When Prophetic Preaching Becomes Another Legalism
Part Two of “The Perils of Prophetic Preaching in the Time of Trump”
How Christianity can become flattened into politics, morality, and a list of things we are supposed to do.
Only singing in the key of the prophetic, or rather, only singing in its basest and harshest tones is a perilous proposition on several fronts.
For starters, it gives a faint and shallow account of the sacred tradition of Christianity, especially if it is divorced from a fuller message including pastoral, liturgical, and general proclamation communication. “Prophetic only” preaching is prone to trapping our imagination in what Charles Taylor calls the “immanent frame,” ventures into alternative legalisms, and appears disinterested in the perils of church decline or the rise in religious “nones.”
While the prophets found in the Hebrew scriptures often describe profound moments of religious ecstasy, experience, and conversion (i.e. transcendence) that initiate their public messages about justice (i.e. immanence) and confronting the powers and principalities (See Isaiah 6), if one were to listen to most prophetic messages today, I bet they would notice a steady diet focused on the immanent sphere.
By immanent sphere I mean that which appears separable from the transcendent. So, it is a more “this worldly” or “horizontal” orientation against a “vertical” one of transcendence. An immanent focus can include, but is not limited to: ethics, morality, duty, obligation, justice, etc.
In the words of a country preacher of my youth, the danger of staying here is that it can slide into a “works righteousness” message. He meant, of course, that what makes one justified before God is what they do, i.e. “good works” rather than all those influenced by Reformation readings of Paul would demand: “grace alone” justifies us before the Lord (Eph. 2:8-9).
Religion in the immanent frame only has value by infusing goodness into society.
If it is the case that “prophetic-only” preaching settles our imaginations only in the flattened world of history before our eyes, then we risk the continuation of modernity’s disenchanting spirit. If all things sacred are tied to our material and finite experience, then there can be no magic, no mysticism, nor transfiguration of the world.
It is important to recall that this is not a problem with prophetic messaging from all ages, indeed the ancients rooted their calls for justice in a transcendent source (see: Ezekial 1, Habakkuk 2:20, Isaiah 6:1-5). But, in our day of post-enlightenment social imaginaries, issues of immanence are more prominent than ones that are associated with the transcendent sphere.
Charles Taylor discusses the way our premodern social imaginary shifted with modernity and into a so-called secular time with words like flattening, direct access, horizontal, and disembedding in Modern Social Imaginaries. He writes, “a purely secular time-understanding allows us to imagine society horizontally, unrelated to any ‘high points,’ where the ordinary sequence of events touches higher time, and therefore without recognizing any privileged persons or agencies, such as kings or priests, who stand and mediate at such alleged points.”
Importantly these “high points” of a premodern narration reach the heavens and include the very heart of divinity.
The premodern way of seeing the world included pilgrimages where people went to sacred places and were transformed along the journey. Contrast that with the modern social imaginary. It has only tourism with ideal destinations to see, consume, maybe even to photograph for Instagram posts. They are locations to be marked off a “bucket list.” Been there, done that!
Time was received differently too. The premodern world understood time with a “vertical” dimension according to Taylor. The seasons, the weeks, and years of life intersect with eternity—thus sacred calendars told a bigger story of life and meaning.
Today, our time is marked by markets of production and consumption. With no transcendent intersection, life/time flies forward in space like an arrow, never touching the heights of the eternal. Our only hope in this imaginary is to improve conditions for people as we progress (hopefully) through society. Scarcely, however, can the modern imaginary produce hope rooted in divine intervention, or suffering to be redeemed in some deep, existential way.
James K.A. Smith commenting on Taylor’s read of the shifting attitudes after the likes of Adam Smith and John Locke asserts,
with Locke and Smith we see a new emphasis: particularly economic benefit. Humans are seen as fundamentally engaged in an ‘exchange of services,’ so the entire cosmos is seen anthropocentrically as the arena for this economy. What happens in the ‘new providence,’ then, is a ‘shrinking’ of God’s purposes, an ‘economizing’ of God’s own interests: “God’s goals for us shrink to the sing end of our encompassing this order of mutual benefit he has designed for us.’ So even our theism becomes humanized, immanentized, and the telos of God’s providential concern is circumscribed within immanence.
Taylor himself writes, that we can see after the 18th century in “apologetics, and indeed, much preaching, is less and less concerned with sin as a condition we need to be rescued from through some transformation of our being,” which would require an openness to transcendence, “and more with sin as wrong behavior which can be persuaded, trained or disciplined to turn our backs on. This concern with morality of correct conduct has been observed by many historians of the period. Religion is narrowed to moralism.”
