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Presbyterian Theological Seminary. This is a wonderful opportunity for all of us, students, faculty, alumni, and friends of the seminary, to come together for a special time of scholarly presentations, class reunions, and opportunities to catch up with the life of the seminary and with one another. And what we remember at moments like this is that the life of a seminary, the encouragement of the life of the mind and heart in service to God, is never just a matter of the mere transmission of information.

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It's also about something a little bit more incarnational, in which, in a variety of ways, the Word of God becomes flesh in our midst. A conversation happens that becomes grace. An action gets taken that becomes ministry. A dream gets shared until it grows the sorts of arms and legs that God needs in this world for God's vision to be expressed concretely.

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All of this happens at a seminary. And when we come together to gather again, Many of us now in other places, and for some long while, and doing other things, we remember, and we renew, and we revisit the ground we have covered together. My dear friend Michael Lindvall, who is now the pastor of the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York, and is also an accomplished writer, has said somewhere that as a minister,

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He is invited to offer what is usually labeled the invocation at assorted community events. I accept these invitations most of the time, he says. But if I'm in a frisky mood, I preface my yes with a prickly little aside about that word invocation. I just may say, I'd love to offer an opening prayer, but I don't do invocations.

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That usually elicits silence from the other end of the phone line. Sometimes the more curious will pursue the matter. Why not invocations? they might say.

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This offers me my in, he continues. Because, I answer, from what little I know about God, God cannot much be invoked. Certainly no words I might mumble could ever invoke the presence of the eternal God.

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But don't worry, God will be at our meeting no matter what. I'll be glad to pray, but if it's all right, I'll just pray that we might somehow see the holy presence that will be there, invocation or no. That is my prayer for these couple of days that lie ahead. that as we gather and visit and meet and greet and remember and laugh and hope, we will somehow see and feel and be empowered by the holy presence that is here already.

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So here at the beginning of this particular season of lectures, welcome to Austin Seminary, and may these days ahead be good ones for you. We are grateful to the staff and session and congregation of University Presbyterian Church for hosting this initial lecture of the series. The relationship between University Church and Austin Seminary is a long one, and for a number of us, myself included, it is an added pleasure to be here because this is our home congregation, the place in which our church life is acted out and our souls are nourished. And so to my pastor, San Williams, and to the entire staff and congregation, we thank you for your hospitality this evening.

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I want to present now two of our lecturers, each of whom will be addressing us for the first time tomorrow. And then I want to introduce to you more thoroughly our lecturer for this evening. Our 2003 Robert F. Jones lecturer is Dr.

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Brent Webb-Mitchell, who is Assistant Professor of Christian Nurture at Duke University Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina. Dr. Webb-Mitchell will introduce us to the ancient yet timeless practice of Christian pilgrimage in a series of lectures entitled School of the Pilgrim. Dr.

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Webb-Mitchell's first lecture will be subtitled Gestures. 15 tomorrow morning in Shelton Chapel. Dr. Webb Mitchell, would you please stand and let us welcome you to Austin Seminary.

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Thank you for being here. Our 2003 Thomas White Curry lecturer is Dr. Katherine Tanner, who is Professor of Theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School in Chicago. Dr.

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Tanner Dr. Tanner's lectures will center around the theme of grace and money, and will attempt to bring theology and money matters into the same conversation. What an important task.

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We're all, I'm sure, intrigued by this subject matter, and we'll look forward to Dr. Tanner's first lecture tomorrow morning, entitled Grace and Money at 8:30 in Shelton Chapel. Dr. Tanner, would you please stand, but we want to welcome you as well to Austin Seminary.

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And now it is my privilege to welcome our lecturer for this evening, the E.C. Westervelt lecturer for 2003, who is Dr. Paul Scott Wilson, Professor of Homiletics at Emmanuel College in the University of Toronto and the Toronto School of Theology. Dr.

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Wilson has taught there for 22 years at the basic and advanced degree levels. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto and did his doctorate at King's College of the University of London. He is a past president of the Academy of Homiletics and lectures and preaches widely in the United States and Canada. He is the author of several books, including such titles as God's Sense, Reading the Bible for Preaching, The Four Pages of the Sermon, A Guide to Biblical Preaching, The Practice of Preaching,

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A Concise History of Preaching, Imagination of the Heart, New Understandings in Preaching, and in addition to these titles, Dr. Wilson has edited or co-edited the books Preaching and Its Partners, Seasons of Preaching, and A Guide to Sunday Worship in the United Church of Canada. He's written many articles, and for nine years, he was the co-editor of Preaching, Word, and Witness. An ordained minister in the United Church of Canada, Dr.

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Wilson has served churches in full-time and interim capacities. Presently, in addition to his full-time teaching, he serves on the ministry team with his wife at St. Stephen's on the Hill United Church in Toronto, where his responsibilities include the adult church school, the youth group, and helping in worship. All of this leads me to say, Paul, that in addition to lecturing here, I hope you have the chance to get some rest while you're here in Austin.

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Dr. Wilson and his wife have three children. He will address us tomorrow at 11:15 a.m. in Shelton Chapel on the topic, Theologizing the Gracious Text, and will address us on Wednesday at 8:30 a.m.

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in Shelton Chapel on the topic, Moralizing the Conflicted Text, And tonight in this, his first lecture, his topic is Historicizing the Fluid Text. Please join me now in welcoming to Austin and to Austin Seminary, Dr. Paul Scott Wilson.

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Thank you very much. I am deeply honored to be here and deeply grateful for the presence of each one of you who makes this event possible. Listen now for the word of God as I read from 1 Corinthians chapter 3, verses 6 to 15.

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I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labor of each.

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For we are God's servants, working together, You are God's field, God's building. According to the grace of god-given to me, like a skilled master builder, I laid a foundation. And someone else is building on it.

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Each builder must choose with care how to build on it. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid. That foundation is Jesus Christ.

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Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, the work of each builder will become visible, for the day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire and the fire will test what sort of work each has done. If what has been built on the foundation survives, the builder will receive a reward.

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If the work is burned up, the builder will suffer loss. The builder will be saved but only as through fire. This is the word of God.

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Thanks be to God. My thanks this evening to Reverend Williams and President Wardlaw, also to Professor Scott Black Johnson and Carol Miles for hosting me. And for all of those who've made it possible for me to be here sharing with you a subject for which I have great love. It is the subject of preaching, and specifically tonight I'm wanting to talk about historicizing the fluid text.

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And essentially what I'm trying to get at tonight is the way in which our approach to exegesis has changed within the discipline of homiletics. Current homiletical textbooks spend considerable time talking about exegesis, and what I am calling the essential practice of historicizing the biblical text. Many homileticians write books on biblical commentary designed specifically to help preachers with specific books of the Bible or particular genres.

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And many homileticians also provide examples of how the Bible may be rendered in the sermon itself. And all of this is simply a testimony to how essential the Bible is to everything that preachers do. It's the starting place for the sermon and a dominant focus for development in actual sermons. We might ask, however, since exegesis is normally dealt with in Bible classes, is it really necessary for teachers of preaching to give so much focus to how the Bible is handled?

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Biblical scholars outnumber teachers of preaching. My guess is about 17 to 1, but that may be just a wild guess. I'm looking at the comparative size of the SBL, the Society for Biblical Literature, and the Academy of Homiletics. ought biblical scholars to work on the biblical end of the preaching task while homileticians work on the preaching end?

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Homileticians, on the whole, seem to devote more time to pre-sermon composition activities with the Bible than how to use the Bible actually in the sermon itself. Is this appropriate? So today, I want to argue that homiletics does need to concern itself with exegetical matters, because the whole enterprise has shifted, and it's become much more fluid than it once was. Former ways of conceiving of the preaching task have been altered.

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Indeed, the text itself is best seen as fluid. When I was a student in seminary, the book that I relied on most to teach me about exegesis was a book that some of you may know. It was done by two internationally known biblical scholars, Otto Kaiser and Werner Kummel, Exegetical Method, A Student's Handbook. And in that handbook, they described exegesis as a scientific process.

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It was a science. And it asked two kinds of questions concerning the text. What is the historical origin of the text? And what is the objective meaning of the text?

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And they said that any interpretation violates the text if it fails to bring the historical meaning forward. Now the steps that Kumal in particular advocates for exegesis are well known. I had a student in my first preaching class who was fairly conservative. who put up all kinds of resistance to exegesis.

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The careful historical study of the text. He said, Exegesis is exit Jesus. And that's clearly not what we're talking about. Where the Holy Spirit can use, and does use, the best of our approaches to the text as a way of helping us

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to discern God's Word but some of the principles are well-known that Kummel outlined use reliable addition of the Greek New Testament try and sketch the rough structure of what's happening in the text try and give an outline for it identify key words and phrases make a provisional translation from the original language determine the text's boundaries, where it ends and where it begins. Read about the historical context and the prehistory of that text. See if you can determine what the author is trying to say in the book as a whole, and then how this particular text relates to it.

