"It shall not return to me empty" (Isaiah 55:11): interpreting scripture in Christ for proclamation.

Giere, S.D.

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it (Isaiah 55:10-11).

Christian proclamation depends on the promise of Isaiah 55: "It shall not return to me empty." It is God's promise that God's word is active and effective because God promises that it is so. Toward this promise, the goal of this essay (1) is to contribute to the ancient, on-going, and urgent conversation about the place and interpretation of Christian Scripture for Christian preaching with the basic thesis that when Scripture is interpreted in Christ, every text in the Bible is preachable.

Martin Luther and the danger of preaching "blue ducks"

In January of 1526, Martin Luther published a linguistic, musical, and cultural revision of the mass; the English title often used is: "The German Mass and Order of Divine Service." (2) In the final section of the document, "The Sunday Service for the Laity," Luther provides direction for those leading the mass about the order and purpose of Sunday worship, he gives them new liturgical tunes, and he offers commentary for each bit of the service as it rolls along from beginning to end. After the Gospel is intoned and the congregation sings Luther's paraphrase of the Creed, (3) the sermon follows. What Luther says in his commentary about the preaching would not likely be received well by many preachers today, as he is quite pessimistic about preachers and their abilities, (4) in particular with regard to their ability to interpret Scripture properly and to proclaim Christ. Rather than have preachers prepare their own sermons, Luther recommends:

   ... the sermon for the day ... should be
   read for the people out of the book [of
   prepared sermons], not only for the
   sake of the preachers who could not
   do any better, but also to prevent the
   rise of enthusiasts and sects. (5)

Luther's pessimism is rooted in the danger of the sermon's lack of and/or misguided engagement with Scripture. He goes on:

   For unless spiritual knowledge and
   the Spirit Himself speak through the
   preachers whom I do not wish hereby
   to limit, for the Spirit teaches better
   how to preach than all the postils and
   homilies, the final result will be that
   everyone preaches his own whims and
   instead of the Gospel and its exposition
   we shall again have sermons on
   blue ducks. (6)

Beware the blue duck! (7) In short, a blue duck is the sermon that results from a disregard for the formative (norming!) nature of Scripture for preaching and thereby undermines the proclamation of the gospel. Scripture necessarily norms and forms the sermon, the proclamation of the word, the preaching of the gospel. This is crucial because it is by means of the proclamation of the gospel that the Spirit works faith within the hearer.

Note that Luther here speaks of Scripture from the vantage of "spiritual knowledge" and the work of the Holy Spirit. What does Luther mean by "spiritual knowledge"? Simply put, it is reading Scripture from the perspective of faith in Jesus Christ rooted in a Triune confession of God. Hence, Luther's placement of the Creed--the regula fidei or rule of faith sung in his hymnic paraphrase of the Creed, "We all believe in One True God" (8)--between the reading of the biblical text and the preaching of the sermon. This is an important liturgical and hermeneutical movement from Scripture to proclamation through the Triune confession of faith. (9) To recall Luther again:

   For unless spiritual knowledge and
   the Spirit Himself speak through the
   preachers ... the final result will be that
   everyone preaches his own whims and
   instead of the Gospel and its exposition
   we shall again have sermons on
   blue ducks. (10)

At the risk of starting out by drawing only from Luther's pessimism about the preachers of his day (with which I don't fully agree in regard to the preachers of today), the concern that he is raising here is as contemporary as ever. Preaching that is not rooted in Scripture and more specifically in an understanding of Scripture that begins and returns to Triune faith (11) centered in God's revelation in Jesus Christ is always in danger of the whimsical hatching of blue ducks. (12)

With the danger of blue ducks--sermons wherein the personal whims of the preacher trump the proclamation of the gospel--in front of us, I want to return to the thesis: When Scripture is interpreted in Christ, every text in the Bible is preachable. I should not need to spend much time defending the use of Scripture for proclamation. This is commonplace. What I'm arguing toward is the theological and imaginative posture from which we interpret Scripture for proclamation-the "spiritual knowledge" about which Luther wrote, that with the power of the Spirit opens the whole of Scripture to the proclamation of the gospel. Preaching is not about us, our whims, our desires, our ideologies, our works. It is about who God is and what God does in Jesus Christ.

Moving forward with the danger of blue ducks in mind, this essay discusses preaching in relation to the being of the church and explores the claim that all Scripture exists within the horizon of Jesus Christ and that when read in faith for faith (13) all texts in Scripture are preachable. Finally, the essay returns to Isaiah 55, as an articulation of the evangelical promise that God's word does what God intends, which may well be the most difficult promise to trust in an age of measurable results.

The church and preaching

Interpreting Scripture in Christ resonates with a distinctly Lutheran eccelsiology.