This is the point, “prophetic-only” preaching done in a social imaginary that only ever reinforces things having to do with this world and what we are supposed to do within it reduces the spiritual life down to a list of do’s and don’ts. And it functions on a personal level as much as a societal-institutional one.
Another helpful way to see how these shifts in the social imaginary impact our moral/religious imaginations comes through the theological ethics of Stanley Hauerwas.
Throughout Hauerwas’ entire project exists a recurring critique about reducing ethics to language having to do with “rights.” Rights language dominates Western thought. This is specifically true of the American starting point for thinking about ethics, justice, and community life.
But have you ever noticed that rights are easily and ceaselessly contested? They hardly seem fully established, let alone immutable. Once a right has been accepted, it raises questions about other rights and entities. This is to say nothing about their moral or ontological grounds—where do rights come from? What gives rights their ultimate value?
In a flattened, immanentized world, rights, which draw morality into the legal framework, are the very best we can do. But Hauerwas is quick to point out that Rights language is never enough for the Christian point of view. For example, he writes:
Christian thinkers, above all, should have been among the first to criticize the attempt to model the moral life primarily on the analogy of law. Instead, fearing moral anarchy, like our philosophical colleagues, Christian ethicists assumed that questions of the ‘right’ were prior to the questions of the ‘good,’ that moral principles were more fundamental than virtues, that a coherent morality required a single primary principle from which all others could be derived or tested, and that the central task of morality was to help us resolve difficult moral quandaries.
In places like The Peaceable Kingdom as well as A Community of Character Hauerwas critiques modern political liberalism for ascribing to politics the job of preserving freedom for individuals by judging and weighing competing rights.
Indeed, the endless disputing over rights exists because there is nothing higher or more primary within the flattened, modern world. According to Hauerwas however, “the good” is primary before morality, and virtue is necessary before “rights.”
Hauerwas will ultimately suggest that the church is the community of faithful witness and practice. It is formed in and through virtues revealing that which transcends rights. The church just so happens to believe that all of this takes place within the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
To put a fine point on it, rights language is not enough for the Christian tradition, because it is founded in something prior, or deeper, and in moral language this is where we venture into the language of virtue, which is tied to the good, the beautiful and the true.
A New Legalism
Given this, discerning how “prophetic-only” preaching might become a new legalism does not require much imagination.
I say, “new legalism,” because when I hear the term “legalism,” I tend to fall back into my boyhood church experience of camp meeting revivals. Then and there I heard many lessons where legalism was compared to “works righteousness,” or at least a stodgy set of rules one can follow that will ensure you “make it into heaven.”
Legalism has the ring of moralism. It is rigid, literal, graceless, and in the poor hermeneutics of many preachers I heard growing up, it is something associated with The Pharisees—the “black hats” of the gospels. Oh, how easy it is to become reductive and thus destructive with ancient, yet well-worn texts.
I remember the feelings of moralistic legalism in my faith training as a child well.
We were the “city kids” in a mostly rural church—a place we only went to because of my mother’s childhood faith. When she decided to seek out God as an adult she knew nowhere else to turn except for the church her momma loved.
It was a loving community, if not a little misguided at times. Indeed, I owe them a debt of gratitude for shaping me in so many ways.
But try as our Sunday School teachers did, my siblings and I never shook off our “city kid,” public school, Simpson’s watching veneer. The parents of other kids made it clear to us that it would certainly be better if we went to a private Christian school, a rural school, or something different.
Certain movies and music were to be shunned, (most of those were the ones my mom let me watch and listen to), and I knew that amongst the worst things I could ever do were drugs, alcohol, and premarital sex.
I remember walking with my girlfriend at church camp. We were going to the “fireside” room for dinner. As we walked, we passed by the camp director. He was a much-loved youth minister from another church—I really looked up to him.
He gave me a sideways glance and said, “avoid the very appearance of evil.”
All I ever wanted to do around this guy was impress him. Had I just disappointed him in some way? Was walking with a girl to dinner a sign of something more sinister?
I sheepishly asked him what he meant.
“Think about it, just think about it,” he told me with a long-lasting side eye.
He presented himself as a wizened sage seeing something no one else could. His goal was achieved that day, and I suppose every day since. I am still thinking about it.
It caused me to look over my shoulder for a spiritual cop to weigh in on all my actions (good or bad), my whole life long. I grew up in the height of purity culture for sure, and I have emotional scars to prove it.
Most Christian legalisms of this type were interpersonal, individual, and moralistic in nature. Yet, “prophetic-only” preaching is just as capable of producing the same disastrous spiritual effects as moralistic and shame-guided teachings of the purity culture were.
The primary difference between the two is that one is inward facing and the other is more outward facing. The outward sense concerns social realities which are often conflated with political realities.
How can appeals to justice or public morality be as legalistic or moralistic as my home-grown course in moralistic spirituality?
Episode one of season one of the comedy show Portlandia does a brilliant job of satirizing culture associated with progressive political ideologies. It makes fun of the progressive orthodoxy surrounding inclusion and care for those overlooked. In so doing, it shows how the rules can become so rigid, it has the opposite effect by harming people in the process or at least stands in their way of flourishing life.
The episode features a well-intentioned couple dining out. After hearing about their “farm to fork” chicken, they decided to put a hold on dinner to visit the farm where it was raised. There they fall under the sway of a charismatic cult leader, more than their dinner was upended. They become members of the commune. Their new life is trance-like and it must be, because in their right mind they would never have wanted it.
The episode’s “b story” is about two militant store clerks, more devoted to their cause than to their store’s success. A customer walks into a feminist bookstore and is met with a barrage of bizarrely strict ideological rules. She can’t use the bathroom unless she buys something. The clerks question her choice of purchase while lecturing her on privilege and moral ranking.
When she attempts to buy a book, she’s offered instead a class on protest organizing—because subscribing to a movement apparently matters more than a book sale.
The point is that knowing all the nuances of every issue might just stand in the way of hospitality and goodwill. As the show progresses throughout its seasons, the same store clerks violate their own beliefs of radical inclusion—it seems no one is ideologically pure enough to stand under their moral scrutiny.
Indeed, if all preaching amounts to what you should and should not do, and if the language of rights and ethical strictness is the height of our moral imagination, then legalism shadows right behind.
Neither progressives nor conservatives are immune. The same must be said for those who think in terms of smaller communities and those who think in terms of large systems.
“Prophetic-only” preaching can cause seekers who are in desperate need of forgiveness or overcoming shame to drown under the weight of a list rules to follow discovering that they are already in violation of things they never knew about (this is often the experience people have in attempting ethical consumerism).
The Law of Diminishing Returns
Third, and finally, “prophetic-only” preaching can functionally follow the “law of diminishing returns” for a spiritual community. This is why I suggest that it appears uninterested in church growth.
I know church growth is a real conundrum for many people. And for good reason. At its worst, church growth trades on the culture of capitalism and consumerism in exchange for more “butts in seats.” Often, this occurs at the expense of real community, spiritual growth, and allowing the church a voice in wider, community concerns.
In my own community, for instance, whenever there is a need for a faith leader to speak out on a public concern like needs of the unhoused, or on some immoral legislation, rarely is it ever the voice of our mega-church leaders speaking out or organizing some form of resistance.
Their ministries tend to focus on the personal spiritual growth of their attenders (often never moving beyond basic catechesis), and very rarely on systemic, social concerns.
On the other hand, if churches do not grow and if the inevitable decline follows stagnation, what does it matter if the pulpit is blaring out how to be a better society—if no one is there to listen?
At least for the Christian tradition, sacred speech is meant to bless the community. And at least one thing that the community is meant to do is to continue to share the same message to the wider world, to be a blessing, as it were.
In the barest sense, concern for spreading the message is part and parcel of the church’s identity.
Yet in my experience, churches that focus on a “prophetic-only” message from the pulpit tend to be less concerned with growth, or the conversion of individuals. These sorts of churches are interested in practicing a message of radical inclusion as a way of honoring their prophetic values which critique a social world where grave exclusion persists.
This is a good thing.
But with all things good, there is a way that it can be distorted into something less than desired.
Stanley Hauerwas says in After Christendom? “a church that only aims to be inclusive risks losing the very narrative that makes inclusion intelligible. The gospel is about transformation, not just welcome.”
Now a truly prophetic message must not end with simple inclusion, it is in keeping with its internal logic, interested in the transformation of selves and communities; to achieve this, there must be at least a passing interest in spreading the message.
I have spent the last year trying to get colleagues interested in studying ways to make our preaching more connective with secular audiences. But interest is light amongst my denominational colleagues.
