The Scandal of the Gospel: Preaching and the Grotesque

Chuck Campbell always takes us deeper in his writings: deeper theologically, deeper biblically, deeper homiletically. This book is no exception. He delves into the grotesque scandal that is at the heart of the Christian gospel, demonstrates how it has been used for good and for evil, and challenges us to engage it deeply—for goodness’ sake—in our own preaching. Out of the shallows and into deep, disorienting preaching waters he calls us. Enter at your own risk!

—LEONORA TUBBS TISDALE, Clement-Muehl Professor Emerita of Divinity (Homiletics), Yale Divinity School

"With the The Scandal of the Gospel, Campbell breaks new ground and suggests alternative paths for the future of homiletics. Through its analyses of the relationship between preaching and the grotesque, from the carnivalesque, incarnate Word through first-century grottos to contemporary literature and the climate crisis, this book will simultaneously unsettle and liberate its readers."

—MARLENE RINGGAARD LORENSEN, Professor of Practical Theology, University of Copenhagen

This gorgeous theological treatment of the grotesque gospel demonstrates once again why Charles L. Campbell is one of the most liberative homileticians of our time. If you want to be freed from easy closed-off homiletical answers, pulpit clichés, and neat sermon patterns, this book is for you. It will embolden you to confront the dehumanizing and destructive powers that weaponize the grotesque in the world and challenge you to become more human, more creaturely, and more compassionate, especially toward the other, including creation as a whole. Moreover, this provocative, imaginative, generative work will lead readers to the borderlands of creation where Jesus, the grotesque God, can be found. What a beautiful literary expression of a Word before the powers!

—LUKE A. POWERY, Dean, Duke University Chapel; and Associate Professor of Homiletics, Duke Divinity School

Charles Campbell is one of the most original thinkers in the field of preaching. He always advances our thought by first knocking it off balance, and this book is no exception. Here he allows the shadowy light of the grotesque to fall across the pulpit, exposing the all-too-shiny empty hopes, the all-too-tidy resolutions, and all-too-easy faux resurrections of much of today’s preaching. Campbell guides us toward a preaching that is more honest, more alert, more porous to the wild interactions of such forces as poetry, raw experience, unresolved plots, punk protests, and jazz. This is an unforgettable book.

—THOMAS G. LONG, Bandy Professor Emeritus of Preaching, Candler School of Theology of Emory University

Charles Campbell steers us away from some of the cherished formulas that have grounded Christian preaching, and he urges us to embrace an edgier, more grotesque approach. He unveils a pathbreaking vision of preaching that reckons with the horrors of the current moment and yet remains faithful to the gospel. This book crackles with electricity and will resonate with preachers, poets, and other truth-tellers. A new era in homiletics has begun.

—DONYELLE C. MCCRAY, Associate Professor of Homiletics, Yale Divinity School

"I don’t have words to express how extraordinary I believe this book is. It cracks the teaching of preaching wide open. It’s an exercise in homiletical imagination, and it will require of us pedagogical acts of imagination that go way beyond anything we may have tried or thought appropriate. Faithful preaching of a grotesque gospel requires careful description of complex human lives—description of lives we believe God has entered, not tidy resolutions or neat homiletical patterns. The Scandal of the Gospel explores a more extreme homiletic—one that disrupts theology and homiletics in valuable ways and that recognizes and resists the weaponized grotesque."

—ANNA CARTER FLORENCE, Peter Marshall Professor of Preaching, Columbia Theological Seminary

The Scandal of the Gospel

The Scandal

of the Gospel

Preaching and the Grotesque

Charles L. Campbell

© 2021 Charles L. Campbell

Foreword © 2021 Westminster John Knox Press

First edition

Published by Westminster John Knox Press

Louisville, Kentucky

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29—10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Westminster John Knox Press, 100 Witherspoon Street, Louisville, Kentucky 40202-1396. Or contact us online at www.wjkbooks.com.

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used by permission. In this book, Scripture may be paraphrased or summarized.

Upon Waking from The Devil’s Workshop, by Demetria Martinez. © 2002 The Arizona Board of Regents. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press. Lucille Clifton, why some people be mad at me sometimes, from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton. Copyright © 1987 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions Ltd., www.boaeditions.org. Anna Akhmatova, Instead of a Preface, from Requiem from Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, edited and introduced by Roberta Reeder. Copyright © 1989, 1992, 1997 by Judith Hemschemeyer. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Zephyr Press, www.zephyrpress.org. Permission to use Anna Akhmatova’s Instead of a Preface is also granted by Canongate Books.

Book design by Sharon Adams

Cover design by Barbara LeVan Fisher, www.levanfisherdesign.com

Cover art: The Red Christ, 1922 (oil on canvas), Corinth, Lovis

(Franz Heinrich Louis) (1858–1925)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Campbell, Charles L., 1954- author.

Title: The scandal of the gospel : preaching and the grotesque / Charles L. Campbell.

Description: First edition. | Louisville, Kentucky : Westminster John Knox Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: Examines the theological, homiletical, and social implications of a grotesque gospel for contemporary preachers. It is the written adaptation of Yale Divinity School’s Beecher Lectures, given by Charles Campbell in 2018— Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021033996 (print) | LCCN 2021033997 (ebook) | ISBN 9780664266202 (paperback) | ISBN 9781646982202 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Bible. New Testament—Homiletical use. | Preaching. | Bible. New Testament—Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Grotesque—Biblical teaching.