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Check to see if the text has parallels somewhere else. Seek the meaning of the text in its oldest attestable form. And then finally, venture and interpretation of the text. Since Kaiser and Kummel wrote in 1967, the basic means of historical textual investigation has basically remained the same, very much intact,

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But attitudes and practices have changed dramatically. It's dangerous to say that scholars agree on anything. Yet we do seem to agree that interpretation is inescapably bias-laden. Because interpreters, like the biblical texts themselves, exist in historical situations.

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And we bring the biases of those situations to the text. All texts have what Ricoeur called a surplus of meaning. They have many meanings, not just one. We now speak of a range of meanings, or an arena of interpretation, even to determine

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What is an authentic meaning depends on one's point of view, on perspective. And there is no one single point of view, no one single interpretation of a text that can be claimed as the right one. Thus, most interpretations are necessarily tentative or fluid. In such a climate, interpreting the Bible can become relativistic.

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What anyone says is as good as what any other person might say. Texts themselves demonstrate a fluidity, for they can mean anything an interpreter wants to make of them. The danger here for preaching is that the authority of Scripture Whatever we might understand by that important phrase, the authority of scripture to govern the faith and life of the church can be seriously eroded.

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However, relativism is not the only alternative in this fluid situation. Theological claims about the biblical text can still be made. It's just that they have to be made from a smaller perspective. One needs to define where one is speaking from.

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Interpretation is performed within the specific cultural settings of the interpreter, and it must be recognized to function within those limitations. The act of biblical interpretation considered a science by Kaiser and Kummel just a few decades ago is now considered an art. As Richard B.

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Hayes says, Because exegesis is an art rather than a science, no single mechanical procedure can be prescribed. Well, one of the most significant changes that has taken place for preaching in these past decades has been the shift with regard to three terms: exegesis, hermeneutics, and homiletics. And the shift can be traced in part to the root meanings of the

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words. Exegiomai in the Greek means to interpret, and normally we associate exegesis with the historical critical rendering of the text, the scholarly study of it. Hermes is the Greek messenger god, and hermeneutics has to do with bringing messages out of the text. Again, it's dealing with interpretation.

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But normally, when we use the word hermeneutics, we associate it with bringing the text's meaning forward to today. It also involves bringing the worldly reality that surrounds us to bear on the particular biblical text that we're working on. And the word homiletics is from homily, which means to crowd together as in a conversation, or indeed as would have happened in the early church where there were no pews, people would crowd together and to a certain extent, all three of these terms, exegesis, hermeneutics, and homiletics, all three of them tend to crowd together because the boundaries today between them are becoming blurred.

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Homiletics in the past has tended to connote taking the meaning of the text and applying it to the specific life and work of the congregation today. Now these three terms and the actions that they represent traditionally were understood to be like three consecutive buses that a preacher would take through the week. in what we might imagine to be sermon city.

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Early in the week, preachers used to board the bus called exegesis, and it would travel through the historical part of town, and as a result, of taking that bus, they would engage in historical, critical endeavor. And then at some point along the way, they would transfer. They would transfer to the hermeneutics bus.

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And they would travel up to the newer end of town, up to today's street. And during that journey, they would come to understand the significance of the text for today. And once they reached Today Street, they would transfer to the homiletics bus. And they would take the homiletics bus the rest of the way up to the church.

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In other words, once they reached Today Street, the interpretive process was finished. And on the homiletics bus, they only had to apply the meaning to the specific congregation. Well, it's a bit of a caricature, but it's not too far off the mark. But several things have changed in recent decades.

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Exegesis can no longer be considered distinctly a scientific method. Often it becomes a hermeneutical process, and it's a process that varies according to the text that one is working on. One isn't going to necessarily use the same method, text after text. Whereas in earlier decades, access to the text was primarily through history.

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It was diachronic through time. Now, when preachers read the Bible, they aren't expected exclusively to use historical criticism to open the doors of meaning. Now we also have synchronic, at the same time, critical readings of the text, which mean that we can approach the text even without historical criticism and engage it in literary criticism, engage it in acts that render the text meaningful for today, even without the historical.

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Not that we can ever bypass safely the historical. Textual interpretation was formerly thought to stop once the meaning for today was secured. The biblical scholarly task was said to be complete, and the baton was now handed over to the preacher from the biblical scholar, and the preacher would carry the sermon to the finish line. There's been a shift, however, now interpretation is not so easy.

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easily confined. It continues all the way through sermon composition as the preacher represents the text in the sermon. And even in the pulpit, sometimes adjustments are made during the course of delivery. In other words, as preachers we have no interpretation of the text until we have the sermon.

