290 - Why Preach? Why Listen?

Why Preach? Why Listen?

By William Muehl

Philadelphia, Fortress, 1986, 95 Pp. $4.95.

In the early 1970s, when American pulpits were beginning to bubble with the "I'm OK; You're OK" rhetoric of transactional analysis and a good many preachers were earnestly speaking in mellow tones of a God who embraces all, accepts everything, and demands nothing, William Muehl published a sermon provocatively entitled, "To Hell With Acceptance." In that sermon, part of a collection called All the Damned Angels (Pilgrim Press, 1972), Muehl asserted that one of the deepest fears of modern people is precisely "the increasing suspicion that no one gives a damn about what they do." In short, to dish out a steady stream of no-cost forgiveness, however well-intended, was not a way to grant dignity to people, but instead ended up trivializing them. To assure people that they are "accepted without reference to the quality of their lives, is to confirm the worst of their darkest fears," that what they do does not finally matter, even to God.

Muehl is the Clement Professor of Christian Methods at Yale

291 - Why Preach? Why Listen?

Divinity School, and it is just that sort of cut-against-the- grain style that one has come to expect from him. Muehl's most recent book is no exception. Indeed, one finds here a continuation of many of the themes developed in the earlier sermon collection. The place of formal theology in Christian preaching is the particular pot he is now stirring, and the result is a book that is at the same time both outrageous and the clearest, richest, and most persuasive statement on that difficult theme.

What makes this book outrageous is that Muehl, a layman who was trained as an attorney before becoming a theological educator, possesses more than a touch of anti-clericalism and misses almost no opportunity to press charges against the ministry for various crimes and misdemeanors, including negligence toward the actual experience of laypeople and theological remoteness. He insists that preachers should lower their heavenly gazes and fix their sights firmly on a fact that is, or at least should be, perfectly obvious: that most people in the pews "have little sustained interest in theology and only a superficial interest in religion," but "they do care deeply about the experience of God, whatever they may choose to call it."

As a case in point, Muehl cites his own participation in a panel discussion on the nature of the church. One of the other panelists, an Episcopal priest, made a rhapsodic statement in which the church was described as "the place in which we meet each other more honestly, share with one another more intimately, and love one another more fully than anywhere else outside the home." The audience, reports Muehl, ,'made their faces to shine upon him and nodded benignly as those do who give assent to a time-honored truism." Then Muehl spoke to the group, asking them to forget that they were supposed to feel about the church as Father X had just claimed they did and wondering how many of them actually felt that way. In the audience of about one hundred, only about a dozen hands went up.

The problem, Meuhl claims, is that the clergy have a professional and personal fondness for the more poetic, dramatic, and theologically impregnated styles of describing religious reality, causing them to develop a distaste for the prosaic, less impressive ways in which people actually come to faith.

Muehl's response to this, and here is the value of the book, is not to dismiss the importance of formal theology, but rather to refashion the way in which it is to be employed in preaching. Muehl wants the method of preaching to replicate the dynamic and two-way flow between theology and practice lay people experience when they try "to apply what they hear in church to the grubby and always recalcitrant details of daily life." He borrows a phrase from Krister Stendahl to encourage preachers to take seriously the active character of the phrase "doing theology" instead of simply "playing Bibleland."

Muehl is fearful that his call to bring theology and human life into vital pulpit interaction will be translated into a brand of homiletic no-nothingness and heard merely as advice to keep sermonic theology

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simple enough for people to grasp it quickly. To the contrary, Muehl insists that "effective homiletic theology consists not in making Christian doctrine simple, but in exploring the rich complexity of the lives which it seeks to inform." He is contemptuous of the famous story in which Karl Barth is alleged to have responded to a request to summarize the results of his theological work by saying, "Jesus loves me/This I know/For the Bible tells me so." In Muehl's view, this incident simply gives anecdotal support to ignorant piety. As for the fact that it was the esteemed Barth who uttered it, Muehl quotes a line that originally appeared in a Catholic journal on the occasion of Freud's death: "His silly ideas fooled many."

Just at the point that the reader is wondering what exactly Muehl is, in fact, advocating, be comes to the rescue with three brief, but finely-crafted, chapters that are themselves models of theology brought to bear upon the homiletical task. These deal, in turn, with God as creator, judge, and redeemer, and they are all nuanced by Muehl's continuing impatience with the "God loves you, regardless" rhetoric of contemporary preaching. For example, in the chapter on God as judge, Muehl struggles with ways to get preachers to acknowledge in their sermons a fact of life almost every layperson deeply understands at some level a grass-roots conviction that decades of mushy pseudo-agape preaching has not rooted out, namely, that human life stands under divine judgment, "that there are finalities in life." When we preachers substitute the formula "Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer" for "Creator, Judge, and Redeemer," Muehl claims, "we omit from our definition of the divine that which is most inescapably real in human experience."

No preacher can read this book without being stung somewhere in its pages. Muehl hunts with buckshot, and everyone gets hit by one or two of his pellets. Gospel preachers are proclaimers of radical grace, and Christian sermons are, by definition, inarticulate attempts to speak the divine "yes" heard in Jesus Christ. Since Christian preachers are never a match for the greatness of their message, it is inevitable that distortions and confusions occur, and often precisely in the areas of human dignity, creativity, and ethical responsibility spotlighted by Muehl.

It is also true that no preacher can read this book without being encouraged to think new and braver thoughts about the place of theology in preaching. It would be unfortunate if Muehl's caustic, witty, and sometimes peevish comments on the flabbiness of much contemporary preaching were to be heard as advocating sermons that substitute harshness for compassion. What Muehl is after is not a gospel of rigid demand, but a gospel with some size.

THOMAS G. LONG

Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey