Too Good to be True: Radical Christian Preaching, Year A

world.

Pentecosting:

Preaching the Death of God

The language of preaching must be theologically apt. Preaching is doing theology.

David Buttrick¹

A minister functions within the visible church by attending to that which is invisible.

That which is in-visible adds to the meaning of our experience and alters the quality of life.

We cannot know the in-visible church without inward thinking and downward thinking.

Charles Winquist²

To speak of the death of God means … that finally at the end of the Christian phase of Western culture, the reality of the living God is freed from the cultural concepts and other institutions that attempt to objectify and domesticate it. The death of God marks the end of Christian culture and, especially, of its attempt to assimilate … the living God of whom our religion as well as our diffuse religiosity is a desperate caricature. This means that, man being a religious animal, we are groping for a new concept of God and a new attitude, a mode of being congruous with it; that a new religiosity is dawning. And a new era begins when a new religiosity appears, rises from the empty tomb of the dead God.

Gabriel Vahanian³

One of the pervasive criticisms of radical Christian theology is that it is out of touch with the common person and is impractical to the life of a clergyperson. Even Thomas Altizer’s ideas were forbidden from being taught in Methodist theological schools by Methodist bishops in the late 1960s.⁴ The fact is that radical Christian theology is not unthinkable or unapproachable by those within the churches, but it is repressed and ignored because those with power have the most to lose in the church.

Instead of taking the radical aspects of its own theology seriously beginning with Paul Tillich, the church has since his death generally elected to go into its own un-theological directions, claiming that because of the threat of radical theology, the church must retreat into a new kind of evangelicalism to survive. This new evangelicalism has branded anything different than whatever resided within the safety of its own porous boundaries as heresy: anything theologically different was branded as radical.

Evangelicalism required a caricature of radicalism to expand and thrive. In doing so, evangelicalism manifested its own destiny: decline, stagnancy, rigor mortis. A stiffening of the boundaries, a necrophilia, or lust for death.⁵ This is easily demonstrated by considering what cultural influences define evangelicalism today. Evangelicalism is influenced by politicians, demagogues, radio talk show hosts, and the repressive social apparatus known as the Christian bookstore industry: Principalities, powers, and spiritual wickedness in high places. ⁶ Preachers may think they are defining the conservatism of our time, but they are really surfing a wave from someone else’s wave machine.

In response, liberal or so-called progressive preachers are attempting to use modern and historically-informed approaches to their craft, indulging in the so-called historical Jesus, and stripes of theology that could potentially be radical, but usually just become a different way to say the same things, such as the many varieties of liberation theology. In our post-colonial academic era, cultural relativism is the new Patriarch. We have returned to preaching our feelings. As Jonathan Edwards warned, if we move into these directions, our affections are all that remain.

But what do I mean by radical theology? By this I mean theology that follows the lure, or the call, of an apocalyptic Christian worldview that God is radically changing, and along with God, we must change as well. And this change is not just a self-transcendence or intersubjective paradigm shift, but a radical change which carries and demands tremendous social and political consequences. Radical theology is blasphemous to the orthodoxy because radicalism points out the hypocrisy at the center of religious power. Radical theology practices blasphemy, as it reclaims Jesus as not only a radical preacher, but Jesus representing and incarnating a God radically moving forward in history.

It is on this point that radical theology preaches the death of God. We should remember that in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, the philosopher told the following infamous parable:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: I seek God! I seek God! —As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated? —Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. Whither is God? he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? …

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. I have come too early, he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves."

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?⁷

There is much to say about these words which have so deeply influenced the history of ideas, but for now I raise the following points. Nietzsche did not say that there is no God: he did not say that he does not believe in a God. Nor did Nietzsche say that there is a God. In Nietzsche’s parable, the only one who walks into any of the churches is the madman, and the conservative townsfolk who flippantly dismiss his questions remain in the realm of commerce. They mock him, and continue their shopping.

Nietzsche’s madman knows the words to the mass. The madman asks: What are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchers of God? Are the noises of hymns little more than the gravediggers burying God?

