Y — Ui. THE PREACHER, THE TEXT, AND CERTAIN DOGMAS By Robert W. Jenson* A preacher's advance situation is easy to descrive, On some not very distant day, | must tae something to say—currently, about 20 ninutes! worth, Today, | must find what then to siy by reading a piece of the Bible. But how does that work? In some sense, | am to say the same thing as the text says. But in what sense of “the sae thing"? {As | write this, the “I” is not merely literary. I have tobe thinking of Sunday at Trinity, East Berlin, Pa., where | am currently vicepastor, and of my text, | Samuel 31-10, the “Call of Samuel.” The following qarentheses will not report the whole of my reflec- ton on text or sermon, only some relevant bits.) The dogmatic history of the church may ap- smopriately be understood as a sustained effort to ind the justdemanded hermeneutic rules, Two haveso far been defined. | will here argue the truth sineither, But assume and develop them. The first tue is stated by the paired dogmas of Nicaea and Clalcedon, the second by the Reformation’s defini- ton of God's word as “law and gospel.” uuu cavnvgaceuasaeezaeaaecvaeevaraiananiaaetny 1 eins. ae ae aaneveu cage uoaanaeezeauaccaanaeanetrntiat The councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon stipulated the matter of right preaching. The creed "Gatysburg Seminary of Nicaea says that God is not God apart from the Son, The decrees of Chalcedon say that the Son and the human person Jesus are without qualification the same one. We can pick up this rule from either end. If we assume the occurrence of proclamation, of ultimate address in God's name, these dogmas stipulate that there can be no true such address that is not somehow about the human person Jesus. If, on the other hand, we assume Christianity, the occurrence of vital discourse about Jesus, these dogmas stipulate that for discourse in fact to be true to the person by that name, it must be pro- clamation, eschatological address; speech only in the name of morality or religion or health, not in the name of God, cannot be true to Jesus A So, picking up the rule from the one end, all right preaching is about the human person Jesus. What then when the text apparently is not? Most New Testament texts are plainly about Jesus; a few are not. A few Old Testament texts are plainly mes- sianic, which if Jesus is indeed the Messiah makes them be about him; but most are not. (Including | Samuel 3:1-10.) Here a variety of positions have been taken through the history of the church The ancient church combined two expedients. One was the concept of the “Logos asarkos” (“unin- carnate Logos”), of the second hypostasis of theTrinity before he is Jesus. The “Logos” is God as his own revealer, as both agent and content of all the Bible—and of whatever other revelation there may be. Since the Logos “asarkos” is not yet Jesus, he can be the speaker and content of divine revelation that does not yet have Jesus as its literal object; yet since he is eternally determined to become Jesus, all revelation can rightly be interpreted christologically, once this determination is itself revealed by the incarnate Logos. Such interpretation is of course attempted penetration to a meaning “deeper” than the literal sense of the texts, a meaning hidden in the inten- tion of the Logos. The legitimacy and technique of such interpretation are given by the second expe- dient: the concept of typological exegesis. The typological question is: What would the Logos have said, e.g. to and through Abraham, had the historical situation been ripe for the Logos’ inner- most intention, ie. for Jesus? ‘Thus the ancient church was able to assert that all biblical texts are in fact, at least typologically, about Jesus. (The ancient preachers would surely have made the young Samuel in the sanctuary at Shilo, and his call to be a prophet, a type of Jesus’ calling or even of his youthful visit to the Temple. Indeed, one supposes that reminiscence of such in- terpretation must be the reason the lectionary com- mittees appointed this text here, for Epiphany II.) So the old preachers could abide by the ecumenically- ordained tule: right preaching “says the same thing’ as the text partly in that it is about the same object as the text, the person Jesus, and so can be guided by the text in its effort to speak correctly of this object The ecumenical stipulation of sermonic content, has been sabotaged in the subsequent history of the western church, by the collapse of the ancient expedients for maintaining it. Our western church father, Augustine, so altered the orginal doctrine of Trinity as to eliminate any essential relation of the Logos to Jesus; only after and in contingent conse- quence of the Incamation is the Logos related to Jesus. Augustine created the pattern we take as ob- vious: first there was the Logos, a purely metaphysical entity; then he became Jesus in Tesponse to the emergency of sin. With