237 - The Preacher, The Text, and The People

The Preacher, The Text, and The People
By Walter Brueggemann

"My impression is that in controversies in the church that get the pastor in trouble, controversies about theology and ethics, that is, controversies about interpretation, we usually assume two parties in the quarrel, pastor and people (or some people). Given two parties, controversies predictably lead to win/lose situations. What has happened in many such situations is that the text has disappeared as a live, vocal partner in the conversation."

The Bible, especially through the lens of its most vigorous interpreters, can be dangerous, subversive, and scandalous. Its scandalous quality is, of course, theological. The God mediated to us in Scripture does not fit our preferred notions but is always more odd and surprising than we can expect or anticipate. That theological scandal, however, will not be contained in formal theological categories. It spins off into other dimensions of scandal. Just now in the church, the oddness and danger of the biblical God is evidenced around socioeconomic, political questions concerning the cry of the poor, the urge of justice, and the power and possibility of real social transformation.

In Luke 7, after John the Baptist raises his christological question through his disciples whether Jesus is the Christ, and after Jesus answers with specificity that "the blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the dead are raised, and the poor rejoice," Jesus adds, "blessed is the one who is not scandalized by me" (v. 23). Or as I would have rendered it, "Lucky are you, if you are not upset." The theological scandal of biblical faith, especially when rendered into political, economic issues, is indeed upsetting.

How is a pastor to give voice to this scandal in a society that is hostile to it, in a church that is often unwilling to host the scandal, and when we ourselves as teachers and pastors of the church are somewhat queasy about the scandal as it touches our own lives? How can the radical dimension of the Bible as it touches public reality be heard in the church? We all have our strategies about these matters. We may simply select around the dangerous texts so that the difficult passages are never

Walter Brueggemann is Professor of Old Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia. He is the author of The Creative Word (1982), The Message of the Psalms (1984), Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile (1986), I and II Samuel (1990), and Power, Providence, and Personality: Biblical Insight into Life and Ministry (1990). Dr. Brueggemann is a member of the Editorial Council of THEOLOGY TODAY.

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voiced. Or we may interpret them away from their evident intent in a spiritualizing direction to make them mean something they clearly do not intend.¹ Or we may speak the text as it seems to stand, and hope nobody notices what has been said.

There are no easy ways about these texts, either for the congregation or for pastors who are also scandalized in our own social setting. Textual conversation in the congregation is important, not only because we have powerful texts that require a hearing, but because we have entrusted to us the word of life that matters urgently in a society seemingly bent on its self-destruction. In recent biblical scholarship-which moves away both from tired scholasticism and from flat historical criticism-there are important resources for taking the scandalous texts seriously without pastors necessarily committing professional or personal suicide. These newer interpretive approaches invite us to pay attention to the processes through which people do in fact engage in transformation through their hearing of the text. In order for the scandalous texts to be voiced and heard in the church without the pastor paying all the costs of the conversation, I suggest three strategic clues that may be useful. When the pastor discerns the text differently, a different conversation in the congregation is possible.

I

In his theory about family therapy, Murray Bowen, popularly echoed by Edwin Friedman, has worked with the notion of "triangling."² Bowen proposes that all domestic relations, even if a family has many siblings and is multi-generational, are a series of triangles, that is, a network of relations in which there are endless patterns of "two against one." In such patterns, the exhausting work of family members is not to be the single one left alone against the other two. Bowen proposes that family therapy consists in breaking up the triangles to permit new, healthy relations that are direct and not manipulative power plays.

The notion of triangles and "triangling" has set me to thinking about the text in the church. My impression is that in controversies in the church that get the pastor in trouble, controversies about theology and ethics, that is, controversies about interpretation, we usually assume two parties in the quarrel, pastor and people (or some people). Given two parties, controversies predictably lead to win/lose situations. What has happened in many such situations is that the text has disappeared as a live, vocal partner in the conversation. The text has disappeared in the church largely, I believe, because of historical criticism which has unwittingly served to eliminate the voice of the text as real and authoritative. And when the text is silenced as a serious theological

¹ On avoidance in interpretation at a practical level, see Richard L. Rohrbaugh, The Biblical Interpreter (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978).
² Murray Bowen, Family Therapy in Clinical Practice (New York: J. Aranson, 1978); Edwin H. Friedman, Generation to Generation.- Family Process in Church and Synagogue (New York: Guilford Press, 1985).

