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opportunity to be with you these days. And I'm so grateful to you folks. I think that you people deserve some kind of an award to be able to listen to so many lectures for such an extended period of time and still to show such freshness this morning. Thank you for being here.

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And our subject this morning is moralizing the conflicted text. And I'm using the word moralizing in both of its senses, both in the common way in which we understand moralizing. Normally, we understand moralizing to be a negative thing that one would do with a biblical text. That is, that we draw a moral from it that isn't in fact in it, and we preach that as though it is the gospel.

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And that's always one of the dangers of preaching, that we will moralize in that negative sense. And when we moralize that way, we are in conflict with the text. So on the one hand we have that kind of conflict, and on the other hand we've got another kind of conflict, and it has to do with the fact that the gospel is never complacent. The gospel never calls us

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to be exactly where we are. It is always challenging us to a new place in life. And so if we leave the gospel, if we preach the gospel as though all is well, and we don't need to change anything as we leave this place, we have also violated the faith. So there's a conflict on two ends.

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And thus, when we seek a legitimate moral from the text, we are always trying to avoid the two extremities, the one of reading something false into the text and the other of leaving the gospel complacent. In the first part of our lecture this morning, I'm wanting to talk about a school of homiletics that has developed that is, by its own definition, an ethical school. It claims to be an ethical school taking an ethical stance towards preaching. And one of the things that I'm going to consider in dealing with that contemporary school

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is whether it, in fact, does what is necessary for homiletics or whether it creates more problems than it answers. But first, I want to deal with a confusion of terms, and it's necessary to deal with these terms in order to get to this school that I'm talking about, the contemporary school. So the first term that I want us to think about is postmodern, because this new school of homiletics calls itself postmodern. And there are a number of terms that are increasingly being used today.

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Terms like post-modern, post-critical, post-liberal, sometimes even post-Christian. And we know that we are post-something. We're just trying to figure out what it is that we have passed. In the present fast-paced world,

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This postmodern world can be characterized as decentering, dispersing. It favors, among other things, horizontal ideas of authority rather than vertical ideas. It favors the social system over the individual. Interdependence and relationship over independence.

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It favors communication ahead of information. It favors multiple meanings and interpretations and the absence of closure. And the postmodern influence in preaching has been largely, I would say, largely positive, not least in terms of language theory, in terms of our appropriation of narrative. in our appreciation of different cultures and different stances, and also in breaking the hegemony of historical criticism.

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That is, we no longer are simply restricted to historical criticism. We've also got literary criticism and a variety of those approaches and other readings that help us to open up the scriptures. The postmodern generally stands in some of our minds for anarchy, because, well, anything seems to reign. There's an increased relativism in the air.

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But I think that would be an unfair interpretation of postmodernism. It doesn't so much stand for anarchy. as it stands for an excess of meanings. There are too many meanings out there.

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And so now it's hard for us to negotiate which meaning is the appropriate meaning for us to, or meanings for us to settle upon. In other words, there are many competing claims. A different kind of truth claim has emerged. And it relates entirely to perspective.

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It depends on what perspective you're taking, what viewpoint. Now, on the negative side, postmodernity can also become an ideology, something that is inherently anarchic, destabilizing, anti-communal, deconstructive. And it can be deconstructive without ever proposing anything positive. It also opposes any kind of foundation.

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And that is, I would suggest, the danger of the postmodern for proclamation. So it's how one negotiates these competing claims in postmodern times that is so critical for us. Ronald Allen, Barbara Shires Blaisdell, and Scott Black Johnson, who's here today, have written an excellent introduction to postmodern preaching.

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And essentially, they're focusing on the postmodern ethos, folk culture, or popular milieu, what it's like to preach in a time and culture when so much is shifting. And I was particularly appreciative of Scott Black Johnson's contribution to that volume because of all the voices, his is the voice that speaks most clearly about the danger of postmodernism and the need not to exchange our faith for a new kind of ism. OK, that's one of the terms that's important for us to be keeping in mind, postmodern. A second term that we need in order to get to this new ethical school of homiletics is the term new homiletic.

