Search

Preachers sometimes find themselves vexed by biblical texts that offer troubling theological problems. Early on Christian proclamation sought to move past those problems by encouraging figural interpretations (Augustine) when what a text said literally did not tend toward the love of God or neighbor. Contemporary homiletics argues that some of these texts may need to be revised theologically, or in some cases repudiated altogether by “preaching against the text.” The author here argues that some troubling texts actually represent the unfinished theological task of preaching itself. They require more than revision or repudiation, but instead a kind of ongoing homiletical-theological re-engagement in the gospel. Just as a preacher tries to makes sense of the gospel in light of trauma, grief, or crisis, so also a homiletical interpreter of troubling texts needs to wrestle with them in light of the traumatic exigencies of grief or crisis that surrounded their production. In this way, preachers can engage some troublesome texts not by standing apart from them in an act of self-possessed mastery of judgment, but pastorally in differentiated proximity to them in all their grief and trauma.

While doing archival research for my part of a book on the history of practical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, I came across very disturbing evidence for a fundamental failure of theological imagination on the part of seminary faculty during the nineteenth century. On the vexed matters of slavery and race, every faculty member at PTS who taught anything about practical theology until nearly the end of the 1800s could not imagine a society in which African Americans and Euro-Americans could live together as equals. A rigid Westminster orthodoxy undergirded with Scottish Common Sense philosophy constrained their interpretation of Scripture as well as their theological imagination in very unfortunate ways. While they all agreed that slavery as an institution was a blight upon humanity, not one of them could or would condemn it outright because of the way they read several texts in the Pauline corpus (none of which explicitly condemned slavery). As a result, they believed and taught generations of future pastors that they should leave politics to the politicians, that slaves should be taught to read in order that they might be able to read Scripture as an aid to salvation, and that slave owners should be admonished to treat slaves humanely, and that freed slaves should be sent en masse to colonize Liberia. Their theological imagination, underdeveloped as it was, can be seen in the admonitions concerning Liberia. Sending freed slaves back to Africa would, so they thought, address multiple problems. It would solve the race problem in the United States by removing black slaves and former slaves from society. They also thought it would contribute greatly to the evangelism challenge of the Great Commission by having people of African descent—whom they argued were constitutionally more adapted to survival on the African continent than were Euro-American missionaries—preaching the gospel to Africans. Astonishingly, even as late as 1877 (14 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and 12 years after the end of the Civil War) the one practical theologian on the seminary’s faculty still held to this line of thinking and articulated it before the American Colonization Society. Though there were voices like Marcus Theology Today 70(2) 105–108 ! The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0040573613488311 ttj.sagepub.com

Though the Reverend Edler Garnet Hawkins was the first black professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, a critical figure within American Presbyterianism and the ecumenical movement of the church, little is written about him. This article attempts to change that by giving voice to his public proclamation as expressed through some of his sermons, lectures, and addresses. It highlights four major motifs embedded in his proclamation and concludes with some reflections on the relevance of his thought for contemporary times.

“Christianity is best understood when it is viewed at its intersections. … Because the Christian gospel of salvation is universal, it must necessarily cross national and cultural boundaries and unite different people under a common identity. Thus, Christian proclamation constantly initiates a new mixing—a new mestizaje.”

“The fundamental problem for him [Luther] is not a verbal description of God but the exposure of man's existence before God; that is to say, the proclamation of God's judgment over man. With this we are not brought into the horizon of metaphors. The linguistic use of metaphors has now quite another task with reference to the subject matter of theology, namely, to bring man into the real situation, where the subject-matter itself occurs, as is the case with Jesus' speech in parables.”

“The claim that there is a new hermeneutic is bound up with the judgment that Fuchs and Ebeling have, with the aid of Heidegger, rediscovered the hermeneutical import of language— perhaps for the first time since Jesus and Luther. In my opinion it is possible to call this insight ‘new’ to the extent that one forgets that, despite frequent aberrations in homiletical practice, the church has always regarded proclamation in the mode of witness as a kind of ‘primal speech’ which serves as the hermeneutics of the Word of God.”

“Worship, in the biblical sources and in liturgical history, is not something a person experiences, it is something he does, regardless of how he feels about it, or whether he feels anything about it at all…. Baalism provided a rich array of ‘worship experiences.’ Israel and the Christian church insisted that worship was the proclamation of the will of God and the call for human response to it.”