Instead, our cohort has shown far more fascination with gathering to discuss the current trends in Christian Nationalism. And I totally get it; Christian Nationalism is one of the single greatest issues facing the contemporary church. It is one of the fastest growing church flavors in our culture.
Christian Nationalism is inherently idolatrous according to most traditional Christian interpretations, and it trades in racist and dehumanizing language. It appears to be at the growing edge of the church’s share of the cultural polarization we are all experiencing today.
It is very important to consider, no doubt. And so, our cohort has convened a whole season of meetings, interviews, book discussions, and conversations for us to consider this topic.
As I participate, I am not shocked that my colleagues are serving politically homogenous (or close to it) congregations that are more than ambivalent about Christian Nationalism, indeed it is the bogeyman at the door. Yet I do not think that there is a threat of this errant theology infiltrating their pews.
Worrying about Christian Nationalism, holding discussions and book studies on it, surely is doing something for this community. I think it is acting as a purification and identity ritual. It allows my cohort to say this does not represent us, this bad faith approach is “them.” By focusing on it, we get to purify ourselves against its theological taint and we get to remain on the side of the just.
And if that is our aim, then we will receive our reward in full.
Someone might protest that these meetings will help us preach against it on Sunday morning. That is true, and Christian Nationalism is just one idolatrous impulse that the church must exorcise from its life. It is one among many! It deserves to be spoken of from the pulpit.
But what if the sermon is just another moment of theological virtue signaling as you preach to the choir—to a congregation that already affirms the same message?
It is also true that congregations need to hear affirmations of belief, but in my context, I have been left wondering if the desire to study and think about this topic has outweighed our specific congregational needs.
Are my colleagues exercising their cultural angst or are they genuinely in alignment with where their people are in the spiritual journey?
Many of these colleagues are serving congregations in decline. What dominates the diet of their spiritual teaching from the pulpit?
Setting Christian Nationalism and its growing concern aside for the moment, most of their sermons address public, and sometimes outright political issues far more than things like overcoming addiction, repentance, contemplative prayer, making other disciples, the supernatural, or other personal expressions of faith and practice.
So, when I heard the crickets chirp after bringing up the issue of learning about preaching to more greatly impact our secular world or finding ways that appeal to a culture of church decline, I was no longer surprised.
It is as if our shared faith only matters if it brings large, sweeping social change—it appears much less interested in personal piety, or orthodox theological belief.
Indeed, the trend in the mainline church over the course of the 20th century was to move away from theological distinctives of denominations and move toward a shared social/political outlook.
Ted Smith comments of the situation in churches today, “there are things that mark a person’s identity in a way that religious affiliation might have in the past...the transition from religious affiliation to a secular political identity is especially smooth when congregations have already downplayed distinctive doctrine and ritual, making them instrumental to ethical and political commitments that are the real sources of identity.”
Many of my colleagues are not far from “prophetic-only” preaching.
I can imagine a response where one might respond, “well yes, the Christian faith is far more interested in the good done in the world than it is in helping people in their piety.”
I imagine they’d look to the great story of The Good Samaritan as a case in point (Luke 10: 25-37). There, a question is put to Jesus, “teacher what must I do to inherit eternal life?” This is a question of piety, devotion, and personal concern.
Jesus’ famous answer has to do with loving God and neighbor.
“Who is my neighbor” asks the curious person, appearing a little defensive.
In response, Jesus narrates one of the most important stories for shaping the moral imagination in human history.
A man has been mugged and left half dead. Religious figures come and pass by on the other side of the road. Are they heartless? No, they are upright and personally devout. It is a religious problem to touch a dead body, of course. They would not dare sully their moral uprightness before God.
For the half-dead man, hope slips away.
Then, an unlikely hero emerges. A Samaritan passes by, but he does not just pass by. He does all the compassionate work of interpersonal care, health care, and financial care so that this one is rightly brought to health and restored.
Religiously, a Samaritan is not in good moral or religious standing before God, obviously, or at least that is what the audience believes. But because he acted with compassion and justice, he proved his righteousness.
Clearly, one might think it is far more important to focus on the prophetic teachings, for they push people to do what needs to be done. And that, after all, is far better than any personal belief, or pious behavior of an individual.
That must be more important than speaking in a way that gets folks to show up to church.
But what if the choice itself is the problem?
What if we have accepted a false choice between personal transformation and social transformation, between piety and justice, between evangelism and prophecy?
A preacher I heard recently gave me a wonderfully simple image for another possibility.
All it takes is a basketball—and the ability to dribble with both hands.
In Part Three: The Crossover Dribble.