instincts and habits, one that had more in common with the social democratic mores of, say, Ontario, than it did with the “don’t fence me in” political culture of Texas, and these differences had something to do with different patterns of immigration. Even today, different immigration patterns account for at least some of the differences that divide the political cultures of say, Minnesota and New Jersey, and it accounts for the conflicts that arise when new immigrants from different shores begin to transform a political culture shaped by an altogether different immigrant past.

My hunch is this: the hyphenated political identities of Americans and the hyphenated ways in which they address issues both public and private might help us better understand the hyphenated character of Christian proclamation that comes as public witness.

What is a public issue and how do we distinguish it from issues of other kinds, presumably private ones? A public issue is one that concerns the public’s business, the business of citizens qua citizens, and presumably one addresses a public issue, and has authority to do so, only as one occupies a certain role, the role of citizen. By contrast, private issues do not concern the public’s business, the business of citizens, and presumably one addresses a private issue, at least in part, not as a citizen, but in some other role, as a member of some other community.

For example, every Sunday evening my wife and I sit down and plan the week ahead. Who will walk the dog, who will cook the meals, who will shuttle the kids? Which day is yours, which day is mine and how will it all work given everything else we have to do? It’s a private discussion about a private matter. It’s not the public’s business; it’s not taken up in public discussion.

By “private matter,” I mean an object of concern that my fellow citizens have no authority to address. By “private discussion,” I mean a discussion that involves an expectation of confidentiality and that accents the private roles of the parties involved. By “private role,” I mean a role other than the one we occupy as citizens. So, when I have this conversation with my wife on Sunday evening, it’s not my role as citizen that I occupy, not principally. It’s not my political identity that matters here, not really. Rather, it’s my role as spouse and parent that matters, and it’s my rightful place within those roles that gives me the authority I need to have a voice and receive a hearing with respect to this particular matter. In turn, it’s those roles and relationships that specify my duties within that conversation: to listen carefully, interpret charitably, share burdens willingly, and so on.

Of course, our Sunday evening conversation might drift into other matters. It usually does, and, some of those matters might be public, not cooking and shlepping, but tax policy and recycling codes. Suppose our boys join in, and suppose that we bring our Christian commitments to bear on the issues we discuss. In that event, we will have a private conversation about a public issue, and the roles that my wife and I occupy will be multiple: parent, spouse, citizen, and member of the household of God. Of course, depending on the conversation or circumstance, we might privilege one of these roles over the others. If, for example, the topic is our troubled health-care delivery system, and if my fifteen year old is railing against unjust distribution within the current system, then my role as spouse recedes into the background and other roles will become more prominent—my role as parent, citizen, and Christian who worships a God who commands that justice be done.

Still, even as I accent one or more of these roles as the topics and circumstances come and go, I cannot forsake any of them. They remain aspects of my complicated, multiply hyphenated identity. I carry each of them with me wherever I go and each will influence how I address an issue and what I actually say.

Now let’s consider a public issue addressed in a public setting, and let’s take a familiar example, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech from August 1963. It’s an example that brings us closer to our topic, to Christian preaching about public issues. I say it brings us closer to our topic without actually getting us there, precisely because I doubt this address was a sermon. It had sermonic elements and tones. It was certainly loaded with theological content, and King was certainly tempted to treat the American republic as a church, his fellow citizens as members of a congregation. Still, if we concede that a preacher in the pulpit addresses the church, the city of God in temporal exile, and if we contend that the church is constituted by the Holy Spirit, that baptism indexes membership, and that the baptized are gathered into the household of God vicariously, through participation in Christ’s baptism, then I think we had better say that, on this day, King made a public address. He considered a public issue—the horrific injustices of Jim Crow and their vile legal protections—in a public setting, and he spoke as a citizen to his fellow citizens.

Having noted this, we need not conclude that, on this day, he left behind the other aspects of his complicated, multiply hyphenated identity. Rather, we should say that he did not speak only as citizen but also as Christian, also as a son of a son of slaves, as a Southerner, as a father with ordinary hopes for his children, as an educated member of the middle class, and so on. Nor did he become somehow less of a citizen when these other aspects of his identity shaped the substance of his remarks. When his theological commitments percolated into his public remarks on that day, when they constituted what he said and proposed to his fellow citizens, he was no less a citizen for all that. Indeed, we have a title for someone who brings his or her theological convictions to bear on public matters in public settings. Such a person is a “public theologian” and their remarks are an instance of public theology, their role, that of the citizen who happens to be a Christian. This is the role King was occupying on that day, and this is, I think, how we should regard his remarks: more public theology in sermonic tones than actual sermon on a public matter.

If we combine this distinction with the others we have drawn so far, then we can say a couple of things in response to the questions that started our inquiry. We can say that a sermon on a public issue is one that addresses the public’s business. It regards some matter or concern that emerges from the political life of a people, which is to say that it regards some concern that the people share (or ought to share) insofar as they are citizens of a common political community.

We can say that a sermon on a public issue takes place neither in a public setting nor in a private one, neither in the city square, nor across the kitchen table. Our model should be neither Paul’s address to the Athenians in Acts 17, nor the theologically charged discussions about public matters that take place in our homes; neither King’s speech on the steps of the Lincoln Monument, nor the theologically inflected discourse that is common currency at the lunch tables of our seminaries and divinity schools.

We can also say that the church is justified in making the people’s business its own, that it is authorized to do so, precisely because the Word of God that it proclaims has jurisdiction over all the world and because the people in the pews who hear that Word have hyphenated identities. They are not only Christians but also citizens, and they bring the public’s business with them as they make their way through the front doors, down the aisles, and into the pews. There is no keeping the public out of the church; its walls are as porous as the souls within.