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The term new homiletic was first coined by David Randolph at the first meeting of the Academy of Homiletics in 1965. And it is a term that hasn't been used widely since then. Other terms have taken over-- inductive preaching, narrative preaching, Fred Craddock's way of doing things. But the term has been reappropriated recently, and increasingly in homiletical literature, you see the term new homiletic.

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And what it's referring to is basically this movement that has happened since roughly 1965. I would date it earlier than that. H. Grady Davis is probably the beginning of it.

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That movement that sees preaching as an event, as an experience, not so much information being given out, but an experience being shared, an experience of the gospel, And in recent essays by Robert Reed, Eugene Lowry, Alice McKenzie, Geoffrey Bullock, the postmodern and the new homiletic are considered to be identical. And so in this, I'm taking new homiletic and postmodern homiletics to be roughly synonymous.

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And they refer to sermons that engage the experience of hearers, that seek to confirm rather than to prove, that value concrete experience over abstraction, and conceive of form as an extension and expression of content. So we've got the postmodern and the new homiletic. And basically they're functioning synonymously.

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And then we have this other school, this ethical school that is claiming to stand for an ethical position that we need to move to in preaching. And it calls itself the postmodern school. A postmodern ethic is what John McClure refers to his own way of collaborative preaching as being. And we need to be able to distinguish between this school and what has been happening, because the people in this school do not see themselves as part of the new homiletic.

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Members of this school include John McClure, Joseph Webb, Christine Smith, Susan Bond, and Lucy Rose. And of those, I guess, To our Presbyterian, Lucy Rose and John McClure, McClure. that homiletics has now moved beyond the new homiletic to the postmodern stances that they represent.

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In other words, their version of the postmodern is not an ally of the new homiletic, and thus we need to distinguish between the two postmodern schools. And so I'm going to refer to this new school of ethical homiletics as the radical postmodern school. It's a term that Christine Smith uses herself. And McClure uses it as well in places.

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And now I want to characterize some of the features of this radical postmodern school that is presenting itself as an ethical route for us to take. First, the radical postmodernists seek to avoid any hierarchy in preaching. Lucy Rose in the Round Table Pulpit sought to avoid hierarchy, the hierarchy of the ordained. She sought to avoid it by having a rotating weekly responsibility for the preaching.

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That is, different members of the congregation would preach each week, thereby allowing different perspectives and what she calls wagers. I suppose that it's... I'm just not sure that one can get away from notions of hierarchy so simply, because as long as we have ordained people in the congregation, they're going to be seen as ordained, and there's going to be seen a higher educational component in theology than many of the lay people have. But for Rose, the church apparently already knows the gospel and can represent it faithfully.

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Thus, the word preacher for her is not a synonym for ordained minister. Rather, the word preacher refers to the one whose function for the particular service of worship is to offer the sermon as one exchange in an ongoing conversation of the community. John McClure's collaborative preaching is related to Rose's roundtable preaching. He thinks that preachers should be

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Preaching should be the result of a collaborative process in which the preacher meets weekly with various congregational members. It would be a group, he suggests, that would last for no more than three months, but you would meet with this group during the week and prepare the sermon largely in that group. That is, the sermon would arise out of the conversation that the group had had. So by way of response, I think that perceptions of hierarchy are not so easily dodged.

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I suspect that the way to handle the authority is not to abnegate it, but to use it wisely. When preachers center their preaching on God, and the sermon is experienced as an event of God, It's God's authority that is evident and not the preachers. And it's God's authority that is welcomed in the congregation.

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The second feature of the radical postmodernists is that they are radically for the marginalized. This is a great strength of their position, that preaching is For them, preaching is undergoing a deconstruction of its common authorities, namely the Bible, tradition, experience, and reason. Each of these is being, in a sense, overthrown, and I would say that the radical postmodernists are a little bit too gleeful in this process.

