PROCLAMATION: An Anglican View

One of the greatest of Anglican preachers, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral John Donne, once wrote:
“if there be discounting or slackening of Preaching, there is the danger of losing Christ”.

Would it be fair to say that across the churches there is just such a “discounting or slackening”? Certainly, within the Anglican Communion there is a trend against the proclamatory aspect of the Christian gathering. The sermon has been shriveled to a perfunctory few minutes and has become instead of a proclamation of the word of God a mere moral rumination or a piece of self-help or the ponderous giving of the preacher’s opinion, a kind of Sunday oral version of Saturday’s newspaper column.

Perhaps it is for the best: if you haven’t got anything to say, then you are probably better off not saying it, or saying it very briefly. Anglican preaching has become a standing object of derision – one thinks of Peter Cook’s famous lampoon or Rowan Atkinson in Four Weddings and a Funeral; and no longer, or very rarely, are the best sermons printed and read.

I suspect there are several reasons for the general decline. Certainly, one of them is that there has been an awful lot of boring, overlong, self-indulgent and incompetent preaching! Another is that the evident humanity of most preachers leads us to suspect whether their words could possibly be “God’s words”: they are someone whose frailties we know too well, whose lack of skill with oratory we suffer and who is as susceptible to tears and tiredness as we are. In the midst of a beautiful liturgy filled with sonorous ancient words and majestic music in a glorious building, the utterance from the pulpit feels like a prosaic interruption. With Eliza Doolittle we say “words, words, words, I’m so sick of words.”

But if the humanity of the preacher is not enough to make us doubt the value of proclamation, the contemporary suspicion of words themselves increases the threat to the sermon. This of course resonates with apophatic tradition, and it is no accident that Derrida, Foucault and others were attracted to the writings of Pseudo-Dionysus and others. Words are too susceptible to become the instruments of power or spin; words are too slippery, too inexact, too imperfect an instrument; words are too limited to contain the transcendent Almighty. As Gregory of Nazianzen once prayed:
you remain beyond the reach of speech.

All that is thought stems from you,
But you are beyond the power of thought.

Archbishop Peter Carnley, former Anglican Primate of Australia, pointed out in his  book Reflections in the Glass that the theology must start from a core Anglican – indeed Christian - belief in the unknowability and sheer transcendence of God. Yet Christian belief must not overbalance in this direction such that God’s revelation of himself in the gospel of Jesus Christ is lost. My observation of Anglican discussions is that there has been a growing embarrassment at speaking about God directly as if he could be known – as if to talk of knowing him implies mastering him in some way.

However: Christian worship is never of a God unknown, but of a God who speaks about himself to us. Have we, or have we not, a gospel: a message that originates from the divine? The contrast between the paganism of the Athenians and Paul’s message in Acts 17:23 is apposite:

23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.

These are presumptuous words indeed, if human words cannot meaningful speak about the divine. And yet Paul is not presenting his message as yet another attempt fitfully to describe God from the human side, but as a decisive intervention from God in Christ Jesus, the crucified and risen Lord.
The sending of the Logos into the realm of women and men - the incarnation, in other words - is often described as the central theological theme of Anglicanism. The incarnation of Son in the likeness of sinful flesh means that that enormous gulf between God and humanity has been overcome. It means that human flesh is an entirely possible dwelling place for divinity. It also means that human words are entirely possible as vehicles for divine self-communication. Gnosticism – which decried the flesh and emphasized the concealment of a mystery rather than its revelation – has been rejected consistently by Christians since the time of Irenaeus as anti-human. Body is not to be played off against the soul; neither is the intelligible to played off against that which is beyond reason. Paul’s preference for intelligible words over ecstatic tongues in the Christian meeting in 1 Corinthians 14 is instructive.

In the gospel of Jesus Christ men and women are addressed by the God who creates with a word. This mustn’t be understood reductionistically, of course, as if God could be contained or captured by human words. The prologue of John’s gospel sums this up well:

No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart who has made him known. (John 1:18)

God is beyond us and our words. But we are not beyond him and we are not beyond the sound of his voice. Nor is it beyond the people of God to pass on what we have heard God say. As the apostle Peter writes:

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim  the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light (1 Peter 2:9).

Those who have heard the call of God are commissioned to proclaim his works to the nations as a priestly duty. Just as Jesus himself came to proclaim a message of good news about himself – “the Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18-19) - so his apostles were commissioned to rehearse the life, death, resurrection and glorious return of their Lord in the hearing of the nations. And it is this repetition of the mighty deeds of God in Christ that forms the basis of the act of proclamation that features so strongly in Anglican worship in its Reformed Evangelical expression.

The Anglican tradition, especially in its Evangelical form, has always, therefore, had a very high view of Scripture as the authoritative, God-breathed (qeo,pneustoj 2 Tim 3:16), witness to Christ. This is not the place to present a full-blown description of that theological step; however, this helps us understand John Donne’s comment. Proclaiming the word of scripture is the way for the church to “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Col 3:16). In his framing of the Anglican liturgy, Thomas Cranmer put a priority on the reading of the whole Bible in the vernacular language once a year; so that

the Clergy, and especially such as were Ministers in the congregation, should (by often reading, and meditation in God’s word) be stirred up to godliness themselves, and be more able to exhort others by wholesome doctrine and to confute them that were adversaries to the truth; and further, that the people (by daily hearing of the Holy Scripture read in the Church) might continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God, and be the more inflamed with the love of his true Religion. 
(The Book of Homilies)

At the ordination of every Anglican minister, the Bible is given as a symbol of their authority and task: to minister in word and sacrament. The Bible, not the cup, is the symbol of the ordained ministry for Anglicans.

The ministry of proclamation, therefore, is not merely the giving of opinions or perspectives. It is a recital of God’s word to human beings, and in this derivative sense may properly be called “the word of God”. It therefore requires an attitude of fear and trembling from the one who would so preach. It asks for an unlearning of the hermeneutics of suspicion and for the forming in the proclaimer an attitude of receptive and humble listening. The pulpit in the Anglican church is not merely the preserve of the priest or even of Anglicans: it may be perfectly appropriate for a layperson or even a non-Anglican to speak, as in fact happens frequently. But the pulpit ought to be guarded with some jealousy as the place from which the word of God is proclaimed and taught to the people of God. The Lord our God uses the proclamation of his Word to remind us that his word is

living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12)