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presence in the community, the pastor has had to substitute a personal voice for the voice of the text. In the place of the text, stands the voice of the pastor. That leaves the pastor vulnerable and exposed, for it is only one person's voice, People are not fooled by the substitution when they receive the word of the pastor instead of the voice of the text.

If it is not flattened historical criticism that has silenced the text, then it may be creedal scholasticism that has emptied the text of its voice and its own danger, and again we are left in a situation when the pastor must say things to substitute for the lost or silenced text.

Consider what happens in such a conversation when it is seen to be a triangle. There are, in fact, in most church situations of interpretation three voices, that of text, of pastor, and of congregation, three voices creating a triangle. The text continues to be present, but it has been usurped by the pastor. Our standard practice is for the pastor to triangle with the text against the congregation, that is, to make an alliance so that the voice of the pastor and what is left of the voice of the text gang up on the congregation and sound just alike. This process automatically generates controversy because, completely aside from the substance of theological or ethical conflict, nobody wants to be the lone one in a triangle. Predictably the third party, the congregation, becomes a hostile, resistant outsider who will undertake reckless, destructive action in such a triangle where one is excluded by the other two.

If, however, the text is as scandalous as we suspect it is, then we need an alternative strategy. We are aware that the text is in fact more radical and more offensive and more dangerous than any of us, liberal or conservative. As a result, it is not honest to ally with the text, because the dangerous text is not any one's natural or easy ally. I suggest, then, let the pastor triangle with the congregation against the text, so that the text is the lone member of the triangle, and then see how the text lives as the odd one in such a triangle. I believe that the textual conversation in the church could be very different if pastors were able to begin with the awareness that the text is too offensive for the people, but it is also too offensive for the pastor, because it is the living Word of God, and it pushes always beyond where we want to go or be. Such a posture honors the great authority of the text. It also acknowledges our restless resistance to the text and lets us enter into dangerous textual conversation with some of our best friends as allies.

The proposal for alternative triangling requires, however, that the text be permitted its own voice, apart from our creedal impositions or our critical reductionisms. There can be no genuine triangle unless the text is permitted a voice other than our own. Thus, this strategy calls for some visible interpretive distance between pastor and text.³

³ On interpretive distance, see especially Paul Ricoeur, "The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation," Paul Ricoeur: Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. by John B. Thompson (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 131-44.

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II

The strategy of triangling invites us to perceive the text very differently from the way we have conventionally perceived it. In order for the triangle to work, the text must have power and freedom to utter its own voice as a real voice in the conversation. This is in part a theological matter concerning inspiration, revelation, and authority. Closer to home, however, it is now an issue of textual theory and literary interpretation as well. Newer literary approaches to the text, rightly handled, will let the text regain its own voice. There are important methodological developments in Scripture study, mostly concerning narrative, and mostly in Old Testament study, that can be useful in letting the text utter its own voice.

For all our prattle about "the authority of Scripture," almost all of us are schooled in silencing the voice of the text. On the one hand, well-educated liberals have utilized historical criticism largely to explain away the voice of the text, so that when we finish with the text, there is no authoritative voice left except our own. Without gainsaying or dismissing the crucial gains of historical criticism,⁴ we may identify two tendencies in it that choke the voice of the text. First, we have preconceived notions concerning what could have happened. My urging is not an obscurantist one that says "It must have happened because the Bible says so," but that we should take the text on its own terms as an utterance, without raising the external question of whether something could have happened. The important point is the text's utterance, an utterance we ourselves are frequently incapable of making. The assertion that Moses brought water from flint rock is a textual utterance on which Israel stakes a great deal (Ex. 17:6; Num. 20:8-11; Deut. 8:15; Ps. 78:15-20, 114:8). Israel stakes much not on the flint or on the water or on Moses, but on the utterance. And that utterance and staking are not subject to our geological claims about flint rock.