What is the church? According to the Augsburg Confession, Article VII, "Concerning the Church," the church is "the assembly of believers among whom the gospel is purely preached and the holy sacraments are administered according to the gospel." (14) If we take this hook, line, and sinker, preaching is at the heart of the church's identity. It is not extra. It is not superfluous. It is central to the church's being because preaching is a means by which the Holy Spirit produces faith. (15)

What then is preaching? According to the apostle Paul, preaching is the proclamation of Christ and him crucified. Recall what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 2:

   When I came to you, brothers and
   sisters, I did not come proclaiming the
   mystery of God to you in lofty words or
   wisdom. For I decided to know nothing
   among you except Jesus Christ, and
   him crucified. (16)

Is there not more to talk about than Christ and him crucified? Probably so. Did not Paul himself talk about other, sometimes quite important stuff? Did not Paul speak about the mystery of God in lofty words and wisdom sometimes? Yes, he did, and so should we. But the content of our proclamation always begins with, is centered in, and returns to Jesus Christ and him crucified. This is the heart of God's self-revelation. (17) This is the heart of God's knowable activity in and for the world. To recall Paul in Romans 3--God reveals God's love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us. (18) Preaching, a task at the heart of the church's being, is at its heart proclaiming Christ and him crucified, the revelation of God's incarnate, crucified, and risen Love (19) for sinners, the Gospel.

While neither new nor cutting edge, this notion of what preaching is remains both radical and outrageous: declare God's love for sinners.

Who, other than God's self, other than the eternal, incarnate, crucified, and risen Word, could proclaim something so bold? Who else but the living God can create and sustain life? Who else but God's Holy Spirit can bring us to Christ and persuade us to trust in this wild notion of God's love for sinners accomplished by Christ's death and resurrection? (20) Who else but the Living God can bring life from death?

Back to the question: What is preaching? It is the proclamation of Christ and him crucified. Who is the speaker? This too is Christ and him crucified, the eternal Word incarnate, crucified, and risen. The Word proclaims the Word to the world. (21) This notion is abstract, for we have moved wholeheartedly into the arena of the mystical, of the imagination, when we talk about Christ as not only the content but the speaker. It is, in a real sense, about imagination, faith-full imagination, on the part of the preacher and on the part of the hearer. The Word is speaking the Word to the world. The Word is speaking himself to the world.

Consider an image used by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his lectures on preaching in the mid-1930s at Finkenwalde. Bonhoeffer taught:

   The proclaimed word is the incarnate
   Christ himself ... [T] he proclaimed
   word is not a medium of expression
   for something else, something which
   lies behind it, but rather it is the Christ
   himself walking through the congregation
   as the Word. (22)

What is preaching? It is Christ himself walking through the congregation as the Word. This imaginative, poetic, faith-full image of Christian preaching serves to center us, to orient our preaching and our hearing, to orient our interpretation of Scripture. And this Word, who is both speaker and content, is the Word by, in, and through whom the cosmos came to be. (23) This is the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us. (24) This is the Word that sent the Holy Spirit to testify on his behalf. (25) This is the Word who continues to be present for us in both Scripture and preaching.

Intrepreting Scripture in Christ

An important aspect of our Reformation heritage is the return to Scripture as the sole norm or measure for doctrine--sola scriptura. Scripture is the norming norm (norma normans). This heritage is most definitely in play here, but not specifically what I'm addressing. The question is not so much about whether or not the Bible is important to preaching. Rather, I want to come back to this notion of Luther's of "spiritual knowledge" (26) or "spiritual understanding" (27) in relation to the interpretation of Scripture for proclamation. The question, then, is not if Scripture is related to preaching. Rather, the question is to whom does Scripture witness?

Without getting too deeply into the argument about trends in biblical scholarship over the past 300 years or so, to get at this with authenticity to the broader issue and to my place in it as a pastor and scholar, permit me a brief autobiographical reflection. The simple point of this self-centered tangent is this: my mind has changed on this question precisely because of this call to teach preaching.

Professor Thomas Schattauer, (28) who chaired the search committee with which I interviewed in the Spring of 2006, said to me during the process that if I was offered and accepted this call to teach preaching, a discipline related to but not the same as what I had pursued during my doctoral studies, it would change my focus. I did not hear him asking me to give up what 1 brought to the table as an Old Testament scholar. Rather, I heard him asking if I was open to that which might naturally happen when a bulk of my time and scholarship were refocused toward preaching and away from the stuff that had occupied much of my research and attention over the previous years. It turns out that he was on to something.

