Preaching as the Unfinished Task of Theology: Grief,Trauma,and Early Christian Texts in Homiletical Interpretation

Ancient and modern struggles with unfinished theology in preaching

The problem is not some new one, recently invented in an age of theological revisionism. In fact one does not need to look far to find examples of this theological struggle historically. Toward the beginning of the critical homiletical tradition stands Augustine himself. In his four-part work, On Christian Doctrine, Augustine ground his homiletical and rhetorical claims (Book IV) with a theological hermeneutic of the Bible (Books I–III). A key theological principle of his hermeneutic goes something like this: whatever does not tend toward love, God, and neighbor should be interpreted figuratively. The tradition has long realized that there is trouble in biblical texts. Through combinations of figurative readings, and interpreting more difficult scriptural texts in terms of clearer ones, the tradition sought a way forward. It realized that it had to deal with the inflection somehow: “The Word of the Lord?”

In recent homiletical literature this has coalesced around a basic question that Augustine might not have imagined. In an insightful series of published works, homiletician Ron Allen asks, When do we give our homiletical assent in preaching, that is, when do we preach with the text? And when do we more clearly differentiate ourselves from the tradition? When do we preach against the text? ²

Taking up homiletical theology’s unfinished task today: Problems and prospects

My goal is to enter Allen’s hermeneutical and theological struggle in such a way that an intermediate option becomes possible. While others have done this in their own ways, I wish to bring both to the problem and the solution a new stance. The issue is not the degree to which or how we will reinterpret the tradition, but rather acknowledging that the biblical text itself represents an “unfinished theology.” The real problem with any theological interpretation of troubling texts is that the texts themselves are a product of historical realities that “haunt” us still: grief, trauma, crisis, and other unresolved issues with which we are still wrestling—in short, an unfinished theology.

Allen’s alternative of rendering a judgment for or against a text strikes me as overly idealized when I consider the biblical texts themselves and the quality of contemporary interpreters. Scholars have long noted that the Bible does not represent one theology, but several. There is in the canon itself a diversity of theologies that cannot be superficially reconciled. Should theological interpreters claim to find a center (say, Luther’s justification by grace through faith), they would be hard pressed to demonstrate the resonance of the whole New Testament canon with it. In the end, Luther himself was concerned about the Book of Revelation and even famously called James an “epistle of straw.” The canon does not provide us with some magical “Kumbayah” that all of the individual texts can join in on theologically. Their divergent theologies cannot be harmonized.

From the standpoint of contemporary interpreters, we have also been tempted to relate to the tradition with a kind of modernist, Enlightenment stance of mastery. In other words, if we use our rational and critical faculties well enough, we can properly evaluate the tradition in such a way that we can plausibly teach Christian faith. Homiletician Ron Allen, in his conversational vision for preaching as teaching, carefully explains how his theological understanding of the dipolar gospel (God loves each and all; God calls for justice for each and all) might be brought into dialogue with troublesome parts of the tradition. Where the text can be affirmed in light of the gospel, there is a direct path to preaching. Where a portion of the text is implausible (say, three-tiered universes of heaven above, earth, and hell below) the text can be preached and yet revised. Where, however, a text is no longer morally plausible or intelligible (say, support of slavery), a preacher can and should preach “against the text.”

Allen’s argument here is deep and is, with respect to the tradition, deeply engaging. I think it is workable in most cases. I have no quarrel with the care with which Allen engages the tradition and seeks to bring it into dialogue with his dipolar gospel—a responsible position that bears great insight. My dispute is actually with the stance of mastery that it may be presupposing. It would seem to require a degree of rationality and self-possession that may be beyond the actual ability of preachers and their communities as interpreters. In other words, I am, as a homiletical interpreter, not so utterly separate from the tradition that I can always stand in critical isolation and render the judgment necessary to live up to the task. As the hermeneutical philosopher Gadamer has noted in Truth and Method, interpreters themselves actually participate in the effective history of texts. ³ Therefore, I must somehow recognize my own deep connection to the tradition even when it troubles and vexes me. The question is not only whether I can stand above the tradition and render the necessary theological judgment; the question is also whether I can stand within that tradition and deal with the intractable elements that it continues to bear in its wake. What I am trying to envision from a homiletical-theological perspective is an invested middle way between Allen’s options of revising a slightly problematic text and “preaching against the text.”