Second, the text is a daring utterance that is largely uncensored, which means it is free to be ambiguous, filled with contradiction, and freighted with irony, as the text struggles through to a new utterance. Our modernist epistemology, however, cannot tolerate such ambiguity and contradiction, and our fearfulness cannot tolerate irony. We characteristically resolve such daring rhetorical acts by killing or dissolving the text by source analysis, by identifying glosses, by various maneuvers that destroy the artistic intent of the text, as though the text could only utter one thing at a time. Elsewhere I have considered, for example, Jeremiah 31, in which scholarly analysis has dissolved the play of the text.⁵ When all such reductionist settlements of the text have been made, there is nothing of interest or power left in the text. Then the

⁴ I do not want to go as far as Walter Wink, The Bible and Human Transformation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973) in his initial broadside; but his statement is congruent with my sense that historical criticism has denied the text its voice.
⁵ Walter Brueggemann, "The 'Uncared For' Now Cared For (Jer. 30:12-17: A Methodological Consideration," Journal of Biblical Literature 104 (1985), pp. 419-28.

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pastor must fill in the silences and that often results in pablum or ideology.

Conversely, conservatives also find the text too dangerous or problematic. In that case, the preferred way of avoiding the danger of the text is not historical criticism, but submerging the text into a theological system so that the text loses its dangerous voice and becomes either a servant or an echo for some intellectual articulation that is distanced from the dangerous utterance. Such submerging of the text is analogous to a repressed ego function, in which the untamed parts of personality must be submerged and silenced in order to make the dominant self-presentation work. Such repression in the end, however, will not work or succeed as the contained, silenced parts will break out somehow.⁶ A systematic control and reduction of Scripture will not finally work, as the "less honorable parts" of the texts will insist upon their honor (cf. I Cor. 12:23). Thus, in doing theology, the text keeps having its say in ways that do not conform to our schemes, liberal or conservative.

When the text is allowed its own voice, other than that of the congregation and other than that of the pastor, we discover that the text is not directly addressed to us, and we should not work too hard at making it immediately relevant. We are helped in this regard by the category about textual strategies proposed by Wayne Booth.⁷ He has proposed that in addition to the "real author" who wrote the text and occupies all our historical questions, there is an "implied author," a literary fiction, who utters the text and who may stand at an important distance from the real author. Conversely, there is in addition to the real audience, an "implied audience" that corresponds to and is evoked by the implied author. Historical criticism has regularly tried to identify and deal with the "real author," for example, "J" or "I"' or a "wisdom teacher." It follows from such an approach that the "real audience" is the one addressed by the "real author." Thus, "J" addressed tenth century royalists, and the sage addressed young boys in a court school. When we think we know the "real author" fully enough, we seek to enter into history to imagine that we ourselves are the "real audience" to whom the text is addressed. We are in the end blocked in this attempt by our historical categories, but we keep trying. When we construe ourselves to be the real audience to whom the text is addressed, we have an inordinate passion that the text should address us directly, hence the drive for relevance which distorts the text and sets us up for a destructive ideological triangle for us and the text against whomsoever.

The main voice of the text, however, is not that of "J" or "P"; and the

⁶ The process of texts breaking out from under the dominant consensus is what is happening in much recent liberation exegesis and especially feminism. The clearest examples are those of Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror (Overtures to Biblical Theology; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984).
⁷ Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983). See also Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

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primary addressee is not a seventh century audience as critical consensus has it, and it is not to us. Concerning the book of Deuteronomy, we all know that Moses did not write it, but it was a Levitical tradent in the seventh or eighth century addressed to Jerusalem in the face of Assyrian syncretism. We all know as well that such knowledge will not preach too well. The best preaching, then, is that the text is addressed to us in our syncretism, which is a people not unlike that of seventh century Jerusalem.

If, however, we take seriously the implied exchange of author and audience, the text speaks otherwise. The implied author is indeed Moses, the "Lech Walesa" of early Israel, who has come with scars from Pharaoh, come from the forty days' rendezvous with God and two broken tablets, be of quail and manna and flint rock. And the implied audience is Israel, land-hungry and desperate, lined up at the Jordan ready to charge into the "Land of Promise" like "Sooners" at the edge of Oklahoma, with "cities you did not build and cisterns you did not hew out," ready to go into the promise that Moses thinks is dangerous. The text does not concern us at all. It does not ask us to do anything. It does not comment on abortion or aid to the Contras. Indeed, it comments on very little that pertains to us. It deliberately addresses an audience other than us, maintaining a distance from us, hardly at all interested in us. The text is, nonetheless, an utterance. In handling the text, the task is to let the utterance of the text be uttered. It is not my utterance as a preacher, and I do not need to like it or agree with it or vouch for it. It is not the utterance of the congregation, and the congregation does not get to vote on it as the text. It is an utterance that the text insists upon. The preacher may indeed triangle with the congregation against textual utterance. The congregation may, in turn, cower in the corner hoping not to be reached by the utterance. The preacher has only to let the implied author address the implied audience in its many implications and let it be. So, the utterance and its reception do not directly and immediately concern us. It is an utterance and a reception of utterance that happens out beyond us. We watch and listen, but at a distance. That distance keeps the text from being too concerned with our dogmatic questions and too insistent about our moral issues.

