Proclamation in/of the Spirit: Toward a Pneumatological Theology of Preaching. Part III
Presented to the American Theological Society, Princeton Seminary,
28 March 2015
In this final section I have space for no more than a sketch cursory almost to the extreme, begging expansion and further detail on every turn—of how a sonic rationality, channeled through the audioscope of pentecostal and pneumatological thought, can revitalize theology of preaching. Three schemes are interwoven: the biblical-soteriological-trinitarian; past-future-present; and Spirit-Son-Father. The key to each register and their interrelationship is pneumatological, and pneumatic preaching advances via this triadic resonance.
First, a pneumatological theology of preaching connects the past to the present through the biblical witness. Chronologically, we might say that we have three sets of events: those behind the biblical text; those constituting the scriptural witness; and those in front of the text, receptors of its legacy and message. The integrity of each set of events, and their togetherness, can be pneumatologically understood.
The world behind the text, while inaccessible (except to scholars) apart from the text, is the salvation history of the living God. These can be understood theologically as superintended by the Spirit. For Pentecostals, the import of Scripture is specifically that it preserves the apostolic witness to these salvation historical events. Two generations ago, C. H. Dodd brought to the fore the main lines of the apostolic kerygma.1 Without the Spirit’s outpouring on all flesh, there would be no apostolic proclamation preserved for posterity. Similarly, apart from the Spirit’s hovering over the primordial waters, or coming upon Moses and the prophets, or accompanying and inspiring post-exilic Israel, we would have no Hebrew canon. In these senses, then, salvation history is pneumatologically pealed, and pneumatic preaching is keen to listen to the ringing of the Spirit’s work therein.
But further, “All scripture is inspired by God” (2 Tim. 3:16), and hence also by the Spirit of God (cf. 2 Pet. 2:20-21). So any reading or hearing of scripture’s witness to the mighty salvation historical acts of God is from the beginning pneumatic, and ought to be pursued pneumatically. If “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6b),2 then only a pneumatic encounter with the Bible will be life-giving. This line of thinking connotes the “distance” between previous distinctions between the words of scripture as Spirit-inspired and the reception of scripture as Spirit-illuminated. Perhaps a pneumatological approach bridges also this gap, enabling hearing through the scriptures of the world of the text. In fact the Spirit not only facilitates such engagement but the scriptures themselves urge us to hear what the Spirit is saying (Rev. 2-3).3 But how do we hear the Spirit’s message? A pneumatic hermeneutic responds: not only by reading with a visual rationality, but by being attentive to the oral dimensions of scripture’s contours. Thus, the narrativity of scripture is important,4 but beyond this, also its affective aspects. Here the point is not only to hear scripture read aloud (as opposed to reading it silently) but also to enter into its affective dimensions.5 The latter is thus attuned both to the affective history of God’s saving works (the world behind the text) but also to the affectivity of the narrative rhetoric (the text itself). Pneumatic preaching thus of necessity–hopefully appropriately prompted and guided by the Holy Spirit—is affectively generated in hearing and knelling the scriptural witness in the preaching event.
My claims, however, is that a pneumatological approach to revelation connects not only the behind the world text to the text itself, but brings both forward to the present.6 It is the Spirit that aids our living into or out of the scriptural witness—the apostolic testimony, for pentecostal-charismatics—through sparking the oral and auditory imagination so that the scriptural message becomes potent for faithful ecclesial discipleship in any succeeding age.7 If Hans Frei not only lamented the loss of but also forged retrieval of the narrativity of scripture for the (post)modern or at least postliberal imagination,8 a pentecostal and pneumatological assist accentuates the oral, sonic, and acoustic soundings of the biblical storyline and probes into their kerygmatic implications for Christian faith in the present time. The point is that the scriptures are not merely a collection of historic “facts” or mythic stories, but “is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 2:16-17). Pneumatic preaching thus thunders out the salvation historical acts of God through the scriptural witness for contemporary inhabitation.
But this line of though leads, second, to the assertion that a pneumatological theology of preaching listens to the living and animated word of God in order that others may hear and experience also divine salvation. This opens up to the teleological and eschatological vectors of preaching. Preaching toward what end? To experiencing the full salvation of God in the present life.9 Let me elaborate on this soteriological arrow of preaching along three lines: the orthopathic, the orthodoxic, and the orthopraxic.
