Radner on Preaching 1: Why Radner?

An Introduction

Over the past couple of years I’ve figured out what this Substack is actually for—or at least what I enjoy most about it: it’s a venue for processing the stuff I find most interesting, until I understand it. That’s what the Jenson-on-preaching series was. Now I want to do the same thing with Ephraim Radner, specifically his doctrine of Scripture, and specifically-specifically his book, Time and the Word.

There’s a problem, though: Radner is really confusing. Not confusing the way a bad writer is confusing—confusing the way a person describing a planet you’ve never visited is confusing. He is doing something strange with ordinary words like “time” and “history,” and it takes a while to see what he’s doing, let alone assess it. So it’s going to take a few posts just to get his ideas on the table.

If you, like me and many of my friends, have ever tried to read Radner and found him impenetrably obscure, these first few posts are for you. (And for me.)

Is Radner worth the trouble?

I think so. For 3 reasons.

First, Radner answers a question the Jenson series kept stepping around. If you followed those posts, you know I’m persuaded that theology exists to serve preaching (“the critique of past gospel-saying, by way of preparation for future gospel-saying”). But… most of the Bible does not, on its face, say “gospel.”

To take an example from Fr Aidan “Fedora” Kimel, you get handed Leviticus, and you have to preach it on Sunday. To preach it as gospel, you have to read it a certain way—as somehow, really, about Christ and for this congregation. Jenson named that as a requirement, and even said that if a text doesn’t seem to be about Jesus, you need to revise your metaphysics until you can see that it is about Jesus. Radner is doing that: he’s revising metaphysics so that we can read Scripture as referring to Jesus and referring to us-in-Jesus.

In other words, this series follows Jenson’s requirement upstream: What does Scripture have to be, and how do we have to read it, for it to be sayable as gospel at all? And more interestingly (for me): How does the fact that Scripture is a word that requires the revision of our metaphysics affect the task of preaching? For these questions, Radner is the best guide I’ve found.

Second, It took me about a year as an Anglican to notice what the lectionary was doing to us. Four readings every Sunday, chosen years in advance by a committee that has never met us. And yet… week after week… they rhyme.

A complaint in the psalm answers a cry in the prophet; the Gospel reading narrates exactly what the epistle was reaching for. It would be merely interesting if it weren’t so unnerving. You start to feel that the readings aren’t only about Israel, or even only about Jesus. They are somehow about the room you are sitting in. Scripture doesn’t simply illustrate our lives; it refers to them, figures them.

No doubt, many of these “coincidents” are designed/arranged by whoever wrote the liturgy. But I’ve found and felt them in resonances that I’m certain the liturgists didn’t intend. Like when the liturgy is just working its way through a book by lectio continua, and then you arrive at a figural convergence out of nowhere, and it’s somehow connected across three or four of the readings. My point is—and it’s Radner’s point—that Scripture’s internal resonances are not a feature of the liturgy but of the Canon.

Radner is trying to articulate what that experience is: what has to be true about Scripture, and about time itself, for our sense that Scripture’s referents are deeply interpenetrating and extend to include us to be more than a trick of the liturgy.

That’s very cool and important, but there’s another reason Why Radner and it’s something more like a vibe.

Third, Radner is a theologian who really believes that Scripture is all that it claims to be: a fire and a sword and a hammer that crushes and the Word of God that outlasts the grass of the field. But he affirms all these things without coming off like a pedant or preachy bible-thumper insisting on literalistic reference or “taking the bible at its word.”

That is, Radner gives readers who love Scripture and want to trust it as God’s Word a way to do that without being fundamentalists. In fact, as I hope to show, Radner’s theology of Scripture isn’t just better/more interesting than the fundamentalists’, it’s way bigger.

There’s a certain way of viewing theologians who expand the referents of Scripture beyond their immediate historical context as people with “a low view of Scripture.” But that’s exactly the wrong way to read Radner. For Radner, the Scriptures refer beyond their immediate temporal context because they are the creative Word of God which figures all things and shapes time itself. Whatever that is, it’s a high view of Scripture. If you want to critique it, you’re going to have to say that it’s too big rather than too small.

So, finally, Radner gives readers (me) a way to seriously revere Scripture, affirming all its literary and rhetorical complexities, without treating it as a textbook or a historical artifact or a mine of spiritual truths. For Radner, Scripture becomes a world we can inhabit. As we inhabit it, we learn that its world is this world, our world, and that we are characters in the story it’s telling.

That’s why Radner.

Where I’m going with this

Radner’s account of figural reading and figural preaching—with one significant revision I’ll propose—gives us a way to read and preach Scripture as gospel: as promissory speech about the unconditional, eschatological identity of God’s people in Christ, in a way that immerses hearers in the story of Scripture and forms disciples with mature scriptural imaginations.

A warning before we start

Radner will sound, at first, a little insane. Stay with me. The early going is just getting his vision onto the table, because it deserves to be seen whole before anyone touches it. I think that his proposal is strange not because He is strange or because he is unclear or silly, but because Time is strange, and Scripture is strange, and God is strange. When I put it that way… why would we expect good theology to be commonsensical?

Up next: what Radner actually claims about time and the Word.

More soon,

Chris