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Preaching as a Mad Act: A Q&A with John Holbert

Preaching as a Mad Act: A Q&A with John Holbert

Last updated on: November 11, 2014 at 7:57 pm by Deborah Arca

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Preaching as a Mad Act: A Q&A with John Holbert 2014-11-11T19:57:50+00:00 Deborah Arca

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“Preaching is a mad act, speaking for God to people who hardly know who God may be, proclaiming the gospel of one who came preaching and loving the world. No small task, that!” — John Holbert, Old Testament scholar and Homiletics professor

In this month of thanksgivings, I’ll be blogging about some of the Patheos folks I’m particularly grateful for in my years of managing the Progressive Christian Channel. As I look back today, one distinguished gentleman comes immediately to mind: The Rev. Dr. John C. Holbert. Holbert, an Old Testament scholar and retired Homiletics Professor, has been tirelessly unpacking the Old Testament texts for us on a weekly basis for nearly five years in his column, Opening the Old Testament. That astounding feat alone tips you off to the fact that Holbert is more passionate than most about the Hebrew Bible! Which ends up being lucky for us, especially those of us who have often regarded the Old Testament as more of a relic full of wrath and fury not worth much time or study (besides, isn’t the New Testament really where Jesus hangs out?). But Holbert marries his thorough and fervent scholarship of biblical history and culture with the skills of a seasoned preacher and story-teller to bring the grand and strange stories of the Old Testament to life in vivid, intriguing, meaningful, relevant and often humorous ways. He manages, week after to week, to make us pay attention to, and care about these stories, and these people, and what their lives might mean for us today, in ways we may not have considered before.

Aside from opening up the Old Testament for Patheos these past few years, Holbert’s main career has been that of a teacher of preachers — a Professor of Homiletics at Perkins School of Theology for nearly 30 years. He himself has preached and taught in more than 1,000 churches in 40 states and 20 countries. After a three-decade-long career in homiletics, he recently retired and wrote a book on one of his favorite Old Testament characters, King Saul. I had the chance to chat with John recently about his passion for the Old Testament, how he became a teacher of preaching, the critical skill every preacher should have, and how we should read the Bible — especially the Old Testament — today.

What got you interested in studying the Old Testament?

I was not raised in the church, only attending a very few times before college. I went to church in college (Grinnell College in Iowa), solely because I was a member of the choir, and as a member, Sunday church attendance was mandatory. There were often more members in the choir than in the congregation. I admit to remembering very little of the liturgies and sermons that I heard there, though anti-Vietnam was a constant theme. I went to seminary in 1968, because the woman, to whom I have now been married for 45 years, said to me, after our fourth or fifth date, that she could never marry anyone who was not a Methodist minister. The call of God got very loud when she uttered those fateful words. And the possibility of a hitch in Vietnam, a war that I deeply disagreed with, had a role to play as well. So, I went to seminary.

When I got to the seminary—it was Perkins School of Theology, where I ended up teaching for 33 years—I had to take some classes, but since I had no church background I hardly had a clue. I lighted on Hebrew, primarily because it looked funny and I had always enjoyed languages. With that very random decision my entire life changed. I loved the language and the culture, history, and theology that it enshrined. I read voraciously in areas of the Old Testament from the very start, and knew almost right away that I wanted to teach that stuff.

However, when I finished a PhD in Hebrew Bible in 1975 there was no place for me to teach. I am a white male, and in those days nearly all positions in seminaries were going to women and persons of color, a reality I was completely in favor of. As a result, I became the pastor of a church for two years, after which I secured a teaching job at a small Methodist college for three years. After those years, I was asked to return to Perkins as a sabbatical replacement person for two years, teaching Old Testament. That leads me to question 2.

How did an Old Testament/Hebrews professor get interested in homiletics (preaching)?

I was not interested in homiletics in 1979, but only in the Hebrew Bible. After the two years of sabbatical replacement, I imagined I would again take a position in the church, since there was no place for me on the faculty. However, in 1981, I was asked to do some administrative work, directing continuing education and the Doctor of Ministry programs, which I did for three years. Then in 1984 a colleague, a good friend on the faculty, was denied tenure in homiletics. The very day the denial came down, the dean asked me to consider teaching homiletics. I thought I would try it, though I knew precisely nothing about the academic side of the field. I read furiously for the next few months, and in August of that same year I found myself teaching homiletics. Believe me, I was only a very few pages ahead of my students in that first year! So, 28 years later I retired as Lois Craddock Perkins Professor of Homiletics, an endowed chair I held for the final 15 years of my time at Perkins.

You taught preaching for more than 30 years. How did the discipline change over those decades?