The text as canon insists upon having its own voice, as norm, as classic.⁸ It does not ask to be held to its critical situation of origin, but only permitted to have its own say when and where it will, even at the risk of distance and perhaps irrelevance. It does not ask for approval or action or consent. It only asks to be voiced for a moment. It asks to be voiced for a moment on its own terms, in all of its concreteness, its specificity, and its precise formulation. It does not ask to have lessons

⁸ As I understand it, this is the intent of Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979). In order for the text to have its own voice, it cannot be dependent upon its locus of historical origin. Whereas Childs speaks directly about "canon," David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1981) speaks of "classic." I understand Tracy to be speaking of a canonical text, but to do so on foundationalist and not confessional grounds.

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extracted or points to be scored, but only listening that may draw the Teat listener" back into the implied world, that may mediate to the new members of the implied audience something new they did not know before this utterance. That is enough, because what is to be known is in the terms of the utterance itself, not our terms. That is all. But that is enough. Booth's notion of fictional author and fictional audience gives us freedom. On the one hand, it lets us come to the text with some freedom and ease, knowing that we are not going to be grabbed by the throat and coerced. On the other hand, it lets us go to the text with awed anticipation, knowing we are likely to hear a voice addressing us we have never heard before, saying to us what we have never heard before.

III

Now what is going on in this triangle with a text that has its own voice? The conclusion drawn from this line of reasoning is that we are essentially textual creatures. We live from a text. Sometimes in the church we think that if we did not have the biblical text, we would not have a text at all. That is, we would be textless.

But there are no textless people. Everyone has a text, known or unknown. It may be a text hidden from us, powerful and authoritative, even if unrecognized. It has been suggested that Ronald Reagan's text came from Hobbes' Leviathan, even though Reagan probably never heard of Hobbes⁹ Or it may be a very local text, like "My Dad always said." Or it may be a narrative construal of an old ecstasy or an old hurt. ¹⁰ That old happening, however, has become a text that bears many retellings and many reinterpretations, tellings, and interpretations far removed from an event. That old happening has become a text that powers and shapes one's life. Most of our texts are hidden and uncriticized, and therefore exercise the persuasive irresistible power of mystification. Therapy, on one reading, is to bring to speech the hidden texts and invisible loyalties out of which we live.¹¹ The psychotherapeutic notion that we are scripted people is so utterly, utterly Jewish.¹² Jews order life around script, not around ideas. In Jewish epistemology, ideas are only spin-offs from texts, but life consists in our texts, in studying, receiving, serving, criticizing, and answering our texts. What has happened in modernity is that we have abandoned

⁹ See Milton L. Myers, The Soul of Modern Economic Man: Ideas of Self-Interest, Thomas Hobbes to Adam Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
¹⁰ "Old ecstacies" and "old hurts" live with enormous vitality in a congregation, and the pastor will hear these narrative construals of the past endlessly reiterated.
¹¹ On such hidden texts and invisible loyalties, see Ivan Boszormenye-Nagy and Geralding Spark, Invisible Loyalties (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).
¹² The popular psychology of being scripted has been articulated by Eric Berne, Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships (New York: Grove Press, 1964). On the text as a Jewish enterprise, see Jose Faur, "God as a Writer: Omnipresence and the Art of Dissimulation," The Bible and the Intellectual Life, vol. 6 (1989), pp. 31-43. On religious script and rewriting the script, see Robert Davidson, The Courage to Doubt (London: SCM Press, 1983), pp. 178-79 et passim.

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our text.¹³ We have abandoned it by scholastic creedalism that tends to put a cover over the danger of the text or we have abandoned the text by historical criticism.¹⁴ The latter we can check out by noting that in the high days of historical criticism, we did not so much study the text in seminary, but we read many books about the text-but no text. We lost confidence in the text, thought it not adequate, and were embarrassed about it.

