wfn.org | Preaching luminaries tell pastors to oppose "Bible-bashers,

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Note #5924 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

Bible-thumpers"
2-June-2000
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	Preaching luminaries tell pastors to oppose "Bible-bashers, Bible-thumpers"

	Pastors advised to immerse themselves in Biblical texts

	by Alexa Smith

MONTREAT, N.C. - It was, interestingly enough, a reserved, feminist Hebrew
Bible exegete who brought the house down – and brought about half of the
1,000 people sitting in a packed Anderson Auditorium at the Montreat
Conference Center to their feet.

	After wending her way through the stories of Ruth and Jacob and Moses,
scholar Phyllis Trible told participants in "Reclaiming the Text: A
Preacher's Conference," that reclaiming the text has much to do with loving
the book's complexities despite its ambiguities.

	"Do not abandon the Bible to the Bible-bashers and the Bible-thumpers,"
said Trible, the emerita exegete from Union Theological Seminary in New York
City. "Take back the text. Read it closely; for in the details both God and
the devil dwell. Reclaim the Bible. Do not let go of it until it blesses
you. But remember, you may be changed in ways that are not always compatible
with your own desires ... Jacob limped.

	"In reclaiming the text, we are called to make it work for blessing and not
for cursing, so that we and our descendants – indeed, so that all the
humanity of the Earth - may live."

	The applause went on and on.

	Not because what she said was comfortable.

	Trible took swipes at both the political left and the political right for
often "naive" and "iron-clad" styles of Biblical interpretation. She decried
how the book is used to fuel the culture wars that have "Bible-thumpers and
Bible-bashers lining up" ... to use its texts "against each other," whether
the issue of the moment is abortion or tobacco or homosexuality - while
failing to explore the ambiguities and multiple meanings that may be read
into centuries-old texts, depending, as she emphasized, on the context.

	  "Those of us who refuse to join the thumpers or the bashers are called
upon to engage the text in more excellent ways ... to make the Bible work
for good and not for evil, for blessing and not for curse," Trible said. She
allowed that that may be difficult, but those who love the book have "a
never-ending responsibility to choose rightly."

	Trible wasn't the first to urge the assembled preachers to go more deeply
and imaginatively into the texts that shape the sermons they deliver Sunday
after Sunday. Columbia Theological Seminary's Old Testament scholar, Walter
Brueggemann, went first, and was followed by Douglas John Hall, emeritus
professor of Christian theology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada;
Eugene Peterson, emeritus professor of spiritual theology at Regent College
in Vancouver, Canada; and Richard Lischer, Duke Divinity School's professor
of preaching.

	The lectures were wrapped around a week's worth of worship services led by
Peterson, Lischer and author Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopalian priest
who teaches at Piedmont College in Demorest, Ga., and workshops led by John
Weaver of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City; Ronald
Peters, associate professor of urban ministry at Pittsburgh Theological
Seminary; George Landes, former professor of Hebrew at Union Theological
Seminary; and assorted others.

	"We must have hit a vacuum in the life of the church in the context of
preaching, and then in the sense of continuing education," said Emile Dieth,
president of the Montreat Conference Center, who was impressed by the
overflow of registrations from preachers from 43 states and 14 denominations
- even though he and Brueggeman came up with the conference idea while
relaxing in rocking chairs on a Montreat porch.

	"There are just not these kinds of conferences," Brueggemann said. "Also,
ministers never have a chance to worship." He said the twice-daily worships
were designed to help clergy men and women to unwind and to be inspired.

	                    Overcoming the Culture

	Brueggemann said the task of the preacher is to overcome the cultural noise
and confusion that have compromised the church's memory of what the Biblical
texts say. He said the U.S. culture has largely replaced those texts with a
story of despair, greed, brutality, consumerism and fear, although the
Biblical texts really tell the story of God's fidelity and generosity. He
said scripture asks people to respond to loving governance with
neighborliness - a total antidote to the anxious selfishness that dominates
global economics and politics.

	The preacher, he said, must get the church out of the fear and scarcity
business, and into the amazement business.

	 "Technological reason since the time of Descartes has been in the business
of helping us forget ... and the alternative is saturated with miracles,
wonders, mighty deeds and great acts," he said, urging the gathered
preachers to "just say it," to tell the stories that will help listeners
remember God's alternative narrative and make them realize that they are the
current stewards of God's generosity.