I actually taught preaching at Perkins for 28 years, from 1984-2012. The discipline of homiletics both changed a great deal during those years and maintained core principles. I found the changes especially in the quality of teaching and research in the field. When I was asked to teach preaching in 1984, the discipline was rife with older preachers, who usually tried to teach what they themselves had done. Too many teaching events began “When I preached from this text…” or “I remember my sermon…” I myself experienced homiletical instruction that way in the 1960’s; both of my teachers were older preachers who were filling out their ministries in the classroom. They were just not conversant with the many facets of the vastly complex task that they had been doing for years. Even in 1984, the literature in the field was in the main not rigorous and very repetitious and derivative. Big changes were on the way.

Fred Craddock was an important voice from the field of New Testament; his book “As One Without Authority” was a revelation for many of us. Tom Troeger brought a poet’s heart, a musician’s skill, and a rich imagination to the task; I learned and have continued to learn much from his diverse work. David Buttrick’s huge tome, “Homiletic” summarized a lifetime of deep sociological reflection about hearers and the linguistic shapes pursued by preachers. Ron Allen wrote helpful book after helpful book, much of it rooted in his own New Testament work. Paul Wilson brought serious thought from the field of theology. I attempted in all of my work to employ my Old Testament training to the field. Not too many of us in the field were trained like that. In more recent days, many women have added significant voices to the chorus: my colleague Alyce McKenzie, Mary Donovan Turner, Dawn Ottoni-Wilhelm, and a host of others.

The discipline has deepened its interests and sharpened its seriousness of research interests in more ways than I can enumerate. It was a very good and fruitful time for me to have entered a field I had no intention to enter in the first place. It remains a discipline with fascinating and gifted people to pursue it in great diversity of approach. I do sense that the discipline now threatens to fracture into sub-disciplines or micro-disciplines, thereby losing the point of the whole thing, namely to make better preachers preaching better sermons to congregations smaller and less certain about just why they have shown up that Sunday. It remains a very great challenge to pursue this work.

What is the most important thing men and women need to learn to become engaging, relevant preachers?

After my experience as an interim pastor of a huge church, riven with terrible contentions over a previous predatory pastor, I became convinced that the chief thing for a preacher is to know her/himself. Until we can know ourselves, we have no business standing in front of anyone, pretending to proclaim the gospel. Thus, a spiritual director and/or therapist is crucial for regular preaching. The task is one of such vulnerability, such nakedness, that a person not in touch with their deepest self risks over-revelation of self, under revelation of one’s truest self, or plain lying about why one is doing this work at all. All the skills in the world cannot cover a thinly disguised would-be preacher who hides themselves behind scholarship or clever raconteur ability, or “aw shucks, folks” likeability. We need to know who we are, and we simply cannot do that on our own, and especially not in the cauldron of pastoral ministry. I want to know that the preacher who preaches is a person of genuine integrity, sharing themselves in freedom with me, and urging me, luring me, to join them in the way of the mysterious gospel of God. We need people with all the passion they can muster, their “highest, wildest, and holiest” selves, as Frederick Buechner said nearly 50 years ago. Preaching is a mad act, speaking for God to people who hardly know who God may be, proclaiming the gospel of one who came preaching and loving the world. No small task, that!

In honor of your academic career, your Perkins colleagues created a “Festschrift” (a book honoring a respected scholar) for you, with the provocative title Parental Guidance Advised: Adult Preaching from the Old Testament. What was your reaction to the title?

I am deeply honored by those who compiled my Festschrift, and I love the title of the thing, since for many the Old Testament is PG at best, if not PG-13. (The Song of Songs gets close to NC-17.) The articles in the book each provide some fascinating looks at texts, some rarely discussed, and possible ways that they might be preached. I should say that the publisher was very leery of publishing the book, saying that such collections of articles in honor of an aging scholar have a very small readership. Hence, my name does not appear on the front or back covers, but only inside the book. This is most odd for a Festschrift! But that is OK; I am glad that my friends and colleagues, Alyce McKenzie and Chuck Aaron, persisted in producing the thing. It was a very long and somewhat arduous process, and I am very grateful to Alyce and Chuck for their work. What the book adds to the field of homiletics is another series of articles that takes the Hebrew Bible seriously as a source of preaching the gospel. After all, the Hebrew Bible is a part of the gospel of God, and its loss in the church has been, in my mind, catastrophic for a full understanding of the event and meaning of Jesus.

Who is your favorite character from the Old Testament?

My favorite Old Testament character is Saul, which is hardly surprising since my first novel tells his story. I have long felt that Saul has been seriously misunderstood and falsely denigrated by scholars of that text for countless centuries. It began with the assault of the Chronicler some centuries before Christ, and has persisted until the modern world. My novel attempts to take very seriously the full richness and ambiguity of the biblical text that we have been given. Please read my novel as one way of hearing this fabulous story!

What’s the most important story from the Old Testament that’s not being preached?

