Musings from an Accidental Preacher
I’ve heard from quite a few folks that they wanted to access the session today but found it full. Stan and I are sorry to have disappointed you. Our Duke Zoom webinar license only permitted 500 attendees. We’re working on finding a better solution for next week and the weeks following. In the meantime, I’ve got the video of the session up on my fledgling YouTube channel:
Additionally, we’ve compiled a list of the questions folks asked for you to peruse:
Hope you can join us next week!
–Will
Stanley and I have decided to extend our Reading Barth Together webinar series (which begins Tuesday at 10am) for a fifth session on the Local Church and Dogmatics in Outline. We’ll be joined on the panel by some pastors who have used the book in Confirmation classes among other settings. We’ll focus our reflection together around how Dogmatics in Outline might be used in the future for the edification of the Body of Christ and as always take some questions from attendees. This final meeting will be on the first Tuesday in June (6/2/2020) at the same time and at the same link. I’ve reposted the webinar details below.
Hope you’ll join us on these Tuesdays,
—Will
Reading Barth Together
Schedule:
https://duke.zoom.us/j/97672236970
Webinar ID: 976 7223 6970
I’m happy to announce that I’ll be giving the 2020 Beecher Lectures and that Abingdon Press is going to be publishing the lectures in book form as Preachers Dare.
This was the Divinity School Press Release:
William H. Willimon, professor of the practice of Christian ministry at Duke Divinity School and a retired United Methodist bishop, has been invited to give the 2020 lectures for The Lyman Beecher Lectureship, the most prestigious and historic lectureship on preaching in America.
Willimon was invited to give this year’s lectures Oct. 14-16 by Yale Divinity School Dean Gregory E. Sterling, on behalf of the faculty. Yale Divinity School’s historic lectureship, which begins with a convocation and processional, began in 1871.
“I’m honored to be giving these lectures at the divinity school that prepared me for ministry five decades ago,” said Willimon, who earned his M.Div. degree at Yale. “It’s my opportunity to express my gratitude to Yale Divinity School on the fiftieth anniversary of my graduation. I plan to emphasize preaching as a theological endeavor in which God speaks to God’s people. To prepare, I’ve gone back and read or listened to all the Beecher Lectures for the past fifty years. I’m honored to be in this company of great preachers.”
The theme for Willimon’s lectures is “Preachers Dare” and will be inspired by theologian Karl Barth’s theology lectures in Germany in the 1920’s. The Beecher Lectures by Willimon will be published by Abingdon Press later this fall in the book Preachers Dare: Speaking for God.
“My lectures will stress the centrality of preaching as if God matters,” said Willimon, who recently published the book Leading with the Sermon: Preaching as Leadership. “I will try to show why preaching is the most significant theological endeavor of the church, the main purpose of pastors, and how theology is preaching’s most important guide and critic.”
In recent years, the Duke Divinity School faculty has accumulated an impressive record of presenting The Lyman Beecher Lectures. Previously giving the lectures were: Charles Campbell, James T. and Alice Mead Cleland Professor of Homiletics (2018); Ellen Davis, Amos Ragan Kearns Professor of Bible and Practical Theology (2003); and Richard Lischer, James T. and Alice Mead Cleland Professor Emeritus of Preaching (1999).
Prior to his current position, Willimon served for 20 years as a faculty member at Duke Divinity School and as dean of Duke Chapel at Duke University. He also served as bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the UMC.
Willimon’s ties to Yale Divinity School also run strong and deep. He was the first to receive Yale Divinity School’s Distinguished Alumnus award. Willimon and his wife, Patsy, have established a scholarship endowment for students at the school that gives preference to students who come there from Wofford College, where Willimon earned a B.A. degree. He earned his S.T.D. degree at Emory University.