As a pastor, preacher, and scholar I'm a product of the machinery of modern biblical studies, well-rooted in the promise of historical-critical methodologies, and impacted by the many methodologies meant to serve as correctives to Euro- and androcentric ways of reading Scripture, ways of reading often imposed upon others. As a college student and then as a seminarian, I was exposed to historical-critical methods as well as to reader-response and ideological approaches. My concern then as a student and reader of Scripture was the history of Ancient Near Eastern traditions that confluence in the Priestly creation story, the liberative trajectory of the Exodus, the role of the suffering servant in relation to the Babylonian Exile, the complicated redaction history of Job, the midrashic nature of certain New Testament texts, and the silence of and violence toward women and outsiders throughout nearly the whole of Scripture. All important aspects of the biblical text. I learned a great deal, and for all of it I am grateful.

After four years in the parish, during which I delighted in preaching and in time spent with parishioners digging into biblical texts, our family packed-up and moved to Scotland that I might study at St. Mary's College, the University of St. Andrews.

As a post-graduate there, I immersed Myself in such things as the paleography of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the textual traditions of the Greek versions of Old Testament texts, and the Postmodern musings of Kristeva and Derrida, which confirmed to me that the texts with which I was working were fragile fragments intimately tied with other fragile fragments partially ligatured to the phantasmal narratives of the world's religions. (29) Primarily, I spent time working with hermeneutics and the history of biblical texts in their interpretation. I was overblown by the richness and diversity of interpretations of scripture within the traditions of synagogue and church, and how true the statement is which the Babylonian Talmud attributes to Rabbi Ishmael: "And just as a hammer divides rock--just as [the rock] is split into several pieces, so too one scriptural text goes forth in several meanings." (30) I had great fun attending to texts with philological rigor and postmodern playfulness. I learned a great deal, and for all of it I am grateful.

Then, I received a call to teach homiletics at Wartburg Seminary, a call that invited me to reconsider how we Christians interpret Scripture especially for preaching. Being an Old Testament scholar, my particular interests gravitated toward the question of how we as Christians consider and preach the Old Testament as distinctly Christian Scripture. Within a Christ-centered understanding of what preaching is, how do we preach texts from the Old Testament? As I began poking around in others' work on the question and working with students in their preaching (I've learned a great deal from my students!), suspicions that I had developed were increasingly confirmed. In many ways, we Christians have lost touch with what it means to think of the Bible and in particular the Old Testament as Christian Scripture. And in an intimately related way, we Christians have in some measure lost touch with what is at the heart of Christian proclamation.

And so my mind changed about the interpretation of Scripture for proclamation. To whom does Scripture witness? My mind has changed from focusing first on humans--the Bible as the result of human activity--to focusing first on God and in particular God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ. (31)

Consider the question: To whom does Scripture witness?

There are three basic answers: (1) God, (2) humans, and (3) both God and humans.

Without getting too detailed about these answers and the historical progression they represent, these three answers provide a glimpse at the broad strokes of the history of the Bible's interpretation and its future. While we could argue over when exactly to draw the historical line--whether with Decartes (1596-1650), Spinoza (1632-1677) in the seventeenth century or with the likes of Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893)--somewhere between the early seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries there was an epistemological shift in the answer to the question, to whom does Scripture witness. Prior to the shift, if you asked a theologian to whom does the biblical text witness, their first answer would in one way or another be God. After the shift, the theologian would first answer humans. This is, of course, an oversimplification, but the general point is correct. A shift in first answer to the question "to whom does Scripture witness" happened. This is what Michael Legaspi calls "The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies," when we moved from a scriptural Bible to an academic Bible, with the study of the academic Bible prospering in a post-confessional framework. (32) That is, ecclesial, confessional commitments were no longer seen as legitimate spectacles through which to read and interpret Scripture. Most significantly after this shift the Old Testament could not be read properly within the horizon of Christ because of a basic historical problem: it was written before the birth of Jesus.

There are many aspects to this shift in the relation of the study of the Bible and confessional commitments--about the basic question, to whom does Scripture witness. It is a complex set of phenomena which we are only beginning to understand even as the church begins to come to grips with the ramifications, especially with regard to proclamation.

What has been gained and what has been forgotten in this shift from God to humans, from the pre-critical to the critical?

We have gained in that (1) Christian interpreters and the Bible itself were unleashed from certain unhealthy and unbiblical ecclesial controls; (2) historical and cultural knowledge from our heuristic exploration and knowledge of the worlds of the Bible and the history of its origins; and among other things (3) insight into some significantly lopsided aspects of Scripture, not the least of which are the relative absence of female characters and voices within largely patriarchal religious and cultural systems. Indeed, we have gained a great deal.

