Proclaimers: Preach the Whole Bible

“The preacher is not to stare at the given text, hoping for it to emit a bright idea or two.”

To preach the whole Bible, proclaimers must presume in advance that the doctrine of the Trinity is not only true but that it alone contains the answers to the questions scripture raises for us.

Later this week I travel to California for a cohort of the Iowa Preachers Project, of which I am the preacher-in-residence. Thus, I’ve had the practice of preaching on my mind. And since the theologian Robert Jenson lives rent free in that mind, he’s been guiding those reflections.

In an address for a Pro Ecclessia conference in 1995, Jenson insists that God only speaks through the scriptures when the church’s proclaimers “preach the whole Bible.” The scriptures are the word of God within this precise homiletical practice of the church. This is why, Jenson argues, it is better for the church choose the sermon’s text rather than the preacher. Jenson thus rejects topical, thematic sermons with the same fervor with which Karl Barth condemned them in his lectures on preaching, collected in Homiletics. Such “wisdom”sermons dominated in the German church that capitulated to Nazification and such preaching dominates today in American Christianity.

Jens writes:

“Real sermons do not expound an idea or theme chosen by some individual, nor do they tell any story other than the story in or around the text. Rather, homilies and sermons and instructions communicate the gospel exactly as the speakers try to say the same thing that a scriptural text or texts say.”

That is, we can get it in the way of what God wants to say.

Only as the scriptures directly control our homiletical discourse does preaching say what God wants it to say.

When Stanley Hauerwas observes the decline of the church in the west and surmises that God is punishing his people for unfaithfulness, this is exactly what he means.

This fundamental hermeneutical principle— that preaching is the attempt to say what the text says— binds the preacher to the given passage in ways that should discomfort the preacher; after all, the Bible contains myriad stories, prayers, and events proclaimers of the gospel would prefer— sensibly— to avoid. From Jephtat’s daughter in Judges 11 to the talking ass in Numbers, from the young man named Lucky who falls asleep during a sermon and tumbles out a window to his death to Psalm 137 which bids the church to pray for the destruction of our enemies’ infants, the Bible is in many places forbidding terrain for preachers.

But therein lies scripture’s authority.

Biblical authority is established not by a theory of inspiration but by the church’s practice.