GIVING SCRIPTURE ITS VOICE: THE TENSIVE IMPERTINENCE OF THE LITERAL SENSE OF THE PERICOPE, METAPHORICAL MEANING-MAKING, AND PREACHING THE WORD OF GOD. A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF EMMANUEL COLLEGE AND THE PASTORAL DEPARTMENT OF THE TORONTO SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF THEOLOGY AWARDED BY EMMANUEL COLLEGE OF VICTORIA UNIVERSITY AND THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO. BY HENRY JOHN LANGKNECHT COLUMBUS, OHIO APRIL 2008 © HENRY J. 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Canada Unless otherwise specified, all biblical quotes are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used by permission. All rights reserved. To Shirla, Adam, and Jake ABSTRACT This dissertation will argue for a homiletical hermeneutic that starts with the pre- referential literal sense of the pericope. Such a hermeneutic will a) preserve the affirmation that the word that God speaks to us through the pericope is a living Word from God; b) affirm that every encounter with Scripture is potentially revelatory and new; c) overcome the temptation to favor settled, received, or accommodated meanings; and d) move candidly, clearly, and persuasively from the pericope (in the context of liturgy and audience), through a metaphorical process to reference, identification, meaning, and revelation. This approach to the pericope is simultaneously unapologetic and apologetic: unapologetic in that the pericope is not stripped peremptorily of its potential oddness, offense, or particularity; apologetic in the sense that the preacher's management of the movement from the literal sense of the pericope to homiletical reference and meaning is open, clear, and fully acknowledges the diverse, disparate entities gathered at the homiletical roundtable. Further, this dissertation experiments with the metaphor of the preacher as a "performing book reviewer" who, like any reviewer of books, knows and is committed to the significance of the text and also wishes to be instrumental in managing the conversation between that text and his or her audience. The sermon, in a way analogous to a book review, imagines and responds to the conversation that unfolds as pericope, liturgy, and worshipers encounter one another in the reading of Scripture and the preaching inspired by it. CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vi Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION 1 2. METAPHOR AND THE INTERPRETATION OF TEXTS 26 3. THE LITERAL SENSE 48 4. CONTEMPORARY TREATMENTS OF THE LITERAL SENSE: HISTORICAL, LITERARY, AND THEOLOGICAL 78 5. THE LITERAL SENSE AND MEANING-MAKING 103 6. THE BIBLE AND NORTH AMERICAN HOMILETICS PART ONE: COGNITIVE AND EXPERIENTIAL HOMILETICS 127 7. THE BIBLE AND NORTH AMERICAN HOMILETICS PART TWO: EVENTFUL HOMILETICS 164 8. A HOMILETIC OF SURPRISE 192 Appendix .....233 Reference List 240 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and final thanks to our blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for my life, my community, my vocation, and the gift of adventure- and terror-filled freedom in Christ. I rejoice for all the days when God was able to draw me forward into the adventure of that freedom in order to claim my calling; I ask God's forgiveness for all the days when I resisted because the terror of it overwhelmed me. I am grateful to the entire community of Trinity Lutheran Seminary who called me, an academically untested parish pastor, to teaching ministry and who supported my doctoral studies, and has made generous bits of space available to me (including a sabbatical year) so that I could work on this dissertation. Special thanks to Bob and Carolyn Haman whose generous support of the seminary and vision in providing funding for the Haman-Pfahler Chair in Homiletics and Christian Communication were instrumental in bringing me to this point. I am fortunate to have had Dr. Paul Scott Wilson as doctoral and thesis advisor; even more fortunate to have had him as mentor, colleague, and friend. And thanks to my family, my wife Shirla and my enigmatic and brilliant sons Adam and Jake for following me as I followed this. I trust that the cost of the time and energy that I diverted from you toward this work is balanced by the fact that we enjoyed the journey together. VI The viewer paints the picture, The reader writes the book, The glutton gives the tart its taste, And not the pastry cook. Allen Kurzweil, The Grand Complication CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Before the preacher preaches in the Christian worship assembly, Scripture is read. The reading may be a single verse chosen by the preacher, it may be an extended passage from a biblical book picking up where the preacher left off last week, or the reading may be in the form of three or four peri copes assigned by a lectionary. In any event, Scripture is read; read because it is God's Word for us and is trusted to be an authoritative reflection on and witness to God's ongoing will for the cosmos. How Scripture comes to be God's Word and how its authority is educed and applied are ongoing matters of conversation and debate across the time and space of the Church catholic. That Scripture is read in some relationship to Christian preaching is a near universal. So, when the Christian preacher rises to preach in relationship to the just-read Bible passage and in that preaching to make assertions about God and God's activity in the world, there is an expectation on the part of hearers, and presumably on the part of the preacher, that such assertions are not only "meaningful but true,"1 that they will refer to the hearers' "real world" in a way that is comprehensible and existentially rich. In fact, there is a double expectation of meaningful reference in the biblically grounded sermon: not only do hearers expect the words of the preacher to make meaningful reference to the world in which they live, 1 James Fodor, Christian Hermeneutics: Paul Ricoeur and the Refiguring of Theology, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 1. 1 2 they also expect the words of the Bible itself to be meaningful and true, or at least to be made meaningful and true in the preaching—language and life, word and world, are expected to correlate. The Problems It is this second expectation, of the Bible's capacity to refer to the real world, that is the more important and the more difficult. It is important, at least in most Protestant traditions, because in various ways the Bible is confessed to be the "only rule and norm according to which all doctrines and teachers alike must be appraised and judged."2 It is difficult for many reasons, two of which are of interest to me. The first has to do with the shortcomings of two means of articulating the Bible's meaning that dominated Protestant hermeneutics for preaching well into the latter part of the twentieth century (and continue their influence today): literalism and interpretation rooted in historical critical methods. The second difficulty has to do with the practical reality that what is read prior to the sermon in the context of worship is never the whole of Scripture or even a whole book of Scripture—rarely is it even a complete chapter of a book. What is read is a portion, a nuance, a sliver. Admittedly, there are times when a single verse of Scripture can be accommodated more easily than the chapter, book, or canon from which it is taken.3 But it is also true that single verses or passages present difficulties when removed from the context of longer development, plot, or argument. The Bible is a diverse collection of writings of various genres (among them history, legal 2 Theodore Tappert, ed. and trans. The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959), 464.