What have we forgotten? We have forgotten (1) the theological framework within which the Old Testament (in particular) is understandable as Christian Scripture; (2) a sense that Scripture is Gods written word that witnesses to the Triune God and in particular to Jesus Christ, and (3) the permission to wrestle with what Luther taught: "All of Scripture everywhere deals only with Christ." (33) Indeed, we have also lost a great deal.

There is much more that could be and perhaps should be written about this historical development and the current reality. For now, consider a move toward a postcritical (34) engagement with Scripture. By postcritical I do not mean that we pitch what we have learned about the text and its historical background during the critical period but that we reengage a precritical imagination that the text witnesses to God in Christ. Such an imaginative move means unapologetically reading Scripture in faith for faith--reading Scripture in Christ in such a way that there is no text in Scripture which does not live within the horizon of Christ.

Consider the place of the Old Testament within the New, wherein the clear assumption is that Israel's Scripture is the early Church's Scripture. Before the need for the nomenclature of Old and New, before the formal existence of the New, the Scriptures of Jesus, the Apostles, and the Early Church were the Law and the Prophets and (perhaps) the Writings--Israel's Scriptures. Clear in the New Testament's use of the Old is (1) that there is a reverence for Israel's Scriptures, (2) that Israel's Scriptures witness to one and the same God as worshipped by the Church, and (3) that the Old anticipates and frames the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Word, the Eternal Son, Jesus the Christ, as well as God's on-going presence with the Church in the Holy Spirit. The writings of the New Testament assume that the Old Testament is Scripture that witnesses to the God revealed in Jesus the Christ.

From the vantage of today (sometime after the age of Modernity), it is clear that the New Testament's understanding of the Old Testament is precritical.

For example, when the writer of Ephesians quotes Ps 68:18 in Eph 4:8, "When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people," the author of Ephesians does not justify the fact that they are pulling this verse from the psalmist out of its original context. There is no exploration of the extreme difficulty of interpreting Psalm 68 or the grand Divine Warrior and Temple themes that are woven into it. There is no acknowledgement of or wrestling with the violence therein attributed to God (e.g., "But God will shatter the heads of his enemies ..." 68:21a). Rather, the writer of Ephesians assumes that this text speaks of the Christ. "When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people." (35) Does this necessarily mean that for the writer of Ephesians the context of Psalm 68 was unimportant? No. Does this mean that there was an assumption by the writer of Ephesians that within the horizon of meaning of Psalm 68 was Jesus the Christ? Yes. The hermeneutical fact of the matter is that Ps 68:18 has multiple meanings, and the historical, literary, original context is not necessarily the primary meaning. (36)

Throughout the New Testament and the precritical period, there is always a similar interpretive assumption that within the horizon of meaning of Israel's Scriptures is Jesus Christ, and vice versa, that within the horizon of meaning of Jesus Christ is Israel's Scripture. It necessarily goes both ways. Each text has multiple meanings, and an important meaning is always the text's meaning(s) in relation to Christ.

If the writings of the Old and New Testaments are to be more than archaeological potsherds that gives us brittle fragmented looks into cultures of old and if the Old Testament is to continue to speak as Christian Scripture--Scripture that reveals Christ--then it is nearing a necessity that we remember and reengage the notion taken for granted during the precritical period: that the Old Testament (and Scripture in general) has a surplus of meaning, (37) borrowing language from Paul Ricoeur (38) to describe an ancient hermeneutical, theological reality. That is, in addition to the literal sense of the text primarily conditioned by or understood in light of the historical, cultural, and linguistic context(s) out of which it arose, there is something more. This something more is not added to the text like a secret ingredient in a family recipe. Rather, this something more is inherent to the text because it is Christian Scripture, because it is God's written word that testifies to the incarnate, crucified, and risen Word. (39) Recall again Luther's bold statement, "All of Scripture everywhere deals only with Christ." (40)

As a biblical scholar, I have also learned a great deal about this from Jewish colleagues who call for and invite Christians to be true to the tradition of Christian interpretation. One of them, Jacob Neusner, teaches that "while the world at large treats Judaism as 'the religion of the Old Testament,' the fact is otherwise. Judaism inherits and makes the Hebrew Scriptures its own, just as does Christianity." (41) Similarly, Jon Levenson invites Christian interpreters to read the Hebrew Scriptures as Christians and not out of guilt or shame. (42) As Jews read TaNaK in relation to God's covenant with Israel, so Christians read the Old Testament in relation to God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ. With the encouragement of Jewish scholars like Neusner and Levenson, I am encouraged to encourage the church and its preachers to proclaim the whole of Scripture in Christ.

So, what does this sound like?

Well, it does not sound like a formula or a specific set of rules. (43) It does not sound like applying Jesus as a fix-all or Band-Aid. It does not mean disregarding the text. (44) Quite the opposite.

