The death of a paradigm - modernity's self-assurance

I have never spent much time among the Lutherans in the limitations of my career, for New England was very stony soil for Lutheranism and your ancestors, and there are very few seeds that survived even to sprout, let alone to become trees. Clearly I was deprived. So, when the Lutheran chaplain at Harvard--who is really a missionary who brings the Lutheran gospel to a place which hasn't heard it before--persuaded me that it would be good for me to do this Hein Fry thing, I accepted. I like new opportunities, challenging contexts, and venturing to foreign lands, and I said I'd do it.

Only then did I ask what it was that I was to do, and I discovered that I was to visit four of the eight Lutheran seminaries and to hold forth under the auspices of this foundation on the subject "Biblical Preaching in Babel." Also I discovered that Barbara Lundblad, whom I do not know well but happened to have had preach for me last year, was also going to do this.

At first I imagined all sorts of scenarios, none of which turned out to be the case. I thought that maybe she and I were coming together, and that she'd do one and I'd do the other; maybe she was Hein and I was Fry, and we would do a little hand-off. Then I discovered that that was not to be the case, and I said, "Well, maybe she goes first and I come to correct her after that," and I discovered that that was not to be the case either. She has gone to your other four seminaries. In some sense it is the proper Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, plus Johann Sebastian Bach; and I think if I were you I would be very grateful to be Bach in that quartet.

I am delighted to be a part of this, and I understand the task that is before me, which is to try to make sense both of the title and of the lecture description which others have written for me. We all know the curse of the title. We Baptists are keen on sermon titles--I don't know whether or not you Lutherans use them, but we are keen--because only if we can give it a title do we know what it is we are talking about.

The title that has been given to this series is "Biblical Preaching in Babel: Preaching in a Post-Christian World," and there is a set of questions that this brochure poses, which I trust you have seen, which Professor Lundblad and I are to deal with in one way or another. I actually am going to try to do that. Here are your questions. I didn't formulate them, but I shall certainly try to answer them.

1. What does genuinely Christian preaching look like in this extraordinary, complex cultural and linguistic situation?

2. What challenges must be addressed? (This is the subject of the present lecture.)

3. What dangers threaten in this context and what new resources and opportunities does this situation present? (That is the subject for the next lecture.)

Now, you may wonder, to what situation do these formulations refer? They refer to the first paragraph of your brochure:

One feature of contemporary life that indicates that we live in post-Christendom is the fact that a preacher cannot suppose that her hearers generally share a broad familiarity with the Bible. Few of its stories are common currency, much of its vocabulary rings strange in many ears, and a great number of persons never or only rarely employ its declarations, themes, and images in interpreting their lives and the world. The preacher today cannot presume that they all speak any common language, large migrations have mixed formerly isolated groups, and rapid change has so differentiated generations that even many small-town communities are now astonishingly diverse. The supplanting of mass media by niche media, such as 200-channel cable television and the Internet, makes it less likely that people share common experiences and stories. The great question is, in that context, in that setting, how does one preach, and how does one preach biblically, if in fact we are speaking different languages and often languages in conflict with one another?

So, it is to the dilemmas, the challenges, the opportunities of biblical preaching in what this paradigm describes as a "post-Christian world," that the formulations refer.

Well, I want to challenge the paradigm, which is why I have called this first lecture "The Death of a Paradigm," and I hope to exhume the paradigm, examine it, perform a proper autopsy on it, and then give the paradigm a decent burial so that we might get on to other matters.

I have to address, however, the question straight on, and the assumption behind it is that "post-Christian" means that nobody speaks our language; that is, nobody has the shared experiences or expectations or vocabulary which our ancestors, our predecessors, could have presupposed. The second assumption of that paradigm is that nobody is interested in our language, that what we say and what we write is of no particular consequence to anybody in general or in particular. We preachers are, in effect, literally speaking in someone else's sleep, and as a result of that we are continuing to use the same images, languages, and theorems that we have always used, but it is as if people are overhearing what we are saying in a badly-remembered foreign language.