Jenson on Preaching 7: Preaching from the Future
Series finale + takeaways and reflections
It’s time to wrap the Jenson on preaching series. This is a kind of summary conclusion where I restate my main takeaways and offer 2 ways—beyond these summary points—that Jenson’s fundamental orientation to the task of theology+preaching has shaped my understanding
The difference Jenson has made for me
Most preachers inherit a sense of what they’re trying to do when they preach. For most of the evangelical world I grew up in, the aim was something like: say what the text says (note: typically not “said”). Or, among those more alert to rhetoric or speech-acts: “do what the text does.” Get the meaning right, communicate it clearly and appropriately, apply it helpfully.
I think it’s Haddon Robinson who said that every point in your sermon needs to be explained, proven, or applied. This is how you help your congregation hear what the text says.
Even this is much easier said than done. What the text says to a congregation now is not the same thing it said to its original audience. In order for preaching to be more than illuminated textual commentary, it has to bridge that gap. What did this passage mean to the people who first received it? And how do I say that to these particular people? “That’s why you have to go to seminary!” (they say with a supercilious1 smirk.)
As you can probably tell, I just don’t think that’s what sermons are for anymore. Or at least, I’m convinced that saying what the text says is not enough—is not all that God wants to say to Christians today.
For my readers squirming in their seats and worried about my descent into liberalism.. I think you actually agree with me a little bit. Think about how you preach narrative (or Law, for that matter). Is it enough to simply say what the text says? Aren’t you actually aiming for something like saying what the text means for post-Easter people who have brought their baggage and their misconceptions and inhibitions and fears to church?
This series on Jenson has been a way for me to reflect on the effects Jenson has had on my view of preaching. And his influence goes way beyond points that I’m able to summarize succinctly, because our theological frameworks (how preaching fits into our theologies of redemption, revelation, discipleship, ethics, etc.) matter more than might be obvious. What you think preaching is and is for—what it’s supposed to do to the people in the room—shapes everything downstream.
The Jenson essay I’ve loosely traced in this series is useful precisely because it acknowledges basic assumptions and unsettles them. The Gospel, he argues, “is never livingly told the same way twice.” What a claim to start an essay with. That single claim, if you agree, unsettles a lot of what most of us were trained to do.
For example… if the task of the preacher is to simply say what the text said, Why write a brand new sermon on this text when Tim Keller already preached it the right way?
The Summary Points
Here are my main summary takeaways regarding hermeneutics, content, effect, genre, and the Gospel’s relationship to law.
After an intro that directly stated Jenson’s thesis, the series began with the question of what makes a sermon “Christian” at all. Jenson demands that preachers preach Jesus from every text, even if the text doesn’t appear to be about Jesus. In these instances, preaching this way will require us to ask: “what must I amend in my picture of reality to read this text about Jesus?” I have come to think that question is the whole series in miniature.
From there, what preaching actually says: the grammar of the gospel. Reduce any sermon to its simplest sentence and look at the grammar: is it if/then, or because/therefore? Any address that makes the future conditional is Law, however orthodox the content. Conditionals don’t open the future; they create hurdles to it. The Gospel is a sentence with no “if” in it: an unconditional promise made in the name of Jesus, with nothing held back and no requirements attached.
Then what preaching does and how it relates to ethics. The unconditional promise generates ethics not as a task, and not even as a capacity (“when the truth melts your heart, you can”), but as a permission: you may. The Gospel announces that the future is already secured, and so dismisses the inhibitions that keep us from our selves.
Then what preaching is for and how it creates the Church. Following Barth, Jenson offers a blunt fork: either the church keeps proclaiming the Gospel as eschatological announcement (a proclamation about the meaning of history and the inbreaking of the future), or it shuts up and lets someone else run the meeting. When the sermon becomes helpful talk, the result is not bad preaching but no preaching at all: discourse that belongs to a different genre. A congregation can be well fed on encouragement and insight and still be starving, because the church simply is the gathering of two or three—or two or three thousand—to hear the Gospel. If that word is not spoken, then when we gather we hear only each other.
Finally, how Gospel and Law relate. The last post covered Jenson’s diagnosis of Lutheran preaching’s default: a sermon that boils down to “never mind, God loves you anyway.” It is the most common form of Law speech and usually the least appropriate. Jenson names five other ways to preach Law that most preachers never touch. Jenson argues that the form of Law you preach determines what the gospel can do when it arrives. Preached into guilt, it lands as relief; preached into dread, it arrives as hope.
Deeper Themes
Looking back across the series (and from a considerable distance in time), two things stand out that I didn’t fully articulate along the way.
