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The Artist’s Way of Preaching
by Charles Denison
Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2006. 116 pp. $16.95. ISBN 978-0-66422-987-0.
IF ART WAS NOT YOUR BEST subject, the title of this book need not scare you away. Charles Denison encourages the preacher to use personal images and memories in preaching, calling this the “art” we know intimately already and simply need to learn to utilize. He argues that in our postmodern world, preachers need to use more imagination and imagery in their sermons, instead of relying on older preaching methods of doctrinal analysis and appeals to reason. In his view, the “left-brained” exegetical approach is no longer as persuasive or effective as it once was. While exegesis and scholarship are important, they need to be presented in a way that connects with the congregation’s hearts and experiences. Using his own journey of preaching as an example, Denison invites readers to reconsider how they preach, and guides them into a discussion on the power of images.
Through writing exercises, sample stories, and sermons, Denison attempts to help readers develop new skills in preaching that resonate more profoundly with postmodern hearers. The object is to move listeners into an engagement with the Scripture on a deeper level, one more likely to engage hearts and inspire response than “three points and a poem.”
In a time of Powerpoint presentations in worship, Denison is somewhere in the middle of the road. While he is not against actual visual images in worship, the imagery he advocates is the art of words, the “imagery of experience and imagination: sensory, dramatic, symbolic, archetypal, and powerful. Such imagery evokes a response from the listener and establishes a connection with the speaker” (p. 26). It is storytelling, using our own stories as a method of entering the scriptural story and connecting with our listeners. If you learned in preaching class never to use personal stories in your sermons, Denison’s view will be vastly different and challenging, but he gives the reader much to think about. If you already use personal stories in your preaching, Denison offers several ways to approach the biblical text to make connections and inspire imagination. The book is a quick read and provides ideas for writing sermons that may be used again and again. Whether you find yourself using it all or just bits here and there, it is a good addition to a preacher’s library.
CARRIE SMITH-COONS
ST. PHILIP PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
HOUSTON, TEXAS
Illumining Leviticus: A Study of Its Laws and Institutions in the Light of Biblical Narratives
by Calum Carmichael
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 2006. 224 pp. $55.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8018-8500-6.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN the laws and narratives of the Pentateuch is addressed in this volume. Traditional biblical scholarship has largely ignored this subject. In the last few decades, however, it has made its way into the scholarly agenda, and Calum Carmichael’s work has played a distinctive role. He views the biblical writers as scholarly scribes, reviewing and editing the traditional literature of their culture in the exilic and post-exilic periods (sixth–fourth centuries B.C.E.). He shares this view with a number of leading scholars in contemporary biblical studies. However, Carmichael applies this common conception of the writers in an uncommon way: he argues that they wrote the laws de novo on the basis of their knowledge, not of Israel’s legal traditions and practices, but of its narrative literature (Genesis through 2 Kings) and the legal issues those stories raise.
Carmichael applies this approach systematically to most of the legal material from the priestly writer (P). To give just three examples: he argues that the purity rules of Lev 10–14 were inspired by stories in 1 Sam 1–6 of priestly wrongdoing at the Shiloh sanctuary and its subsequent effects. He relates the rules in Lev 22–23 about holy food and annual festivals to stories in 1 Sam 20–22 that mention these same issues. And he connects the rules for the Jubilee year in Lev 25 with the theme of harvests and famines in the Joseph story of Gen 27–50. This volume presents to the field a fully-developed theory for understanding the entire corpus of biblical law.
Carmichael’s thesis runs counter to the prevailing presuppositions of most scholars working in the field, including my own. His most convincing arguments, however, stem from his explanation for details in the laws, especially for the order in which the laws appear in the pentateuchal collections. Many biblical chapters seem to be arranged completely at random. Very many books and articles have been published addressing this issue, with relatively little progress in solving it. By positing that the writers of the laws were following the order of topics suggested to them by specific narratives elsewhere in the Bible, Carmichael provides a very interesting solution to a long-standing interpretive problem. I find his case more persuasive on some texts than on others.
JAMES W. WATTS
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
SYRACUSE, NEW YORK
The So-Called Deuteronomistic History: A Sociological, Historical and Literary Introduction
by Thomas C. Römer
T & T Clark, New York, 2005. 202 pp. $120.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-567-04022-0.
THIS VOLUME BEGINS with a comprehensive review of the content of the books incorporated into the Deuteronomistic History. This is followed by a concise summary and balanced evaluation of scholarship on this topic, something that has developed (or perhaps unraveled) from the original, elegant hypothesis of Martin Noth into manifold competing theories of composition, purpose, and date.
Thomas Römer then offers a compromise among these competing compositional models, suggesting a three-stage process. In the first stage, royal scribes produced a library of shorter works in the Neo-Assyrian period, including a propagandist version of Samuel–Kings highlighting Josiah’s Davidic legitimacy and a version of Deuteronomy– Joshua (based on Assyrian models) emphasizing Judah’s possession of its land. In a second stage, these were linked together into a “Deuteronomistic History” intended to meet the crisis of 597/586 B.C.E., in part through the addition of organizational discourses. A third stage of redaction continued into the Persian period, stressing segregation, monotheism, and integration of the Golah. The Persian period witnessed a struggle between competing paradigms of “Hexateuch” versus “Pentateuch plus Former Prophets.” Deuteromony 12 evidences this three-fold schema: vv. 13–18 show concern for the practical effects of centralization, vv. 8–12 stem from the exilic period, and vv. 2–7 originate in the early Persian period.
I recommend the volume as a useful orientation to the problems entailed in current scholarship on the Deuteronomistic History. Römer’s own reconstruction is well argued and has the advantage of incorporating into a single model those diverse issues and concerns within Deuteronomy through 2 Kings that many have connected to a range of historical and social contexts extending from the Assyrian period to the Persian empire.
RICHARD D. NELSON
PERKINS SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY
DALLAS, TEXAS |