Earlier this year, when Willimon’s memoir, Accidental Preacher, was published, Duke Divinity School Dean L. Gregory Jones hailed the book as “a remarkable portrait of the excitement of ordained Christian ministry as a vocation.” Luke Powery, dean of Duke Chapel, in his endorsement called Willimon “a Jesus-loving, story-telling, truth-talking, laugh-generating gift from God for the church.”
In March 2000, First Things asked a variety of folks to name which theological books of the twentieth century “made a lasting mark,” so Stanley named Barth’s Dogmatics in Outline, recommending that it be read yearly. If you’re planning to attend our Reading Barth Together series of webinars in May, this little encomium may pair well with Ralph’s series of discussion question to help you read Barth’s wonderful little book.
Copyright (c) 2000 First Things 101 (March 2000): 46-47.
Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (1947)
By Stanley Hauerwas
In 1946, standing amid the ruins of Bonn University, Karl Barth gave the lectures that we now know as Dogmatics in Outline. He lectured without a script, because as he tells us, the “primitive conditions which I met with in Germany made it absolutely necessary for me to ‘talk’ instead of to ‘read.’” In fact Barth says it was impossible for him to be only an academic teacher (which he confesses came easy since he had never been that). But rather he had to be a kind of missionary, Sunday School teacher, and popular orator. Yet the result was and is a beautiful book that witnesses to the God who alone gives us hope that we can live in a world in which war is not assumed to be a given.
First Things, I assume, is committed to the proposition that God matters for all that is matter. That God, moreover, is not just any god, but the God who has made Himself known to us in Israel and Jesus Christ. It is not easy to speak well of such a God in a world that might assume God is but another piece in the metaphysical furniture of the universe. Even the most “orthodox” in such a world often discover that in spite of themselves, their speech about God turns out to be speech that serves to underwrite idolatry. Dogmatics in Outline is Barth’s short, but intense, course in how to speak of God in a world that has lost the habits of faithful Christian speech.
When he delivered the lectures in Bonn, Barth was sixty years old and he was working on the third volume of the Church Dogmatics. Barth lectured extemporaneously, but the words he spoke were ones that could come only from a life of struggle with the Bible. Indeed, one of the attractions of Dogmatics in Outline—in form, a commentary on the Apostles’ Creed—is that it really is an outline of Barth’s much larger Church Dogmatics. In the “Foreword” to the paperback edition of these lectures, Barth expresses some concern that some may try to substitute the reading of Dogmatics in Outline for the Dogmatics. Anyone who would do so he condemns by quoting Paul—”If any one will not work, let him not eat.”
Barth understood that recovering Christian speech is work and it is a work that the world literally cannot live without. The heart of Barth’s theol ogy is the presumption that if we get God wrong, we get everything wrong—our politics, our science, our art, our very lives. Moreover, he thought the wars that had wracked this century were the result of our making ourselves rather than God the beginning and end of existence. Dogmatics in Outline, indeed the whole of the Dogmatics, was Barth’s attempt to help us regain the language adequate to our situation as creatures created to praise our Creator and thus capable of living at peace with one another.
Barth coyly observes, “A Christian Father once rightly said that Deus non est in genere, ‘God is not a particular instance within a class.’” That “Father” was, of course, Thomas Aquinas; and Barth, in spite of his attack on natural theology, knew he shared far more with Aquinas than he did with many Protestant theologians. Barth, like Aquinas, knew that God is God and we are not, and (also like Aquinas) took on the hard task of helping recover the grammar of the God Who is Trinity. Barth thought this work important because it cannot help but force men to speak and live precisely. For to say that “Jesus is Lord” overturns the presumption that we, not God, rule the world.
Consider, for example, Barth’s claim: “Men are timeless when we are without God and without Christ. Then we have no time. But this timelessness he has overcome. Christ has time, the fullness of time. He sitteth at the right hand of God as he who has come, who has acted and suffered and triumphed in death. His session at God’s right hand is not just the extract of this history; it is the eternal within this history.” Accordingly Christians need not leap Lessing’s ditch separating the necessary truths justified by reason from the claims of faith justified only by history and tradition. Our God’s history “is indeed an accidental truth of history.” Our task is not to try to fit God into our histories, but rather to understand the good news that God has made us part of His history.