Classification: LCC BS2361.3 .C36 2021 (print) | LCC BS2361.3 (ebook) | DDC 251—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033996

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033997

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For more information, please email [email protected].

For Dana

I believe that closure is a steaming load of middle-class horseshite invented to pay for shrinks’ Jags.

—Detective Frank Mackey

in Tana French’s Faithful Place

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. Jesus in the Grotto: The Gospel as Grotesque

The Gospel as Grotesque

Preaching a Grotesque Gospel

2. The Thing: Resisting the Weaponized Grotesque

Resisting the Weaponized Grotesque

Preachers of the Fictional Page

Humanizing Stories: The Preacher’s Dilemma

Jesus, the Man That Was a Thing

3. Incarnate Word: Preaching and the Carnivalesque Grotesque

Grotesque Realism

The Grotesque Body

Preaching, Homiletics, and the Grotesque Body

4. Apocalypse Now: Preaching and the Environmental Grotesque

Apocalypse Now

Preaching and the Environmental Grotesque

Who Knows? Grotesque Hope

Environmental Justice: Resisting the Weaponized Grotesque

Back to the Grotto: The Environmental Grotesque Body

Selected Bibliography

Index

Excerpt from Invasion of the Dead, by Brian K. Blount

Foreword

H eavy lifting. That’s what preaching is. Those who deny this fact are lying to themselves and everyone else. Teaching preaching is the heaviest lifting in the academy. Almost everyone in the academy denies this, which means almost everyone is lying to themselves and to a watching world. If we take just the sheer volume and density of the work for a preacher—wrestling each week with difficult texts in order to offer a word from God that is bound up with and yet aimed at the cacophony of voices, the myriad of struggles, and the forest of feelings, dreams, and memories that weave together a congregation—it rushes us into exhaustion. If we take just the sheer volume and density of the work for a teacher of preaching—listening to hundreds of sermons over countless hours, reviewing the exegesis and interpretation of each one, cutting through the denials of the complexities of life, of the text, and of the preachers themselves—it pushes exhaustion toward madness.

There are preaching pretenders. There are those who, when faced with the heavy lifting and the exhaustion that awaits, opt out. Like those reluctant souls who go to the gym but spend most of their time walking around talking to people, never breaking a sweat, these pretenders preach lite. Easy does it. Say a few words—sound like a television commercial that glides along our waking consciousness softly touching our attention. This will not do for hard-core instructors in preaching. They war against the pretenders, aiming to kill them in all would-be preachers. Pick up the damn weight! This is the unspoken motto of the preaching professor. There is a refined cynicism in every preaching professor I know, honed over years of listening to people avoid the weight or seek to put the weight down as quickly as possible, long before the work is done. Their cynicism is a gift from God to the disciples of Jesus, especially those who are following him at a distance, having allowed too much space between his body and their own.

Charles Campbell (affectionately known as Chuck) allows no distance between Jesus’ body and our own, no distance between Jesus’ body and the body of the preacher, no distance between Jesus’ body and the body of preaching. All of it is captured in the grotesque. Jesus is a shattering, a crumbling, a breaking, and a pulling apart of the building projects that constitute a life, a society, a religion, or even a world. Chuck knows this deeply, powerfully—this knowledge has been a signature of his writing and teaching for decades. So to turn to the grotesque was inevitable for him. What better idea captures what preaching must be in order to be of the shattering life? The idea of the grotesque in his hands is no aesthetic ploy. It is the means through which this seasoned warrior against facile preaching will teach us to see what God’s overturning of the given order means for proclamation.

Chuck has always been an intellectual who is honest about what he sees, never allowing the scholarly myopia that often afflicts academics to capture him. He refuses to narrow the frames of intelligibility and legibility down to disciplinary conversations and concerns in what he writes. To see the grotesque as he does in this text is to open up our negotiation with two kinds of contradiction, one an obstacle and the other a necessity. The obstacle is the kind of contradiction that comes from hiding from the grotesque in favor of images, ideas, and narratives that paint Hallmark movie lives of faith. Such imagined dainty lives of faith exhibit a controlled messiness that will resolve itself into a tidy ending very shortly. In contrast, the grotto and the carnival hold truths that are closer to the heart of the gospel where things spill out of their appropriate form—the grotesque is unleashed in the body of Jesus. Porous and leaking, his body’s energies and urgencies cover everyone who comes near him, upsetting what and who and how they understood themselves to be in this world and calling them into a new kind of experimentation of living on the edge with the Spirit and with their enemies.

But how do you preach that? Wrong question. What do you understand preaching to be once you grasp the grotesque calling? Instructor Campbell wants to lead us into that calling, which brings me to the necessary kind of contradiction: the contradiction that haunts the preacher who is constantly pulled toward a respectability politic resourced by a respectability preaching. That pull is toward a silence while speaking and a death while living—a corpse in the pulpit, weekly sanitized so as to never give off the odor of decay. Preaching is in constant struggle against this pull toward