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For preachers, the sermon is the interpretation of the text. It's not as though we have written something out that we call the interpretation prior to the sermon. We don't have words for the interpretation of the text until we have the sermon in front of us.

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The sermon is the interpretation. Before, preachers were not supposed to engage a text in personal ways, until its singular meaning, its only meaning, its one meaning, had been determined. And now, preachers are to engage the text in both scholarly and personal ways as a means to determine its multiple meanings.

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There are yet more exegetical changes to identify. Preachers used to be encouraged to spend most of the week studying the biblical text and reading widely, and then turned to composition late in the week. I left the seminary with the impression, whether it was mistaken or not, whether my professors intended to give it to me or not, I left seminary with the understanding that I should spend about 80% of the week doing exegesis, reading up on the text and on its historical background.

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And then only 20% of the time that I had for preparation would I devote to composition. Well, a preacher is relatively safe, as long as one is dealing with what the text meant. But it's during that composition time where we enter a risky zone, because then we're trying to articulate what the text means for today. And the ride becomes bumpy, and we have to venture statements in faith.

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We have to take risks, and many preachers seek to delay the experience. Walter Brueggemann, even in writing a commentary designed for preachers, expresses some of this disease. This is what he says, The farther one moves away from then, toward now, the more the risks increase.

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On the one hand, that is because we have no methodological consensus about how to move from then to now, or even if it is legitimate, to make the move. On the other hand, the move very much depends on the interpreter's judgment about the needs and prospects of the present situation, a judgment that is inevitably personal. Well, I'm no less convinced than I once was of the importance of doing exegesis for preaching, but I am altered in the percentage of time that I think preachers wisely can devote to this process of historicizing the text.

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It is perhaps now what I would consider to be closer to 30% of the preparation time that we have. So much needs attention by way of literary, theological, and congregational interpretation in the process of composition. Further, historicizing the text is not a process that finishes before the sermon is done.

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It continues into the sermon as the preacher seeks to represent the text responsibly in the act of preaching. So my own suggestion is that we begin our sermon composition early in the week at the same time that we are doing our research. Just as this process of biblical interpretation extends from the beginning

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of the sermon, it also extends to the end. And homiletics, which normally was considered to be at the end of the sermon process, now needs to be considered present at the beginning as well. Preachers start thinking about the congregations to which they will preach from the moment of their earliest first reading, for instance, in Fred Craddock's Fred Craddock has a step that he recommends preachers do, and that is read the text aloud and imagine the people that you're going to be speaking the text to.

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Further, much is lost in the old way of devoting most of the week to reading and note-taking, and waiting until the end of the week to start drawing one's notes together. This is the same advice that I give to my doctoral students. I say, Don't read all the books and make notes on them, and then try and put them together. Start writing even as you're doing the reading.

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And there's a good reason for it, because When we read, we get energy from the texts. And if we write notes that we're then going to use later on for the composition process, well, you know what it's like when you go back to notes that you've made? It's kind of like going to a used tea bag.

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You might put it in the water, it might still tint it, but you aren't going to get a lot of zesty flavor from it. It's used up. The energy that you had from the reading went into the note, and it should have gone into the sermon. Now, I'm not saying that we can simply start to write without doing scholarly work on the text, but I am saying that these three processes are somewhat parallel.

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operating on separate tracks, to be sure, but we are capable of knowing, okay, at this moment I'm doing scholarly historical work, and at this moment I'm doing composition related to my congregation. If I were looking for a model today that might better suit the exegetical hermeneutical process for preaching, It wouldn't be the image of a preacher taking three buses, exegesis, hermeneutics, homiletics. Nor would it be the image of a biblical scholar handing the baton to the preacher who takes the sermon the rest of the way.

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Rather, I would conceive of a single bus on which the preacher rides, and there are three groups of conversation going on on that bus. And the preacher moves freely between the group that's doing exegesis, and the group that's working on hermeneutics, and the other one that's working on homiletics. The one that's working on homiletics is composed of a wide assortment of people, several from the congregation, some from the preacher's family.

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These conversations are happening simultaneously on the one bus, and the circles of conversation are not clearly defined. People move from one group to the other, even as the preacher does. In other words, there's some fluidity about the whole process, and the preacher moves with fluidity from one to the other and back.

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and the bus makes its way along Bible Boulevard and Today's Street and arrives at the church. The weekly route is the same, but the journey is different, for different people are on board according to the specific text and contemporary events. So in this analysis, homiletics shifts from being third in a sequence to being one element of the threefold parallel activity-- exegesis, hermeneutics, and homiletics.