God’s history, moreover, cannot be told or lived without the living presence of the Jews: “If as Christians we thought that church and synagogue no longer affected one another, everything would be lost.” Barth’s comment about the Jews is not an attempt to “make up” for the destruction of the Jews but rather a reminder to Christians that Hitler’s hatred of the Jews must be read as a judgment on our unfaithfulness to our Lord. Our recognition that our God is the Lord of history requires that we recognize that Jesus was “of necessity a Jew. . . . The problem of Israel is—since the problem of Christ is inseparable from it—the problem of existence as such. The man who is ashamed of Israel is ashamed of Jesus Christ and therefore of his own existence.”
In the midst of his lectures at Bonn, Barth was asked if he was aware that many of the people at the lectures were not Christians. With his usual good humor and the sheer joy he found in theology freely done, Barth responded, “It makes no difference to me.” Theology becomes a burden only when we take our unbelief seriously. Only faith is to be taken seriously—a faith, moreover, that recognizes that “we are not nearer to believing in God the Creator than we are to believing that Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. It is not the case that the truth about God the Creator is directly accessible to us and that only the truth of the second article needs a revelation.” In both cases we are faced by the mystery of God and the recognition that our existence is the work of grace.
That God and man have become one in Jesus Christ, however, has made through Christ’s ascension not only the possibility but the necessity of the visible witnesses in the world called Church. Barth knew such witnesses could not help but appear in the world as “strangely human persons.” How could we not but appear strange, believing as we do that we are timeless, if God has not in fact redeemed us in Christ? Just to the extent that those committed to the witness of First Things might be tempted to forget our strangeness, I can think of no better reminder than a yearly reading of Dogmatics in Outline.
Stanley Hauerwas is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Theological Ethics at Duke University.
With the Reading Barth Together webinar series with Stanley Hauerwas and me set to begin next Tuesday (hope you’ll join us), my friend Ralph Wood, one of our finest scholars of theology and literature, shared with me a set of questions related to Dogmatics in Outline. Now I share them with you to help stimulate and guide your reading of Barth. Ralph has labored heroically to bring Karl Barth’s work to undergraduate students over the years.
Formulated by Ralph Wood
Baylor University, Waco, Texas 76798
In a forthcoming review essay in The Christian Century on a reclamation of gracious preaching as the core Protestant practice, my friend Jason Micheli includes the following friendly words about Accidental Preacher:
Will Willimon, in his highly theological memoir Accidental Preacher (Eerdmans), exemplifies the self-effacing humor and playfulness of someone whose life down here on earth has been hijacked by the presence of a talkative God.
Accidental Preacher—accidental in the sense of fortuitous and serendipitous—illustrates the way the loquacious God of Protestant theology is also necessarily a living God at work in the world. A God who gives Christ to us through proclamation must also be a God who works by vocation, electing and grabbing hold of conversation partners called preachers. And because the only candidates God has available are reluctant sinners like us, God has no choice but to be a God of grace.
Willimon weaves together memories—from his episcopacy and preaching ministry, but also from his growing up with a con-artist father and as a white boy amid the unfettered racism of the Jim Crow South—so that together they present a kind of coda to Mark’s cliffhanger Easter story. God is alive and at work in the world, the memoir shows, just as in Willimon’s own life God has been on the prowl. “My curriculum vitae is a string of incursions,” Willimon observes, “when unexpectedly, often belatedly, I discovered that I was being pursued by a God who refuses to take no for an answer.”
