"Not in His Wrongness"

In a sermon that is truly theological, no side is affirmed uncritically.

To be blunt, but I sometimes wonder if an ailment afflicting Christ’s body is that too many of her public proclaimers appear not to like their hearers.

At some point during the inaugural year of the Iowa Preachers Project, I commended Angela Dienhart Hancock’s wonderful book Karl Barth’s Emergency Homiletic to the cohort of preachers. Hancock provides a historical account of the “preaching exercises” Barth taught his students off-line in 1932-1933. For such endeavors, Adolf Hitler eventually exiled Barth back to Switzerland. Barth’s underground lectures on preaching became the powerful, little book entitled Homiletics. He offered the exercises simply because the Professor of Homiletics at his school had been an early adopter of National Socialism.

Hancock’s research provides helpful— sobering— context to the sort of preaching dominant in the Protestant churches prior to their capitulation to Nazism. For example, most Protestants in Germany during the last years of the Weimar Republic were accustomed to the same sorts of sermons prevalent in the American churches today— thematic sermons aimed at practical “Christian” living that often had only a single verse of scripture as their text.

Having been weaned off the Word of God, it is little wonder, Barth judged, that such preachers and hearers lacked the resources to “know what time it is.”

To my surprise members of the IPP cohort heeded my advice and read Karl Barth’s Emergency Homiletic; just so, I’ve been revisiting the pages I dog-eared and the paragraphs I underlined and the comments I scribbled in the margins.

In Session 7 of his preaching exercises on June 27, 1933, Barth departed from the theology of preaching to the actual design of the sermon. Here Barth infamously eschewed the sermon introduction as both unnecessary for practical reasons and anathema to belief in the Holy Spirit.

“Why do people come to church?” Barth asked his students.

“To hear a word from the LORD,” Barth answered.

Thus preachers do not need to lure their listeners; they’re already invested in the undertaking. And because their presence already evidences their investment, “the whole worship service already leads into the sermon!” After dismissing sermon introductions that seek to establish a point of contact with contemporary events or our modern time, Barth warns his students against “the negative introduction.”

A familiar rhetorical move in the preaching of his day, the negative introduction is one which “indulges in the description of the sins and weaknesses of humanity so the Word of God can shine all the more brightly against this background.” Barth has in mind a sort of reflexive Law vs. Gospel preaching that renders Luther’s distinction between command and promise into a mere trope. We might call such a homiletic today “fire and brimstone preaching.”

Barth’s admonition against such a starting point is instructive both to preachers and those who endure them. As Stanley Hauerwas likes to say— a lesson learned from Barth, “To know yourself a sinner is an achievement. You only know sin on your way out of it. The Gospels are told retrospectively from the vantage point of the empty tomb.” Saul only understood his grave, gross error after the Risen Christ encountered him on the Road to Damascus. The good news begins not with sin but with resurrection, and the one the Father and Spirit raised from the dead is the Son who died for the ungodly.

If sermon introductions are theologically problematic, the negative introduction is especially so, for in the name of eliciting their hearers anxious attention, preachers risk nothing less than the gospel itself.

Barth instructed his students:

“We are not permitted to greet the hearer with a cold shower. For then the great danger develops that we use the word of the Bible only as a club, which we swing with growing passion against these sinful people.”

In session 7, a student responded to Barth by suggesting that a preacher might “aim at the old Adam in people and then oppose to this old Adam the great “But!” of God.” Whether he knew it or not, the student was appealing to the logic of Law and Gospel preaching, or, as the New Homiletic trend of the late twentieth century framed it, Problem and Solution.

Barth more or less said, “Nein!”

He responded:

“A preacher should not see their hearer primarily in his/her wrongness. Their wrongness then becomes the secret theme of the entire sermon, regardless of the biblical text. Instead, let the Word itself show the way.”

“A preacher should not see their hearer primarily in his wrongness.”

Again—

Barth offered these underground lectures in 1932-1933. He warns his students of preaching not to view hearers through the prism of their wrongs during a time of totalitarian propaganda, widespread complicity, and ecclesial fracture. To catch the prophetic offense of Barth’s counsel, insert more timely characterizations such as partisan antagonism, ICE raids that terrorize immigrant families, and a looming potential conflict with Iran. To understand the gravity of Barth’s teaching, one must first grasp the stakes of his context. The Confessing Church stood against the co-opted “German Christians,” a movement that had bent the knee to Hitler’s nationalistic theology. Barth’s homiletic project, formed in the crucible of this ecclesial emergency, was neither abstract nor sentimental. The preacher stood before congregations divided, some enthralled by Nazi ideology, others terrified, and many complicit through silence.

