What's Good about This News? Preaching from the Gospels and Galatians

Theology Today, Oct 2004 by Brown, Sally A

What's Good about This News? Preaching from the Gospels and Galatians By David L. Bartlett Louisville, Westminster John Knox, 2003. 136 pp. $16.95.

In this book based on his 2001 Lyman Beecher lectures, David Bartlett, professor of homiletics and Dean of Academic Affairs at Yale University Divinity School, explores how contextual issues shaped a particular understanding of the gospel for five biblical writers-Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul (in Galatians)-and then projects how these understandings may be played forward into preaching today. Bartlett's aim is to open preachers' eyes and ears to the distinctive shapes and sounds of the good news as expressed by each of these biblical writers for particular contexts and in response to a specific array of issues.

"Preaching," says Bartlett, "is always good news," yet he reminds us that "what the good news looks like and how we respond to that good news" differs, depending on what is at stake in the setting where it is announced. What makes Bartlett's book important reading for every preaching pastor is his insistence that the church's testimony to Jesus Christ is multivocal, not univocal. He reminds us that, as we wander from church door to church door on a Sunday morning, we can expect to hear a polyphonic gospel shaped by a polyphonic biblical witness. God's "happy announcement" will not be a dogged reiteration of a single theological mantra or evangelical slogan. Faithful gospel preaching is occasional and context-specific, taking many rhetorical and theological forms.

Bartlett persuades, not by shouting at us, but simply by doing what a good biblical scholar does: He pays attention to the text and invites us to look over his shoulder while he does so. We learn how the social and religious tensions within the communities to which various books were probably addressed influenced, not only the rhetorical strategies of each text, but shaped as well what counted, theologically, as God's good news. Bartlett's Good Friday sermon on a Johannine text demonstrates well how preaching may be shaped by a particular understanding of the good news. With simple directness, he identifies the paradox of loss and victory that lies at the heart of John's Gospel and invites us to discover with Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman the costs and possibilities of that paradox in our own lives.

Bartlett tests the parameters of "gospel" in the New Testament from beginning to end, in the conviction that, ultimately, the gospel is neither our good news, nor Paul's, Matthew's, nor John's. It is God's good news; and in all of its forms, it is news that changes the world. Yet, some pastors and the congregations they serve may find Bartlett's reading both of the biblical text and contemporary ecclesial life too narrowly focused on white/Anglo/mainline-Protestant concerns and, at points, insufficiently critical. Apart from a sermonic allusion, Bartlett skirts the vexed question of the identity of the group designated by the epithet "the Jews" in John's Gospel-a matter of no little import for understanding what really counts as good news in John, and for whom. Similarly, Bartlett notes the "dualism of decision" in Matthew and John but says little about the controls that need to be in place, lest such rhetoric become a warrant for preaching that too confidently sorts the world into the godly and the ungodly, insiders and outsiders to God's redemptive purpose. One also wishes Bartlett had turned his considerable acumen and creativity to the question of whether preaching today demands new expressions of "gospel" beyond those envisioned by biblical writers. Might new visions of the good news emerge, shaped not only rhetorically but theologically by questions characteristic of postmodernity?

This book belongs in seminary classrooms and adult education forums, as well as pastors' studies. The book's format is compact but the scholarship by no means thin, with notes sufficient to steer readers who wish to delve further into textual and theological issues. Seminarians and inquiring lay readers will welcome Bartlett's invitation to test the relevance of a distinctively Matthean or Johannine or Lukan vision of the gospel for today's church. Bartlett invites every student of Bible and preaching to that invigorating place where the multiple worlds of the text and those of Sunday morning congregations meet, overlap, collide, and blend.

SALLY A. BROWN

Princeton Theological Seminary

Princeton, NJ