Proclaimer Blog
Book review: Proclamation and Theology by Will Willimon
William Willimon: Proclamation and Theology (Abingdon Press)
£6.99 from Amazon or £6.51 for the Kindle.
It’s my reading week this week so I’ve got four books lined up to read, learn from and then review for The Proclaimer. This is the first. I forget now who recommended that I should read it (though I have a notion it may have been Garry Williams at the John Owen Centre). Nor do I know anything about the author – William Willimon is apparently a Resident Bishop in the United Methodist Church in the US – but I have no idea what that means in terms of theological position – nor did I try to find out; I wanted to read this book on its own merits, not because I share the doctrinal convictions of the author!
The book is based on three lectures on preaching given by the author and at times it feels like there has not been enough work done on editing and making it a book rather than a printed lecture. So, for example, there are times when it seems that Willimon is contradicting himself, albeit gently:
“We must recover a sense of preaching as something that God does – a theological matter before it is an anthropological matter – preaching is the business of God before it is our business” (p19).
He goes on to explain that this means the primary issues are of understanding truth, not playing to the gallery of our hearers.
“The Christian preacher is so much more interested in the nature of the God who is to be brought to speech rather than the nature of the listeners who are to hear the speech or in the limits or attributes of the speaker who must give the speech” (p41).
But he then later berates preachers who are “prejudiced against concerning themselves greatly with matters of style and delivery….in preaching, style is substance, the way truth is presented is part of the truth.” (p43). At times, then, there is the lack of internal consistency.
At other times, the book seems rather bitty – like a collection of thoughts strung together when a lecturer has reached the end of his allotted time and realised he still has a lot to say. Whilst this often works in a spoken context, it rarely does in a written one and I found those parts of the book hard going.
However, I don’t want to paint a negative picture. Far from it – this is a good book, especially in its initial defence of preaching as God means of communicating himself and growing the church. The first third of the book (probably the first lecture?) is a robust defence of what I would call “biblical preaching.”
The author also uses a puritan type language to align the work of preaching (both public proclamation and private exhortation) with prophecy.
“From my reading of Acts 2 and Luke’s account of the birth of the church I derive a few principles of prophecy: (1) The Spirit has given the world a prophetic community not simply a few outspoken social critics; (2) The goal of the Spirit’s descent is the creation of a polis a people who look, speak and act differently from the world’s notions of community; and (3) No individual prophets are possible without the existence of a peculiar prophetic community whose life together is vibrant enough to produce a band of prophets who do not mind telling the truth to one another and the world, no matter what” (p26-7).
He also has a high view of the nature of Scripture which is helpful for every preacher.
“The Bible was spoken before it was written….All Scripture is, in its various forms, proclamation remembered, recollected, and reformed in literary form. We will read Scripture in a way that is faithful to its intentions if we read Scripture as a sort of sermon before we read it as history, mythology, literature, biology or doctrine. Scripture may proclaim through literary modes that resemble what the world calls history or literature or myth or cosmology but we do the Bible a disservice any time we read it without being cognisant of its essentially theological, homiletical intent” (p32-33).
This high view of the nature of Scripture as essentially God’s sermon means that Willimon has a corresponding and welcomed high view of preaching itself. So the preacher is not analaysing an ancient text like a scholar with Homer’s Iliad, “desperately hoping to make this ancient writing relevant to a contemporary audience” but, rather, that “here, the living, resurrected Christ, intends to be with his people…Scripture is God in action, not just then but also now.” (p39).
The strong exhortation to think about serving God as our main aim is an encouragement to every preacher.
“[This is] different [to the] approach of contemporary homiletics. We tend to think of that the test of a sermon is the impact upon the listeners. Have they heard what is said? Do they consent to the argument? Are they emotionally moved? Have their lives been enriched?” However, “we are to love the text more that we love our congregational context. We preachers are to worry more about what is being said and how well we can replicate that word than we are to worry about whether or not what is being said is being heard in the world” (p20).
The second two thirds of the book though seem weaker. This may be because I have fundamental difficulty with the way Willimon applies his principles (with which I largely agree). For example, on the style of preaching,
“Biblical preaching tends to be narrative rather than abstract or propositional or theoretical because narrative is the typical way of dealing with the truth of a Trinitarian incarnate God” (p48).
Therefore,
“so-called expository preaching is not truly biblical when the extracted idea is expounded and applied, turning biblical narrative into abstract, general concepts and principles.”
I think I know what he is saying, but it’s not a helpful way to say it. For sure, those of us committed to biblical preaching can lack variety in our preaching (and I think Jeffrey Arthurs is best on this in his book Preaching with variety). Nevertheless, the epistles, for example, which Willimon acknowledges as God’s sermon, do precisely what he denigrates here – they do present the truth of a Trinitarian incarnate God in propositional terms.
Later on Willimon explains a bit more what he thinks it means to preach a Trinitarian God, but this section only gets 3½ pages and has some strange conclusions, for example,
"The conventional three point sermon, the sermon that explains, defines and fixes, is usually too tame and stable a medium for the dynamic living Trinity. Most of us preachers require a three year cycle of Scripture in the Common Lectionary..” (p64).
In the penultimate section “cross and resurrection in preaching” the author gives almost 5 pages to “Cruicform preaching” (which consists of 5 slightly abstract and unconnected thoughts) but gives 15 pages to “Resurrection preaching.” I would be the first to admit that Evangelicals can neglect the Resurrection at the expense of the Good Friday story – but I can’t go with Willimon’s balance. He links with crucifixion with “failure” in our preaching and the resurrection with “potential” (p79) but I’m not sure that this is a parallel that really works.
It’s easy, of course, to find fault rather than praise excellence and there is much in this book that is excellent and worthy reading for any preacher. Nevertheless, I finished up feeling a little cold about preaching rather than warmed and stirred. My initial enthusiasm gave way to befuddlement as concrete propositions gave way to somewhat confused (to my mind) application. Perhaps the book needed to be longer to allow Willimon to make his points more clearly?
Greg Jones (Duke Divinity School) wrote the blurb. “Will Willimon explains the urgent importance of preaching for the church and for people’s lives and he commends it beautifully as a theological task.” Yes, he does do that – I agree. But it is what he then does with his principles that left me feeling ever so slightly cold and more than a little dazed.