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John McClure, sorry, deconstruction in this view can can keep preaching critically and ethically open and renewable. And I think that's a healthy perspective, that we keep on examining the assumptions that we have about these common authorities that we use. For John McClure, it can be understood as a process, preaching can be understood as a process of exiting that allows for the rebirth of preaching

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as otherwise. Now, it's a complicated theory that he's developing because he's using the deconstruction theory of Eugene Levinas. And McClure considers the way the Bible is both centrifugal, that is, it pulls us towards itself and gives us a certain identity, and he says the Bible is also centrifugal. It overthrows whatever identities we have and calls us to a new identity, problematizes all positions and identities, and places our identities under what he calls erasure in a manner that allows the Bible to function as scripture, and this is what he means by functioning as scripture.

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It allows the Bible to function as Scripture by bringing us into proximity in a relationship with others and of being for them. So the authority of Scripture rests on its ability to bring us into relationship with others and be for them. And I think that's at least half right. That's half of what is necessary.

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That is, loving one's neighbor. But the problem with, almost consistently in the postmodern school with these five authors that I'm talking about, is that God is left out. Loving God is not part of the equation. Loving one's neighbor is, and that's important.

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And he makes an important ethical claim. The church has not allowed the voices of many people to be heard that need to be heard. The disenfranchised, women, the poor, gays and lesbians, people with differing abilities.

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And so he calls us, quite rightly, to be wise to the other. Hence his title, Otherwise Preaching. The third feature of the radical postmodern group is that it denies transcendence. They avoid the use of the word truth to describe what is preached, and they prefer other words, like wager, or working hypothesis, or practice, or testimonial affirmation.

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I don't know about you, but I'm not one who's in favor of organized gambling. And I don't find wager quite adequate as a substitute for truth. And I don't think that if we were preaching and we were to say, This is my working hypothesis, that it would really carry the day. Meaning and truth, in this radical perspective, are a result of one's social location and ways of knowing.

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Notions of meaning and truth reflect the importance one gives to an idea as opposed to what they represent. Because language in this school is non-referential. To say that language is non-referential means that it points to nothing beyond itself. There is no reality that we can access apart from the language itself.

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Truth, therefore, is always conditional. And such a view of language can be helpful and instructive, particularly when we're dealing with social constructs, when we're trying to understand what the claims of the gospel might mean in one culture and realize that it's relative compared to what it might mean in another culture. And as preachers, we need to be tentative in many of our claims about God, particularly concerning how our knowledge of God translates into specific social action. However, the radical postmodernists closed the door to the transcendent too quickly.

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Their language theory accommodates a notion of a God who has accessed within our language system. But for them, language is a closed system, and it does not accommodate the notion of a God who is truth and who is capable of transcending even the limits of language to impart knowledge and revelation. Were preachers to move in this direction, this non-transcendent direction, we would never be able to dispense what Gerhard Ford and Richard Jensen both call proclamation, that first and second person direct declarative speech from God. That's what they say preaching should always include.

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Some first person direct speech from God A declarative statement, I love you. I forgive you. You are my children.

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I will never let you go. If we followed the radical postmodern perspective, we would not be able to make such statements. A fourth feature of the radical postmodern school is that they represent a theology from below, generally to the negation of a theology from above. Christine Smith upholds a profoundly negative worldview in preaching as weeping, confession, and resistance, radical

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responses to radical evil. Radical evil, she says, is the pervasive world reality, and it dominates our everyday reality. And she continues this same understanding in her more recent Risking the Terror: Resurrection in This Life, 2001. And in both, she's deep in compassion,

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But to my mind, preachers are called to preach out of a positive worldview, that no matter how bad things are, God's goodness is greater, and the blessing given to creation remains with creation. Homiletics needs to seek out new images and fresh ways of articulating the faith, new ways of thinking about the resurrection, but her own approach makes resurrection not something that God does, but it's something that we do in this theology from below. And we do this resurrection through remembering.