What should be said to such a people?

Barth’s answer: the gospel.

Barth’s answer to his own question, as Hancock documents, is not to begin with the listener’s error, even when that error is manifest and dangerous. Instead, preaching begins with the proclamation of God’s Word— God’s claim, God’s promise, God’s reconciling action.

She summarizes Barth’s seventh lecture:

“The preacher is not to fixate on what the hearer has gotten wrong...the preacher’s fundamental stance is not to expose the sinner but to announce reconciliation.”

For Barth, the pulpit is not the throne of judgment because the One we proclaim is the Judge Judged in Our Place. Barth resists the preacher’s temptation to exhort, condemn, and finger-wag. “Let us” sermons can also amount to fire and brimstone preaching. Barth’s lesson is not a call to ignore sin, but to relocate it— to preach through it, not at it.

And this is where Barth the Theologian meets the Barth the Homiletician, for he is summoning preachers to an act of faith— trust, not in the hearer’s innocence but in the Word’s power.

I recommended Karl Barth’s Emergency Homiletic precisely because Barth’s logic flies in the face of contemporary preaching trends, especially in a time of entrenched polarization. In the United States today, many pulpits function as platforms of tribal reassurance or as tools of moral indictment. Most of what passes for gospel is but glawspel— the gospel mixed and muddled with the law.

All the cultural and ecclesial incentives tempt preachers either to coddle the like-minded or to excoriate the other side.

Yet Barth, through Hancock’s careful reading, offers a third path— not silence, not appeasement, not prophetic bombast but proclamation.

Barth insists:

“Preaching is not a moral lecture. It is the announcement of God’s action. It does not ignore the wrongness of the world, but it refuses to reduce the hearer to that wrongness.”

Barth’s point is thoroughly theological; the gospel starts with resurrection.

We are not first of all sinners!

We are first creatures, created and reconciled in Christ.

In a sermon that is truly theological, no side is affirmed uncritically.

Only then, in the light of that Word, does our sin come into view. Only then can it be judged as that which has already been overcome. Such a stance does not lend itself to partisan manipulation. In a sermon that is truly theological, Barth argues, no side is affirmed uncritically. Everyone is placed under judgment. And yet, astonishingly, everyone is also placed under grace. This is not a message that can be co-opted by any ideology—not by the left’s pursuit of justice, nor the right’s appeal to order and tradition.

For Barth, the sermon is not where we confirm our side is right and theirs is wrong.

It is the place where God speaks a new world into being.

Not to be blunt, but I sometimes wonder if a problem afflicting Christ’s body is that too many of her public proclaimers appear not to like their hearers. The preacher must not take the hearer, Barth says, “by the scruff of the neck” and hold him over the fire. Instead, Barth teaches that the preacher must speak to the hearer as one already claimed by God’s grace.

Even the masked, faceless, badge-less agents arresting people off the streets.

Even the chicken-hawkish senators.

Even the progressive mayoral candidates in NYC normalizing anti-Semitism.

This is not to let anyone off the hook—it is, in fact, a more radical indictment. It says, “You are not your sin. You are not your politics. You are God’s.”

For Barth, this also reshapes what the preacher is for.

• The preacher is not an agent of critique, but a herald of reconciliation.

• The preacher is not an advocate for one side, but a minister of Christ’s new humanity.

Barth’s homiletic gives no quarter to neutrality or passivity; but it insists that God—not the preacher—does the convicting. The preacher announces what is true in Christ, and then lets living word to have its way with us.

I commended Angela Hancock’s reading of Barth to the cohort of preachers because I find it pastorally vital. At a time when— seemingly— every issue is a litmus test, every cause a cause to change our profile picture, and every sermon a potential landmine, Barth calls preachers back to the simplicity and scandal of the gospel.

• Preach not first against your hearers’ wrongness, but announce their reconciliation.

• See your hearer not primarily in their distortion, but in their rectification.

• Name the wrong— certainly, but name sin only as forgiven sin.

• Point out trespasses only because they are already overcome in Christ.

Again, if the gospel of the justification of the ungodly has been preached, then no side is affirmed uncritically but neither is any side condemned ungraciously.