If Forde helps preachers to reflect on the nature of their craft, Willimon demonstrates how ordinary Christians might go about theological reflection. Writing about a Methodist youth retreat he attended as a teenager, Willimon sees that he was, fortuitously, paired with a black youth from his own town. “Does it bother you that there are laws that separate us, keep you in your place and me in mine?” the teenager, Charles, asks Will one night. Willimon, in his context of unexamined racism, hadn’t been bothered by it until that moment. About their ensuing night-long conversation, Willimon confesses, “I had my world skillfully cracked open [by God], exposed, infinitely expanded and disrupted.”
In just this way, Accidental Preacher is a gift not only for those who proclaim the gospel but for those who receive it. It models with wit and humor how we all might go about discerning the cracks the living God creates in our world. Once we’ve been exposed and infinitely expanded, there is still the question of how this divine disruption reorients us toward our neighbors.
If the gift of Christ makes God’s forgiveness ours, as Martin Luther so compellingly showed, then we should be freed to love our neighbors as our neighbors rather than as the objects of our anxious quest for enoughness. But does this Protestant piety of the word actually lead to works of love, or does it provide an attractive rationalization for believers to avoid them?
If the latter, perhaps the deficiency is less in Protestant theology than in its reliance upon the writings of the apostle Paul.
The Christian Century, 5/20/20, pp.28-29
–Will
Just as Donald Trump was endorsing inoculation against COVID-19 with bleach, and then lied about what he said, Albert Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, joined Rod Dreher and Jerry Falwell Jr. in endorsing Trump for a second term. While Mohler didn’t vote for Trump the first time around, Mohler said that he now shares Trump’s worldview, even if he is occasionally “frustrated” by him.
When some evangelicals pushed back, wondering if Mohler had paid too high a price for dinner at the White House, Daniel Strand – an assistant professor at the USAF Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama – defended him in the Institute on Religion and Democracy’s online magazine Providence under the headline, “Evangelicals Need More Pragmatism and Less Moralism.” [1] Strand is thrilled that evangelical leaders like Mohler are at last abandoning their naive “over-moralizing of politics.”
Strand has done graduate work in ethics and knows that “Politics is more than ethics…. Ethics and character are part of the equation, but only a part.” Which part? (Karl Barth, when asked to define sin, replied, “A PhD in ethics.”)
“I want my politicians to be moral but also effective. I want them to have character but also competency, understanding, and skill….” For the first time in history somebody has connected “competency, understanding, and skill” with Trump. Professor, check out your claim of Trumpian competence with a nurse or grocery store worker.
Strand praises the Donald’s “track record on judicial appointments and defense of religious liberty.” Though “Compromise is a dirty word these days,” Strand can show you how.
Strand says that “character” isn’t all that it’s made out to be. Abraham Lincoln despite “enjoying a recent resurgence of love and admiration, was not above political chicanery and tricks,” Strand says. “But when Trump does this more brazenly and brashly, we are told this is unprecedented and a corruption of politics.” Strand may be a better Christian than I am if he can forgive Trump for buying his way out of the Army when Trump and I were students during Vietnam. (I didn’t. I don’t.)
Strand admits that Trump is not “without major flaws,” But quibbling about Trump’s lies, adultery, racism, or corruption overlooks that by appointing the right people to the Supreme Court he has saved “the lives of hundreds of thousands of children.” To quibble about Trump’s character just “shows how narrow-minded moral politics can make us.”
Chiding all the narrow-minded fellow Evangelicals who make such a big deal over adultery, serial divorce, prostitution, lying, racism, caging kids, cozying up to the Russians, and shady business deals, Strand says, “Evangelicals need to move away from moralistic politics.” He then scolds Evangelicals for believing that, “Republican politicians were the sole possessors of ‘virtue’ or ‘character’…. They are flawed human beings, like the rest of us, and Christians need to reject this sort of hyper-moralizing tendency,” building to the whopper, “Christians need to get a big fat dose of realism.” Reinhold Niebuhr would be shocked to know that his “Christian realism” is now used by the Evangelicals (whom he despised) to jettison historic Christian moral virtues.