It does mean approaching the text through the rule of faith in the Triune God and imagining the text with all its complexities within the horizon of Christ, remembering that preaching is knowing nothing but Christ and him crucified and recalling Luther's movement in the "German Mass" from the reading of Scripture to the preaching through the Triune confession of faith.

The fifth chapter of John's gospel provides an interpretive tension within which we might consider the interpretation of Scripture in Christ for proclamation.

The chapter begins with Jesus at the edge of Jerusalem. He is at the Sheep Gate, (45) at the pool called Beth-zatha ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]) known for healing powers that come when an angel of the Lord would trouble the waters after which the first person to step into the waters would be healed. John explicitly tells us that in the five porticoes around the pool lay the blind, the lame, the paralyzed (v.3). (46) Jesus, without asking for details, approaches a man diseased for thirty-eight years. "Do you want to be made well?" Jesus asks him. The man, referencing the healing story associated with the pool (cf. v.4), says that he is unable to get in the pool at the appropriate time. Jesus' healing words to him are unbidden and simple: "Stand up, take your mat and walk." That's that. The man unable to walk for thirty-eight years can now walk. Pretty cool, but it is not until the second half of v.9 that the real kicker comes into play: "Now that day was a Sabbath." Jesus not only heals on the Sabbath thereby breaking the sabbath, he also commands the newly healed fellow to take up his mat and walk. Jesus commands another to break the sabbath. The sabbath, of course, is not a peripheral commandment. It is rather central to creation and faithful adherence to the covenant. Yet, Jesus breaks it and commands another to break it as well.

Hold that in tension with what happens at the end of the chapter, where we hear the sabbath-breaking Jesus saying to the religious leaders: "If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?" (47)

This is the imaginative tension into which the Christian interpreter is called. It is a tension that holds fast to the notion that all of Scripture is in some way about Christ while acknowledging that Jesus himself does at times critique Scripture.

Precritical interpreters made this move naturally. Scripture witnessed to the Triune God and in particular to Jesus Christ. This was obvious. Bent by the strong winds of the critical period, however, we have in some respect and to differing degrees forgotten this instinct, this way of reading and knowing. The movement to a postcritical period includes regaining trust in what Jesus, the Sabbath-breaker, says at the end of John 5. "Moses wrote about me." This is the heart of the "spiritual knowledge" of which Luther spoke. This is interpreting in faith for faith. This is moving from the reading of Scripture through the confession of faith in the Triune God to the preaching of Jesus Christ and him crucified. When we forget the basic tension of John 5, we are more likely to hatch blue ducks.

Isaiah 55

When asked about the relation of her writing and faith, Flannery O'Conner (1925-1964), whose work is noted for its willingness to enter wide-eyed into the depths of the human condition and to do so within the horizon of Christian faith, responded: "I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that." (48) This notion of interpreting Scripture in Christ is a way of seeing all Scripture in its textual complexity and ultimately in relation to Jesus Christ. In short, it is seeing with the eyes of faith.

The organic images of Isaiah 55:10-11, undergirds such a hermeneutic of faith:

   For as the rain and the snow come
   down from heaven, and do not return
   there until they have watered the earth,
   making it bring forth and sprout, giving
   seed to the sower and bread to the
   eater, so shall my word be that goes out
   from my mouth; it shall not return to
   me empty, but it shall accomplish that
   which I purpose, and succeed in the
   thing for which I sent it. (49)

The promise here is clear. God's word is active. It accomplishes. It does what God intends.

But what is it that it does?

For this we look to the prophet's metaphor: as rain and snow come down from heaven, they do not return until they have watered, until they have caused the earth to bring forth and sprout. And what is it that grows? Seed for the sower and bread for the eater. Nourishment. Life. Faith.

The plain sense of this poetic text is clear. As spring rains green-up landscapes colored by winter's death, God's word does what God intends. (50)

The narrative context and theological witness of this portion of Isaiah 55 hears this promise from YHWH, from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth, the God of Israel, the Triune God. Reading and hearing in faith for faith, this Word which YHWH speaks is the eternal Word, who became incarnate, was crucified, and rose from the dead. This Word speaks himself to the world in the sermon. Such is the promise of the living God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the God who invites our trust in the promise that God's word does not return empty.

In a world that longs for the proclamation of the gospel, take courage to listen to the whole of Scripture from the vantage of "spiritual knowledge" confident in God's promise: the word does not return empty. The preacher may not always see measurable results, but take care not to lose faith and replace the gospel with blue ducks. Take care not to lose faith and replace Jesus Christ and him crucified with our whims. (51) For from the vantage of faith in Christ, every text in Scripture is preachable.