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This is what she says, The act of remembering resurrects people, engages energy, vision, and life to change the present and helps us live differently in the future. John McClure does not limit God in the same ways, and yet similarly he makes almost no reference to God and allows little room for our transcendent God. Either way, theology from below

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produces anthropocentric homiletics, and this, in turn, can only produce anthropocentric preaching. Finally, a fifth feature of the radical postmodern school, which, as I say, is representing a particular ethical stance. It's taking a radical stance for the other, for the marginalized, for those who are on the outside. For Smith, Bond, and Webb, theology is reduced to mere metaphor.

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Joseph Webb, in his preaching and the challenge of pluralism, counsels that we do not need to get upset when someone denies one of our hub symbols, as he calls them, like the divinity of Christ. Rather, he says, we can track the symbol in our own experience to its social origin. and use the insight we gain to understand the other person. In other words, he's suggesting that the only reason we're getting upset is because we have that particular belief and it's socially conditioned.

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And we won't be upset if we reach back into our history and realize the features that shaped our belief. We believe what we believe because we are conditioned to believe it, and in his view, the Bible is not gospel in any kind of metaphysical sense. Instead, it is the church's charter. It's mythic, foundational document.

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It is not historically true, nor was it ever designed to be in the various bits and pieces. he says. So what Webb is doing is he's reducing the authority of the Bible to our own need for the heart of the faith to be true. By the same token, Susan Bond, in her Trouble with Jesus, Women, Christology, and Preaching, understands theology from below to be rooted in the historical Jesus as a human being, about his teaching and ministry.

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And it is not concerned primarily with the relationship of Jesus and God. Bond is able to say that Jesus acted like a son of God, acted like a son of God when he preached and enacted the reign of God. And she says this without ever claiming who Jesus is. She can say that the story of his resurrection teaches us that his ministry of radical hospitality is stronger than the powers of violence, without saying that Jesus rose from the dead.

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She can say that the presence of his ministry endures wherever new life emerges from crushing death. without saying that Christ is risen and is present. So hers is a metaphorical theology, and that's what she calls it, a metaphorical theology that rethinks Christology in what she calls salvaging ways.

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And by salvaging, what she's trying to do is retain the symbols while splitting the metaphysical reality from them. She feels that by doing this, she is avoiding any literal use of the metaphor, which is a less idolatrous approach, she says. Well, if my postmodern colleagues are right, and these people are friends of mine, I'm not trying to sabotage them, but I am trying to have a conversation with them. If my radical postmodern colleagues are right, they represent a significant movement in homiletics.

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McClure is so confident of the radical postmodern ethic that he says, even the new homiletic has been left far behind and there seems to be no looking back. However, I suspect that homiletics as a discipline has not taken this turn to otherwise preaching, as he calls it, and that it would be other than wise for it to do so. The problem is not with their ethical objective of finding new ways to do theology, but

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do not perpetuate the suffering done to particular groups in society. I think that's a noble goal. And the problem is not the attempt to include the outsider. Isn't that what the faith is about?

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The problem is largely doing theology and homiletics by splitting off the divine from the human and giving priority to the human without examining their own reasons for doing so and thereby bringing a kind of foreclosure that postmodern discussion says that it abhors. In the rest of the time, I'm going to try and be a little constructive, and I want to make some recommendations for how homiletics as a whole might move. And then I want to be more precise with some specific examples.

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First, how we do homiletics is an ethical matter. Homiletics exists to serve the preaching needs of the church. Homiletics seeks to facilitate an encounter with the triune God, and it seeks to foster loving action on the part of communities, communities that are dedicated to moral responsibility and social justice. Second,

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Homiletics arises out of, needs to arise out of, and lead to actual sermons. It's devoted to helping preachers to think through what they do and to help them with greater economy, skill, and insight. It's theory and practice driven. And my primary criticism of the postmodern school in, or the radical postmodern school in homiletics today, the one that is claiming the ethical position, my

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criticism of them is that they are dissociated from sermons themselves. Their theory is not arising or inspired from excellent preaching in the church at any time. It's coming from other theories and it doesn't, it never proves itself that it results in excellent preaching. Sermons are left kind of far in the distance.