“What we need is a principled pragmatism…. We can work with morally flawed people…. The perfect is the enemy of the good.” (John Wesley is rolling over in his grave.) “If we are people who understand that we are fallen sinners, then this should be no problem.” “All the handwringing about Trump is tiresome…. Character matters, but it’s not all that matters.”
When Trump jilted the government and all of those veterans out of their money in Trump University, maybe he wouldn’t have lost his case if he had defended himself on grounds of realism. “I’m not a crook; I’m a pragmatist!”.
Call me an old-fashioned, narrow-minded, unrealistic, idealistic, moralizing Evangelical. If a man will lie to his wife and family, he will lie to the voters. If someone bears false witness against immigrant families at the border, who knows what he’ll say about my family? Ironic that there are those who for the sake of opposing abortion will lay aside all ethical concerns and support the man who may be the only President in history to have actually paid for his mistress to have an abortion.
I’m not sure if American Evangelicals who defend Trump are being pragmatic or realistic but I’m really sure they are not being evangelical and thereby doing incalculable damage to evangelicalism.
Speaking of Evangelicalism, two topics that neither Mohler nor Strand mention in their Trumped-up statements: COVID-19 or Christ.
Good call, Mohler and Strand. Wise, realistic, pragmatic omissions.
–Will
[1] Daniel Strand, “Evangelicals Need More Pragmatism and Less Moralism,” Providence (Institute on Religion and Democracy, April 22, 2020), https://providencemag.com/2020/04/evangelicals-need-more-pragmatism-less-moralism-al-mohler/)
My student Parker Haynes, now serving St. Timothy UMC in Brevard, NC, invited me to talk with him about this Sunday’s gospel lesson: the walk to Emmaus in Luke 24:13-35.
I appeared with Pastor Brandan Robertson of Missiongathering San Diego on his podcast The Quest to talk about COVID-19, the church, and what God’s up to in the midst of a crisis among other subjects. You can watch the conversation where it is embedded below or at this link. The audio form will be up within a couple weeks on The Quest’s podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts.
–Will
Perhaps intimidated by the imposing Church Dogmatics and unsure where to start, many would like to be more familiar with Karl Barth’s theology. My dear friend Stanley Hauerwas and I have have decided to do a series together on Barth’s Dogmatics in Outline to introduce folks to Barth’s thought in an accessible form and forum. Despite Dogmatics in Outline only being 153 pages (less than 2% the length of CD!), Stanley described it as the most influential theological book of the twentieth century. Here are some discussion questions to consider as you read.
Note: The webinar license has now been upgraded to allow 1000 participants.
I’ve heard from a number of people who were unable to access the first webinar. If we fill up the 1000 person webinar license, be assured that the sessions are being recorded and posted on the blog. Here’s the first session:
The sessions will be hosted each Tuesday in May from 10-11am EST as a Zoom Webinar. No pre-registration is needed; all we ask is that you include your name and email address when you join. The Zoom information is at the bottom of the post.
Stanley and I will talk about what Barth is doing in the chapters and what those chapters have to do with our theology today before taking whatever questions participants might have. All are welcome regardless of whether they’ve been reading Barth for years or this is their first exposure to his thought.
For the first session, we’ll be considering Barth’s accounts of The Task and Faith (Ch. 1-4). For the second, God and Creation (Ch. 5-9). For the third, Jesus Christ (Ch. 10-19). For the fourth, the rest of the book (Ch. 20-24). While it’s available quite affordably on Amazon, you may be able to access it here or here as well.
We’ve also decided to broaden the panel for a fifth session the first Tuesday in June (6/2) on Dogmatics in Outline and the Local Church at the same address and same time. Stanley and I will be joined by pastors who have used the book for Confirmation classes and other applications.
Also, our former student Andy Rowell has offered to host a discussion group on Zoom after each session. We’ll be posting that link during the webinar.
Reading Barth Together
Schedule:
https://duke.zoom.us/j/97672236970
Webinar ID: 976 7223 6970