I am increasingly aware of the recurring inclination among seminarians, who prefer for preaching some idea, some cause, some experience, some anything rather than the text. A community without its appropriate text clearly will have no power or energy or courage for mission; it will be endlessly quarrelsome because it depends on ideology and has no agreed upon arena where it adjudicates its conflicts. I am, of course, aware that the text is no sure source of unity, as texts can indeed be divisive. A text does, however, provide a subject of conversation that gives us space from each other. It is better to struggle together with the text than about ideologies that are the extreme voices of the community.

We are learning the hard way that when the church scuttles its text, other texts will readily intrude. We cannot tolerate textlessness very long. So now we have on our hands in the church alien texts that sound authoritative, texts of secular humanism, texts of free market advocacy, texts of scholastic certitude, texts of moral absolutism, texts of individual subjectivity, all of which are idolatrous texts that are pitiful when contrasted with the dense, rich playfulness of our text.

IV

A text, as Walter Ong notes, creates its own community.¹⁵ Ong's argument, congruent with Booth's notion of an implied reader, suggests that a writer, even school-children who write about "What I did Last Summer," must create in imagination those to whom they are writing. A text implies its own audience and summons its audience in each hearing to become the community for which the text is voiced, and therefore the community that can sympathetically and responsively host the text. Ong states that all such implied audiences for texts are in fact fiction, for no such audiences exist, except in the intent and address of the author.

Put theologically, the biblical text creates the church, that is, the text summons a certain kind of audience to host and receive the text. Moreover, the audience cannot receive the text as its text unless it will imagine itself to be the audience intended by the text.

¹³ On the abandonment of the text in modernity, the classic statement is by Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).
¹⁴ George Steiner, "The Good Books," The New Yorker (Jan. 11, 1988), now reprinted in The Bible and the Intellectual Life, vol. 6 (1989), pp. 9-16, has given an eloquent and passionate expression to this problem.
¹⁵ Walter J. Ong, Interfaces of the Word (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 53-81. See the utilization of Ong's argument by R. Alan Culpepper, Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), pp. 205-211.

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The drama of Deuteronomy, for example, creates the listening community at the Jordan on the Plains of Moab. The drama of the Gospel of Mark creates a community that ponders the One who is strong in utter weakness. The Book of Revelation creates a community waiting in the presence of whore Babylon for a new heaven and new earth and who can share in the ultimate prayer, "Come Lord Jesus." When the preacher and the congregation first come to the text, we are not folks seeking land from the Jordan, not prepared for weak strength, not waiting in the presence of Babylon. But we must be, if this is our text. In being addressed, we must yield ourselves to the requirements and expectation of the voice of the text.¹⁶

Our "realism" says "no"; we are not with Moses on the Plains of Moab, or in Rome with Mark, or on Patmos with John. And we are certainly not witness to Elisha making iron float (II Kg. 6:6). We are just middle-class taxpayers trying to get along. Such a realistic resistance, however, ignores the power of the implied author (Moses, Mark, John) who implies the listener, compelling an imaginative act of entry into the world of the text. Of course such self-presentation for hearing is an act of imagination. It is, however, the force and authority of the text that authorizes such imagination of a counter-self and a counter-community in a counter-world reading for counter-joy and counter-obedience. That is at its best what happens in the moment of the text. And then, if I have disagreement with the text (hopefully with the text and not with preacher), I can at least entertain that my disagreement is not that of a twentieth century taxpayer, but first of all is a dispute concerning a land-hungry Israelite or a waiting, needy, persecuted Christian. The disagreement is softened; it is not so here-and-now, life-and-death, not so immediate, not so lethal, because I am invited into another hearing beyond my assumed self.

The text implies that I can be and must be someone other than I assumed myself to be prior to hearing. If the text cannot create a different community of pain and obedience, nothing can, certainly not our scholastic certitude, certainly not our historical criticism, certainly not our best theology. The text not only has a voice of its own which waits to be reuttered. That reutterance in the most practical, concrete way is reality-summoning. It is reality-summoning more radical than we expect, but a summons to the reality which is in the end our God-given true self and true community.

