Hi Friends,
Here is my fourth and final talk on proclamation at St. Peter’s Kyrka in Stockholm, Sweden. In addition to meeting with their young men tonight, I will be preaching on the Ascension in the morning. The hospitality they’ve shown me has been moving and I hope I have been of some help in doing what they asked me to do.
On Handing Over the Goods
I wish to begin with a passage from the theologian Gerhard Forde, who provided me a breakthrough in understanding the difference between first-order and second-order discourse; that is, he distinguished the difference between speaking about God and speaking for God— information versus proclamation.
In the Preached God, Forde writes:
“It seems to me that one of the biggest temptations in theology today is to confuse the lecture, the explanation with the proclamation, the primary discourse, the “I declare unto you.” When that confusion is made, what happens is that the proclamation invariably gets lost and is ultimately silenced. Without proclamation, there will be no systematic theology— at least not proper systematic theology. If systematic theology does not understand the place of proclamation, and realize that its purpose is to drive to proclamation, then it will overstep its bounds and try to usurp proclamation. Systematic theology, that is, has to recognize that there are definite limits to the enterprise, boundaries to our explanations. It has to realize that proclamation is not the practical application or popularizing of systematic theories, but that it is itself the last move in the theological operation, the last step in the argument. If done properly, systematic theology leads one to the point where the only move left is to leave the lectern and enter the pulpit. The only point, finally, in saying so loudly and persistently as we do in our systematics that grace, faith, and all those things are free and unconditional gifts is precisely to give them.
To do it.
To say it.
To do God to sinners.
That is what God is up to in this world.”
In the Preached God, Forde describes a temptation, but he might just as well be describing a fait accompli. The confusion he names, between the lecture and the proclamation, between explaining the gospel and speaking it— doing it listeners, has become so habitual in so many of our churches and seminaries that we have largely stopped noticing it. The sermon has become a TED Talk in theological drag. The preacher has become what preachers must not be, communicators. Meanwhile, theology, freed from its obligation to drive toward proclamation, has become a discipline that converses primarily with itself, generating sophisticated revisions of Christian doctrines and dogma that are never quite cashed out into first-order discourse.
The cost is not merely homiletical. Forde’s claim is that when proclamation is silenced, theology itself eventually collapses, not dramatically, but by slow starvation. A theology that does not know what its proper purpose loses its object. It can continue to produce discourse for a considerable time on institutional momentum alone, but it is no longer doing what theology properly aims to do, which is to think in service of the church’s announcement that the God of Israel raised Jesus from the dead. When that announcement ceases to be the telos of the theological enterprise, theology fills the vacuum with other ends: relevance, critique, therapy, ethics, the management of intellectual respectability.
All of these are easier than proclamation.
None of them is actual theology.
I was tasked to reflect upon the role of theology for preaching, but I want to reject the very premise of the request. It is not case that theology has a role in the preaching task; rather, theology’s only purpose is to equip and enable gospel proclamation. If theology does not do so, if theology does not aid preachers in speaking promises only God can promise, then theology is the opposite of proclamation. It is mere speculation. In other words, proclamation is not the application of theology but its consummation, the last move in the argument, as Forde says. And this is not a move theology can make for itself. To reach that conclusion requires understanding something about the nature of the gospel, something about the community that carries it, something about what the word does when it is genuinely spoken, and something about the limits that belong constitutively to theological discourse as such.
The Message That Must Move
Theology begins with a datum it did not generate. The church did not invent the proposition that God raised Jesus from the dead; it received it. This is why the first axiom of any adequate account of theology insists that theology is simply the church’s thinking in service of the particular evangel, “Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim is risen indeed.” The gospel is not a general religious truth, amenable to being extracted from its narrative context and deployed as a principle. It is a message— specific, particular, dateable, and located. It concerns a man, whose name we know, who was executed under the authority of another man, whose name we know. Jesus of Nazareth, crucified under Pontius Pilate, lives with death behind him. And because the gospel is a message, it requires transmission.
Someone must speak it.
And someone must hear it.
There is no such thing as a gospel that travels silently. There is no salvation outside of the church because there is no such thing as salvation that does not pass from one sinner’s lips through another sinner’s ears. “Faith comes by hearing,” Paul writes, and he means it as an ontological statement, not merely a pedagogical one.
This is already a claim about the structure of theology.