I think of the terrifying stories of Gen 38, the account of Tamar and Judah, II Samuel 13, the rape of Tamar (a different Tamar), and the abusive story of the concubine in Judges 19. These stories are all about the abuse of women in a deeply patriarchal world. It has been said that in all of our modern congregations perhaps 40% of the women have been or are being abused by their partners or parents. These stories could well serve as an entering point for this pervasive and immensely difficult subject. It remains a mystery to me why the church is simply not voicing this subject publically. I am not naïve about the subject; it is explosive and needs great care. But that is no reason to remain silent.

Your most recent writing venture was a novel entitled King Saul. What inpired you to write a novel about Saul?

I was inspired to attempt a novel, because, frankly, I decided that the world did not need another scholarly tome, heavily footnoted, in conversation with previous work. I had done enough of that in my life, and determined that I would attempt to express my love for and engagement with the text in this new way. There have been a few attempts to write a historical novel on the stories of David. Two pop to mind: Joseph Heller’s wild and often ludicrous God Knows, though he does know the story very well, and Stefan Heym’s quite wonderful The King David Report. These were of some inspiration to me, but neither of these writers were scholars of the Bible, of course. But they surely could write well, something that I wondered if I could do in this fictional genre. I think I have done relatively well for a first effort, but as I read back through the novel (I am currently reading it for the blind through an organization called Reading and Radio Resource, for which I am a fifteen year volunteer) I can see places that needed a firmer grip from the would-be novelist’s keyboard. Still, I think I have expressed my hearing of the Bible’s story in my story and am pleased that it came out as well as it did.

You say that your intention was to tell Saul’s story again, but to tell it new and to tell it ‘slant,’ as Emily Dickensen so memorably put it. What do you mean by that?

The Dickensen quote has long been a hallmark of the way I approach the biblical text. Truth rarely comes in straightforward ways, but quite often appears “slant,” that is sideways, off-kilter, overheard rather than heard directly, as Kierkegaard said. The Bible to me is often reminiscent of that Gilbert and Sullivan ballad “Things are seldom what they seem; skim milk masquerades as cream…” Far from being a book readily grasped, the Bible’s riches of meaning appear well nigh bottomless, and readings can only be followed by further readings that lead to conversations that can go on and on. My reading of the Saul story is only one reading; there obviously are many other possible readings. If that were not so, the story would not be worth the reading in the first place. It would be mere propaganda.

Why do you think the world needs a fictional account of King Saul – or any Biblical character for that matter?

I doubt the world in fact “needs” a fictional account of King Saul. However, I needed to tell one. This was so for me because the stories of Saul, as well as of many biblical characters, are prose fiction in the sense that they have been told by a narrator and not simply reported by an eyewitness. Robert Alter has said that the narratives of the Hebrew Bible are “the beginnings of prose fiction in the Western world.” I quite agree, and I would add that these stories should be read in world literature classes as much as Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Virgil long have been read.

There have been several books published this year by prominent bible scholars (Peter Enns, Brian McLaren, Adam Hamilton) arguing for a less defensive and rigid way of reading the Bible than many Christians have been taught. What is your advice on how to read the Bible, especially the Old Testament? How is it authoritative for our lives today?

This is a huge question! Since I first read the Bible as I had read literature (I was as much English major in college as philosophy major), I always recommended my students do the same. Begin first reading the Bible as a compendium of great tales, with plot, characterization, point of view, the tools of any good reader of stories. My first scholarly book, Preaching Old Testament, and my last, Telling the Whole Story, tried to summarize in much detail what I mean by that advice. When the Bible is read in that fashion, defensiveness and rigidity are not welcome. And I would further say that any authoritativeness it has is wrapped up in the ways in which it is written. If I cannot actually read the thing, I cannot have any sense of its authority for me. Of course, the simple answer to the question is that the church for the last 1700 years has announced that the OT is an authoritative part of the canon of Scripture. But beyond that ecclesiastical fact, the Hebrew Bible expresses its authority in its divine insights into humanity, the created order, the wonders and mysteries of God, the dangers of power, the possibilities and hopes of a future of shalom. Without the Bible, these crucial questions would float in the air, unattached to the world in which we live.

How are you enjoying retirement so far?

Retirement is grand! My wife and I have travelled like mad—in fact we are off soon to the Baltic on a cruise, followed by excursions to Poland, Hungary, and Romania. I have been privileged to be asked to lecture on several cruises organized by Educational Opportunities over the past years, and am very grateful to them for those chances. We have gone to various places in the Mediterranean on Pauline trips and to Israel. This has afforded my wife and me many occasions to extend the trips to other places. Then too I was able to finish my novel and to begin work on a sequel, “King David,” a story every bit the equal of Saul’s in breadth and richness. And there is much to be said for the opportunity just to be together, to grow older together, to explore both the inner and outer worlds of our lives together. I know well how fortunate we are to be able to have all these experiences; they are gifts that we continue to unwrap day by day.

Follow Dr. Holbert and his weekly reflections on the Old Testament at his column “Opening the Old Testament,” here.

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