RITUAL REVIVAL FOR PLAYFUL PROTESTANT PREACHING

10 Adorno, 25.

11 Edward Farley, Practicing Gospel: Unconventional Thoughts on the Church's Ministry (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 81. Farley's key contribution to the field of homiletics is his argument for nonbiblicist preaching. The problem he perceives is the prevalent "bridge" paradigm in which the preacher's task is to bridge the gap between our age and that of the biblical text (this problem has its roots in a Barthian understanding of preaching that will be discussed later). Farley's argument here is based on his "distinction between scripture and the world of the gospel." While the Bible holds essential clues for discerning the gospel, one's task is to preach gospel, not Bible. Gospel preaching, as differentiated from biblicist preaching, is characterized by "the disruption of the world of the congregation under the hopeful expectation of redemption." My use of the term "gospel" throughout this paper follows Parley's definition. Thomas G. Long and Edward Farley, eds., Preaching as a Theological Task: World, Gospel, Scripture: Essays in Honor of David Buttrick (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 165, 170, 174.

12 Ibid., 81.

13 Garry Wills, Bare Ruined Choirs: Doubt, Prophecy, and Radical Religion (New York: Dell, 1971), 259.

14 Peter John Gomes employs this language in his Cole lecture "The Bible: The Development of an American Book" (Vanderbilt University Divinity School; Nashville, Tennessee; November 2004). While certainly there is a time and place for pastoral, pietistic, and "care of the soul" preaching, why should we allow these forms to dominate our pulpits when the majority of Jesus's preaching carried a more radical and subversive tone?

15 Michael Warren, At This Time, In This Place: The Spirit Embodied in the Local Assembly (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1999), 118.

16 Niebuhr, 194.

17 Gene Bartlett, The Audacity of Preaching: The Lyman Beecher Lectures, Yale Divinity School 1961 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), 37.

18 Karl Barth, Homiletics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991), 8.

19 Ibid., 76.

20 Jeffrey Stout, Ethics after Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 60, 69.

21 Ibid., 94.

22 See Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 97-99, for an in-depth discussion of the role of religious language in public life.

23 Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 49.

24 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993). I am indebted to Wilson Dickinson's reading of Milbank here. Dickinson notes that one of Milbank's errors seems to be that he equates peace with order. The peaceable kingdom is thus one of order and discipline, one in which violence, understood as a kind of diversity, is eradicated.

25 Stout, Ethics after Babel, 291-92.

26 Ibid., 198.