Preaching is Possible Only as a Summary of the Doctrine of the Trinity
How we may preach Jesus and where Jesus is are the same question
In a previous post on the nature of proclamation, I argued that in order to speak gospel the utterance cannot be a mere recitation of past formulas or historic slogans. For the gospel to be itself, the gospel cannot be preached in the same way twice.
The gospel can change— must change, will change— without ceasing to be the gospel because Jesus is at once, simultaneously, the gospel’s fixed object and innovating subject. The ever-changing nature of the gospel is itself an item of tradition, for part of what the rule of faith remembers is that the object of the church’s proclamation lives with death behind him.
Therefore, to be itself, the gospel must change, for part of what the tradition remembers is that Jesus is not dead.
Just so—
The question of how we may speak of Jesus in the present tense and the question of where is Jesus’s present location present themselves as two forms of the same problem.
That is, space is to time as the present is to the future and past. The word-relations are key: the presence of something is exactly its presentness. And the Gospel’s clear answer to this problem is that Jesus’s spatial location is the crossing of the lines of communication which bind believers together.
“Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I AM, in their midst.”
The gospel is thus Jesus happening to us.
There is a single reason why proclamation is not advice or exhortation, teaching or mere talk about God. Namely, the gospel hands over promises only Jesus can rightly promise. The gospel then, spoken by one person to another, is Jesus’s word.
The gospel is his self-address to us.
As Robert Jenson writes:
“The gospel promises that Jesus will give himself to us; it promises the total achievement and outcome of his deeds and sufferings as our benefit; it promises his love.
If the gospel occurrence is true, its occurrence is Jesus’s occurrence as a shaping participant in our world. It it the truth of the gospel-promise that is the presence of the promiser.
If the gospel is not true, then when we hear it we hear only each other.”
Of course, proclamation is recollection; for example, as Paul writes to Corinth:
“For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.”
However, if proclamation is recollection only, then the presence it mediates is not subject presence— it is not promise.
“Insofar as the remembering words are some kind of address to us,” Jenson writes, “the future they pose must be free over against whatever use we make of them; the modification the address makes in our world must be his modification and not ours.”
A promise, meanwhile, opens a future, new and otherwise different, a future otherwise not mine, and so is the presence of a subject other than I. Jesus is present in the gospel in that he is both identified in recollection and the free-shaper of our world in promise. And this is how any of us is present to others as subject.
But, Jenson observes:
“The recollection includes that Jesus has died, and is thus recollection of a finished and defined past; and the promise is of the last future, the future of our death. That is to say: the person here present is the person of God.
In precisely this way, preaching is possible only as a summary of the Doctrine of the Trinity.
Gospel proclamation is recollection that points to God— who is never past only, but the future of every past and thus the Presence to every present. To assert the presence of this executed man is to assert a miracle— the miracle that God is.
And this is why God is just and we are in right relationship with him through faith. Not because faith is the one work God demands from us but because the gospel issues promises only God can make, promises we can only take at the word of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
(art: “Preacher Man” by Chris E.W. Green)
Powerful words Jason! Thanks! Gerhard Forde and Jim Nestigen taught this to us for what makes a Christian sermon:
"Christ Jesus is the subject of all the verbs. The hearer is the direct object. The hearer is the beneficiary. When the Gospel is spoken it is unconditional. When the Gospel is spoken it is present tense. The Gospel comes out of the future into the present."