Theology Is for Preaching (eBook)

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THE DECLARATIVE GOD: TOWARD A THEOLOGICAL DESCRIPTION OF PREACHING

Mark D. Thompson

Preaching, as Christians have understood it for the past two thousand years, is the public proclamation of the word of God and its application to the lives of all those who hear. That task carries with it certain assumptions which need to examined regularly, since conviction that this is something still worth doing rests on the truthfulness of those assumptions. A number of these are examined elsewhere in this volume. In this chapter, however, I will be asking how the task of preaching is grounded in the person, character, and gracious activity of God, before reflecting upon how this impacts the way those of us who preach engage the task. That is because I am convinced that we need to see preaching as a richly theological activity, not just in terms of its content (ensuring that we are talking about God rather than just ourselves) but also as an activity (ultimately this is something God is doing).

It was Thomas Aquinas who gave the lasting definition of theology as talk about God and about all things in relation to God.1 Despite first appearances, he was not in fact inflating the definition of theology to include everything. Theology is not an attempt to saying everything about everything. But it does say something very important about everything, that is, that everything is ultimately to be seen in relation to God, since everything exists as part of created reality and he is the Creator. And that is true, of course, of preaching. All preaching occurs within the reality which has been created by the triune God, but that does not take us very far and it does not exhaust what we mean when we speak about preaching as a theological task. We have to begin with God himself.

THE BIBLICAL PICTURE OF GOD AS SPEAKER

Though the usual categories in which God’s person and activity are considered are “Creator” and “Redeemer” (whose work produces the economy of creation and redemption), in recent theological discussion God’s communicative character has been a particular focus of attention.2 This is not to minimize the importance of these other two reference points in the doctrine of God, but rather an acknowledgement that they are both aspects of God’s work outside of himself which is neither necessary nor definitive. God, though our Creator, would still be God if he had never created. Though we know him as our Redeemer, he would still be who he is if there had been no one to redeem. Creation and redemption do not define him in the way love and light do (1 John 1:5; 4:8), or the names “Father” and “Son” (Matt 11:27). There was never a time when God was not “Father” and there was never a time when the Father was without the Son. Moreover, as John reminds us, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). The communication between the trinitarian persons, however we are to conceive of it—and we must be very careful not to say too much at this point—is not external action (opera ad extra) but internal relation (relatio ad intra). It is not dependent upon anything outside of the Godhead or created by him. God has always been a communicator. His Word has always been with him.

Communication matters to God, we might say, because it is intrinsic to his being. Despite its modern popularity, this is not exactly a novel thought. In 1723, the great American theologian Jonathan Edwards wrote “The great and universal end of God’s creating the world was to communicate himself. God is a communicative being.”3 This is not a thought that Edwards develops at any length. His posthumously published Dissertation Concerning the End for which God Created the World did, however, return to the theme, arguing that God’s final goal of “a glorious and abundant emanation of his infinite fulness of good ad extra” arose from “a communicative disposition in general, or a disposition in the fulness of divinity to flow out and diffuse itself.”4 In both of these instances it is clear that Edwards had in mind a broader understanding of communication than is commonly understood. The combination of the words “communicative disposition” and “emanation” suggest precisely this. God’s communication of himself is his self-giving. It is a constituent element of his love. It is not in the first instance mental or verbal discourse. He communicates “his own excellency and happiness.”5 Edwards was certainly not suggesting that the creation is necessary or an extension of God’s being. Later in the dissertation he spoke of how “God is above all need and all capacity of being added to and advanced, made better or happier in any respect.”6 What he has done, though, is to insist communicativeness is a proper divine attribute: “for it is his essence to incline to communicate himself.”7

This insight has been taken in two slightly different directions by Robert Jenson and Kevin Vanhoozer. Jenson, speaking of the being of God, included, as the fourth of his propositions, “the one God is a conversation.”8 With a similar reference to John 1, he remarks “the Logos is at once with God and is God: the Word is both spoken by and to God, and is the God who speaks and hears. According to the doctrine of the Trinity, the Son is both of one being with the Father and the Spirit, and is himself the Word that the Father speaks and the Spirit enlivens … The Christian eternity is not silence but discourse.”9 One implication he sees of understanding this aspect of God’s life is that it challenges certain strands of Christian mysticism: “spiritual progress in the gospel does not take place by silence but discourse.”10

There is, of course, a subtle but significant difference between speaking of God’s communicative disposition and speaking of God himself as a conversation. If this is just another way of saying that mutual self-giving is an eternal and intrinsic characteristic of intratrinitarian life, then this is undoubtedly true. The perfection of God’s eternal relational being most certainly has this character and the words of John 1 do provide an important ground for saying this. From eternity the Word was both with God and was God. The living God is not a solitary monad, but in all eternity enjoys a glorious and sufficient fullness of relationship as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. However, the language of God as “a conversation” leans too much in the direction of an abstraction that neglects the idea that a conversation takes place between two or more persons. The identity of being and action in God—he is as he acts and he acts as he is—does not negate the reality that it is persons who act. Likewise, a conversation requires persons who converse. Jenson’s proposition is suggestive, but in the end unsatisfying.

Vanhoozer moves in a slightly different direction, helpfully interacting with a range of voices including, especially, Catholic philosopher and theologian W. Norris Clarke.

Unlike creatures, God is the author of his own existence. Moreover, God is constrained by no greater metaphysical principle than himself to be self-communicative. God’s being is active in its own distinct way, communicating its goodness first of all ad intra. Before God creates and relates to the world, God’s being already consists in communicative activity, namely, the Father’s begetting of the Son and the proceeding of the Spirit.11

He then goes on to make an important observation, before quoting Clarke:

We only know God as the paradigm personal communicative agent, however, from his triune speaking and acting in the history of salvation: ‘It is constitutive of the very personality of God as Father that he communicates the whole fullness of the divine perfection (or nature) without remainder to the Son.’12

In other words, this is not abstract metaphysical speculation but the necessary conclusion from the concrete particulars of how God has acted in the creation, most especially in the person of Jesus Christ. Vanhoozer is rightly only prepared to describe the inner life of the triune God “to the extent that it can be discerned from the communicative patterns that comprise the economy … God is antecedently in his eternal being what he is consequently to us in the Son.”13 As he says, “It is on the basis of God’s communicative presence and activity in history that we come to understand the communicative perfection in eternity.”14 It is for this reason that Vanhoozer goes on to explore the Johannine testimony that God is light, life, and love (1 John 1:5; John 1:4; 1 John 4:8), linking light to the word of God, life to the Spirit of God, and love to the fellowship of the Father and Son in the Spirit.15 That this is not a matter of scattered proof texts but the very texture of all God’s dealings with his creatures from the beginning until the consummation is immensely important. It is no accident, nor is it simply a literary device, that the Bible opens and closes with God speaking (Gen 1; Rev 22). It is ultimately reflective of a very important truth about God: that communication of himself, his will and his love, is not something incidental or transitory in his dealings with human creatures. It flows out of who God is, who he always is.

It then becomes...