that, Augustine destroyed the dogmatic basis of typological exegesis; and through the middle ages typological exegesis in fact gradually lost theological validity. Already Aquinas stated the principle that Luther would so insist upon: only the “Witeral” sense of a text has more than illustrative value The abandonment of typological exegesis is doubtless in itself a gain, Since we have no in- dependent access to the heart of the Logos, there is no control on what the typological exegete thinks he “hears the text saying.” But what are we todo instead? What we in fact have done has been most ly disastrous To maintain the hermeneutic rule of Nicaea ad Chalcedon without typology, one would hae roundly to assert that all biblical texts are inthe literal sense about Jesus. Most of the church kas not managed such daring. Then only three moves remain. The first: preach only from New Testament and plainly messianic texts, abandoning mos o the—still allegedly inspired!—Bible to purely historical interest. (But I don’t want to preach on the Gospel for Epiphany II!) The second: give wp the founding dogmas of the ecumenical church which insist that right preaching is always about Jesus somehow, and with apparently nor christological texts preach about whatever they ae about. This move is regularly covered by thease of “progressive revelation” and by praise of the ble’s theological diversity. It is the classic Calvinist move, biblicistically maintaining the revelatoy authority of the canonical text, whatever its various pieces may turn out to be about, The third: giveup the demand for an identity between what preaching is about and what the text is about Where the second move is once made, it o course is no longer possible absolutely to insston christological content in preaching, not even fia ly when preaching on New Testament texts. When the third move is once made, it is no longer genete ly possible to insist on identity of the texts objec and the sermon’s object, even when this would te possible. In general practice, through the mide ages to the present, all three moves are made at once, to be safe Thus the preaching of the church has for cn turies been conceptually defenseless against tee temptations, one for each of the above moves. The first: flight from the rich concreteness of actual lie and of corresponding eschatological hope, mair tained also for the New Testament church mos by the necessity of preaching on the Old Teste ment. The second: christological faithlessness Praise the variety of Scripture as we may, the choice faced by Nicaea is still peremptory: Isitoris it not possible and sometimes right to proclaim God without the Son? Arius said Yes; and the christology of those who make the second of the modern moves is invariably Arian, once dug out (Perhaps a sermon on "The Prophetic Movement i Israel”? Or on “Samuel at the Hinge of History"? 0: “God's Call” [in general]?) The third: loss of te text's control over the sermon’s matter, so thattie sermon’s matter is whatever the preacher thins currently important, usually something of slight ir terest to anyone else. (“Also in Our Day There istoFrequent Vision? Or "Do We Answer, as Did Samuel, ‘Speak, Lord, for Thy Servant Heareth’?”2) In its abject submission to all three sins at once, current protestant preaching merely perfects the besetting errors of the middle ages (Of the church’s great teachers, perhaps only Luther had the nerve to go all the other way, and to. claim without qualification that every biblical text is literally about the person Jesus. Of course it was apparent also to Luther that most Old Testament and many New Testament texts do not name Jesus ‘or mention his acts, (Assuredly not | Samuel 3:1-10!) But, according to Luther, if a text belongs in Scrip- ture, it somehow “urges Christ”, ie., put us ina position where it is precisely this particular person with whom we have—also verbally —to do. All the biblical occurrence is in fact one act of God, whose internally demanded climax is Jesus’ death and resurrection. Thus, e.g., one simply has not correct- ly read—in any sense!—a set of Levitical rubrics unless one reads them as events within the encom- passing event of the worship of that God who presents himself for worship on the cross. Or more in Luther's own mode, if those Levitical rubrics belong in the Bible it is because Christ the Logos—not a Logos asarkos—tells us by them something about himself. And if faith that the human person Jesus is the author of the Old Testa- ment violates our usual interpretation of time and its sequences, then it is that interpretation that needs revision. Here preachers simply have a choice to make. | can obey the ecumenical rule: preach about Jesus. To do so now, | must either forget about most of the Bible or defy the metaphysical common sense of our civilization. | am unlikely to achieve such defiance unless | do it consciously, for every self- evidency of my education