Groans of the Spirit

Homiletical Dialectics in an Age of Confusion

Slemmons

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781621893004
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Groans of the Spirit constitutes a rousing challenge to mainline churches and their practice of preaching. In this inventive work, Timothy Slemmons calls preachers beyond the formalism of the New Homiletic, and beyond the ethical proposals that have arisen in the frustrated struggle to transcend it, and toward what the author calls a penitential (reformed) homiletic. This new homiletical proposal is distinctive in that it faithfully adheres to the Christological content of preaching, finds its inspiration in the promise of the real presence of Christ, and trusts in the ministry of the Holy Spirit, from whom alone the power for the renewal of the mainline church shall come.This book includes a thorough reconsideration of the infinite qualitative difference between God and humanity in Barth's thought, an important critique of Gadamer's reception of Kierkegaard's concept of contemporaneity, an undelivered lecture on the content of preaching, and two sermons that illustrate Slemmons's important proposals.Groans of the Spirit is a long-considered, calculated, and overdue break with conventional hermeneutics that proposes a vital homiletical pneumatology, which draws the art of the sermon out of the ghetto of mere rhetoric and presents it as it truly is: as theological reflection of the first order, the church's primary language of faith.

1

“Not Our Ways”

Diastasis as Karl Barth’s Enduring Realdialektik

and an Exercise for Homiletical Pedagogy

What, then, do I mean when I say that a perception of the “inner dialectic of the matter” in the actual words of the text is a necessary and prime requirement for their understanding and interpretation? It has been asserted—a Swiss reviewer has said it particularly roughly—that I mean, of course, my own “system.” I know that I have laid myself open to the charge of imposing a meaning upon the text rather than extracting its meaning from it, and that my method implies this. My reply is that, if I have a system, it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the “infinite qualitative distinction” between time and eternity, and to my regarding this as possessing negative as well as positive significance: “God is in heaven, and thou art on earth.” The relation between such a God and such a man, and the relation between such a man and such a God, is for me the theme of the Bible and the essence of philosophy. Philosophers name this the KRISIS of human perception—the Prime Cause: the Bible beholds at the same cross-roads—the figure of Jesus Christ. (Karl Barth, “Preface to the Second Edition” [1921], The Epistle to the Romans)

Jesus said to them, “I will ask you one question; answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I do these things. Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin? Answer me.” They argued with one another, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ But shall we say, ‘Of human origin’?”—they were afraid of the crowd, for all regarded John as truly a prophet. So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And Jesus said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.” (Mark 11:29–33)

Introduction

This essay ventures a pedagogical appropriation of what Karl Barth termed, in the preface to the second edition to his commentary on Romans, “a necessary and prime requirement for . . . understanding and interpretation” of “the actual words of the (biblical) text.”1 Barth’s description of the “inner dialectic of the matter,” however, “the matter” being that of scriptural interpretation, requires some clarification. In its original setting, the use of the term dialectic in the quotation which serves as the first of two epigraphs for this essay indicates a dialectic between, on the one hand, what can be known via the human enterprise of historical criticism (to which, Barth charged, most modern commentaries confined themselves, assuming that they had done the work of interpretation), and on the other hand, what can be discerned only through the revelation of Jesus Christ. Historical criticism, to which Barth offers no objections per se, is not yet interpretation. For Barth, the latter does not even begin until the temporal and the human are brought into dialectical relation with the eternal and the divine.

Dialectical is a term often used to categorize Barth’s theological method as well as those of his contemporaries, Rudolf Bultmann, Emil Brunner, Friedrich Gogarten, Eduard Thurneysen, “and to a lesser extent Paul Tillich.”2 The term, however, lends itself to a certain confusion as it is often used in various senses to describe widely divergent relations. For this reason, §1 of this essay will identify the sense or senses in which this term may be applied to Barth’s understanding of biblical interpretation, that is, the form(s) of dialectic which endured over the course of his dogmatic project. Toward this end, I will take stock of two attempts, by Princeton professors Daniel Migliore and Bruce McCormack, to clarify the term as Barth himself employed it. In each case, as well as in Barth scholarship generally, dialectic must be understood in its relation to analogy, the dominant school of thought regarding Barth’s use of dialectic being that these two “methods” are to be taken as alternatives to one another, and further, that Barth’s method took a “turn” from dialectic to analogy around 1930. We shall see, however, that both analogy and dialectic were operative throughout Barth’s work. Specifically, the enduring form of dialectic, what McCormack terms the diastasis between Creator and creature, between divinity and humanity, is what I seek to uphold for homiletical pedagogy where it impinges on the issue of interpretation.

