Notes on preaching

Detail of historiated initial 'P', Paul preaching (13th c., France)

Thinking about preaching recently, I returned to a paper I wrote for preaching class in divinity school in which the assignment was to develop a theology of preaching.  I found the exercise clarifying, so I thought I would share it here, with the caveat that the course textbook, Richard Lischer's The Company of Preachers, largely determined the figures with whom I engaged.

What is preaching?  To answer this question with a normative, theological account of the practice of preaching, it is clarifying to first look at how we use the word and then to see what theological claims follow.  The word “preach” entered the English lexicon through Middle English, deriving ultimately from the Latin praedicare (“proclaim”), a compound of prae- (“before”) and dicare (“declare”).  In ecclesiastical Latin, praedicare means “preach” and can carry connotations of praise, commendation, foretelling, and warning.  In Greek, the words most often translated as “preach”—kēryssō (“herald, proclaim”) and euangelizō (“gospelize”, “announce good news”)—carry the same connotation.  Etymologically, to preach is to declare before, both in the sense of saying beforehand and in the sense of announcing before others: preaching is public and preparatory.  Furthermore, that “declare” derives from declarare, from the combination of de- (“thoroughly”) and clarare (“make clear”), suggests that preaching involves making lucid what was once unclear.  This sense is that of the commonplace response to preaching in African-American congregations: “Make it plain!”  To preach, then, is a public and preparatory speech act of making something plain.

What Christian preaching makes plain is the gospel, the good news that the One who called light out of darkness and brought Israel out of Egypt has raised Jesus Christ from the dead.  To preach is to clearly proclaim the good news of God’s saving works, preeminently in the person and work of Jesus the Christ.  It is difficult to improve upon Luther’s succinct summary of the gospel as “a discourse about Christ, that he is the Son of God and became man for us, that he died and was raised, that he has been established as a Lord over all things.” [1]  Preaching is proclaiming this gospel.  Put differently, the task of preaching is to steadily point to the risen Lord Jesus, and by so doing to point to the Triune Lord, to direct our gaze toward the only source of life and salvation.

That preaching points to the risen Lord does not mean that every instance of preaching, every sermon or homily, needs to explicitly articulate the entirety of the gospel or to unpack every element of the mystery of faith: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”  However, every instance of preaching should fundamentally be about the Triune Lord.  Whatever else preaching does (e.g., encourage, convict, remind, lament) will be secondary to and derivative from what it says about God and God’s actions.  Preaching does all that it does by making plain God for us.  Luther made this point provocatively when he wrote, “…the preaching of the gospel is nothing else than Christ coming to us, or we being brought to him.” [2]  Carl Michalson offers a helpful gloss when he writes that in preaching, “time is telescoped in such a way as to make the event of God’s turning to us in Christ a reality of the present moment.” [3]  Of course, the preacher’s words are not sufficient in and of themselves to make present the risen Lord.  But this Lutheran, sacramental conception of preaching does underscore preaching’s fundamental task to bring home, to make tangible and concrete for us today, the significance of God coming to us in Christ Jesus.

More concretely, preaching seeks to make plain the Word of God, proclaimed in the public reading of the Scriptures.  Rowan Williams puts it very simply:  “When the leaders of the congregation deliver sermons, their main purpose is, or should be, to help believers understand the unity and harmony of the texts that have been read at an act of worship; and then to encourage them to live lives worthy of the good news that they have received." [4]   Preaching, then, necessarily involves exegesis of the biblical text.  Karl Barth described well the type of exegesis preaching calls for, when he wrote, 

We should not try to master the text.  The Bible will become more and more mysterious to real exegetes.  They will see all the depths and distances.  They will constantly run up against the mystery before which theology is like trying to drain the ocean with a spoon.  The True exegete will face the text like an astonished child in a wonderful garden, not like an advocate of God who has seen all his files. [5]

Preaching comes out of being mastered by the Word of God, and excellent preaching evinces the astonishment of a child at its wonders and depth.

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