Preaching in a Postcolonial Age
Telling the truth about our past allows us to be faithful in the present.
BY DAVID SCHNASA JACOBSEN, preaching professor, director of the Homiletical Theology Project
A common sobriquet for the School of Theology is schola prophetarum, or school of the prophets. The name calls to mind the prophetic witness at the heart of what the institution does and how its students, alumni, faculty, and staff have sought to engage in the world. We gratefully recount the prophetic memory that makes us want to celebrate this place and its prophetic preachers: Anna Howard Shaw (1878, MED 1886), Martin Luther King, Jr., Howard Thurman, and so many others.
At the same time, it is exceedingly important for us to be honest about our identity and our witness for the sake of preaching gospel prophetically today. If we mistake our sense of memory and identity for uncritical hagiography, we are not truthful about our past, nor can we be prophetically faithful in the present. At the very least, some grounding in a critical reading of history and a truthful theological perspective should give us pause.
In the Heidelberg Disputation, Martin Luther argues that the chief virtue of a theology of the cross is to “[call a] thing what it actually is.”1 A theology of glory runs the risk of occluding the truth; a theology of the cross acknowledges the troublesome truth that the gospel and the call to prophetic witness meet us where we really are. Somehow we in STH need to learn to speak of ourselves historically and theologically in an even more truthful way: a way that acknowledges all the differences among us and the cruciform shadows in which our prophetic calling is issued.
Some of this naming of the cruciform truth of our identity and witness is already a topic of conversation in the Church. Thirty years ago, postliberal theologians like Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon invited mainline churches to embrace their loss of cultural power and any pretensions to a universal liberal “we” and hold instead to a Church with a countercultural identity, as “exiles” or a colony in a secular world.2
INVISIBLE PRIVILEGE
In my view, this shift away from liberal universalism to ecclesial particularity is just the beginning of what needs to take place.3 My quarrel with the postliberal view held by Hauerwas and Willimon is that it has often not come fully clean with its identity and the nature of its prophetic witness in a world that doesn’t feature just one dominant culture, but many cultures and identities. My concern is that both mainline liberalism and a culturally wary postliberalism have inadvertently occluded the complexities of identity and privilege that even now are too often unspoken features of common life. STH and the mainline Church are neither chaplains to some universal order nor the vanguard of a pure, countercultural ecclesial body. We are, in truth, largely white institutions for whom our privilege has too often been invisible to “us.”
I place the pronoun above in quotes because, as every preacher knows, it is often difficult to speak in the first-person plural. Postcolonial theory and theology actually problematize the way in which we construct our identities, reinscribe often unnamed points of view, and understand our realities not in terms of some monolithic culture, but in intercultural relation.4 The problematic “we” of homiletic discourse reveals the difficulty we have of understanding our identities and the nature of prophetic witness itself. Implied underneath it is the idea that the largely white mainline Church needs not only to acknowledge its disestablishment, but its racial privilege and its need for decolonization.
The goal of all this, however, is not an extra dollop of white, liberal guilt, but responsible and faithful prophetic witness, calling a thing “what it really is” in the shadow of the cross. This will not be easy, and may also require an honest, intercultural capacity that is both painful and life-giving.
It is painful because it means embracing the truth of memory and acknowledging the corruption that attends any institution’s desire to possess its identity as a reified essence. Prophetic witness may just mean that we take seriously postcolonial theology’s commitment to identity as being formed in intercultural relation with others. Postcolonial theology acknowledges that identities in a colonial (and now neocolonial) context are often reified so as to disavow the complexity of relationships across groups and their identities. It may not be easy for the white mainline Church and its institutions to acknowledge the painful truth of the ways in which its identity has been constructed to keep others at bay and away. Postcolonial theory invites us to see ourselves as entangled in our identities with others and therefore not heirs to some preserved purity.
CALL IT LIKE IT IS
In Germany, many communities have begun placing inscribed stone memorials—Stolpersteine (“stones of stumbling”)—in the uneven cobblestone surfaces of the streets outside the homes and businesses that once belonged to Jews and had been appropriated during the Holocaust. The point of these Stolpersteine is to keep the memory and therefore the truth of that memory alive. It requires contemporary Germans to be aware of the complexities of identities, both past and present, so that what happened then might never again. Here, memory and identity are not hidden, but brought out into the open, where they help sponsor responsible living with others today. I suspect for “us” it is also about offering prophetic witness that exposes power and privilege in the cruciform shadow of calling a thing what it really is. This is a piece of the work that remains for “us” going forward—where the gospel must be named in the presence of who “we” really are in relation to neocolonial others.
And yet postcolonial vision offers still more: a life-giving pneumatology for what is otherwise a dislocating experience for people of privilege who share this neocolonial world. In a volume on prophetic preaching, ethicist James Childs makes the case that “the Spirit makes alliances.”5 Perhaps the greatest possible shift in the mainline Church’s prophetic witness would be to recognize that the Spirit of God animates prophetic witness not just by the “no” in the face of human idolatry, but also by the “yes” in seeing God’s Spirit already at work in the wider world beyond our ecclesial circled wagons, beyond the purity of self-enclosed identities. If the Spirit makes alliances, we may find ourselves engaging a prophetic witness for this time, one that both sees and embraces a Church that is being disestablished and decolonized in God’s good time.
Footnotes
1. Martin Luther, “Heidelberg Disputation,” in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 31.
2. Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989).
3. For more details about the critique of this classic liberal view of prophetic preaching, see my article, “Schola Prophetarum: Prophetic Preaching Toward a Public, Prophetic Church,” Homiletic 34: I (Summer 2009), 12–21.
4. The term postcolonial names a set of relationships that continue to haunt the realities of life in a neocolonial world marked by the migration of peoples, economic oppression, intercultural meetings and conversations, and the privileging of certain American or Eurocentric ways of doing things, thinking, and speaking. For postcolonial theory, culture and identity are not fixed essences, but interactive. For a helpful introductory summary of postcolonial theory and theology, one may wish to read Ania Loomba’s Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 2nd Ed. (London: Routledge, 2005) and Kwok Puilan’s Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005). For a brief overview of how postcolonial theory and theology might impact contemporary homiletics, see my articles, coauthored with Yohan Go and Duse Lee, “Introduction to the Essays of the Consultation on Preaching and Postcolonial Theology” and “Making New Spaces in Between: A Post-Reflective Essay Weaving Postcolonial Threads into North American Homiletics” in Homiletic 40:1 (Summer 2015), 3–7, 56–62.
5. James M. Childs, Jr., Preaching Justice: The Ethical Vocation of Word and Sacrament Ministry (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000), 40. Childs writes about the Spirit of Pentecost in connection with deepened ecumenical relationships. I press Childs’s language further by viewing creating alliances with others across cultural and even religious lines as the Spirit’s ongoing creative task in the world, in connection with the prophetic Word.