If the gospel is a message that must be conveyed from speaker to hearer, then theology, the disciplined thinking of the church about the content and form and implications of that message, is always already oriented toward speech. Theology thinks so that the church can preach. It refines, defends, expands, and corrects the message not for the sake of theological refinement but for the sake of faithful proclamation.
Gerhard Ebeling put the point sharply:
“The history of the church is the history of the interpretation of the scriptures, and the interpretation of the scriptures is the history of preaching. Theology is the middle term, the act of interpretation that keeps the two ends, the received word and the spoken word, in contact with each other across time.”
This is a claim Forde would endorse with his characteristic bluntness. Theology that does not know it is in the middle, that it receives from the tradition and hands off to the pulpit, will inevitably begin to imagine itself as the destination rather than the passage. It mistakes its own refinements for the thing itself. And then the proclamation gets lost, not because anyone decided to silence it but because the theological enterprise expanded to fill the available space. Thus there was no longer any room for the first-order discourse, for the declaratory “for you” that is the primary form of the gospel’s speech.
The Swedish theologian Gustaf Wingren, whose The Living Word remains one of the most penetrating accounts of preaching’s theological significance, argues that the scriptures do not so much point to preaching as overflow into it. The same word that called Abraham out of Ur and parted the sea before Moses and raised the dead through Elijah is the word that sounds in the gathered assembly when the gospel is preached. The word of God is not a class of statement but a living act. It does not describe what God has done. It extends what God is doing. Theology is for proclamation and proclamation is the present-tense form of the mighty acts of God which do not conclude with the canon of the New Testament. Theology is for proclamation; therefore, theology that treats the acts of God as items of the past is no longer theology.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing to his students at the Emergency Pastors’ Seminary at Finkenwalde in 1935, pressed this point to its confessional extreme. “The preached word,” he taught, “is the Risen Jesus walking in the midst of his people.” Bonhoeffer claimed nothing more than what the Second Helvetic Confession confesses, “The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.” These are precise theological claims about the direction from which the sermon moves. The word comes not from the congregation upward toward a God who may be inclined to respond, but from God downward through creaturely speech into human ears. Bonhoeffer’s point, developed in those Finkenwalde lectures, is that the authority of preaching is not rhetorical or institutional but participatory. The preacher speaks with authority insofar as he is transparent to the Word that addresses him as much as it addresses his hearers. He does not stand above the text applying it to others from a position of mastery; he stands beneath it, already judged and comforted by it, speaking a word that has first spoken to him.
Or, as Forde might add, “And if she has only been lectured at by the text, she will only be able to lecture from it. The first person address must be received before it can be given.”
No sinner can self-apply the promise.
In order to preach, therefore, the preacher first must find a preacher of their own.
The Community of the Message
Because the gospel requires transmission, it requires a community of transmission. One does not discover the resurrection by solitary reflection. The forgiveness of all your sins will not encounter you on the golf course. One hears about it from someone who heard about it from someone who was there, or who was told by someone who was there. This chain of witness— traditioned, interpretive, embodied— is what the church is. The church is not the kingdom movement begun by the dead Jesus. The church is not the Jesus Memorial Society. The church is the community constituted by and responsible for the transmission of God’s own living word.
This is why theology can only be done inside the church.
Theology is only theology inside the church not because the church is a guild with proprietary access to certain claims, but because theology is the thinking of a community in service of a message. Without the community and the message, there is nothing to think. Or say. The moment theology tries to abstract itself from that community, to become a general science of religion or a philosophical inquiry into the divine, it stops being theology and starts being speculation. And none of us is getting out of life alive; sinners cannot afford to waste time on speculation. The God theology speaks of— we should always remember— is not the god of philosophical theism, the Unmoved Mover or the Ground of Being and certainly not the Big Guy who needed your loved one up in heaven. The God we proclaim is but the God of Israel who raised Jesus from the dead having first raised Israel from slavery in Egypt. And that God is known only by way of the witness of the community that has received and transmitted the news of what he has done.
This has a specific implication for theological method that Forde would recognize immediately. The temptation to confuse lecture and proclamation is not merely a failure of nerve; it is a symptom of theology having drifted from the community that gives it its purpose. Academic theology, conducted at sufficient distance from the church’s actual proclamatory practice, loses its feel for the distinction between explanation and address. It knows how to describe grace with increasing precision; it does not know how to give it. The language becomes third-person, second-order discourse throughout.
