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An Ecclesiological Perspective
on the Role of Scripture for Preaching
James R. Nieman
Wartburg Theological Seminary
Exploring the authoritative role of scripture for preaching first
requires exposing a few typical yet masked anxieties. Usually embedded
in this topic is the long-standing puzzle about why preaching should
even be biblical, let alone how it ever can be. And beneath that
rests the still deeper concern whether sermons need to submit or
attend to scripture at all, or at least this particular text more
than another. For me, the common core of these anxieties is the
perceived separation and distance between the character of preaching
and that of scripture. Throughout its history, one of the chief
aims of preaching has been adaptation, being particular to a setting
and thus, in the best sense, opportunistic. By contrast, the very
nature of scripture as written text produces the sense that it is
actually decontextualized, remote from all but its own origins and
thus potentially irrelevant for any other setting. Therefore, the
question becomes how the aims of the former can ever be attained
by appealing to the latter.
In the American Protestant milieu, there is a familiar, stock answer
to that question. It is the flat assertion that scripture simply
is the authority that sets the terms for any Christian practice,
including preaching. There is a healthy intuition in this answer,
the recognition of how easily preaching shifts from adaptation to
accommodation. Left to itself, preaching is under pressure to weaken
its claims and relativize its message in order to make a particular
appeal. Scripture therefore serves the role of a strong warrant
for preaching, a hedge against deviation with the power to bring
compliance. This stock answer remains unsatisfying in two ways,
however. As for scripture, it essentially avoids the question about
why one particular sacred text is more authoritative than another.
Ironically, scripture then loses its ability to operate powerfully
in the public sphere, reduced to a mere warranting device for in-house
discussion. As for preaching, the position above limits proclamation
to its cognitive and normative dimensions, risking a still greater
detachment from any current setting.
A more satisfying account of the role of scripture for preaching
calls for a more oblique approach. Rather than begin directly with
the relation between scripture and preaching (and the nagging sense
of distance between the two), it might be fruitful to look more
generally into the relation between scripture and the church, the
primary home for preaching. By making that turn, we learn that we
are by no means alone in wondering how to engage an ancient body
of writings. In a passing remark some twenty years ago, Krister
Stendahl noted that this question was lodged in the church's earliest
reflections on its own canon. For example, a late second century
fragment known as the Muratorian Canon provides not only a very
early list of which texts were accepted as the New Testament in
one portion of the church, but also an intriguing rationale for
some of those decisions. Of special interest is the treatment of
Paul's letters, in which the distinctiveness of each is highlighted.
By emphasizing that Paul wrote to particular people at definite
times on distinctive themes, the Canon clearly portrayed that these
letters were aimed at others long ago. Stendahl therefore identified
the underlying challenge that we still share with this Canon, "How
can letters written to specific churches with specific problems
speak to all churches?"1
Although Stendahl only posed this question rather than answer it,
a further excursion into the Muratorian Canon can enlighten the
present discussion. How did the Canon finally justify including
Paul's quite distinct letters to distant churches? The answer is
ecclesiological, "since the blessed Apostle Paul himself, imitating
the example of his predecessor John, wrote to seven churches only
by name…" Therefore, "it is yet shown-i.e., by this
sevenfold writing-that there is one Church spread abroad through
the whole world. And John too, indeed, in the Apocalypse, although
he writes only to seven churches, yet addresses all."2 In one
way, this rationale baffles us with its tangled assumptions about
the date and authorship of various texts. Understood as a theological
assertion, however, this rationale makes a simple and profound claim
still worthy of our attention. At its heart was a basic trust that
John (for the Canon, the disciple and evangelist who knew Jesus
directly) once wrote to seven churches, a perfect number that signified
the whole. Paul, modeled upon his ancestor in the faith and seeking
the same aim, also wrote only to seven churches, again as a gesture
to all. It was therefore not the individual merit or power of these
letters that granted them a place within the canon, but their ensemble
role in the witness of the church for the sake of the world (una…per
omnem orbem terrae ecclesia diffusa esse denoscitur). The point
was not some obsession with totality and closure, but that these
letters opened outward for the sake of the church's integrity and
wholeness in mission.