Some texts as products of grief, trauma, or crisis

What we have in parts of the New Testament canon is likewise an unfinished theology. By this, I mean more than saying that the strands of the tradition are unresolved with each other; they are themselves unresolved or provisional attempts at working through a struggle. Some are themselves works of unfinished theology. One support for this is the documentary history itself. If source critics are right, Mark was written first. As Matthew and Luke took up their task, they saw some sort of lack in Mark and thus sought to wrangle a better ending than Mark’s fearful, scandalous failure of both the disciples and the women—as represented in the strange ephobounto gar (“for they were afraid”) in 16:8—and secure thereby a more stable theological vision. In the rest of the New Testament canon, there are similar tensions between Paul and other traditions (e.g., Paul’s self-portrayal in the seven authentic letters and his depiction in Acts or James’ reaction to Paul’s teaching) and within the Pauline tradition itself, as the deutero-Pauline literature demonstrates.

While these historical issues in our text bear witness to the unfinished theological task of the tradition, the issue comes to the fore even more when we consider the critical and sometimes traumatic exigencies that drive so much of the writing. Apart from a few of Paul’s letters, much of the New Testament was committed to writing after the destruction of the temple in 70 ce. ⁴ They are attempts to do theology in the wake of catastrophic historical events that left a great imprint on the historical memory they would preserve. Others deal with problems of persecution. Still others dealt with the beginning of the “parting of the ways,” where either Christians left the Jewish milieu or reported themselves painfully pushed out. Thus, we have Jesus portrayed as an early first-century figure, yet his religious opponents in the Gospels became important foils for his ministry in a uniquely late first-century way. Perhaps the anti-Jewish feelings of the late first century ce became thereby inscribed, even traumatically, into the story of the early first-century Jesus.

A modest way forward

I wonder if the trouble preachers sometimes experience around early Christian anti-Judaism is more than just a dispensable element of the tradition from which we can and should rationally differentiate in favor of a more plausible, intelligible, and morally responsible gospel. It seems that the unfinished theology of the tradition bears witness to a formative trauma at the core of Christian faith. In using the language of trauma, I am doing more than trying to bring in some diagnostic category—that, too, would presuppose a stance of mastery that I do not think is warranted. Instead, I am trying to name the intractable nature of the event and the difficulty we have of even talking about our past. Christian proclamation is, in this sense, “haunted” by a trauma to the tradition that is more than we can master by our saying or our theologizing. It is not just something we preach against; it is also part of our unfinished theological task in preaching. Viewed positively, it calls forth not finished “reconciliation,” but glimpses God’s unfinished “reconciling.” It offers not finished health, but trusts God’s unfinished healing at the sites of scars and pain. Such preaching might be more like a groping, stammering, ecclesial-sized, world-embracing provisional “talking cure” by which we are sustained and anticipate signs of promised life until God’s full purposes are revealed.

There is a scene in the movie Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close where the protagonist, the intellectually precocious child Oskar Schell, seeks in vain to make sense of his father’s death in the World Trade Center in 2001. Young Oskar finds a key in his father’s blue vase. Having played so many problem-solving games with his father until now, he assumes that by finding what the key unlocks he will learn something—anything—that will help him make sense of the tragedy. The problem, of course, is actually finding the lock it fits in New York City. Although Oskar has a name associated with the key, there are far too many people with that name in the metropolis, and far too many locks to try for him to solve the mystery of his father’s key. After trying every urban lock he can over a series of weeks and months, the young boy finally falls apart. He rages at his now widowed mother and collapses in a heap on their apartment floor. For all Oskar’s precocious intellectual gifts, he cannot solve this most personal of problems.