Orthopathically, salvation begins with what the scriptures denote metaphorically as the heart. Thus is preaching never merely about cognitive content but is also ways affective, directed to the soul and its fears, desires, and hopes; preaching attempts to align human hearts with the heart of God and this happens when human lives are gripped with the love of God and comforted by the presence of God. Divine salvation is more than intellectualizable as it meets people in their historicity, embodiment, sociality, and environmental situatedness. In these domains, conversion is about reorientation of human concerns, aspirations, and longings toward the eschatological—present here and now through the Spirit but also coming—reign of God. Whatever else might be rightfully said in criticism of pentecostal emotionalism in preaching, their attentiveness to the dispositional and gut levels of human affectivity is pneumatically resonant. The goal is to steer away merely from being emotional for emotion’s sake, or to be manipulative of the emotions of hearers, but to nurture right feelings and proper Christian piety—orthopathos—allied with the soteriological work of God.10 Pneumatic preaching thus hears what the Spirit is whispering to human hearts to heal them of their brokenness and rehabilitate right feelings and actions that signal the eschatological age has come.
Yet to be sure, orthopathos is impossible without orthodoxy in some fundamental sense. Here I refer to orthodoxy not as could be creedally defined (most Pentecostals are minimally creedal, at least with respect to the historic creeds, even as charismatics are nominally creedal or exist across the spectrum of confessions), but in terms of living into the truth of Spirit’s present outworking of the biblical narrative. Because such a pneumatological approach presumes that the works of the Spirit did not cease with the canonization of the biblical writings (as cessationists, increasingly few in number, have claimed), retrievals and reappropriations of the apostolic message will always tinkle in continuity with the salvation historical acts of God but yet with a difference for the present time. This variance will always be disputed, but it is precisely in such contestation that we discern a mere repetition (which can be ritualized and controlled clerically or through some other authoritarian ecclesial means) from a vibrant and thereby salvific reiteration. In pneumatological perspective, for instance, such might be seen in the prophetic preaching and ministry of the Blumhardts: their charismatic leanings were by no means clearly heard in their age, but their legacy has withstood the stand of time since.11 In this way, orthodoxy understood as the truth that the Spirit always leads into confirms orthopathy heard as the affections that the Spirit fosters, and vice versa. Pneumatic preaching thus listens to what the Spirit is saying to illuminate human minds of their distortions, darkness, confusions, and ignorance, and renew right thinking in accordance with the coming reign of God.
Yet orthopathy and orthodoxy also cannot stand apart from orthopraxis. The passions of the Spirit (the heart of God) and the mind of the Spirit (also the mind of Christ) are inseparable from the fruits of the Spirit (the works enabled and empowered by the Spirit). The Spirit-filled and Spirit-empowered life, after all, consists not only of right feelings and right thinking but also in right behaviors, actions, and activities in relationship to others. The telos of right feeling and right thinking is incomplete without right acting, and it is the work of the Spirit to transfigure the last so that we can be rightly related not only to ourselves and to the divine but also ethically shaped in response to others and to the world, including the spiritually animated cosmos with its principalities and powers. Preaching that is of the Spirit and in the Spirit will empower liberative praxis in an otherwise unjust world.12 Pneumatic preaching thus hearkens to the Spirit’s voice in order to transform human deeds in their self-directedness and arouse right behaviors as harbingers of the eschatological reign of God.
The work of the Spirit thus redeems human hearts, repairs human thinking, and renews human lives. Thus does the Spirit foster a multi-stranded soteriological telos—that is simultaneously orthopathic, orthodoxic, and orthopraxic—as heralding the divine reign. Preaching in the Spirit thus not only looks back to the scriptural message but also indwells that as precipitating the eschatological age.
In the end, however, a pneumatological theology of preaching is irreducible to the biblical message or the pronounced eschatological redemption since both inevitably involve and include encounter with the living God. This third strands moves us from the biblical and soteriological to the theological register. More specifically, this is not a generic theological turn but, consistent with our pneumatological reframing, an explicitly Trinitarian one. Pneumatic preaching listens to the scriptural testimony that brings divine salvation into the present surely by inviting encounter with the triune God. There are not only horizontal dimensions to the event of preaching—wherein the past meets the future in the present or through which human lives are reformed internally (in their hearts and heads) and set right relationally with others (through their hands)—but there is the vertical passageway. Pneumatic preaching opens up a portal between creational immanence and divine transcendence so that human lives meet and are transformed by the God of Jesus Christ through his Spirit.