Although we might be unwilling today to accept such grounds for
canonical assessment, the more important insight is what this Canon
suggests about the role of scripture in and for the church. No less
than us today, our ancestors realized that the church was not an
institution sui generis. The very terms used by early Christians
for their gatherings relied too much on prior Jewish and Greco-Roman
forms to permit any other conclusion. What they evidently did find
distinctive about the church was how it was generated. As ekklesia,
it resulted from a divine call that implied both convocatio (the
act of calling together) and congregatio (the group constituted
by that calling act). Therefore, while these Christians recognized
the particularity of their gatherings, they also affirmed that these
gatherings were framed by something transcending their own socio-historical
existence and to whose action they were devoted.3 The core of that
action was the missio Dei shown chiefly in the life, death, and
resurrection of Jesus Christ. The church was distinctive insofar
as it participated in that same mission activity, extending and
expressing God's intent that the world might have life in Christ.
It therefore did not exist for itself, but as a sign to the world
of the divine desire that all might have life in abundance.
"...when
the church at worship was attentive to its identity in mission,
scripture played a key role. Beyond this, the development of
the Christian canon of scripture over time and in diverse places
again suggests the importance of such texts for the character
and work of the church."
In such an ecclesiology,
the role of scripture was to aid the church in this outward mission
in and through Christ. This was affirmed especially in early worship
ordos.4 When the church gathered for its most self-consciously Christian
reasons on such occasions, the reading of scripture was at the very
center. Certainly there were ways other than reading by which scripture
was heard (as in prayers, hymns, and eucharistic narratives), and
the practice of public reading was itself borrowed from earlier
synagogue models. Nonetheless, when the church at worship was attentive
to its identity in mission, scripture played a key role. Beyond
this, the development of the Christian canon of scripture over time
and in diverse places again suggests the importance of such texts
for the character and work of the church. We might lament certain
results of that process, to be sure, but at its best, the eventual
purpose was not to declare some fixed and final completeness to
scripture as such. Instead, the canon signaled the "more or
less" that was needed for the church to persist in its outward
witness to life in Christ Jesus, including interpreting him within
a larger Jewish frame of reference. Just as the Muratorian Canon
argued that the letters to seven churches could speak in fact to
the whole, so the admittedly limited canon provides what is enough
for the church to be in mission with integrity and wholeness. The
role of scripture for the church is to offer a sound, generative
disclosure for the sake of that mission, a disclosure the church
engages, tests, and particularizes in each new time and place.5
This roundabout discussion
now finally brings us back to preaching. At its best and most robust,
preaching has long been one of the main practices by which the church
actively focused its mission. In particular, preaching created a
discursive space in which the church could examine and extend its
identity in specific relation to its own sacred text. Again, the
general contours of this practice were not new in antiquity. Many
Greco-Roman oracular religions used some form of strong speech as
a religious corrective, and the model for the Christian preacher
was most likely the Jewish darshan, who connected scripture, rabbinic
tradition, and daily life. What made this preaching distinctive,
however, was the message it declared: the missio Dei of life for
the world in Christ Jesus. While this message could be and was preserved
through many other church traditions and practices, preaching did
so by actively and directly bringing scripture to bear on the current
situation.
"...an
ecclesiological perspective on the question indicates that scripture
needs preaching so that the resources and hope of earlier generations
is brought to bear in a critical fashion for the church's mission
today. It is only in this sense that preaching can or should
be biblical."
Note, though, how far this
brings us from the stock American Protestant answer to how scripture
relates to preaching. In that view, preaching needs scripture in
order to ground its claims and confer authority. By contrast, an
ecclesiological perspective on the question indicates that scripture
needs preaching so that the resources and hope of earlier generations
is brought to bear in a critical fashion for the church's mission
today. It is only in this sense that preaching can or should be
biblical. Preaching is not biblical in its dependency on a textual
warrant. Indeed, such a strategy could well be antithetical to scripture
insofar as it replaces the church's mission task with a defense
of preaching for its own sake.6 Instead, preaching is biblical when
it extends the open word of scripture and particularizes it anew
for the sake of declaring God's desire for life. By giving voice
again to the ancient witness to God's ways for us, preaching seeks
to re-present the Risen One, whose life is the hope for the world.7
This suggests, in turn,
something yet more specific about the role of scripture for preaching.
I have argued that the church exists as a sign of God's hope for
the world in Christ Jesus. As a core practice of the church, preaching
is a direct instance of that sign work, explicitly declaring the
content and energy of that divine mission. Therefore, the authoritative
role of scripture for preaching is to generate and shape the sign
work of preaching.
In the first place, this
means that scripture grants preaching the substance for a mutual
interrogation between the ancient witness and the contemporary situation.
Let me stress that this is a mutual activity. On the one hand, the
open word of scripture emerged through human communities and cultures.