What a place, what a vista from which to view Scripture and the world!

S.D. Giere

Associate Professor of Homiletics and Biblical Interpretation, Wartburg Theological Seminary

(1.) An earlier version of this essay was delivered at Wartburg Theological Seminary, 29 April 2014, on the occasion of the author's inaugural tenure address.

(2.) WA 19.44-113; LW 53.511-90; PE 6.151-189. I am grateful for the Rev. Matthew Agee for drawing my attention to Luther's language about preaching in this document.

(3.) LW 53.78. The hymn is "We All Believe in One True God" (Wir glauben all an einen Gott). Evangelical Lutheran Worship (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2006) #411.

(4.) Not the first or only time Luther got on this particular bandwagon, cf. "Treatise on Good Works," PE 1.224-225.

(5.) PE 6.180.

(6.) Ibid.

(7.) ... blau en[d]ten ... WA 19.95.

(8.) Luther's hymn was first published in 1524 and is "an amplification" of a medieval single-stanza hymn. In "The German Mass," he locates this hymn by name between the reading/singing of Scripture and the sermon. James F. Lambert, Luther's Hymns (Philadelphia: General Council Publication House, 1917), suggests that this hymn was sung after the sermon with exception of funeral services during which it was sung prior to the sermon. (83) However, given what Luther conveys in "The German Mass," it seems that his intent was that it precede the sermon during the Sunday service. Additional information, cf. LW 53.271-273.

(9.) Cf. S.D. Giere, '"As a Bee Gathers Honey': The Rule of Faith in Luther's Interpretation of the Old Testament," Currents in Theology and Mission 41 (2014) 39-44; Christine Helmer, "Luther's Trinitarian Hermeneutic and the Old Testament," Modern Theology 18 (2002) 49-73. I am also indebted to regula fidei frameworks presented in: Nathan MacDonald, "Israel and the Old Testament Story in Irenaeus' Presentation of the Rule of Faith," Journal of Theological Interpretation 3 (2009) 281-298; and Don Collett, "A Place to Stand: Proverbs 8 and the Construction of Ecclesial Space," Unpublished paper, 2013.

(10.) PE 6.180.

(11.) Christian preaching "is ... unapologetically doxological in proclaiming the glory of the Triune God, the divine mystery who is the source, means, and goal of all our feeble attempts to bring Christ to speech." Michael Pasquarello III, Christian Preaching: A Trinitarian Theology of Proclamation (Baker, 2006), 37.

(12.) "For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake (2 Cor 4:5, RSV).

(13.) Rom 1:16-17

(14.) BC 42.1-German text.

(15.) Cf. Augsburg Confession, Article IV "Concerning Justification" and Article V "Concerning the Office of Preaching." BC 38-41.

(16.) 1 Cor 2:1-2.

(17.) Cf. Luther's "Heidelberg Disputation" (1518), especially theses 19-21, LW 31.39-58.

(18.) Also, Matt 9:13b--For I came not to call the righteous but sinners.

(19.) 1 John 3:9, 1 Cor 13.

(20.) From Martin Luther's explanation of the third article of the Apostles' Creed in his Large Catechism: "Just as the Son obtains dominion by purchasing us through his birth, death, and resurrection, etc., so the Holy Spirit effects our being made holy through the following: the community of saints or Christian church, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. That is, he first leads us into this holy community, placing us in the church's lap, where he preaches to us and brings us to Christ. Neither you nor I could ever know anything about Christ, or believe in him and receive him as Lord, unless these were offered to us and bestowed on our hearts through the preaching of the gospel by the Holy Spirit. The work finished and completed; Christ has acquired and won the treasure for us by his sufferings, death, and resurrection, etc. But if the work remained hidden so that no one knew of it, it would have been all in vain, all lost. In order that this treasure might not remain buried but be put to use and enjoyed, God has caused the Word to be published and proclaimed, in which he has given the Holy Spirit to offer and apply to us this treasure, this redemption. Therefore being made holy is nothing else than bringing us to the Lord Christ to receive this blessing, to which we could not have come by ourselves." BC 435-436.37-39.

(21.) "The Word exists to be made known; only when it is preached is its objective content fully disclosed. Man was created in the beginning by the creative Word, and destined to live by that which comes from the mouth of God. Men understand themselves aright and receive true human life in the hearing of God's Word. The Word reaches the objective for which it was sent only when it effects an entrance into men. Man reaches the spring out of which he can draw human life only when the Word of the Creator comes to him." Gustaf Wingren, The Living Word: A Theological Study of Preaching and the Church (Victor C. Pogue, trans.; Wipf & Stock, 1960), 13.