God is always the subject of discussion but never the speaker in the room.
When God is never the speaker in the room, the theologian has no practical reason to leave the lectern; there is nowhere to go.
And be warned: there are many theologians in the church disguised as preachers.
Robert Jenson captures the logical structure of this problem with characteristic precision. When theology departs from the pattern of the church’s prayer, its address to the one Jesus called Father, with Jesus who thus made himself the Son, in their common Spirit, it slips from its object. Theology grasps the resurrection’s particular God only by following the ineluctably trinitarian pattern of the church’s worship, which is itself a pattern of proclamation. The gospel proclaimed to the world and the gospel returned to God as prayer and praise and petition. Theology that abstracts from this pattern of proclamation and prayer has lost contact with the object it claims to study. With it, it has forsaken the reason to drive toward proclamation at all.
The Word Does Something
The confusion of lecture and proclamation rests, finally, on a mistaken account of what the word does when it is spoken. If the gospel is primarily information, true and important information, but information nonetheless, then the distinction between explaining it and proclaiming it is merely stylistic. Elaborate it clearly enough, and you have done what theology is for. But this is precisely the assumption Forde rejects, and it is the assumption the entire Reformation tradition rejects with him.
The word of the gospel is what Luther called a “verbum efficax”, an efficacious word, a word that does what it says. When the gospel is truly proclaimed, it does not merely inform the listener that sins are forgiven; it actually does the deed— it forgives them. It does not merely report that death has been defeated; it kills and makes alive. This is why Forde insists that the only point in saying so loudly and persistently is our theology that grace and faith are free and unconditional gifts is to give them: to do it, to say it, to do God on behalf of God. The theological explanation or speculation is not the handing over of the goods. It is preparation for the giving. It establishes the conditions under which the giving can happen without distortion, without the gift being confused with a loan or a reward. But once those conditions are established, theology has reached its limit. The next move is the gift itself, spoken to a particular person as though the speaker were none other than the LORD, “I forgive you all your sins.”
Karl Barth made the same claim when he called proclamation the “third form” of the Word of God. Preaching is not a lesser or derivative form of God’s word; it is the form in which revealed Word and written Word press into the present tense and address this particular community. Bonhoeffer’s warning belongs here as well, “A sermon that has not first judged the preacher will inevitably become a judgment on the congregation.” He means that the preacher who approaches the text as a lecturer— extracting propositions to convey— has never been addressed by it. The preacher has been informed by it. And he can only pass on what he has received. The congregation will thus hear explanation. They will not hear the “I declare unto you” that is the primary form of the gospel’s speech.
There is a characteristic failure mode of theologically serious churches that Forde’s diagnosis names precisely. The congregation becomes so sophisticated about theological matters that it can no longer receive the word as word. The sermon becomes a seminar. The preacher explains rather than declares. The congregation listens for ideas— or worse, advice— rather than waiting to be addressed. The theological sophistication is real, and it is, finally, a form of unbelief. The church has decided that what is needed is the refinement of understanding, not the event of proclamation. It has confused the lecture with the gift. And so the gift is never given.
Handing Over the Goods, Not Handing Over To Do’s
The confusion of lecture and proclamation does not happen in a vacuum. It tends to happen alongside, and be reinforced by, a second confusion: the confusion of theology with anthropology, or theology with ethics. When theology loses its proclamatory telos, it fills the resulting vacuum with the human subject. The sermon that no longer knows how to declare what God has done defaults to describing what the human being should do or feel or aspire to. In the liberal tradition, theology becomes the articulation of religious experience; in the conservative tradition, it becomes the enforcement of moral standards. In both cases, the indicative has been swallowed by the imperative, the gift replaced by the demand, the second-person address replaced by the second-person accusation. This is the deformation that Barth spent his career fighting, and his treatment of the Sermon on the Mount is its clearest homiletical expression. Too few who tackle Christ’s Sermon approach it in order announce the event: that the one who speaks the Sermon is the Word through whom all things were made. Therefore, the Sermon’s commands are in fact the promise of the life Jesus is already giving us. The law is the form of the gospel— but only if the preacher dares to speak not about Jesus but for him.
Proclamation is not a lecture about blessedness.
It is the declaration of its fact.