	Calling Israel a "relentless hoper" that believed the world would be made
new in God's good time, Brueggeman said the Christian church must take such
hope seriously, as Jews and Muslims do. "God will be God," he said, "and it
is in God's deep character to make things new." He said the community that
gathers around these texts is able to forgo despair and be generous.

	"The dominant texts [of the culture] are failing," he continued. "We've
seen the old text of racial separatism in South Africa fail. We've seen
brutality fail in Eastern Europe. We're watching the old text of hate fail
in Northern Ireland, and the text of self-destruction run out in exhaustion
in the Balkans. ... And if we look more closely (we can see) that the texts
of self-invention and self-sufficiency are producing a kind of selfishness
that cannot be sustained.

	"Fear, greed and violence are empty texts," he added, saying it is the
preacher's "evangelical task" to switch texts, replacing the culture's
deadly texts with a story that has the power to transform.

			
   	                      Text and the Context

	Hall told the preachers that there is no authoritative reclamation of the
Biblical text which does not include an invitation of the preacher to
"deeper, clearer and less-guarded immersion" in his or her own world - and
to a hearing of what he called "another voice."

	Conceding that doing both is a delicate balancing act, he said two
weaknesses in contemporary preaching reflect the tension between them.
Liberals, he said, are often rooted in the here-and-now, but not clearly
connected to the text; and so their preaching, while often reflecting themes
of peace and justice and the environment, too often do not reflect a
"profound struggle with the Biblical passage." At the other end of the
spectrum, he said, is a self-consciously Biblical style of preaching that
"fails miserably to connect with life," as though "the mere re-telling of
the Biblical story is itself a sufficient achievement."

	Calling his critique an exaggeration for the sake of making an important
point, Hall urged preachers to immerse themselves in personal dialogue with
the text, which, he said, is "infinitely more demanding than putting
contemporary questions and concerns to the text ...

	"The preacher must first become one addressed by the text ... (so it is)
always (heard) anew," he said, advising those in the packed auditorium not
to assume that they understand the text, so it may put a fresh claim on the
preacher and the congregation. The preacher's audience always knows, he
said, "whether the preacher has heard another voice."

	"There's more at stake here than the personal integrity of the preacher,"
said Hall, who described himself more as a pew-sitter than a preacher. "The
congregation wants to know not only has the preacher heard the voice ... but
does the preacher hear that voice as one of us? Does the preacher live where
we live, with our hopes and anxieties, with our limits and temptations?  And
is the preacher capable of clarifying for us not only what the text says to
us, but who we are ... as addressed by the text?"

	                         A Practical Piety

	Peterson told the assembled preachers that prayer and practical study of
the way that Jesus drew disciples into the fold is how pastors ought to be
working at church growth – resisting temptation to adopt secular models that
emphasize "big," but compromise the relationships that are so crucial to
spiritual formation.

	"Context is previous to the text and determines the way we hear the text,"
he said, noting that Jesus ignored both the power-based organizing tactics
of the empire and the performance-based precepts of the religious sects in
favor of telling stories that pull people into relationships with each other
and with God.

	"We've left the Biblical story," he said in response to a question, "if we
let the rhetoric of growth seduce us out of actual relationships."

	"When growth ceases to be relational, we have a biological name for that:
cancer.

	"Why don't we stay with the way Jesus did it?" he asked. "Why do we think
we need to do differently than he did? Why is going into ‘all the world'
different for us?  I don't get it."

	Peterson - a pastor for 29 years - cited the Magnificat, the Lukan prayer
spoken by Mary after the angel Gabriel visited her - as a model for the kind
of submissive prayer that frees Christians from the contemporary context. He
said one such prayer - "Not my will but thine be done" - kept Jesus from
adopting more "successful" organizational models for his ministry. "We have
to be aware of the context we find ourselves in," he said, "and we have to
have some critical, active ... defense against the secular, depersonalizing
Herodian stuff that seeps in on us."

	Peterson said smaller and more marginalized churches often have more
freedom to reject  corporate strategies.

	A second conference for preachers is planned at Montreat Conference Center
in 2002.

	Next year there will be a conference for lay preachers May 28-June 1. The
scheduled presenters include Anna Carter Florence, professor of preaching,
Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga.; Tom Long, professor of
preaching, Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, Ga.; James H. Logan Jr.,
senior pastor, South Tryon Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, N.C.; and Ted
Wardlaw, senior pastor, Central Presbyterian Church, Atlanta.

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