A text that redescribes

Theology Today, Jan 2002 by Brueggemann, Walter

THE CHANCE OF THE PREACHER

The chance of the preacher, at this juncture in our common life, is crucial-as it has not been in a long time-precisely because the dominant texts are failing. It is sad for a trusted text to fail, sad to watch while people continue to act it out in its failure:

It would be a shame and a pity if we mark the failure of all these old texts and did not notice that the text of self-invention and self-sufficiency that engenders fearful selfishness is also failing among us. The beneficiaries of that old text have huge muscle among us and include most of us; but it has failed.

It is a task of the church-with synagogue and mosque-to offer this countertext of generosity, fidelity, and neighborliness. It is the chance of the preacher to permit people to give up old, failed textual construals and to reimagine and redescribe by this countertext. It is our human work to "switch texts," and we do not do that easily. We do not do it unless the alternative text is visible, credible, and available.

Moses said:

I set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity... choose life. (Deut 30:15, 19)

Jesus said:

Enter through the narrow gate . . . for the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it .... Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. (Matt 7:13-14, 24)

And Matthew added:

Now when Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority and not as their scribes. (Matt 7:28-29)

What an authority given us in doxological memory, oracles of promise, and summons to alternative! It is an oddness entrusted to us. The technical "speak" of a computer lacks the thickness we require to be human. That thickness must come from preachers who love and live in this odd text.

ABSTRACT

This paper reflects on the church's engagement with the biblical text and the emergency in the church when the church is inattentive to the biblical text. It considers the impact of the modern interpretive period in the church's loss of the text and ponders what the church's recovery of the text might entail. The large theological sweep of the biblical text is seen as an offer of reality profoundly alternative to the dominant scripting of reality in our society. Particular attention is paid to the peculiar opportunity of the preacher-pastor in lining out an alternative scripting of reality vouched for in this text.

1 George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia, Westminster, 1984).

2Gerhard von Rad, "The Problem of the Hexateuch," The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (London: SCM, 1966).

3Patrick D. Miller, Deuteronomy (Louisville: John Knox, 1990).

Walter Brueggemann is William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA. He presented an earlier version of this article at the Reclaiming the Text Conference in Montreat, NC in the summer of 2000.