V

The proposal of triangling (Bowen) and an implied voice (Booth) that evokes an implied audience (Ong) may sound as though the text is excessively open, and as though the conversation is not very ernest. Against such an impression, I would make two points. First, this way of understanding the moment of interpretation takes the text with utmost

¹⁶ On the matter of letting the text have a say to which we can yield, see George Lindbeck, "Barth and Textuality," Theology Today, vol. 43 (1986), pp. 361-76.

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seriousness, with more seriousness than does most historical criticism and most creedal closedness. It is the text that provides the sound and formulae and cadence of the utterance, whenever the preacher can submit and stay out of the way. Second, this playful, teasing, imaginative process is not an imposition of our interpretation, but is a characterization of what in fact happens when our interpretation has transformative force. I am not proposing something odd, but reporting on what happens when the text is permitted to be its own live self. It is the power of the text that may call us out of our presumed self to newness. It is this chance of newness we take whenever we engage in serious interpretation. If this strategy sounds odd to us, it is only because we have been too fearful, too reductionist, too coercive to respect the dynamic of newness initiated by the text itself.

This tensive text, as every preacher knows, has little chance against the closed orthodoxies of economics, politics, psychology, theology, or morality. That little chance is, however, urgent, for this text is not simply the offer of another closed orthodoxy. It is a protest against all closed orthodoxies, left, right, and center. It is the voice of holy freedom that shatters all closedness for the news; it is the voice of free holiness that refuses to let us be where we are or on our own terms.

In this textual strategy, there is no closed orthodoxy, and so no final settlement in any certainty. So what is this live text about? What do we intend to happen in the moment of the text? The moment of the text is a moment posed for transformation, a pause in our several settlements, a chance of liminality.¹⁷ The text in its moment of liminality is not on the far settled side, as our caricatures of the Bible often pretend. The text is rather an offer of evangelical liminality that sponsors, authorizes, and invites to a regrouped, re-patterned world.

In the most practical way, the text's moment of playful imagination is urgent in our church and in our society, before we destroy each other in our certitudes. If we think of liminality as a prerequisite for reappropriating life afresh, it is imperative that we identify where such textual moments may occur among us. Liminality for reappropriation is offered primarily in three ways in our society: (a) in art that gives us a text from the artist but is mostly elitist in our society; (b) in therapy that reworks our personal, hidden texts, but is expensive and a little restrictive in our society; and (c) in these textual moments that are readily available in our society. The text entrusted to us is a broad offer of freshness that in our society has enormous access, not enjoyed either by art or by therapy. It is this text we know to be God's live word that utters, shatters, destroys, and creates.¹⁸ It authorizes our rechoosing beyond all our settlements. It requires, for such rechoosing, its own utterance. We

¹⁷ Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969), pp. 94-130 et passim.
¹⁸ Such texts are indeed "classic" in Tracy's sense, but they must be understood as more than classic. Such a category leaves too much to the human assessment of the text, and such a criterion is never adequate for serious faith that relates to its text as revelatory word of God.

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should be commonly alarmed that the text is not trusted much among us. Instead of this dangerous bread, we often give stones.¹⁹

This text is classic, which means it keeps generating new worlds,²⁰ it is not, however, "our" classic, but a classic that offends even us. To create space for this text in the church requires not certitude, not deductiveness or historical reductiveness, but a skilled capacity for its own utterance in its own cadences. When this text offends, it is not the pastor's affront, but the text's own trouble.

The text, when rightly uttered, will still offend. Scandal belongs to its very character.²¹ When it is trusted enough to create its own community, however, there will be those lively enough not to be upset. In that utterance that serves no consistent ideology, while the gospel is shared, the pastor becomes more marginal to the process, less exposed, and therefore less vulnerable. The pastor is not the voice of newness nor the source of trouble. It is the text, in its own utterance, that is both life-giving and scandalous. The text's own voice, without sounding exactly like the pastor, may indeed be what we mean by "Scripture alone." The scandal may continue to be acute, but it is a scandal rightly rooted in this affirmation of reality, not in quarrels too horizontal to give either light or life. When preachers reposition themselves vis a vis the dangerous text, congregations may also be repositioned for a listening they thought not possible.

¹⁹ The use of this phrase by Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza, Bread Not Stone (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), is exactly pertinent to the point I am making.
²⁰ Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, pp. 102-103, has expressed the way in which classic texts keep yielding new interpretations and keep requiring new interpretive attention.
²¹ This point is well voiced by Herbert N. Schneidau, Sacred Discontent; The Bible and Western Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).