will hinder. | must be constantly asking: What about my inherited way of construing reality must | amend, in order to read this text about Jesus? Or | can make Jesus just one item of my preaching, who appears when the text seems right. Or | can refuse to have the text deter- mine my matter lfwe make what I must regard as the right move, certain means of exegesis become dominant. We want to grasp both the text and, if the text has referential content, the realities to which it refers, as a moment or moments in the one event of God's self-revelation as Jesus. The branch of Reformation Christianity with this intention has, laudably, pro- duced exegetical method to match it: so-called “tradition criticism,” “form criticism,” and “redac- tion criticism.” All these “criticisms” are no more than the ex- plicit determination to notice and exploit an ob- vious but usually ignored fact about any text: that it has its own history. Thus, e.g. with one of Jesus’ parables, form criticism investigates the parable’s role in the life of the primal church that—surely for some reason!—told and passed on the parable; tradition criticism investigates the antecedent and perhaps contemporary history of the parable’s motifs and concerns; and redaction criticism in- vestigates the parable’s role in the documents in which it is now available to us. By such reading, a text is read in its own history, and just so can take its place in the whole sweep of the history of which Jesus’ death and resurrection are the climax, of which the Eschaton is the conclusion, and in which we too live (A day's reflection, recollecting, and reading about Samuel in general and |, 3:1-10 in particular has garnered the following. Samuel is a connected account of the founding of the Israelite state, in oc- cupation of the whole of the promised land. The core and bulk of the account is the earliest docu- ment and probably the first creation of the specifically historical consciousness in Israel. What was to be grasped, within and by Jahwistic faith, was the tremendous event of David's achievement, which at once first truly fulfilled the promise of land by which Israel had lived, and fulfilled it by a political and religious system in glaring contrast to Israel's traditions. The account was probably com- posed within direct memory of the events, so that while sundry items of traditional narrative were in- corporated, an oral-traditional prehistory of the text is not decisive for the general account. The account, was composed to legitimate the Davidic state; when it was later made a segment of the larger Deuteronomistic history, the editing incorporated the view of certain prophetic circles, that the mon- archy was an intrusion in Israel. (Chapters 1-6 are a sort of preface, probably added later, with two motifs. One is the collapse oF the old “amphictyonic” system, necessitating David's new beginning. The other is the origin of Samuel. Doubtless, this prophet was indeed a chief agent of the transition to monarchy; by Israel's faith, he was God's agent. Precisely a newly historicizing consciousness had to know where he came from. The stories in | Samuel 1-3 develop conventional motifs of piety—the childless woman, etc.—and probably relay little actual information. Chapter 3 is the mandatory call-story; it is built up around its theological point and probably had little if any history prior to its composition for its present place. What was needed to move history to necessary in- novation, and lacking until Samuel came, was, ac- cording to v. 1, “the word of the Lord” and “vision.” “Vision,” the concordance reveals, covers both visual and auditory receptions of God's communica- tion; it equals our “revelation.” Needed and lackingwas the reception and utterance of God's word. When in v. 10 Samuel finally says “Speak, Lord...,” the deficit is overcome. The facit of my text is a profound but timeless and conventional theologoumenon: when the word is needed, because God wants to create something new, he raises up the required prophet. (I have, then, from my text, a theological truth ap- plicable to all chief junctures of the history of God’s people. But if that were all that could be said, the history of God’s people would be dreadful: new beginning leading to worn-out ending, followed by new beginning leading to..., etc, forever. As precisely the next great event of Israel's history — the Exile—made inescapably clear, for history con- ceived as repeated recreation to be good , there must be finally be new beginning that leads to no decrepitude. It is the church’s conviction that this happened with Jesus’ resurrection. In terms of revelation, there must be a prophet's call followed by no renewed drought of vision. It is the church’s conviction that this is what happened with Jesus, in- cluding—attending to the Gospel for Epiphany 1—-his call of disciple-prophets.