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The pulpit is not clearly in view for most of these writers, and thus they only take preachers to the doorstep of homiletics, which I think is the responsibility of other disciplines, not homiletics itself. Third, homiletics needs to be realistic in its interpretation of the church. Laura Tubbs Tisdale recommends that theology in a sermon be seriously imaginable within a local community of faith. seriously imaginable.

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And something of that, I think, is useful in homiletics as well. Few churches that I know would tolerate for long a preacher who proclaims at a funeral, Jesus is a good metaphor of our hope. Or at Easter, it is as though Jesus rose from the dead, which is what Susan Bond would have us speak. Or Joseph Webb would seems to encourage us to say, if it helps, we can think of Jesus as risen from the dead.

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Moreover, few churches will tolerate for long a preacher who is so other-focused that the needs of those who are present is ignored. A fourth recommendation for homiletics, and really what I'm trying to develop here is an ethic of homiletics that's an alternative to the post-radical post-modern ethic that has been published by these five authors. Homiletics is interdisciplinary, and it mediates between other disciplines and preaching practice. And this makes homiletics generally

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be prone to adopt, uncritically, whatever ideology serves it, be it historical critical method, non-referential language theory, splitting the divine from the human, the reduction of God to a scientific worldview, privileging homiletical theory over practice, or whatever. And even justice can become an ideology without appropriate scrutiny. Not everyone who is marginalized by history or society is a victim.

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Many of the people who are marginalized are oppressors, pimps, drug pushers, pedophiles, sociopaths, and some mechanism for distinguishing amongst the marginalized is needed in our theological reflection. But it isn't present in the radical postmodern school. Moreover, nearly everyone in our era feels like a victim. Whether this perceived victimization is economic, you know, I don't earn enough, or physical, I've got trouble getting health care.

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or social, I'm too overworked, or political, I'm underrepresented, or environmental, I'm suffering the effects of pollution, or whatever. Moreover, as Charles Barto says at Princeton Seminary, while God indeed may be on the side of the poor and the marginalized, God may not be there always as the poor themselves suppose. because the definition of holy finally remains with the word of God. Also, what happens to those individuals in our culture and churches whom we might determine are not marginalized?

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They also need ministry, but they will come away from much radical postmodern preaching still hungry for God's word of sustenance for them. Because homiletics serves preaching, homiletics is, I would say, conservative in relation to tradition and radical in terms of the gospel. Tradition needs to be critiqued and doctrine must be rethought for every generation. But if, for example, we simply discard many of the ways our ancestors read scripture, what is to stop racists, bigots,

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warmongers and others from adopting the same tactics to justify their practices. With a view from below theology, the Bible becomes scripture, not because it has the capacity to reveal God's actions and human identity in history and the present, but rather because A, it tells the stories of people who prevailed against injustice, and B, because it distances the reader from his or her assumed identity. Instead of choosing one or the other, the divine and human perspectives both need to be considered and both have something to teach us.

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So in keeping with my own injunction that homiletics must be practical, I now turn to an alternative view of ethics in the sermon. We've been talking about an ethic of homiletics that's alternative to the radical postmodern school. And now I'm turning to the sermon itself and how we may view ethics within it.

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Sermons in previous ages, even from people who were social activists like John Wesley, contains surprisingly little unethical issues. And it's as though social ministry was lived so much through the week in the various class meetings and the close relationship of the elders to the people. And with the schools so evident, it's as though that it was so present in their minds that it didn't have to be preached.

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On the other hand, Much preaching in all churches might loosely be considered as ethical, although it is more accurately moralistic. The gospel message becomes do's and don'ts that have an anthropocentric flavor. From a preaching perspective, substantial treatment of ethics and substantial focus on grace and faith seem almost at odds.

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Some reasons for this are clear. It takes a good deal of sermon time to develop effectively the trouble from a biblical text. And it takes as long in a sermon to develop a dependence on God. Ethical analysis may simply demand more sermon time than preachers have.

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And also it demands more carefully thought than many congregations want or are able to follow major discussion of an ethical issue in a sermon can easily be heard as trouble and has the potential to divide the congregation moreover sermons are oral exercises not not to sound like essays or lectures and ethical analysis easily becomes either of those. So my first suggestion is that ethical direction for the sermon normally will arise from the biblical text itself.

