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Docta Ignorantia LXXII Preaching And Kerygma It was a serious question about "preaching" today and a technical one. The background is NT scholarship of the last 200 years, since Reimarus knocked the stuffing out of the scholars and the church. Kerygma is a technical word from the NT meaning "Preaching" and refers in that context to a specific set of things that Acts says were preached and were the Kerygma, rather like a set of talking points. So the Q for scholars recently has been, "What is the Kerygma in modern context?" It's a very serious question. But there is now in my mind an even more serious Q: "Is there a Kerygma today at all?" And my answer at the moment is, "No, there isn't, not a Christian one, not a Jewish one, not Muslim one, not a Sai one, not any at all anywhere at all, and probably not for centuries to come or at least as long as we and our children have here." If this is the case, it has huge implications, as you can see. I think preaching now is just silent work that emits the Light, suis generis. Make sense? In a sense, yes "what-is-kerygma" is always a difficulty for preachers to grasp, but there's now more to it. Now, there's also not something there to be grasped. It's an attribute of the era. We rack our brains on the one hand, trying to come up with something to say that will help folks, and trying to rely on inner guidance, etc., etc., etc., ranging the range of the human epistemological repertoire, and that the end and during the beginning we have the feeling of not connecting with whatever it is we had been wanting to connect with. We seem not to get anything done. And it occurs to us that our words and rituals aren't soteriologically puissant, we aren't saving souls, to use the old language. Then it occurs, as it did to Bonhoeffer long ago facing Himmler, that there isn't a set of words that are soteriologically effective in the sense we had thought there might be because we know there have been times when there were words that were soteriologically effective, puissant. When Francis preached the world listened. When Jesus preached the monastic community he was part of listened and Paul put it out to the world, which listened. When we preach the world yawns. And if we are dishonest, we become fanatics and then God is nowhere near us. So in that case too we haven't anything [soteriologically effectice] to preach, just blather. The reason is there isn't any kerygma, no word, to preach. Nor any ritual. I shared this with Barbara Thiering yesterday: "Religionless Christianity" [one of Bonhoeffer's terms] means Christianity without kerygma and without ritual, without Word (Preaching) and without Sacrament (Liturgy). Duty is God, work is worship. Welcome to the world come of age.
Adwaitha Hermitage
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