} Picking up the Nicaean-Chalcedonian rule from the other end, right talk about Jesus is always preaching, eschatological proclamation,speech on behalf of God. What then when such speech is not desired, as it is not much now? Here | will be peremptory. then the church should either never theless keep proclaiming, or just shut up. The faithlessness, paltriness and irrelevance of all at- tempts to maintain Christian discourse as other than eschatological proclamation, to find a use for Jesus as religious or therapeutic inspiration within the im- manent continuities of life, and to enlist—of all books!—the Bible in this enterprise, were estab- lished once for all by Karl Barth and his fellows of the 20s. So, from this end, | will be peremptory also in the rule: right preaching says the same as the text in that. it promises the same God as the text, in that it opens to hearers the same final future as the text. When this elemental principle is not followed, the result is not bad preaching but no preaching at all, discource that simply belongs to a different genre. (Here is another, and the basic reason why I could not stop with extracting a general theological-historical prin- ciple from 1 Samuel 3:1-10.) c Drawing this section together, let me propose a version of the old rules. About every text | must ask: What eschatological future, possible and cer- tain only because there is one particular person Jesus, may 1 promise my hearers by the leading and authority of this text? And | must remember: | will be able so to question the text only by reading it form, tradition- and radaction-critically. HHH EHH UTE EHETEH aie Eeaeetesienieeroeaernieiin Wh youn uoeueucauuececuvcder cease cceeeceeercagee een The Reformation stipulated the function of right preaching. In all the foregoing, the definition of both text and sermon as “law and gospel” is already presupposed and obeyed, by the key posi tions of such notions as “address,” “opening,” “finality” and so on. Insisting that no text can be understood except as “law and gospel,” the Refor mation insisted that texts are rightly read only as they come to life, only as they do something(s) to us, Insisting that the preacher must speak “law and gospel,” the Reformation insisted that the preacher may not merely inform hearers about something—not even about God or Jesus—or even urge hearers to do something; | must myself do something to the hearers, precisely by my speaking to them. The text is understood as biblical text only when it casts us down and raises us up, and when we grasp that it is doing this. A sermon is a real ser mon only when it casts down and raises up; and my labor to make a sermon is well directed only when it is directed to this event The Reformation’s proposed dogma thus in structs that the text is and the sermon is to be & istential address, “law-and-gospel” Just so, it fur ther instructs that existential address, whether of text, sermon, or whatever churchly discourse, is to be law and is to be gospel, in sharp distinction The duality of law and gospel is demanded by the content of text and sermon, as specified by Nicaea and Chalcedon. In that the content of every text is Jesus, the crucified and risen one, every text as ac tive address crucifies and raises, opens the future as threat and opens it as fulfillment, is law and is gospel. The task of sermonic exegesis, that is sup- posed to activate the text as address, is therefore to discover the text’s law and the text's gospel A The text is to be exegeted as, and the sermonisto be, existential address. That the sermon is to say the same thing as the text, can in this mode only mean that text and sermon make one living discourse, ie, that text, preacher and hearers a¢- dress each other, that they are brought into conver sation. How does this happen? For there to be conversation, my potential part ner must both be together with me and other than me, familiar to me and strange to me. If it is a text that is to be my partner, this dialectic is established historically: on the one hand, the text is an event in that one history in which I too occur; on the otherhand, the text is an event at some distance from me in that history Itis “historical-critical” reading in general, and especially the various modes of criticism discussed earlier, that reads the text as an historical event Therefore it is historical-critical exegesis that can discover at once the strangeness and the familiarity of the text, and so enable conversation with it, In- deed, form and redaction criticism, by reading the text as itself an extent of history, let the text slide sometimes toward my present and sometimes away from me further into the past, thus establishing a dialectic of familiarity and strangeness within the very act of reading. I read the text as a sequence of versions of itself, some closer to me and some stranger to me Historical-critical exegesis enables the conversa- tion; it cannot compel it. For precisely as conversa- tion in which | am involved, my discourse with the text is my free act, | can, if | insist, go through all the exegetical steps and remain aloof. | have to speak up, and so question the text as to invite it to question me. Here we touch the chief concern of a century’s hermeneutic pondering can understand a text at all, as Bultmann ana- lyzed in detail, only because it speaks to my “prior understanding” of its matter, and cannot help so speaking. | do not come to the text blank, without ideas about and attitudes toward its matter; if | did, Icould never get started with the text at all. When | read a synoptic parable, | already know—as it seems to me!