Book Review: Embodying Grace: Proclaiming Justification in the Real World by Andrea Bieler and Hans-Martin Gutman
Embodying Grace: Proclaiming Justification in the Real World, by Andrea Bieler and Hans-Martin Gutman, Translated by Linda M. Maloney
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010) 218pp/$2.54.
The 21st century milieu is more interdependent than ever. In a globalized economy and the digital revolution, we should be more connected than ever. Yet, the stark reality is the widening gap between the affluent and the poor. Preaching’s task is not to offer platitudes, but to offer a prophetic and personal word; the pulpit is both to critique destructive realities of economies of scale, and, declare and embody the living Word of the Gospel for a world that hurts and is broken.
Co-written five years ago by an American theologian of worship and a German practical theologian, this volume still speaks truth to us, particularly in Bieler and Gutmann’s proposal in anchoring a performative homiletic to the doctrine of justification. As we near the quincentenary of the Protestant Reformation, this is a welcome work in how we in the Protestant traditions appropriate the meaning of forensic justification (God declaring us to be righteous) in a modern era where we are daily confronted with the tragic realities of hunger, poverty, and the commodification of people and the environment.
As a volume written from and for Global North contexts, Bieler and Gutmann call preachers to synchronic the “how” (form) and the “what” (content) of preaching to the “life-worlds” of parishioners, specifically, and the human family, more broadly. Using the insights of: Karl Barth’s homiletic on the incommensurability of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ and human language (as in preaching) as that which testifies to the Word; Luther’s insight on the Word as the most powerful communication whose purpose is to turn hearers away from destructive forces towards God; the speech-act theories of J.L. Austin and John Searle and their exposition of locution (the spoken word), illocution (the intent of the word), and types of speech; and historical-critical hermeneutics that takes seriously the particular contexts of the biblical narratives, Bieler and Gutmann call for a performative homiletic that honors the whole human person – mind, body, spirit – with what they call “responsory receptivity.”
“Responsory receptivity” is being open to people, to their bodies, to their lives, to the histories recounted in Scripture. Bieler and Gutmann extrapolate the powerful implications of the doctrine of justification: sermons should communicate to poor and forgotten (the so-called “expendables”) that they are worthy, they are loved, they are not superfluous, when society and economic systems value profits and work over people and the environment.
Both preaching, preachers themselves, sermons, and congregational settings where most preaching occurs all need to embody grace. This means offering space for hearers and preachers to confront both the joys and benefits of the contexts in which they work and play, as well as the pains and struggles of those same contexts. The Protestant motto simul iustus et peccator is a good reminder for the preacher, the craft of preaching, the sermon, the congregational setting (and the world for that matter), that in Jesus Christ we are right and good, but we also carry the baggage of sin and brokenness.
While so much of the doctrine of justification was about the righteousness of the individual and their own relationship with Jesus Christ (a precursor to the cognitive emphasis of the Enlightenment), Bieler and Gutmann tether justification to the community by reminding us of the Old Testament notion of ṣĕdāqâ, or covenant fidelity to the community. In other words, Bieler and Gutmann call all of us to be accountable to one another, to name “expendables” as deeply loved by God and empowered and enabled to change the world and their life-worlds precisely because of God’s justifying power and work.
I commend this book to all preachers, pastors, and those who care deeply about connecting the sermon to the realities of the world. This, like Eunjoo Mary Kim’s Preaching in an Age of Globalization, is one of the few books in homiletics that thoughtfully engages a key doctrine of the Christian faith, a homiletical theory (performative theory), and what this means in both form and content for our globalized world. I found helpful that each chapter has a sample sermon or liturgy to demonstrate the lesson of the section; for example a word from the San Francisco Tenderloin district in the annual Good Friday stations of the cross, or the romana da terra procession in Brazil. God approaching and confronting us in concrete history is what the Judeo-Christian faith is about. This book takes that Good News seriously, and takes people and their lived world seriously.