This Christological face, word, and voice of pneumatic preaching cannot be underemphasized.13 Christian preaching in and by the Holy Spirit calls attention ultimately to no other name. This is not just the historical Jesus, but also the living and resurrected Christ, encountered through his Holy Spirit. Further the scriptural witness finally also culminates in the incarnate, crucified, and risen Christ, even as salvation of mind, body, and soul is actualized in his name through the Spirit. Pneumatic preaching therefore has as its alpha and omega the lifting up of the name of Jesus, the explication of his life, ministry, and teachings, and the manifestation of his presence.14
Yet we also are saved by and meet the living Christ by his Spirit through his body, the church. Thus is preaching “a communal event,”15 not merely because much of it transpires within congregational worship services, but indeed because its verbalization and vocalization are communally shaped, contextually negotiated, and ecclesially interacted and inter-activated. Such communality and ecclesiality might be most pronounced in the call-and-response tradition of the black (pentecostal) church (portrayed above) but we ought not to underrate the interrelationality between all ministers and preachers and their audiences, regardless of the outward or auditory perturbations—or lack of such—during the preaching event. One might say then that the sacrament of the word—the homily or the sermon—is the moment when the community of faith, through the preacher, echoes the voice of God in Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit. Pneumatic preaching is ecclesial preaching in that sense because the church is not only the body of Christ and the people of God but also the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
Last but not least, then, pneumatic preaching is an event of divine-human encounter as it mediates the presence, voice, and call of the living God. “Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says,
‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts…” (Heb. 3:7; cf. Heb. 3:13, 15, 4:7). Pneumatic preaching announces the divine call and urges human response in the immediacy of the moment, one bursting with existential urgency and momentum because of the divine presence proclaimed by the living word of Christ. Under the authority of the Spirit of Christ, the preacher voices the saving word of God that has the capacity to redeem the past and transform the transient present in anticipation of a more ecclesially-shaped and kingdom-constituted future.
If there can be no end to these reflections, in part perhaps because their truth, if echoing at all, will persist into our future, then we can at least return to James Forbes’s claim announced at the beginning: “Preaching is an event in which the living word of God is proclaimed in the power of the Holy Spirit.” I have tried to sound out the event-ness of preaching by audibilizing its pneumatological and oral character: the word of God arrives through the acoustic and auditory forms of vocalized and verbalized speech.16 Our rehearsal began with pentecostal orality and then navigated the sound-rooms of oral ontology and the ontology of the auditory in search for clues to the dynamic event of kerygmatic proclamation. The resulting acoustemological arrangement was then oscillated across three theological registers: the biblical, the soteriological, and the trinitarian–in order to articulate the contours of a pneumatological theology of preaching. At this point, then, I can do no better than riff off Ephraim Radner’s insistence: “In my view, the less we talk about the Spirit—and simply pray in the Spirit—the better”17 and say, let the pneumatologizing cease and let the preaching begin…!18
Notes
1. C. H. Dodd, The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1936).
2. Arthur J. Dewey, Spirit and Letter in Paul, Studies in the Bible and Early Christianity 33 (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1996), argues historically from Galatians 3:1-5, 2 Corinthian 3:1-6, and Romans 2:29 and 7:6 (7:7-8:25) toward reading of Paul as opposing the life-taking aspects of tradition and the Law, and highlighting the life-giving aspects of the eschatological Spirit, a thesis which is congruent with the thrust of this essay.
3. See also Robby Waddell, The Spirit of the Book of Revelation, Journal of Pentecostal Theology Supplement Series 30 (Blandford Forum, UK: Deo Publications, 2005), ch. 4, “Hearing What the Spirit Says to the Churches”; cf. Melissa L. Archer, ‘I Was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day’: A Pentecostal Engagement with Worship in the Apocalypse(Cleveland, Tenn.: CPT Press, 2015), ch. 4 on “Hearing the Revelation of John,” and David Seal, “Sensitivity to Aural Elements of a Text: Some Acoustical Elements in Revelation,” Journal of Biblical and Pneumatological Research 3:1 (2011): 38-51.
4. Pentecostal biblical scholar Martin Mittelstadt thus argues that pentecostal orality comes more fully into its own when narrative analyses and approaches predominate; see Martin W. Mittelstadt, Reading Luke-Acts in the Pentecostal Tradition (Cleveland, Tenn.: CPT Press, 2010), §3.1.
5. Leading the way among pentecostal biblical scholars in exploring affectivity in biblical criticism is Lee Roy Martin: “Psalm 63 and Pentecostal Spirituality: An Exercise in Affective Hermeneutics,” in Lee Roy Martin, ed., Pentecostal Hermeneutics: A Reader (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), ch. 15; “‘Oh Give Thanks to the Lord for He is Good’: Affective Hermeneutics, Psalm 107, and Pentecostal Spirituality,” Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 36:3 (2014): 1-24; and “Rhetorical Criticism and the Affective Dimension of the Biblical Text,” Journal for Semitics 23:2 (2014): 339-53. Martin’s The Unheard Voice of God: A Pentecostal Hearing of the Book of Judges, Journal of Pentecostal Theology Supplement Series 32 (Blandford Forum, UK: Deo Publications, 2008), also begins but does not follow through on an auditory hermeneutic insofar as he remains concerned primarily with the literary aspects of the “voice of God” in the Judges narrative.