—about seeds and kingdoms and God. And a text such as those of the Bible will necessarily speak to that antecedent stock of ideas and attitudes, for it has—probably unknown to me—helped create it. My prior understanding itself is a creation of the total historical and linguistic tradition into which | am born, one item of which is the text. | construe reality as I do because of the language | was taught and the “obvious” facts | was told, and those who taught and told me were in the same case; and if | keep pushing this chain back Iwill find among the multitude of its links the preservers and authors and objects of any biblical text you please—or Homeric text or pietist text or... The text has a hold on me before | ever see tt The prior hold of the text obtains however | then go about reading it. If the alliance between the text and my prior understanding of its matter remains in my reading itself undisturbed, my reading will not be a conversation, for everything will be familiar. | will experience no difference between what the text itself says and what “I hear the text saying.” It is historical-critical reading, which keeps putting the text back into its own time that is not mine, that can change my monologue with my own “common sense” into dialogue with the text. Indeed, historical-critical reading is nothing more than per- sistence in the question: | know that is what | hear the text saying, but is that what the text itself says? Which is why the church has always practiced historical critique, long before anyone knew there was such a thing The distancing effect of historical critique can, or course, result in sheer alienation from the text, breaking its prior hold on me so that it becomes a mere object of historical investigation—as has hap pened to the whole Bible in most American depart- ments of biblical studies. But this need not happen. What can and should happen instead is that the strangeness of the text over against my prior understanding of its matter becomes a challenge to that understanding, interpreting it as prejudice in possible need of correction. When this happens, the prior bond between the text and me holds, but now as mutual interrogation, as conversation. (As a good pietist of a vanishing generation, | know about prophets and temples and how badly Hannah wanted Samuel and “God calling yet — shall I not hear?” [If | were educated as is the subsequent generation, doubtless the connections would be vaguer—and | had better think about that too before | preach] What | immediately hear the text saying is: “We should respond instantly to God's call, as did Samuel—except of course that we are not exactly prophets, they were for olden times —ex- cept of course that we are indeed to be prophetic.” Except—why does the story of David's political achievement need a prophet at all? And if indeed because prophecy, in the original Hebrew concep- tion, is the agent of creative change, how does God now get along without prophets? Or does he? If not, is the prophecy by which he now works that sort of with-it agitation we call “prophetic”? What exactly is the call of God to which I might say “Speak, Lord... ”? Have | ever heard it? Does the pattern of the God-Samuel exchange really fit anything but the call to be an actual prophet? If it does, what? If it does not, what does it fit about us? (I do not construe the world as moved by words, nor does my congregation. The text does. Which is right? If the text, how can it be right?) B The text is to be exegeted as, and the sermon is to be, two distinguished kinds of existential address. | will consider “gospel” first, for a reason | will come to. The fundamental insight of all the “eschato- logical’ theologies currently afoot, is that the Reformation’s demand that text and sermon be living address, and the ecumenical demand that text and sermon have an actual object, Jesus, can be simultaneously obeyed only if text and sermonare promise. All addresses of whatever sort are living challenge of some kind, they “open the future” somehow, but most addresses are not about anything. Thus, to stay churchy, “Bless you,” ‘You are forgiven,” “Be righteous.” What seemed to many of us the inadequacy of the gospel-address toa challenge without object-content—when | was a student in Germany, a