My pastor, professor, and friend, the Rev. Dr. John W. Wright, recently released an illuminating book called Telling God's Story: Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation. For the scope of this post, I will only be covering what Wright is doing in the first chapter, dubbed "Homiletics as Biblical Hermeneutics." [Brief glossary: "homiletics" means the study of or art of preaching, and "interpretation" can be thought of in place of "hermeneutics".]
Horizons and being grasped by Scripture
In this first chapter, Wright argues that "preaching is not merely a technique of application subsequent to interpretation"; rather, "preaching represents interpretation par excellence" (p. 12). Drawing on Robert Bellah, Wright offers a diagnosis of recent trends which has left pastors in a situation such that the 'managerial' demands of a pastor are contrasted with the 'therapeutic' needs of those sitting in the pews whereby the therapeutic always wins the day. Thus, Scriptures then must made relevant and conform to the individual in need of therapy, but Wright would rather ask: "How do we translate human lives into the biblical narrative to live as part of the body of Christ in the world?" (p. 19)
Wright traces much of this disconnect to the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Seeking to remove ambiguity from interpretation, Schleiermacher attempted to set up a universal method of interpretation that objectively sought after the true meaning of the text -- perhaps even better than the original author! Meaning in Scripture, however, must be kept purely historical, and thus has no contemporary relevance. Effectively, "Hermeneutics is about historical retrieval; homiletics [is] about contemporary significance" (p. 24). The wedge is firmly hammered in: hermeneutics (meaning) gets relegated to professionals in the academy, and preaching is for pastors. As Wright notes, Scripture itself then becomes a 'relic' to be excavated. Or, as Indiana Jones often quipped, "It belongs in a museum!"
Tracing his story after Schleiermacher, Wright introduces Martin Heidegger and his pupil Hans-Georg Gadamer into the fray of interpretation. For Heidegger, his hermeneutical circle made it such that "Interpretation is not a method per se, but the enclosing of new data that arises from within the whole of human lives" (p. 26). Wright uses the example of parents who, after an initial trip to urgent care to discover that their relentlessly crying child had an earache, they will now know what signs to look for to signify an earache, if another episode should occur.
Gadamer, deepening Heidegger's insight, explicitly recognized that there was something about preaching that "revealed important dynamics of what goes on in all interpretation":
Gadamer's rethinking of the relationship between interpretation and application holds the key to our story about preaching as interpretation. If the theologian and preacher Schleiermacher developed an interpretative theory that excluded preaching from interpretation, the philosopher Gadamer explicitly held preaching up as a normative exemplar of the very dynamic of interpretation. Of all practices associated with reading texts, Gadamer noted that both legal judgment and preaching embraced application as central to their task:
In both legal and theological hermeneutics there is an essential tension between the fixed text--the law or the gospel--on the one hand and, on the other, the sense arrived at by applying it at the concrete moment of interpretation, either in judgment or in preaching. A law does not exist in order to be understood historically, but to be concretized in its legal validity by being interpreted. Similarly, the gospel does not exist in order to be understood as a merely historical document, but to be taken in such a way that it exercises its saving effect. this implies that the text, whether law or gospel, if it is to be understood properly--i.e., according to the claim it makes--must be understood at every moment, in every concrete situation, in a new and different way. Understanding here is always application (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming [New York: Seabury Press, 1975], pp. 309-10).
According to Gadamer's insight, application remains within interpretation. Preaching provides an archive from which application could be retrieved as an indispensable aspect of interpretation (Wright, pp. 28-9).
For the Christian, then, "There is no meaning and then application; the application grows, changes direction, corrects, reproves as part of the very hearing of the text withing the ongoing life of the Christian" (p. 30). Thus, "Interpretation is application because to grasp the meaning of something changes the history of the one who grasps and is grasped by the text in the very act of grasping" (ibid).
Wright points to the example of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King did not merely "apply Scripture" and "apply" the writings of Gandhi who, in turn, read from Jesus' teaching of nonviolence.
Rather, King stood within a particular history, the history of the oppression of African Americans in the United States. He stood at a particular time, the time of the African American struggle for civil rights. Finally, he, along with other African Americans, stood within the church as a people formed by the Scriptural teaching on nonretaliation. King's concrete historical existence opened him to grasp the gospel's teaching on nonviolence, even as those same teachings grasped him (p. 31).
Comedy vs. Tragedy, or complacency vs. call to conversion
In the last section of this chapter, Wright contrasts the notions of comedy and tragedy as they correspond to the horizons and outlooks we all share. He upholds the TV show I Love Lucy as an example of a comedy that reinforces the continuities of love, despite the disruptions of the disturbances of life. On the other hand, a tragedy such as Romeo and Juliet calls into question our assumptions about love and challenges us such that we realize the frailty of life itself.
Instead of a continuity with one's horizons, a discontinuity is experienced. Gadamer calls this "hermeneutical experience" (and Alasdair MacIntyre calls this an "epistemological crisis"). Speaking again of texts, Wright states, "Whereas the fusion of horizons enfolds a text into our past horizons [comedy], hermeneutical experience [tragedy] opens our horizons to the future" (p. 40). It is at this point that this opening up to the future has the hope of opening up the possibility of seeing anew.
For the preacher, Wright considers the tragic moment such that it "unseals the congregation so that they might find their lives in the biblical narrative, rather than absorbing the biblical narrative into [their lives]" (p. 44). Throughout the chapter, Wright equates the construing of the biblical narrative as it enfolds the lives of Christians into God's story one that sets the church up as a "contrast society" (Wright draws heavily from Rodney Clapp and Stanley Hauerwas here).
As a contrast society, proclaiming the good news of the Gospel, we may be able to receive the gift of Christ such that we also pose that "tragic" moment to the world so that it, as Wright says in his introduction, "might see, and in seeing, believe."
On the receiving end of preaching: What are ways in which our own churches fall prey to only preaching comedies, or, sermons in which there is only a continuity between the way we already live our lives and what we know of Scripture? (Leaving aside, of course, the fact that everybody likes a funny preacher.) Or, here's a good one: What are ways we have been preached at "tragically" such that the discontinuity called for invokes a challenge we are not ready to face?
On the proclaiming side: In what ways can we better our own proclamation of the good news -- nay, in what ways can we more faithfully proclaim the gospel such that we do not capitulate to the continuities and comfort of the stories we already live within, but rather preach such that it is God's story in which we should be finding ourselves? [Note: I intend "preach" very loosely hear, I don't imagine that everybody is a preacher reading this; instead, I mean "to proclaim" in all aspects of our lives. Wright's book is on preaching, but it should grasp us beyond thinking that it is a book explicitly for those called "preacher."]
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