German New Testament scholar Günter Wasserberg has a helpful way of talking about this with respect to some anti-Jewish elements in Luke–Acts. The two-part work, Wasserberg argues, is trying to reconcile the success of the gospel to the Gentiles to its failure with the Jews to a mixed community of Jewish and Gentile Christians. Wasserberg says that Luke–Acts is a “grief document” and calls the New Testament a faith document of disappointed hope. ⁵ If he is right, part of what lies at the heart of the tradition which we interpret theologically in our preaching is an unresolved grief. Its impact goes beyond the two books which Luke is credited with writing in the New Testament. Because of Luke–Acts’ outsized influence in the structure of the lectionary and calendar, its unfinished theology shapes the way many of us worship and remember in the weekly Christian assembly. The idea that these are grief documents might also help us to reframe the way in which we talk about how we hand down the unfinished theologies of our biblical texts: whether liturgically or homiletically. It underlines that the ethical task of dealing with morally problematic texts is handled best not from a standpoint of rationalistic, Enlightenment mastery, but from a pastoral viewpoint that recognizes the profound enmeshment of our lives in these unfinished, troublesome and yet grace-bearing, prophetically powerful texts of the tradition. It requires of preachers an openness to speak theologically about our texts. It senses its task also as one of resuming a text’s unfinished theological work, not merely replicating it or repudiating it, depending on whether a hermeneutic of assent or suspicion is in the ascendancy.

This idea of the perduring, haunting nature of unresolved grief or even trauma may not really be all that new. In many texts where the risen Lord appears, he typically does so pointing to his wounds (John 20:19–29; Luke 24:36–43). Such sites of trauma or crisis are not magically overcome, forgotten, or invisibly healed. The wounds persist and keep those of us animated by resurrection grounded in the trauma and grief that attended our tradition’s birth. A theology of the cross, that “thin tradition” that runs through the works of Martin Luther, Jürgen Moltmann, Deanna Thompson, and Douglas John Hall, and reaches a startling self-critical insight in the recent work of James Cone, will help us to remain honest in our preaching by helping us “call a thing what it really is.” A retrieving of Luther’s simul justus et peccator (simultaneously justified and sinner) is also helpful here insofar as it prevents a premature closure about that which has been handed down to us. I suspect we will discover that the resurrection has unusual life-giving power precisely when the trauma or grief which we dare not mention is actually spoken and named, even while laying hold of the promise that resurrection represents. ⁶

For whatever reason, the tradition also seems to know in some deep way that those wounds will be there in the end. Revelation’s returning Lord in 1:7 will be publicly observed and be recognized by those who pierced him, presumably by his wounds. The history of loss, suffering, trauma, and grief is not obliterated or erased, but taken up into the purposes of God. Revelation’s final vision in chapters 21–22 includes the wiping away of tears in 21:4. Please note: there will be tears to be wiped away. ⁷

From the standpoint of preaching practice, this view calls for a more embedded form of theological engagement. We probably cannot always in some purely rationalistic way stand over the tradition and render pure, critical judgment. The middle way I propose suggests that while the tradition can be sometimes problematic, we do not so much offer a final answer or judgment, but provisional truths to which we can hold even in the presence of God and neighbor. I am aware of the fragmentary nature of what I propose. Still, in this way we might stand within our problematic traditions and in more honest relation to our world. Thus, for preaching, we might break with tradition not so much to leave it lie, but as a prelude to picking up its shards and soldering them in all their jaggedness in relation to the gospel and as yet another venture about our strange future with the God who keeps promising something new.

Outline of a homiletical approach

What I envision here methodologically for the crux of such a sermon is a three-part theological move. It is designed to address some part of a troublesome text or its theologoumenon that has come before the assembly. Although preachers experienced with grief and trauma might find their own way forward, here is a useful way to envision such a process.

In the first part, the preacher in the spirit of the theology of the cross “calls a thing what it really is.” With searching honesty, the preacher differentiates from some aspect of a text that must be named openly. With this move, the otherness of that text is honored, while the preacher still “pushes back” and acknowledges that this theological position is a profound struggle for faithful persons in our context. All is not right with this text or tradition.

