Geoffrey Stevenson

Pertinent and Post-Critical Pauline Preaching: Fleming Rutledge, Not Ashamed of the Gospel (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007. £10.99. pp. 421. ISBN 978—0—802802737—1)

Fleming rutledge is an extremely literary, as well as literate preacher, and her references and quotations reflect a huge appetite (becoming to any preacher) for novels, films and plays, and particularly for serious news reporting and the contemporary culture reflected there. Barth may not have said exactly that sermons should be prepared with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, but the wisdom is his, and it has been taken deeply to heart by this preacher. indeed of her previous collections of sermons, The Bible and the New York Times (eerdmans, 1998) is particularly fine. her apercus on contemporary culture are American, but not exclusively nor opaquely so for the British reader. these sermons are mostly preached to educated episcopalians, and are thus redolent of middle-class hopes and fears, of urban American ethical dilemmas, and of prophetic comment on the political mis-steps and machinations of the most powerful government in the world. yet, again and again she expounds a gospel that both transcends the culture context and speaks directly into it, calling hearers to live in the light of God’s amazing grace. these sermons on the Letter to the romans are collected from thirty years of preaching ministry, here arranged in the order of the passages, and only slightly edited for publication. they have been preached on specific occasions, and the reader is informed of the context, which aids greatly in interpreting the sermon as written and in deducing her homiletic strategies and some of her hermeneutic decisions. she modestly states she herself is no pauline scholar, but clearly she has spent a lot of time with the best of them, and could never be accused of naïveté or wilful misreading of the text. she is dedicated to a Barthian doctrine of scriptural revelation (along with William Willimon, who, she has noted elsewhere, described Barth’s attempt to read scripture in essentially ‘post-critical’ terms, subordinating the insights of historical criticism to a confessional, Christological reading of scripture). Accordingly her concern is to uncover in God’s revealed Word his living and life-giving Word for today. Preaching is not merely a human endeavour, but a performative and proclamatory part of God breaking into human affairs, or (after Käsemann) a demonstration of apocalyptic as ‘the mother of Christian theology’. this gives her confidence as a preacher to tackle pauline theology head-on, and to demonstrate that paul’s writing, and romans in particular, makes explicit what is implicit in the gospel accounts. Again, after Käsemann, she preaches a gospel of justification that does not just mean acquittal, but the restoration of right for wrong. As an expository preacher she seldom works in line-by-line explication of the text but in her hermeneutic seeks to be utterly faithful to the argument of the text and the man who wrote it. A typical sermon on romans 8:35–36 demonstrates that paul’s paradigmatic assertion does not need abstruse theological reasoning for most congregations, but en-fleshing and embodying in story, illustration, image and examples – all of which she provides with a pastor’s sensitivity and compassion. there is a shade more pathos to some of these than some British congregations would be comfortable with, but this goes with the contextualized nature of good preaching. her application is usually by way of instances and examples that invite the listener to make their own connections. i would recommend this to all preachers as brilliantly applied homiletics, and for any reader able to make at least some connection with the milieu of the usA east Coast liberal intelligentsia, it presents the gospel challenges of romans with force and brilliance.