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A couple of words about the fluid text. If there's one book that was more pivotal than any other for undermining this traditional sequence, that we've been talking about. It was a volume entitled Preaching Biblically, Creating Sermons in the Shape of Scripture, edited by Don Wardlaw in 1983.

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Now, the foundations for this book had already been laid by Edmund Steimle, Fred Craddock, Charles Rice, and others who worked on preaching narrative texts in narrative ways. However, when Wardlaw's group of homileticians from the Academy of Homiletics arrived on the block and started building their house, the neighbors took notice because this house had a new form. They were working from different plans. Sermons apparently could be shaped by the language of the text, Ron Allen, by the context of the text, Don Wardlaw,

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by plotting the text's claim upon us, Tom Long, by the interplay of text and metaphor, Charles Rice, by the structure of the text, William Carle, by the shape of the text and Gardner Taylor, and by the encounter of the text with the preacher, Tom Troeber. In the words of The Christian Century, which reviewed this book, What is new in this case is the notion that preaching ought to be biblical, not only in theological content, but also in form and style. In other words, these preachers recognized that preaching is no tale on the exegetical dog.

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They could discern the creativity of the sermon from the text itself. They experienced themselves to be most creative when they could feel the text move between the past and the present. Homiletics is no mere receptacle for the learning of others. From the beginning of the interpretive process, preachers handle texts in ways that are distinctive to their end task of proclamation.

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All of this implies A rhetorical and performative dimension of texts. and a greater degree of interaction with them on the part of readers, ultimately a different vision of the biblical text in the homiletical process. When historical critical exegesis was the preacher's almost exclusive entryway to a biblical text, We treated the text as if it were a fragment of pottery, unearthed in an archaeological dig.

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One did not just pick it up, one treated it as an object of historical respect, a repository of knowledge, both in itself and in its location. It needed to be photographed in the dirt. The level at which it was found needed to be clearly measured and marked. And then it needed to be examined using every reasonable laboratory technique.

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For all that a text might tell us, it was nonetheless an object, an inert thing, something that passively received the scientific things that we did to it, and eventually it yielded its objective meaning. That image is no longer adequate, because as we have seen, our methods have expanded to include literary and other approaches. Our science is now more appropriately considered to be an art, and all of our readings include some measure of subjectivity. We now contend with many legitimate meanings.

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In other words, opening a text is less like finding a piece of pottery than it is like dipping into a pool of meanings. The text, far from being an object that is inert, fixed, and constant, now is much more of a fluid substance. Its homiletical boundaries are harder to determine. A biblical scholar defines a text as a unit of scripture, something that has its own unity.

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It's got a beginning place and an end place. But in homiletics, is the text of a sermon most appropriately considered to be that unit? on its own, or that unit of scripture that we're preaching, and any of the intertextual connections that we might seem needing to bring in to our reading. In any case, the biblical text is rarely just the text.

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It's the text Plus, whatever meanings traditionally have been attached to it, such that to read it as though those meanings don't exist is to misread it. The text is always changing, depending upon the angle from which we look at it, which way the sun is slanting on it, the time of day. Now, we appreciate the tremendous fluid energy within a text that's waiting to be released, and the energy that exists between it and other texts.

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Because those connections already exist, it's just a matter of us uncovering them. Every text in the New Testament relates to the resurrection. It's those kinds of intertextual connections that I'm talking about. Now when we deal with a text, we are meant to be affected by it.

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We aren't meant to stay distant and objective. In fact, we cannot properly understand a text until we have entered into it, immersed ourselves in its water, experienced what it has to say, not primarily as an historical activity, that is to find out what it meant, but rather as an essential interpretive activity without which it can have no significance today. Unless we enter into the text and find ourselves transformed by it, it has no meaning.

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Though different interpretive activities are still implied, the boundaries between them increasingly are blurred as the text is fluid, and an individual act of interpretation is no longer understood to be the end product, but rather we're after a process and a moment, a moment of discernment, like a splash of water, and then it's gone. Well, what does the fluidity of the text imply for the authority of Scripture? Our view of authority of Scripture is not the literalist one that takes all texts as being of equal value, nor is it the fundamentalist one that insists on certain fixed ideas as absolute interpretive keys.

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Rather, our view of Scripture is one that affirms God's authority in the Word, the necessity of the Holy Spirit to illuminate the Word, and the authority of the Church in affirming Scripture as the book by which it measures and guides its life. Within homiletics, we need to undergo, it's my opinion, we need to undergo a paradigm shift to put God back at the center of Scripture. Historical criticism has tended to push God to the side for the simple reason that history feels comfortable dealing with data, not with faith.

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And yet the Bible is only scripture.