Barth’s work in support of proclamation, however, continues to meet with stiff resistance in the homiletical community. §2 will engage recent objections to Barth’s view of hermeneutics and his theology of preaching that have been raised within homiletical circles by David Buttrick and Ruthanna B. Hooke. In each case, I will briefly summarize the critic’s concerns and venture a response from primary sources.

Finally, in §3, I will suggest a pedagogical exercise by which homiletics might aid students to identify this diastatic dialectic at work in Jesus’ sayings in the Gospel of Mark. The dialectic we will identify, however, is not one that is confined to specific parts of the canon. Rather, by taking account of the ultimate diversity up front, namely, the “infinite qualitative difference” between the ways of God and the ways of human beings, such a dialectic calls into question the ultimate equivocality and cacophanous plurality of hermeneutical claims. By identifying this dialectic at work ubiquitously in Mark, I hope to further demystify this dialectic and render it more practical for homiletical interpretation.

§1. No Dearth of Dialectic: Two Welcome Clarifications

Perhaps it is best to start with a definition. Dialectic has been defined as “The art or practice of arriving at the truth by disclosing the contradictions in an opponent’s argument and overcoming them.” Dialectics, as a discipline, is “A method of argument or exposition that systematically weighs contradictory facts or ideas with a view to the resolution of their real or apparent contradictions.” Resolution, however, is not necessarily the outcome of dialectics. Still another definition views dialectics as “The contradiction between two conflicting forces viewed as the determining factor in their continued interaction.”3 What is common to these definitions is the element of (either real or apparent) contradiction. Further, we note that the derivation of the term carries both dialogical-disputatious (Gk. dialektiké) and idiomatic-linguistic (Gk. dialektos) connotations. In other words, dialectic is not only inherently (1) aware of and open to difference and contradiction as a priori presuppositions, not as a posterióri complications, and (2) tolerant of a lack of resolution; it is also (3) potentially conversational in a sense that is hospitable to homiletics, and (4) attuned to the linguistic particulars of distinct idioms or dialects. This would suggest that certain of the criticisms which we will encounter (in §2) below are already anticipated and at work in the nature of dialectic itself. Meanwhile, however, we must enumerate the particular ways in which Barth employs the term dialectic. The first of the two clarifications to which we will attend concerns Barth’s earliest dogmatic lectures.4

§1.1 Daniel Migliore’s Synopsis of Barth’s Dialectic

In his introductory essay to Karl Barth’s Göttingen Dogmatics, Daniel Migliore is quick to note that a “dialectic understanding of revelation marks Barth’s treatment of all the loci” in these seminal lectures from 1924–1925.5 While he goes on to explain the four senses in which the term dialectic is used in “Karl Barth’s First Lectures in Dogmatics,” Migliore tips his hand by first distinguishing Barth’s dialectic from that of Hegel. In contrast to Hegelian logic which resolves thesis and antithesis into a grand synthesis, the primary sense in which Barth understands dialectic pertains to “the hiddenness of God in the event of revelation.”

God’s revelation is always hidden revelation, always grounded in God’s free grace alone. But equally true, God’s hiddenness is revealed hiddenness and is not to be identified with the inaccessibility of supposedly transcendental realities. God truly reveals Godself, yet without ceasing to be hidden, without ceasing to be the free, living Lord. God freely becomes an object for our knowledge while yet remaining indissolubly subject. In revelation God is knowable but never comprehensible.6

As Migliore explains the four senses of dialectic, however, this primary sense must await further clarification by way of two other forms of dialectic, placing it third in his list of f...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: “Not Our Ways”
• Chapter 2: Contemporaneity in the Dock
• Chapter 3: “Enter Through the Narrow Gate!”
• Chapter 4: Two Sermons on the Narrow Gate
• Bibliography