(22.) Bonhoeffer's lectures on homiletics are found in: Clyde E. Fant, Bonhoeffer: Worldly Preaching (Thomas Nelson, 1975). This reference is from p. 126.

(23.) John 1:1-2.

(24.) John 1:14.

(25.) John 15:26-27. Formula, Epitome, II: Free Will (BC 492.4-6).

(26.) PE 6. 180. "... geistlicher verstand ...," WA 19.95.

(27.) LW 53.78.

(28.) Professor of Liturgies and Dean of the Chapel, Wartburg Theological Seminary.

(29.) Sparing the good reader of the important but also tedious philological detail of the thesis, but I draw the reader's attention to a portion of the work's final paragraph: "Building off of the teaching of R. Ishmael recorded in the Babylonian Talmud that the biblical text when the subject of interpretation is "like a rock that shatters upon the strike of a hammer," and also of post-modern philosopher of language, Julia Kristeva, who observed that every text is an intertext, that is a mosaic of other texts, I wrote: "There is a theological edge to this 'postmodern' observation in that [a] text is dynamic insofar as readers continue to sort out, organize, and reorganize the intertextuality of the text--to read and interpret. The meaning of a text, then, is not wholly in its author, Sitz im Leben, form, literary context, and (most dangerously) in any individual's or community's interpretation. Texts live and breathe by means of their interpretations. Without continued reading and interpretation texts are subject to deaths of irrelevancy and/or petrification ... Lest meaning become static and die, this little book looks to the wondrous diversity of the past with hope for the life of text, today and tomorrow." S.D. Giere, A New Glimpse of Day One: Intertextuality, History of Interpretation, and Genesis 1:1-5 (BZNW 172; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009) 292-293.

(30.) b. Sanh. 34a

(31.) This is, of course, not to the exclusion of the human aspect. Rather, it is about priority. God has chosen to reveal God's self in this way, a way that is sometimes messy and covered with human fingerprints.

(32.) Michael C. Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (Oxford Studies in Historical Theology; Oxford, 2010). Also, cf. Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (Yale, 1974); Murray A. Rae, History and Hermeneutics (T&T Clark, 2005).

(33.) "Avoiding the Doctrines of Men" (1522), LW 35.132.

(34.) "Postcritical" is a term already in use, probably originating with George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Reason and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Westminster/John Knox, 1984), 122f. While I do not always agree with the theological use of those who employ the approach, I find the term's theological and historically descriptive quality useful. A summary of the basic postcritical interpretive assumption: "'Postcritical Scriptural Interpretation' refers to an emergent tendency among Jewish and Christian scholars and theologians to give rabbinic and ecclesial traditions of interpretation both the benefit of the doubt and the benefit of doubt: the former, by assuming that there are dimensions of scriptural meaning which are disclosed only by way of the hermeneutical practices of believing communities and believing traditions of Jews or Christians; the latter, by assuming, in the spirit of post-Spinozistic criticism, that these dimensions may be clarified through the disciplined practice of philological, historical and textual/rhetorical criticism." Peter Ochs, "An Introduction to Postcritical Scriptural Interpretation," in The Return to Scripture in Judaism and Christianity: Essays in Postcritical Scriptural Interpretation, Peter Ochs, ed. (Wipf & Stock, 1993), 3. For a summary of the approach, cf. "Postcritical Biblical Interpretation," in Richard N. Soulen and R. Kendall Soulen, eds., Handbook of Biblical Criticism (Westminster/John Knox, 2011), 156-158.

(35.) Of course, there is a clarification that comes immediately after the quotation of Ps 68:18a, but the clarification bears no need to apologize for understanding this text as speaking of Jesus. Rather, it is a further clarification of the text in relation to its speaking about Christ. From Ephesians: (When it says, "He ascended," what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.) The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ (Eph 4:9-13).

(36.) "The original text as spoken and heard limits a field of possible meanings. Those possible meanings are not dragged by the hair, willy-nilly, into the text, but belong to the life of the Bible in the encounter between author and reader as they belong to the life of any act of the human imagination ... To be sure, medieval exegetes made bad mistakes in the application of their theory, but they also scored notable and brilliant triumphs. Even at their worst they recognized that the intention of the author is only one element--and not always the most important element at that--in the complex phenomenon of the meaning of a text." David C. Steinmetz, "The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis," Theology Today 37 (1980) 37-38.