For that reason, it is subject to distortion and bears the seeds
of its own potential failure. Since scripture needs preaching to
complete its witness to Christ through the church, it may be critiqued
on the same mission basis as are we today (for example, by challenging
cultural blind-spots that inhibit a more ample witness now and in
the future). To state it plainly, the authority of scripture does
not rest in its supposed purity or finality, but instead in generating
new and enlivening forms of witness to what God has done in Christ
Jesus. On the other hand, we must remain willing to submit ourselves
to this scriptural witness in discerning our present witness. Because
scripture bears the claims of those who shared the same faith as
do we, it still provides a substantive test for our contemporary
identity as church.8 Indeed, its place as canon indicates that the
church has come to view it as trustworthy in this regard. Even so,
this test of scripture functions more like an evolving, prototypical
gesture than a fixed, archetypical structure. Scripture gives direction
to our witness without determining its exact course, marking the
broad boundaries of a channel in which many routes can be navigated.
Although scripture sets criteria to which we, in a common faith,
are yet beholden, it does so as an open word that generates new
meanings beyond the horizon of its own origins.9
Beyond this, scripture
grants preaching the strategies that can set this open, mutually
critical dialogue in motion. It does so by attending initially to
the literary forms by which scripture first shaped its own witness
and noticing the affective and experiential encounter produced by
this language. Once this has been done, preaching can then explore
how to evoke comparable encounters for the sake of effective witness,
but by deploying language patterns and rhythms more appropriate
to its own time and place.10 In this approach, scripture can serve
a catalytic role for preaching that sets in motion and gives shape
to alternative ways to re-present the missio Dei, using strategies
that are consonant with the substance of that message while re-energizing
it for an appropriate contemporary witness.
In summary, I am suggesting
that the role of scripture for preaching should be understood as
part of the church's mission to be a sign of God's hope for the
world in Christ Jesus. Through the kind of scriptural use mentioned
above, preaching can become be a richer kind of sign work of the
church for the sake of the world. In particular, preaching then
becomes a truly iconic (or, if you prefer, sacramental) sign that
participates in the reality it signifies,11 thus drawing its hearers
into that same life-giving reality. Engaging both the iconic signs
of scripture (its substance and strategies) and the strong signs
present within the contemporary situation, biblical preaching is
in this sense capable of offering a witness at once publicly credible
and existentially compelling.
ENDNOTES
1 Krister Stendahl, "Preaching
from the Pauline Epistles," in Biblical Preaching: An Expositor's
Treasury, ed. James W. Cox (Philadelphia: Westminster Press,
1983), 306.
2 S. D. F. Salmond, trans.,
"Fragments of Caius: III. Canon Muratorianus," in The
Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers
down to A.D. 325, ed. Alexander Roberts and others, vol. 5,
The Fathers of the Third Century (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1899; reprint of the Edinburgh edition), 603.
3 This double consciousness
of the particular yet transcendent church finds expressions in such
early texts as Ignatius to the Smyrnaeans, 8.2.
4 One example of such an
ordo is found in Justin Martyr, Apologia I, 67.
5 This also suggests why
the Christian scripture has precedence in the church over any other
text. Scripture matters not as a rule demanding compliance but as
an open sign of the mission we share with those who precede and
follow us in the faith until that mission reaches its consummation.
The reason we today are able to affirm life in Christ Jesus for
the whole world is because this was already declared to us by others.
Those who came before us anticipated the same missio Dei as do we,
and so their hope can become a resource and guide as we join in
that mission as part of the same church, now and in the future.
To attend to the "more or less" same scriptures as did
they is therefore not a rigid act of conformity to an arbitrarily
assigned authority, but instead a dialogical process of discernment
in a common mission task, one we remain responsible to engage in
ways specific to our own setting.
6 Perhaps this is what
led Edmund Steimle to observe, "A sermon that begins in the
Bible and ends in the Bible is not necessarily a biblical sermon."
Quoted in Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox Press 1990), 48.
7 It seems to me that this
is what is meant by the Lutheran hermeneutical criterion for biblical
preaching, Christum treiben (to impel or drive Christ).
8 Supra note 5.
9 Gerd Theissen, The
Sign Language of Faith: Opportunities for Preaching Today, trans.
John Bowden (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1995), 31-58.
10 Cf. Mike Graves, The
Sermon as Symphony: Preaching the Literary Forms of the New Testament
(Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1997); Thomas G. Long, Preaching
and the Literary Forms of the Bible (Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1989); and Alyce M. McKenzie, Preaching Proverbs: Wisdom
for the Pulpit (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press., 1996).
11 Charles S. Peirce, Collected
Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vol. 2, Elements
of Logic (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1931-1958), 247.
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