Thus, a preacher who addresses some matter of public concern must assume that the Word she preaches has jurisdiction over this matter and that the congregation she addresses is, in Augustine’s famous image, a corpus permixtum. Each member is not only a saint but also a sinner, not only a Christian but also a citizen. Each is a person of multiply hyphenated roles and identities, and while it might be safe to say that in this setting they put their Christian identities first, there is no leaving behind the other side of the hyphen. Mixed and multiple, they always come as they are—Christians but also citizens, saints but also sinners—and this, it seems to me, creates the most pressing problems for the preacher who addresses public issues.

Put simply, problems come as the preacher addresses a topic that emerges from the right side of the hyphen—the citizen side—in the language and concepts of the left, the Christian side. To see how this happens, recall our definitions. A public issue is one that regards the public’s business and, in a democratic political culture like our own, authority to address the public’s business comes packaged with citizenship. Once an issue is identified as public, then, at least in principle, it is assumed that all have a voice, that all should be heard, and that each has authority to hold all others responsible for what they say and do. In a democratic culture, citizens address public issues, not preachers, and they do so as individuals. They proceed with the assumption that each must decide for themselves how best to address the matter at hand. They assume that no one can do this for them, and they resist every attempt to replace the authority of individual judgment with the authority of some other.

If these are the attitudes that citizens of a democratic culture will have when confronted with a public issue, if these are the assumption they will share, then the problem for the preacher who takes up such an issue should be plain. It comes as conflicts emerge between the authority of the Word of God that the preacher proclaims and the authority of the citizen that every public issue assumes. It comes in the conflict between proclamation that must ultimately arrive with the confidence of faith and democratic debate that can be flush with skepticism’s uncertainty. ³

The Word of God demands deference, it demands that its authority be recognized, that its judgments be regarded as peerless and sound. Yet in a culture of democratic debate, deference is given to no person, text, or collection of judgments, at least not at the start. Deference might be earned along the way, and yet whatever is earned can always be challenged by some new authority exhibiting some new excellence, some new finding or judgment.

In the church, this means at least a couple things. When a public issue is addressed in the proclamation of the Word, the people in pews are likely to feel their authority as citizens challenged. It is their issue after all. How can they receive this Word, how can they defer to its demand, when they are obliged by the citizenship they share to speak, not receive, to challenge, not defer? If these democratic questions press hard against their souls, then they may come to doubt the jurisdiction of God’s Word over this issue. They may resist the undemocratic way in which the Word is preached—with confidence and authority—and if they remain offended by this trespass upon their authority they will certainly leave with trouble hearts, and they may very well leave less in the plate when the offering is passed.

This is the problem that hyphenated identities create for the church’s public witness in a democratic political society, and it is exacerbated by a dynamic that Walzer describes in his tale of immigration in America. In the typical narrative, in the transition from first to fourth generation, the left side of the hyphen tends to weaken and the right side comes to dominate. My siblings and I, great grandchildren of our Norwegian-American ancestors are, for the most part, simply Americans. Something like this pattern repeats itself in the churches; over time, the Christian side of the hyphen atrophies and the American side dominates. Our parishioners have hyphenated identities, yes, but many of them live mostly on the right side. And of course, when this happens they cannot help but object as a pastor takes up the public’s business from the pulpit.

What is to be done? The conflicts that emerge when we address the public’s business are often unpleasant, and it comes as no surprise when pastors avoid these conflicts by ignoring that business. But this cannot be right. What’s needed instead is a certain degree of courage on our part, a certain measure of faith in the Word that we preach, and a certain hope that accompanies that faith. The hope that I have in mind regards the relation between the right and left side of the hyphen under the influence of God’s Word. The hope is that by bringing that Word to bear on the public’s business, we might encourage a citizen who happens to be a Christian to remember her baptism, to remember that her identity is hyphenated, that she lives simultaneously on both sides of the hyphen, and that God has jurisdiction over all.

Let me close with an example, with a sermon preached by Don Meisel. The year was 1972, the Vietnam War was grinding on, and in December of that year Nixon announced a massive bombing campaign in North Vietnam. The Reverend Dr. Meisel had just moved from First Presbyterian Church of Princeton (what was soon to become Nassau Presbyterian) to Westminster Presbyterian in Minneapolis. Westminster was, in every sense, an establishment church. I was thirteen years old; bookish, rebellious, and poorly catechized. That year, I tended to sneak out of confirmation class with my pals and ride the elevators in the stumpy skyscrapers in downtown Minneapolis, only to dash back in time for cookies at the coffee hour. But for some reason I was in church on the day that Don preached on the war. I don’t remember what he said, what text he considered, what images he used or arguments he made, whether he was cautious and measured or passionate and bold. What I do remember is the crescendo, the finish, which went something like this: “If we believe what we confess about the cross of Christ and the righteousness of God, if we believe that the strong stand condemned by the vicarious suffering of the weak, then we must stop this insane war!”

He paused. He was finished. He turned, sat down, and held his bald head in his hands. There was complete silence; not a cough, not a breath, not a creak on the floorboards. An eternity passed, or so it seemed, and then, from up in the choir loft, Peter Johnson, an old family friend—hairy, bearded, and clothed in late 1960s garb—started to clap, slowly at first, but deliberately and strong and with growing confidence and volume, until nearly the entire congregation joined in.

Here was a public issue addressed in Christian terms. Here was the Word of God addressed to Christians who were also citizens. Here were citizens who were reminded that their public lives fall under God’s rule, care, and judgment. Here were Christians called and recalled to faithful witness in their public lives. Here was a newly installed pastor preaching with courage, faith, and hope. We can do no better.