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There can be both ethics in scripture, when we find a moral principle in a biblical text, and there is an ethical use of scripture. If we're preaching on ethics, we need to use texts that correspond as closely as possible to the ethical issue at hand. Our ancestors had a moral sense of scripture. They had four senses of scripture.

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One was the literal, what the text says in its historical and grammatical sense. Another was the allegorical, what it said theologically about Jesus Christ. One was the anagogical, which had to do with eschatology and end times. What is this text telling us about how life is going to end?

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And the final sense that they had was the moral sense. Every text, our ancestors, up until 1500, our ancestors understood that every text provided A moral instruction. And by our own way of thinking, some of the morals that our ancestors drew from the text were not from the texts really at all. They were a perversion of the text.

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But the principle is a sound one. And it's one that we have tended to deny since the Reformation, because since the Reformation we have affirmed that there is only one sense of Scripture, and that is the literal sense. So we've ignored any of the others tried to suppress them where possible, but the moral sense prevails.

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Because every time we preach and we envision something that we want the congregation to do as a result of that preaching, we have invoked the moral sense of scripture. We still employ it, but we don't talk about it. The moral can be an action of love, perhaps taking meals to shut-ins or visiting someone in hospital, But the issue is whether it is moralizing, or what we might deem to be, in our own time, an authentic moral sense of the text.

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Well, preaching morality without God leaves individuals utterly reliant upon their own resources. Such sermons remove any need for Christ. Preachers who fail to develop the text's God sense often end up with moralistic sermons. They never get to God and they never tell us how God is going to empower us.

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So let's consider Proverbs 11 25 as an obvious moral text. Proverbs 11 25 says a generous person will be enriched and one who gives water will get water. Is it true? Can a generous person not become poor?

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If someone gives water, will they always get water? At a literal level, the text endorses generosity as a means to get rich. That isn't the moral that's being implied. I would say that isn't an authentic moral of the biblical text.

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It's one that we may read into it, but it seems to imply that if you're generous you're going to get rich, so be generous. A faithful preacher will go beyond historical criticism into theological criticism and look in the surrounding verses for clues to an alternative understanding, because theologically that is not appropriate, the one that we came up with. Verse 28 says, those who trust in their riches will wither. And verse 30 says, the fruit of the righteous is a tree of life.

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And both of these imply that our verse speaks of riches beyond material wealth. Thus, in terms of faith, a generous person becomes rich, obtaining the tree of life. Even preaching a moral text requires theological interpretation, a theological rendering. The moral sense

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often requires looking for a moral even when it is not obvious. For instance, miracle stories obviously point to Jesus' authority and power. And yet even in the example of the healing of the paralytic who is lowered through the ceiling in Mark 2, even there a moral can be discerned. It's a healing story.

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What's the moral? Well, the moral can be, be as faithful as those four friends of the man who lowered him down believing that he would be healed in Jesus' presence. Or, the moral could be, be more faithful than those in the crowd who will not let them near. I would say that that's a legitimate moral sense of the text.

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Theological criticism goes even further, for it is not content to leave moral instruction indistinguishable from the laws of the world. When we come to church, we should receive instruction that is specifically Christian. There should be a specific Christian feel to what is being said. Preachers can make an important, practical move.

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Instead of preaching a text as a mere moral lesson, that they can preach, they can rather preach it as a theological lesson capable of bearing truth. Thus, if the text is the Lord loves a generous giver, we move from what we must do, we must be generous, it's the moral of the text, to how this action relates to God's action. How does this action, we must be generous, relate to God's action?

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And when we ask that kind of theological question, we get a theological answer. Only God in Christ is the perfect giver. And that's something we can proclaim in relationship to this moral text. Further, we can say that God becomes poor on our accounts in Christ.

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And we can say we cannot become poor if we are rich in our relationship with God and our neighbors. Another way to consider ethics and texts concerns the fact that individuals in the Bible invariably represent positive and negative models of behavior, and they're intended to do so.