First, the standard homiletical model2 gives preachers a sequence: expound the text, identify the human problem, announce the gospel, provide an application. Four steps, in order. Jenson assumes (implicitly, but consistently) that none of these is really separable from the others.
A sermon that reads the text faithfully is already doing Law, because the text that witnesses to Jesus opens the hearer’s future as something that depends on whether Jesus is who he claims to be. A sermon that announces the unconditional promise is already doing ethics, because the gospel’s “you may” is not an application added at the end—it’s intrinsic to what the proclamation creates. The exegesis, the law, the gospel, the ethics/application aren’t pieces a sermon has to put together. They’re dimensions of what it means to preach Christ livingly.
This is one of the things that first drew me to Jenson. For him, these don’t have to be engineered into an integrated whole—they cohere naturally when the sermon has the right object. For all the scholarly talk about the division between Pauline indicative and imperative, this way of doing theology/ethics feels so much like New Testament reasoning. Give me Jesus and His teaching and His death and His resurrection and His Spirit and New Creation ethics all at once.
2. With rare (and stunning!) exceptions,3 the preaching I grew up on was oriented toward the past. That’s not a small thing. The whole logic of most evangelical proclamation runs backwards: you have sinned (past), Christ has paid (past event), you are forgiven (clearing of a past account). Even when eschatology enters the picture, it tends to adjudicate the past rather than open the present. How sure are you that you’d go to heaven if you died tonight? The only way we talk about the future is as the space for a verdict on what has already happened. The white throne of judgment is a backward-looking eschatology.
Jenson, shaped in part by Wolfhart Pannenberg, consistently works from the other direction.4 For Pannenberg, the future isn’t merely where history ends up; it’s where history comes from. The resurrection of Jesus is a kind of downpayment and anticipation of what God will do with all things. Which means the present is already being defined by what’s coming.
Jenson illustrates this point really well in Jesus’s own ministry. Jesus, he argues, treated the people he encountered as the people they would be in the Kingdom; he left them no time to make preparations.5 He called Zacchaeus down from the tree and declared that salvation had already come to his house. He addressed the sinful woman as someone already forgiven. He spoke from the future into and about the present, and in doing so as Lord he made the future real. To receive—or reject—His word was already to be who you will be. To believe Jesus’s promises is to acknowledge that the future is constitutive of the present.
If preaching is the announcement of unconditional promises in the name of Jesus, it’s not an explanation of the past. The gospel is not merely a transaction that clears your account. Preaching is a declaration of the future that comes back into the present and addresses you as who you will be—which is also, thereby, and when you believe it, who you already are.
I find it hard to understate what this reorientation does to everything downstream.
Faith, is not primarily intellectual: confidence in historical claims, certainty about propositions. Faith is trust in a person and His promise, orientation toward a secured future. The question isn’t “will I decide to believe this?” but something more like “will I live as the person Jesus says I am.” Again: to believe Jesus and to live accordingly are one and the same.
Relief, in this frame, is real but incomplete. The gospel does relieve—that’s what an unconditional promise does to someone who has been anxious. But the Gospel as eschatological proclamation aims at the superior theological virtue of Hope.
Finally, I think this is the root of the change in the way the Gospel relates to ethics. The movement is not only freedom from guilt, from condemnation, from the weight of what has already happened—but freedom toward. Toward the Kingdom that is coming. Toward the person you already are in it. You are freed toward these things because they already are, and Gospel proclamation is just telling the truth. A sermon that opens the future doesn’t just tell you that you are forgiven; it addresses you as someone already on their way.
Stay tuned for another series: Ephraim Radner on Preaching. The Jenson series has been about what it is to say the gospel. But it kept stepping politely around a prior question: most of the Bible does not, on its face, say gospel. You get handed Leviticus, and you have to preach it on Sunday. What must Scripture be for it to be sayable as gospel at all? That’s the next series. And it’s gonna get strange. Chronology stops governing what Scripture refers to, the figures of the text interpenetrate every age, and preaching is intentional conflation. Radner will sound, at first, a little insane. Stay with me.
More soon,
Chris
Even the word supercilious is supercilious, no?
“hook, book, look, took” anyone?
e.g. I’m still haunted (in a good way) by a sermon that mentioned in passing the ceaseless praise of the Seraphim.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom of God (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969) is the accessible entry point to his eschatological grounding of theology. Jenson engages Pannenberg’s work throughout his career and identifies him as a primary conversation partner in developing this future-oriented frame.
Story and Promise (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973), pp. 36–39