story went around about the discovery of the original manuscript of John’s Gospel, minus all churchly “redactions”, unrolled. it read only “Decide.” But if we ask what sort of speech both inseparably opens the future and refers to objects, there in only one sort. specific promise, assurance that particular such-and-such will happen. The particular such-and-such about which the biblical text speaks and the sermon is to speak is the person Jesus. Thus, at the end of this argument, there are the exegetical and sermonic rules. the text promises and the sermon is to prom: ise Jesus. Jesus, of course, has died and can be coming in the future only because he is risen. So the question is: What does this text promise, and what may I pro- mise, that can come because and only because Jesus lives? The object-content of the gospel- promise is given by who this Jesus is, by the facts about him, by the theme of his life and the manner of his death The promise is and is to be final This can be established simply by reference to the outcome of part I, or by noting that the coming of a crucified and risen one, a person with death behind him must be an unsurpassable event, | e., the promise in question is “eschatological ” The rule is. What does this text promise, and what may | promise. eschatologically, as the last future that Jesus and he only can bring? Since there can be, tautologous. ly, only one Eschaton, the answer to the question in what sense the sermon and the text can say the same thing is in this connection: both promise the same event, so that the sermon’s description of the event can be straightforwardly guided by the text’s, description The final promise is and has to be, lastly, ab- solute, unconditional, entirely and utterly free of “if’s or “maybe”’s of any sort The point is again tautologous. an Eschaton can be promised only un- conditionally —whatever problems that may raise about the significance of the hearer’s acceptance, etc I have not got things going until | hear from the text and can say to my hearers, “You will be, in spite of all considerations to the contrary.” This is the distinction of gospel from law; for the law is any address with an “if.” Since the text’s eschatological promise is ap- prehended only in involved and therefore free con- versation with the text, there is no laying down in advance how this 1s to happen, not even for any one text If the conversation is genuine, if the text participates as its historical seli, the conversation’s course will nevertheless not be merely undeter. mined, and | will not be able to find in the text whatever promise | like But neither must you and I, or | yesterday and | tomorrow, always find the same evocation of the Eschaton, the same descrip. tion of history's Fulfillment (So what does | Samuel $ 1-10 eschatologically and unconditionally promise? For this time. and pro- Visionaily to writing the sermon itseli, | read at least the following complex. The world will be recreated by a prophetic word. because there is now a risen prophet, whose prophecy cannot fail. Indeed, the world will be recreated by our word, called as we are to be his atter-prophets —here a note from the Gospel for the day Never again can there be a drought of the word of God. a cessation of vision; for the gospel can always be truly spoken. And its content in turn is a coming word entirely shaped by the word of God, held together by a universal “Speak, Lord. Somehow, this is what I have to get said Sunday.) Thave to harp on this matter a bit more, for a par ticular historic reason. The tendency to evaporate all material content trom the gospel is not only a peculiarity of Bultmann, it is the centuries besetting curse of Lutheran exegesis and preaching generally Lutherans preach the same sermon from every text “Never mind, God loves you anyway.” Perhaps in many periods this was merely inane, perhaps in some period it was the appropriate promise, now it 1s actively destructive For in the time and place of any likely to read this, it 1 precisely antinomianism trom which the gospel must rescue its hearers It 1s precisely promise that Iife is not a series of “Never mind”s, that life has an ordained and describable Fulfillment and value, that can now be the gospel Lutheran contentless gospel comes about because of the particularly Lutheran sort of legalism that our fundamental exegetical and homiletic quest is still for law, even af only to over throw it When we look for law tundamentally and so directly, our question get to be What does the text demand? Or What does the text condemn? (So queried, | suppose my text might yield, e.g.’ “People don't respond ‘Lord, speak as they should, which is why there is a shortage of revelation.) Once off on this foot, we will almost inevitably cast the gospel in the category of “forgiveness.” And if we then remember that the gospel is to be uncondi- tional, we end up with the great Lutheran sermon cliche-outline. “You ought to be _; but since you are not, that is OK too, for Jesus’ sake.” (“You should listen to God, but if you do not, he forgivesthat t00.”) All the matter is in the law, and is merely cancelled by the gospel The authentic gospel 1s a promise with descrip- tive content of its own It describes the eschatological future that Jesus, because he is Jesus and not Gandhi or Stalin or whoever, will bring, insofar as the text enables me to articulate such description And it describes the present possibilities that obtain because this Fulfillment is coming and not some other or no fulfillment [From 1 Samuel 3:7-10: “You can be prophets; it is not hopeless or impossible “} The primary exegetical and homiletic assignment 1s to come to such description Now—and, I think, only now —we can fruitfully tum to the law. A text or sermon 1s law insofar as it poses the last future as a Fulfillment that may not te ours. It is vital to see that this can happen in many different ways. A text or sermon can say You do not deserve the Fulfillment This 1s the most usual form of law preaching, and usually the least appropriate. Or: Your present course will not lead tothe Fulfillment Or God will withhold the Fulfill- ment, because. Or: 1s the course that would lead to Fulfillment Or the task of life, set by its Outcome, may merely be stated, leaving hearers to measure themselves against it Or it may often sut. fice simply to analyze structures of life, revealing life as fulfillable while retraining from assurance thereof. Not only is there an unpredictable variety of ways in which the text or the sermon can be law. there is also no definite way for the text as law to guide the sermon as law. However it works, that is, how it works. The bond to the text is that estab- lished by its exegesis—not as law but—as gospel The sole rule is the description of the Eschaton against which the sermon as law pits its hearers must be the same description discovered in the text as gospel and spoken by the sermon as gospel (Sunday, | think it will suffice to say: “Since the resurrection and your baptisms, you have to be God's prophets, whose word must recreate the world.) c There is a second way in which the distinction of law and gospel determines the preacher's relation tothe text, which I cannot altogether omit because t touches problems that are currently much debated and are, moreover, very real for preachers more recently in seminary But a full discussion would burst the limits of this essay, and a middling one only be confusing So | will be very brief The text is supposed to be authority for the ser- mon But the kind of historical-critical study here commended, and now more or less taught in stan- dard seminaries, grasps the text as a sequence of its own forms With, eg. a parable of Jesus, we may sort out a parable that Jesus told, two or three stages of oral tradition, the canonically written form, and finally the christologically exegeted parable in my notes. Which is the authoritative text? Whole schools of current biblical studies sort themselves out on this question, and every seminary student sooner or later asks it The distinction of law and gospel lets us answer That depends For the Reformation doctrine detines also the authority of the text over the preacher as double On the one hand, the text has. authority as gospel for the preacher: it grants my sermon, liberates me for my sermon, sug- gests possibilities for my sermon, On the other hand, the text has authority as law for the preacher: it judges my sermon, limits my arbitrary and pious reflections, makes me back up and start over Insofar as the text has gospel-authority over the preacher, it is the text as the whole sweep of its ‘own history that is the authoritative text. Itis, eg all the forms of a parable, precisely in their historical movement, that set my thoughts moving, that liberate me from fixed conceptions, that will at some point or other in my conversation with them grant me that new thing, my sermon. But insofar as. the text has Jaw-authority over the preacher, it is the canonically written text that is the authoritative text. Its by the canonical writing that I am to judge my product, criticize and perhaps give up my bright ideas. It is about the canonical text that | am obligated to ask after the fact: Is this sermon | have prepared faithful to the text? {I write this last parenthesis after Epiphany II at East Berlin, Looking back, it seems clear to me that what got me started toward an actual sermon was the perception that the author of | Samuel 1-10, probably a later hand than the original writer of the story of Saul and David, composed this piece of a preface around a general theological truth: When God has recreating to do, he calls a prophet. Here is where the movement of the text picked me up. at a redaction. As to that other question, “Was what I said faithful to the canonical text?” | will have to think a while.)