(37.) "In order to be helpful for preaching, biblical studies need[s] to take history seriously, while at the same time taking account of the fact that preaching is not an antiquarian or archaeological endeavor ... And so my proposal is that preaching would benefit from critical biblical studies that reflect a more inclusive view of a text's history, a view that takes into account not only its supposed original meaning but also the abundance of meaning that has been found in the text through the centuries by Jews and Christians. We can interpret the Bible for the Christian life--and interpret it accurately, skillfully, even beautifully--only because others have consistently done so before us. Because the space between us and the original Sitz im Leben of a given text is not empty, an approach to biblical study that is fully critical and therefore most helpful to preachers must include awareness of the riches that fill that space." Ellen F. Davis, Wondrous Depth: Preaching the Old Testament (Westminster/ John Knox, 2005), 165. Davis' book is beautifully done but would benefit from more specific consideration of the christological horizon of Old Testament texts.

(38.) Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Texas Christian Univ. Press, 1976).

(39.) In line with Ricoeur, when he notes that a text by nature of being a text "escapes the finite horizon lived by its author," and that "what the text means now matters more than what the author meant when he wrote it." (Ibid., 29-30) This surplus of meaning that a text has insofar as it escapes the finite horizon of its author in the case of Christian Scripture is the ultimate horizon of Jesus Christ.

(40.) "Avoiding the Doctrines of Men" (1522), LW 35.132.

(41.) As quoted by Christopher Seitz, "Old Testament of Hebrew Bible?: Some Theological Considerations," in Word without End: The Old Testament as Abiding Theological Witness (Waco: Baylor, 2004), 66.

(42.) A keen critic of the study of Scripture, both Jewish and Christian, Levenson draws his readers attention to an unintended danger of a theologically neutral engagement: "... to the extent that Jews and Christians bracket their religious commitments in the pursuit of biblical studies, they meet not as Jews and Christians, but as something else ... Though Jews mindful of Barcelona in 1263 or of Schechters 'Higher Anti-Semitism' will be grateful for the small favor of neutral ground, neither they nor Christians should overlook the costs and the limits of religious neutrality. Nor should a method that studiously pursues neutrality be mistaken for the key to a genuine and profound dialogue between these two great religious communities." And, "... Christians must ultimately aim for another sense as well, one that upholds the idea that their two-volume Bible is a meaningful whole, lest their scripture decompose before their very eyes." Jon D. Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies (Westminster/ John Knox, 1993), 84, 103. It is also important to note Levenson's critique of Protestant Old Testament interpretation that is theological exegesis veiled in/by historical critical language and/or the interpreter's lack of self-awareness, cf. "Why Jews Are Not Interested in Biblical Theology," chapter two, 33-61.

(43.) The following are solid proposals for Christian proclamation of the Old Testament that get tangled up trying to establish too much precision of method: Elizabeth Achtemeier, The Old Testament and the Proclamation of the Gospel (Westminster, 1973); Sidney Greidanus, Preaching Christ from the Old Testament: A Contemporary Hermeneutical Method (Eerdmans, 1999); Graeme Goldsworthy, Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture (Eerdmans, 2000); Rein Bos, We have Heard that God is with You: Preaching the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 2008). Perhaps a simpler proposal are the nine theses of The Scripture Project, "Nine Theses on the Interpretation of Scripture," pp. 1-5, in Ellen F. Davis and Richard B. Hays, eds., The Art of Reading Scripture (Eerdmans, 2003).

(44.) Ellen Davis is on to something when she suggests that "the gravest scandal in the North American church in our time ... is the shallow reading of Scripture," Wondrous Depth, xi. In line with her call to reading deeply, she also calls for an "imaginative precision," which is particularly interesting in her exploration of the interpretation of the burning bush in relation to the Theotokos. Ibid., 68-72.

(45.) Cf. Neh 3:1.

(46.) John 5:4 is omitted in the NRSV, as it reads: the invalids ... "waiting for the stirring of the water; for an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool, and stirred up the water; whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was made well from whatever disease that person had." Cf. Metzger, Textual Commentary, ad loc.

(47.) John 5:46-47, RSV.

(48.) Quoted in Wilfred Stone, Nancy Huddleston Packer & Robert Hoopes, eds., The Short Story: An Introduction (McGrawHill, 1976), 440. Similarly, "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." C.S. Lewis, "Is Theology Poetry?" in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1976 & 1980), 140.

(49.) Isa 55:10-11.

(50.) For a concise and compelling articulation of the activity of the word as law and gospel, cf. Timothy J. Wengert, Reading the Bible with Martin Luther (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013).

(51.) From a 1515 sermon of Luther: "Whoever wants to read the Bible must make sure he is not wrong, for the Scriptures can easily be stretched and guided, but no one should guide them according to his emotions; he should lead them to the well, that is to the cross of Christ, then he will certainly be right and cannot fail." Quoted by H. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, 173. Also, lecturing on Psalm 6, Luther: Crux Christi unica est eruditio verborum dei, theologia sincerissima. Ibid., 248.