This is why the scriptures must govern theology rather than serve as a resource bank for positions already determined. The biblical drama is not a collection of religious illustrations; it is the history of God’s self-identification. The God of the Bible is not a generic divinity who happens to feature in certain ancient Near Eastern texts. He is the God who brought Israel out of Egypt, who spoke through the prophets, who was born of Mary, who was raised on the third day. His identity is constituted by that story, and any theology that abstracts from the story abstracts from God. The attempt to speak of God in general, without the particularity of Israel and Jesus, is not modesty. It is a description of a different deity altogether, one who, notably, has nothing in particular to declare.
The Word Advances Through the Nations
Gustaf Wingren writes in The Living Word that the ministry of the word advances “through the nations to the ends of the earth and through the generations to the end of time, to the Parousia.” The sentence locates the proclamation within an eschatological movement that theology must inhabit if it is to think rightly about its own task and its own limits.
The word is not a static deposit to be preserved. It is an advance: directional, purposive, moving toward a destination. The destination is the Parousia, the appearing in fullness of the one who was raised. Between the resurrection and the Parousia, the church is the community commissioned to carry the word forward through history, through cultures, through languages, through the deaths of generations. This forward movement is not the church’s achievement; it is the movement of the word itself. The church is swept up into it. And this movement is the context in which Forde’s warning arrives with its full urgency. If the proclamation gets lost— if the explanation swallows the declaration— the word’s advance is interrupted. Not permanently; God does not depend on our faithfulness for the ultimate outcome. But the interruption is real, and the people who needed to hear the “I declare unto you” in this generation did not hear it.
The eschatological stakes of getting proclamation right are not abstract.
Listening Before Speaking
Forde’s insistence on the limits of systematic theology belongs also to the category of listening. The recognition that theology has boundaries, that explanation must finally give way to declaration, that the lectern must give way to the pulpit, is not a counsel of intellectual humility in the generic sense. It is a theological claim about the nature of revelation. God’s word comes from outside the system. It is not the conclusion of the system. When theology forgets this, it tries to generate the proclamation from its own resources, to produce the words by logical extension of its premises. But the declaratory word is not that kind of word. It is received, not produced. It is spoken into the theologian first, and then spoken through the theologian to the congregation. The system can prepare the space for it, but it cannot manufacture it.
Bonhoeffer, who was living that distinction in real time at Finkenwalde, understood it at the level of sermon preparation itself. The preacher who meditates on the text is not generating insight; she is submitting to judgment. The word that will be spoken to the congregation must first be spoken to the preacher, and a sermon that has not first undone the preacher will not do much for anyone else. The authority that results from this shared exposure is not the authority of mastery but of witness; the preacher does not apply the word to others from above but speaks the word that has already arrived, ahead of her, at the place where her hearers live. This is what Bonhoeffer means by the preacher’s necessary disappearance: not self-erasure but transparency. The congregation should see through the preacher to the one who sent her.
Wingren’s test for all of this is simply, “Did Christ rise?”
It is the most concrete question that can be asked in a Christian assembly, and the answer is either “Yes” or “No.” There is no third option. If the answer is “Yes,” if the preacher stands in the pulpit as a witness to the resurrection, speaking the word that God has spoken into history, then the sermon participates in the ongoing act of God. If the answer is anything other than “Yes,” if the preacher hedges, or translates, or sublimates the resurrection into a general truth about hope, then the word has been silenced, and the sermon, however eloquent, is not the word of the gospel. It is a lecture about a gospel that is no longer being proclaimed.
In which case, as the apostle Paul proclaims, we are people to be pitied most of all.
The Last Move
It is not accidental that Paul calls the proclamation of the cross moria— foolishness, stupidity, something that makes the sophisticated wince. The gospel is not sophisticated. It does not flatter the intelligence of its hearers or meet culture on culture’s own terms. It announces a specific event— a first-century Jew was raised from the dead— and announces it as the determinative act in the history of the cosmos. This requires an extraordinary kind of courage to say without apology, and part of what theology is for is the formation of that courage.
At its best, theology clears the ground so that the offense of the gospel is the genuine offense of the crucified and risen Lord, not merely the offense of confused thinking or intellectual laziness, and equips the preacher to say what must be said: that death does not have the last word, that the powers have been unmasked, that the crucified one lives and his life is offered to you, here, now, in this bread and this cup and this spoken word.
