Book review: "Sharing the Word", Lucy Atkinson Rose

 

Rose, Lucy Atkinson. Sharing the Word: Preaching in the Roundtable Church (Westminster

John Knox, 1997).

 

 

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Rose’s foundational claim about preaching, which she calls a proposal, is that it is Transformational, one she defines as nonhierarchical, heuristic and communal. It is preaching rooted in a relationship of connectedness and mutuality between the preacher and the worshippers which flow from and go back to faith and hope, and not from and to an objective, final truth.

Preaching’s goal is to gather the community of faith around the Word where the central conversations of the Church are refocused and fostered. Labels like clergy and laity disappear and believing or wanting to believe is all that matters in this centrifugal movement in preaching. The new goal of the preaching as proposed by Rose demands new whats and hows.

Dialogical preaching requires absence of a normative power and an authoritative figure of the preacher. Therefore, Rose sets out adding her voice to the discussion by first questioning and bringing responses to deficiencies in the mainstream homiletical traditions; and second, by adding her voice in the perspective of the Transformational Preaching. Limitations of language and exclusion have convinced Rose that no “Truth” is objective and final. Conversational sermons are offered to the community for their additions, corrections, and counterproposals.

 

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Rose engages first with traditional Homiletics. After outlining its main aspects, she brings up her responses to it:      

1)     TradHom creates and undesired gap between preacher and congregation. Rose prefers solidarity and mutuality in the sermonic process.

2)     The sermon shouldn’t be filled with answers from the normative power of preaching, rooted in traditional homiletics.

3)     We live in a time where words grasp and convey reality no more, since words can be disconnected from their original meaning. New understanding of language and sermonic language enter the conversation.

4)     Traditional homiletics is too rational, forgetting to value de imaginative and mysterious dimensions of the Word of God.

 

Next, she engages with Kerygmatic Preaching, which is a both/and: transmission of the kerygma and the event of God’s speaking. God speaks through the preacher, which widens the gap between preacher and congregation. Kerygma both defines and creates faith, with a set of statements and saving activity of God. It is not just the communication of an intellectual message, but an event that brings salvation and sanctification. The kerygma, the core of the Gospel, cannot change.

Responding to Kerygmatic preaching, Rose finds essentially the same problems she raised with TradHom, especially the gap between pulpit and the pew, power, and authority, and matters of language and form.

The third homiletical movement analyzed by Rose is what she calls Transformational voices – an umbrella that welcomes a variety of claims of shared convictions in preaching. The primary purpose here is to facilitate an experience, an event, a meeting or a happening for the worshippers. There’s a shift from the God-side to the human-side of the sermon proposing a complete transformation. Its content is focused on existential truths (the hearer’s situation before God), with a shift from epistemology to hermeneutics. The Word is not primarily restricted to the Bible anymore. The truth is known in a “living existential person-to-person relationship”. In this field there is a sense of an eroding confidence that theology can provide preaching’s content. God’s Word, revelation and sermonic truth are fleeting and fragmented. The focus is on the change of the human situation created by the words. And the preacher’s first task is to experience the Word. The second is to recreate for the congregation what the preacher has experienced.

Here Rose turns, again, to questions of hierarchy, power, and language to highlight her disagreements with this field in Homiletics, which are supplied with her definition of “Marginal voices around the Table.

Rose adds her take on a path into a Homiletical approach, which she calls “Marginal voices crowd around the table”.  Here, preaching’s aim week after week to gather the community of faith around the Word to focus and refocus its Partnership between preacher and congregation. Since all languages are limited and biased, preaching’s aim is not to transmit a message, but it is like a poem.  Preaching should show people how to make sense of their lives.

Rose proposes a conversational understanding of preaching. The primary assumption is that the preacher is not the one-in-the-know, but he is at the same level of the parishioners,

The clergy should relinquish their monopoly of the pulpit since the right of preaching derives from Baptism (Schussler Fiorenza). The relationship between Preaching and power is a core underlining concept. Shared preaching is up against power and patriarchy.

Five characteristics at the heart of conversational preaching; It is communal, non-hierarchical, personal, inclusive, and Scriptural.

The language here is both confessional and generative of multiple meanings. The word of God is better understood by the powerless (Gonzalez and Gonzalez). The content of the sermon cannot be reduced to a formula otherwise, there would be no need for sermons. It needs to remain an open construction. It is a tentative interpretation of a biblical text and of God’s activity in the world as meaning that makes life bearable and worthwhile.

 

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My feeling reading Rose’s book is that it has good questions and suggestions but framed in an insecure ground. Framed under a more confessional framework they can be useful for the Lutheran Preaching experience, from my point of view.

For example, the reduction of the gap between the pulpit and the pew. My understanding is that Lutheran pastors don’t need to rely on that gap for the authority in ministry. Preaching as one who is made of the same matter as those in the pews does not take away his authority as called and ordained. “People admire your talents, but hey love your mistakes", because they can see your humanity.

Another example is the effort to make the sermon a more conversational experience even if people don’t actually say anything out loud, but if the pastor acts as if he is listening to their voices.

Some of Rose’s responses to the homiletical theories are helpful as food for thought. For example, when she writes against the grandeur of every sermon as a saving event. And her reflections about the gathering at Church in an individual perspective versus a communal one.

 

4

Rose’s work is on a different side of the Homiletical conversation of that of Lutherans. One of her problems is the confusion between Theological Knowledge and the Pastoral Office. A preacher preaches not because he knows more than everyone else, but because he was called from among the people of God preach and teach.

The core of the problems with Rose’ approach lays in that preaching practice based on sharing experiences in faith and hope, which does not fully rely on the objective truth of the Word, disconnects itself from the power of the Word that enables preaching and the preacher. It places people in a context that could be likened to a group dynamic, an AA meeting, or a coaching event. As much as it strives to maintain a “Divine-human” conversation, it falls almost solely on the “human-human” category because it lacks objective ground to establish the conversation and for the emphasis of listeners reaching “their own conclusions”. In John 8:32 Jesus is clear affirming that remaining in the Word we are disciples, and we get to know the truth. Claiming that truth is always partial and needs to be worked together in the sermon is an unsafe, even incorrect way to set out the homiletical task, since Jesus himself assured us that we will know the Truth as we remain in His Word.

In the analysis of the antagonism between autonomy and solidarity to reclaim a form other than the traditional homiletics, Rose resorts to sociological authors that analyze solidarity and autonomy from bottom up, that means, they tend to put preaching under the scrutiny of human sciences. It sounds more like a political manifesto against authority. The homiletical task, however, moves from top to bottom, in the sense that the activity of preaching creates both autonomy and solidarity by the Power of the Holy Spirit in action. In that sense, a confusion between Holy Ministry and Royal Priesthood leads to an exacerbated criticism of the distance between the pulpit and the pew and a progressive view against authority and hierarchy.

As a final comment, Rose’s book stems from a sociological ideological perspective of a progressive feminist theology, which militates against power and hierarchy. This comes with a price and in this case, which is undermining Theology and Preaching's only solid and permanent ground they can be built upon – the Objective Truth of the Revelation in Scriptures