In the second crucial step, the preacher then probes why this is. Deeper contextual reflection about the text or theologoumenon may be offered here. In doing this reflection, however, the goal is not so much to render a judgment, but to confess an inability to make sense of the text or its theologoumenon in light of the broader tradition. If, in certain cases, it is the broader text or set of related traditions that causes one to question why this is here, the probing will become even more sharpened and focused. This simply stated differentiation and admission is important. The text has emerged in all of its trouble out of a situation of grief, crisis, or trauma. In a direct sense, that grief or trauma is not ours. To the degree the struggle over reading such texts today is problematic, we run the risk of continuing to reinscribe the trauma and thus reactivate it instead of taking up its unfinished theological task ourselves. The goal is not to rationalize a text or explain its moral implausibility, but to set it in contrast with the rest of the text or tradition or contemporary life. What can we do with this text? We do not know.

In the third theological move, the prior admission permits the preacher to say something different in connection to the gospel: “We do not know what to do with this text; but we do know this”. At this point, the preacher bears witness to that part or parts of the gospel in relation to text or context that still do hold. Sometimes this will come from other parts of the lection; other times from the broader work from which it comes, say a Gospel or a letter as a whole. With this theological move, the preacher picks up some remaining pieces of the gospel that he or she still holds true and offers sustenance even in the midst of this paradoxical differentiation from the tradition. The goal is not to master the tradition, but to acknowledge its unfinished character and pick up some of the pieces. It is neither to replicate nor repudiate a biblical text, but to take up its unfinished theological task again alongside the text. It has enough distance to recognize and rightly name the problematic text, but it is close enough to resume its unfinished theological task anew.

This three-part homiletical-theological process is not really new. These are theological moves that I have seen and heard in other homiletical moments of grief and crisis. These include the difficult funeral where some aspect of the deceased’s life or manner of death sets loose a struggle that must be named but cannot really be mastered in the moment of grief. It also happens in situational preaching where in the fog of crisis or the numbness of loss, a reality must be truly named even while a differentiated gospel must be offered—even if only in a piecemeal fashion. On the other hand, it is not appropriate for every moment either. I agree with Allen that there are times when we must preach against a text. There is sometimes no alternative to saying a clear “no” to something less than gospel. Some texts engage in forms of blame, invective, scapegoating, or stereotyping that so reactivate the trauma or grief that renaming the gospel with parts of the text into our own troubled context becomes all but impossible. Rather, this intermediate approach I offer is for a certain subset of problematic texts or theological moments where we sense the limits both of the text and the degree to which it offers possibilities for taking up its unfinished theological task anew. In those cases, this approach offers an alternative that with wisdom could prove apt for a congregation that learns over time to live ecclesial life in differentiated proximity with this part of its tradition. Somewhere between subtle theological revision and baldly preaching against the text, there is also space for something different. It is solely for those times and places where the tradition can be taken up again as an unfinished theological task. Such a homiletical move neither replicates a troublesome text nor simply repudiates it. It neither reinscribes it nor erases it. It takes some aspect of the tradition seriously enough to take it up yet again, and to try anew—even if haltingly, in bits and pieces. It stays close enough to certain troublesome texts from contexts of grief, trauma, or crisis long enough to name gospel both with them and despite them.

Conclusion

If so, preachers of troubling texts are clearly more like pastors than we have actually recognized. Theologically, preachers stand within a tradition born partly in situations marked by trauma and unresolved grief. Preachers do ministry in this context aware that in such crisis moments there is a numbing and a blessed forgetfulness that in the presence of others requires ongoing homiletical-theological work. Good pastoral engagement requires an ability not to let the promise appear disconnected with the unspoken grief of the past, but given precisely within. ⁸ It is not pretty, but preachers often know from their own experience around funerals and crisis that it is just such situations where they often do their best work! In those moments, preachers are not really systematic theologians, but pastoral ones—better, homiletical theologians of the promise. And who else would be ready to notice and deal with something as tiny and yet profound as inflection: “The Word of the Lord?” Then preachers can perhaps respond together with hearers in the midst of painful paradox nonetheless: “Thanks be to God.”