But theology cannot perform the proclamation for the preacher. The congregation does not need a more nuanced account of resurrection theology; it needs to hear that Jesus rose. The addict does not need a careful phenomenology of grace; she needs to be told that she is forgiven and that the power of God is for her. The dying man does not need a sophisticated theodicy; he needs the word that goes down with him into the grave and comes back out the other side.
Jenson described preaching as Jesus making love to us. The phrase is almost indecorous, but it is theologically precise. Love addresses the beloved directly, in the second person; it does not offer information for the beloved’s consideration but speaks the word that changes everything. The sermon that has become a lecture has stopped being a love address. It has become a report about a past event rather than an enactment of the event itself.
This is, in the end, what Forde means by leaving the lectern and entering the pulpit. The lectern is not the enemy. It is the necessary antechamber. It is where the preparation happens, where the thinking is done, where theology does its work. But there comes a moment when the preparation is complete and the only move left is the gift— when the only thing left to do is to say loudly and in the first person what has been established so carefully in the third.
Perhaps I cannot adequately explain the difference between first-order and second-order discourse, the distinction between speculation and proclamation. But I can illustrate it for you.
Lecturing on the gospel at an event years ago, I heard the theologian Jim Nestingen share a story about how he’d been traveling long hours and many miles from conference to conference.
“As the plane was taking off,” he said, “the guy sitting next to me asked what I did for a living. I said to him, “I’m a preacher of the gospel.” Almost as soon as I got the words out, he shouted back at me, “I’m not a believer!”
“But the man was curious,” Jim said in his presentation:
“Once we got to cruising altitude, he started asking me about being a preacher. After a bit, he started telling me stories about the Vietnam War. He’d been an infantryman in the war. And he’d fought at all the awful battles and done the terrible things his country required of him. This went on the whole flight, from coast to coast, him giving over to me all the awful things he’d done. As the flight was about finished, I asked him. I said to him, “Have you confessed all the sins now that have been troubling you?”
“What do you mean confessed?! I’ve never confessed” the man replied.
“You’ve been confessing your sins to me this whole flight long. And I’ve been commanded by Christ Jesus that when I hear a confession like that to hand over the goods I’ve received and speak a particular word to you. So, you have any more sins burdening you? If so, throw them in there.”
“I’m done now,” the man next to him said, “I’m finished.”
“So I unbuckled my seatbelt and I unsqueezed myself from my chair,” Nestingen said, “and I stood up. The stewardess then— she starts yelling and fussing at me, “Sir— SIR— you can’t do that. Sit down. You can’t do that.””
“Can’t do it?” I said to the stewardess. “Ma’am Christ our Lord commands me to do it.”
Recalling the exchange, Nestingen said,
“And she looked back at me, scared, like she was afraid I was going to evangelize her or something. So I turned back to the man next to me and, standing up over him, I put my hand on his head and I said, “In the name of Jesus Christ and by his authority, I declare the entire forgiveness of all your sins.”
“You— you can’t do that,” he whispered to me.
“I can do it. And I must. Christ compels me to do it, and I just did it and I’ll do it again.”
“So I gave him the goods again. I tipped his head back and I spoke faith into him, and I did it loud for everyone on that plane to hear it. And just like that, the man started sobbing… like somebody had stuck him. Soon his shirt was wet from all his weeping and I held him in my arms like I’d hold a child.”
After the guy stopped weeping, he laughed and wiped his eyes and he said to me, “Gosh, if that’s true, it’s the best news I’ve ever heard.”
When I thought the story was over, Jim started to cry all over again and he said, “After the plane had landed, I handed my business card to him. I told him, “If you get hungry for that word in the future, call me and I’ll hand it over all over again.”
And then Jim laughed a big, deep laugh and said:
“Wouldn’t you know it. He called me every day— every day— just for me to serve up the little word of the gospel to him. So I did, every day until he died— I wanted the last words he heard in this life to be the first words he would hear Jesus himself say to him in the next life. That way, in the future he will discover he’d already met Jesus in his past— he got him in his word.”
Theology is for that kind of preaching.
That is what God is up to in this world.
Theology exists to make the absolving word intelligible.
Just so, I’d be remiss if I did not hand over the goods here at the end.
“In the name of Jesus Christ and by his authority alone, I announce to you the entire forgiveness of all your sins. The Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world and he hasn’t missed any— not even yours.”