Our so-called contemporary church movement affirms Nietzsche’s parable. Indeed, the evangelical mega-churches are quite Victorian in their commemoration of the death of God. As Mark C. Taylor writes, tombs are erected to remember so we don’t have to remember.⁸ The anti-sacramentalism of our contemporary church movement also reflects the smell of divine decomposition: we don’t have to re-member a death of God, because there is nothing left to dis-member. This God is long gone. It would seem that the shadow of God worshiped by the nihilistic American fundamentalism of Christianity, transcendent and totalitarian as ever, is no longer a God who shatters out of Godself a genuine and full incarnation. This image of God reflects the political hopes of conservative Christianity, a mighty fortress, staunch and unchanging, beyond reproach and largely inaccessible, but a personal God who is there as a cosmic Santa Claus when conveniently needed to thank or cling to in times of crisis.

So where does this leave the one called to preach a genuine Gospel, and reclaim the blasphemous core of Christian preaching?

First, before going any further, I wish to pronounce openly that preaching is a contextual act, and a liturgical act. Preaching happens within the context of worship. That worship can occur anywhere, but preaching is a sacramental act among other sacramental acts, and preaching must come from the context of the preacher’s own worship. The spirituality of the preacher itself demands a life of worship, and a lifestyle of liturgical living.⁹ But for the radical preacher, this context of worship must also be as self-reflective as it is theological, and if having no other community is done in solitude amongst a community of other readers, practitioners, and theologians. Our local contexts may be very different, and our local issues may be foreign to one another, but our commitment to the Gospel as a radical movement is part of our commitment to the church universal.

Second, radical Christian preaching must declare the Good News of the death of God as the basis of an incarnational faith. A full and apocalyptic understanding of the doctrine of the trinity is impossible apart from a Christian faith in a kenotic incarnation. Christ is the center of Gospel preaching, and it is this same Christ who is God-made-flesh. This Christ is not a mode or modal person of God, but is himself God. It is the radical position that orthodox Christianity denies the fullness of Christ’s divinity by rejecting an actual change of God at the moment of Christmas, the incarnation of Christ. The radical critique of liberal Christology is that liberals usually either deny the divinity of Jesus (that is, psilanthropism or adoptionism) or overemphasize the patriarchy of God by removing all possible attributes or natures from God, especially gendered attributes (that is, monar-chianism).

While I respect much of what contemporary theologians have attempted to accomplish with regard to the gender of God, and at some points these theologians’ ideas are radical, the ironic result is often a denial of certain kinds of genderings or racial understandings of God in favor of other genderings, queerings, or racial understandings. The theologian might admit that all are legitimate, but the theologian is not being honest; Mary Daly called this dishonesty a re-labeling.¹⁰ By simply re-labeling, the theologian’s image is always prioritized, and in doing so the station of the transcendent God is always elevated to an alien transcendence that can only be approached by metaphorical language. The power of symbols, the theory of which Tillich so painstakingly developed over his lifetime, is completely robbed by the inaccessibility of God and the banality of language to describe the divine.

The scholar might ask, how is the alternative not the heresy of patripassianism, or the idea that God the Father suffers on the cross? God the Father does not suffer on the cross, because God the Father has already incarnated in the incarnation. The birth of God the Son is absolutely necessary as the apocalyptic move from God the Father pouring out into God the Son. God the Son suffers on the cross. The fullness of Godhead dies on the cross.

To this end, third, radical preaching must have the crucifixion at the center of its images: preaching Christ crucified. ¹¹ Obviously, not every sermon must exegete the crucifixion, but the crucifixion must be the lens through which radical interpretations of scripture must be read. We live in a world of crucifixion, a world of continuing crucifixion. The Good News is that the Christ-event of God’s death on the cross may lead us to take up our own crosses and imitate Christ through self-sacrifice and doing the hard work of building the Kingdom of God, but the Bad News is that the church and its inhabitants have failed throughout history to do just this. As a result, our world is a world of Bad News; Bad News largely enabled by those preaching the Good News. When a child dies of hunger or at the hands of violence, God dies. The crucifixion continues at the hand of the authorities. The call of radical preaching is to accomplish the meaning of the crucifixion, forsaking transcendence (My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?)¹² and being willing to step into a descent into Hell by way of the cross, to search for a genuine resurrection of flesh in Easter.

Fourth, radical preaching understands that the enemy of Christianity is usually inside of the church. Carefully recognizing the anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism of the New Testament when it comes to the Jews and the Temple, the core of Jesus’ critique regarding the religious of his time is not a criticism that may only be applied to the Jews of his time. To the contrary, and to state the obvious, religious hypocrisy is everywhere, always beginning with ourselves. Our unwillingness to name and claim it for ourselves kills God by continuing the crucifixion.