6. I argue this thesis in my Renewing Christian Theology: Systematics for a Global Christianity, images and commentary by Jonathan A. Anderson (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2014), ch. 12.
7. The great homiletician Roland Allen proposes a “hermeneutic of analogy” that makes plausible present experience of the apostolic message; see Ronald J. Allen, Preaching Luke-Acts (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2000), 20. A pentecostal-charismatic parallel is Kevin J. Spawn, “The Principle of Analogy and Biblical Interpretation in the Renewal Tradition,” in Kevin J. Spawn and Archie T. Wright, eds., Spirit and Scripture: Exploring a Pneumatic Hermeneutic (London and New York: Bloomsbury / T & T Clark, 2012), 46-72, which replays David Tracy’s analogical imagination in the oral cultural arena of the Spirit’s and its attendant spiritual dimensions.
8. Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).
9. Urged forcefully by pentecostal theologian, Chris E. W. Green, “Transfiguring Preaching: Salvation, Mediation, and Proclamation,” in Lee Roy Martin, ed., Toward a Pentecostal Theology of Preaching (Cleveland, Tenn.: CPT Press, 2015), 46-63.
10. Pentecostals who have worked on orthopathic theologies include Steven J. Land, Pentecostal Spirituality: A Passion for the Kingdom, Journal of Pentecostal Theology Supplement Series 1 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993). and Samuel Solivan, Spirit, Pathos and Liberation: Toward an Hispanic Pentecostal Theology, Journal of Pentecostal Theology Supplement Series 14 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998); cf. also my discussion of orthopathy in Yong, Spirit of Love: A Trinitarian Theology of Grace (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2012), ch. 5.
11. See Simeon Zahl, Pneumatology and Theology of the Cross in the Preaching of Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt: The Holy Spirit Between Wittenberg and Azusa Street (New York and London: Bloomsbury / T & T Clark, 2010).
12. See also Vincent Beng Leoh, “Ethics and Pentecostal Preaching: The Anastatic, Organic, and Communal Strands” (PhD dissertation, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1990), who connects the emotivist and ethical horizons of preaching in the Spirit.
13. Such christocentrism is most pronounced in Oneness pentecostal traditions, although a Jesus-piety is palpable across pentecostal communities as they are in other pietist forms of Christian faith. For a representative “Jesus-only” systematic theological formulation, see David Norris, I Am: A Oneness Pentecostal Theology (Hazelwood, Mo.: Word Alfame Press, 2012).
14. As argued in Timothy Matthew Slemmons, Groans of the Spirit: Homiletical Dialectics in an Age of Confusion (Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick Publications, 2010), it is only through the Spirit that the gap between divinity and humanity and the crevice between past incarnation and present faith are bridged. Slemmons thus invokes a “fifth sola…: Sola Sanctus Spiritus…. For only when contemporaneity is understood in light of the role of the Holy Spirit and faith—faith as gift, as sphere, as Truth—can the preacher say with the apostle, on the one hand, that ‘we are not peddlers of God’s word like so many; but in Christ we speak as persons of sincerity, as persons sent from God and standing in his presence’ (2 Cor 2:17)” (p. 77).
15. Justo L. González and Pablo A. Jiménez, Púlpito: An Introduction to Hispanic Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005), 57.
16. L. Susan Bond, Contemporary African American Preaching: Diversity in Theory and Style (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2003), ch. 5, notes that Forbes’s sermon is a speech-event because of the pneumatic mediation of divine presence that makes proclamation a present-tense experience; my essay can be heard as an effort to add theological and pneumatological heft to Bond’s more homiletical analyses.
17. Ephraim Radner, “Responses to Reviewers,” Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology 23:3 (2014): 274-81, at 275—which is Radner’s rejoinder to friends and critics of his recent book, A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2014), although his topic is far afield from ours.
18. Thanks to Professor Jin Han, editor of The Living Pulpit, for inviting my contribution to this leading journal of homiletics, and then for agreeing to publish an overly lengthy essay in three installments. I also appreciate Professor Myk Habets for persistently demanding something from me to include in his groundbreaking edited book, Third Article Theology: A Pneumatological Dogmatics (Fortress Press, forthcoming). I am grateful to both for agreeing to use this essay in the two different forums and formats. My graduate assistant, Ryan Seow, proof read an earlier version of this piece and helped tighten its chords, and then this was presented at the American Theological Society annual meeting at Princeton Seminary, 28 March 2015. All turbulent dissonances, clamorous clangs, and boisterous bongs over the course of the preceding electro-script remain my own responsibility.
