The other day I finished reading Charles L. Campbells Preaching Jesus: New Directions for Homiletics in Han Freis Postliberal Theology. Essentially, the book is an exploration of the thought, teaching, and context of Freis use of narrative preaching. The context seems to be the reemergence of biblical preaching by mainline denomination liberals as their move away from subjective religious experience and back towards the centrality of Jesus and the meta-narrative told through the Scriptures. During the 1960s, liberal preachers began to abandon neo-orthodoxy in favor of a more private spirituality and a secular politics, both completely divorced from the Christ event. Much of the book - literary interpretations of the Bible, the meta-narrative of the Scriptures, refocus on neo-orthodoxy - is old hat to me. My studies of Kierkegaard, Mullins, Barth, Brunner, Bonhoeffer, Niebuhr, Moody, Stagg, Buber, and Wright taught me all this long ago. But it is nice to see liberal Christians starting to get it right to some degree. The most interesting aspect of this book for me was the examination of how people become Christians culturally and how they come to believe what they believe. Essentially, the thesis here is that becoming a Christian is a process of socialization or enculturation within a particular cultural-linguistic community. One doesnt become a Christian by having a religious experience but by learning the particular language and set of practices inherent in Christianity, a denomination, and a particular faith tradition. Furthermore, people learn the meaning of a scriptural teaching and their way of interpreting Scripture by adopting the cultural practices of their faith community, not by drawing upon the sensus literalis. All of this is really about the practical process of how individuals and community arrive at Biblical interpretation and theology, regardless of accuracy. All of this can be quite depressing to the learned Christian but it really seems to be the way the majority Christianize themselves in practice. Frei is said to argue that the function of the gospels is to render the identity of Jesus. I find this highly questionable but probably only overstated. I greatly appreciated Freis assessment that Jesus enacted the way of God in the world as an embodiment of the reign of God. I think this is right on the money. This dips slightly into some of the deeper areas of Scriptural studies involving Jesus self-understanding and prophetic vocation. I really dont think there are any deeper aspects of Scripture studies than the theology of Job, Roman 1, Deutero-Isaiah, and Jesus personal understanding of his prophetic vocation. The book is fairly technical and might be of some interest to preachers. However, its probably more interesting to those who study preaching. And though I think most evangelicals would find this book uninteresting, liberal and more progressive Christians would find the more practical homiletic parts very useful.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 00:48:22 +0000
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