It is on this point where American forms of atheism, the so-called new atheism, need to be addressed from pulpits. As radical Christianity became marginalized in the 1960s at the beginning of the new evangelicalism and mega-church movements, a new scapegoat was required to fuel constituents’ fears: secularism, and later atheism. This, of course, led to new forms of evangelical atheisms.¹³ In the past few months, for example, in my home state of Pennsylvania, one of the leaders of the state’s primary atheist advocacy organization announced plans to desecrate the Qur’an as a protest against the state legis-lature’s declaration of a Year of Religious Diversity.¹⁴ Deep down, this atheist and his organization are embodying what many evangelicals wish they could do, and their inability to do this in public is the fault of the so-called liberal media who would shame them for doing so. Many evangelicals, too, scoff at the reality of religious diversity, and wish they could simply legislate or prioritize their own.

Again, what this particular atheist group is attempting is not very different than what many evangelicals wish they had license to do.¹⁵ This new atheism is a product or by-product of the church. Even when atheism expresses itself as an innocent humanism, it castrates liberal Christianities as little more than a humanism with God added. Its own product is required by evangelicalism. Evangelicals believe that they will receive the Mark of Cain in this rivalry because of their faithfulness, but we should recall that the one whose offerings were more pleasing to God ultimately perished.¹⁶

But, fifth, radical theology requires the practice of a Christian atheism. To follow with our earlier discussion of atheism, a Christian atheism acknowledges that if we are truly worshiping the divine, we cannot simply say that all is divine and worship the encompassing whole of all that claims divinity. We pick and choose. I do not worship the god of Christian evangelicalism; in fact, I emphatically reject this god. Or at least I attempt to reject it. Similarly, I choose not to worship the God of capitalism. I am an atheist in this regard. But my atheism never quite measures up to the atheism demanded by the God whose death points us toward the final and ultimate joy of the cross. I, along with others, fail at my call to be a Christian atheist, as a true Christian faith requires atheism. Preaching is one way we openly proclaim our rejection of certain gods, as well as our inability to reject other deities.

To practice atheism faithfully requires radical doubt in our preaching. As a child and teenager I heard countless sermons about how having true and real faith leads to a life of abundance and happiness; this theology is often called the Gospel of Wealth. The insanity of this preaching—popularized everywhere Christianity is comfortable¹⁷ —is emphasized by anyone asking the question of evil or theodicy: why, then, do bad things happen to good people? The preacher usually answers this, sometimes at funerals for young people, proclaiming evil to be part of God’s big plan that is not open to question, or by pointing to the book of Job, knowing that his adherent is not going to really read the text.

Instead, the radical preacher teaches that doubt is necessary for belief. Again, as Tillich famously taught, if we have no doubt, we have a religion devoid of faith, reduced to arguments about history and not about life-changing ideas and world-changing paradigm shifts.¹⁸ The earthquake of the resurrection is practiced in faith by looking for evidence of seismic events rather than asking what it means for the curtain of the temple to be torn and then searching out a means to live and embody a resurrection life.¹⁹ In this way, as Peter Rollins so eloquently preaches, to simply accept the resurrection is to actually deny the resurrection, a denial of its power to change the world in substantial ways.²⁰

Radicalism always has the possibility of going too far, and therefore must attempt to be accountable to others when possible, be derived out of a life of prayer and servitude, and be willing to change when errors are acknowledged. We should be careful not to proclaim a new Gospel, but proclaim and re-claim the Gospel newly.²¹ Davidson Loehr, one of the great American radical preachers, writes that in preaching we must engage the spirit of our times and the gods being served by our society, or else religion is too cowardly to respect.²² Both Paul Tillich and Mary Daly have written extensively on existential and radical courage. Our courage to be may be regarded by others as courage to sin, but when preaching radically and with an unpopular message, we are in need of accountability and dialogue with others, so we may boldly, as Daly suggests, re-call the courage to Sin Big.²³ Doing so cracks the fissures of structures which need to be torn down and reconstructed. This kind of blasphemy is the very core of the Gospel.

*

Prior to his declaration of the death of God, Nietzsche prefaced his parable with this short aphorism simply titled In the horizon of the infinite:

We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us—indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land