THE TROUBLE/GRACE SCHOOL OF HOMILETICS[1]

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Paul Scott Wilson, Emmanuel College , University of Toronto .  

            The trouble/ grace school of homiletics is largely unnoticed in homiletical literature. It is the only school that identifies sermon form as a theological issue, that sermon form is not a neutral category, it affects the theology that is expressed. This paper will give a brief overview of the development of that school in the last 120 years in North America and it will do so in three stages, I. Modernist Law and Gospel, II. Organic Law to Gospel, and III. Postmodern Trouble/ Grace. Law and gospel move from being categories within Lutheran theology to fruitful homiletical principles of form and function across the denominational spectrum, making the trouble/ grace school one of the largest homiletical schools today.  

I. Modernist Law and Gospel  

Modernist ideas of law and gospel are largely mechanical for each category is intended for a particular type of individual, and together they are non-homiletical in that they point to how one does theology, in a sermon or elsewhere.  Luther spoke of law and gospel as two different kinds of emphasis or weight within the single unity of the Word, the one condemns humanity to its sin and failure and the other is the saving initiative of God. The foremost interpreter of Luther on these matters was Prof. C. F. W. Walthers at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis , Missouri . From September 12, 1884 to November 6, 1885 , he devoted his Friday evenings to thirty-nine lectures interpreting Luther on the subject of The Proper Distinction Between Law and Gospel.[2] He chose the topic because the 1577 Lutheran confession, the Formula of Concord, had stated that law and gospel were necessary to understand Scripture correctly. Law and gospel, he said, are a means to bring people to conversion: law addresses the conscience and discloses an individual�s sin. Without law written in the heart, the gospel cannot be heard. The law exists as a threat; as with Abraham and Hagar, it �hands us a piece of bread and drives us out into the desert.�[3] The Gospel, by contrast, �demands nothing at all� but �invit[es] a hungry person to come to the table to eat�.to partake of heavenly blessings.�[4] �The Law tells us what we must do, while the Gospel speaks only of what God does.�[5]  

For Walthers, law produces a guilty conscience, contrition, fear and confession. It is to be preached to people who are confident in their sin while gospel is to be preached to terrified sinners. Law and gospel must be preached in such a way that the hearer is in no doubt as to whom each is addressed. In private one must not proclaim the gospel to an unrepentant sinner, for it can do that person no good, but in the sermon, even though some impenitent people are present, both must be proclaimed. Law and gospel exist primarily as distinct and opposing repeated emphases in a sermon. Nowhere in Walthers do they represent an overall movement or flow in the sermon from law to gospel: �Such a topographical division is meaningless. Both may be contained in the same sentence, but every hearer must be able to say, �That is meant for me!��[6] For Walthers the �ultimate test of a proper sermon�[7] is separation of law and gospel, so everyone understands what applies to whom.  

M. Reu, taught homiletics at Wartburg Seminary in Dubuque , Iowa , some years after Walther�s death in 1887, and approvingly cites him at length in his Homiletics (1922).[8] In Reu, again, there is no overall law/ gospel sermon movement. While they may be found in the same Bible passage,[9] and while only the Holy Spirit can rightly divide the two,[10] the preacher�s task is to determine according to the spiritual needs of the congregation which of the two to preach.[11] Overall sermon movement is linear and logical, such that the preacher always leads �towards the conclusion to which he is striving to bring his hearers.�[12]  

II. Organic Law to Gospel  

For two writers in the late 1950�s from separate Lutheran traditions, law and gospel start to become more than just two emphases of God�s Word. They begin to be understood organically and their inter-relationship comes into focus. However, it will be non-Lutherans in 1977 who follow their cue and develop law and gospel into an overall sermon movement.  

In 1959, Richard R. Caemmerer of Concordia Seminary stopped short of this. The preacher �sounds the alert [of law] simply that the people might pick up their ears and stand with their hands outstretched, saying: �Then the �preaching,� the telling of the good news, really begins.�[13] Caemmerer has a three-stage development of the sermon: goal (God�s goal typically of repentance and belief[14]); malady (God�s judgment that offers a diagnosis of what is wrong[15]); and means (a proclamation of God�s grace or rescue as it is found in the immediate text at hand or in the larger section of Scripture[16]). They are not to be conceived as an overall movement from law (goal and malady) to gospel (means); they are a way for the preacher to ensure that the text adequately speaks through a sermon to determine its content:  

Isn�t it true that the accent on persuasion�will suggest the major division for every text: I. Goal, II. Malady, III. Means? No�that division [is] possible only where the text discusses all three. Even then, it may not be preferable, for that division tends to slot all of the affirmation of the Gospel into one section. When the preacher can confront his hearers with Law and Gospel repeatedly in the same sermon without muddling his plan, then he is on the track of a good outline.[17]  

Sermon structure is an outline of points, and law and gospel have little impact on it[18] except somehow to �cue� goal, malady and means.[19] His goal is intellectual, to get people to understand the gospel.  

H. Grady Davis is the first in homiletics to hint at law and gospel as an overall sermon movement. This is not surprising since he emphasized the organic nature of the sermon as an idea that grows. He implies a development of the gospel from the center of the sermon: �The apprentice must learn to make sure that the gospel is in his germinal idea to begin with. If it is not there, it cannot be at the heart of the sermon where it ought to be. The gospel cannot successfully be dragged in later. The last point of the sermon is much too late to begin thinking about the gospel.�[20]  

In 1977 organic notions of law and gospel dominate. Frederick Buechner, Presbyterian minister and novelist, seemed to pick up on Davis when he wrote his classic essay, Telling the Truth, The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale: �The gospel is bad news before it is good news.�[21] For him the tragedy is our sin, the comedy is that we are loved anyways, and the fairy tale is that extraordinary things happen by God�s grace.[22]  

Within a year, two additional books appeared that radically changed the law/ gospel territory for preaching. Herman G. Stuempfle, Jr., at Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg , in Preaching Law and Gospel, devised a more sophisticated understanding of law and gospel than had been plainly evident before. On the vertical access, the law functions as accusation and as a hammer of judgment that brings individuals to their knees in guilt and repentance�the gospel of forgiveness is needed. By contrast on the horizontal axis, law as a �mirror of existence� reflects back to the world its fallen condition that includes anxiety, finitude, alienation, doubt, and despair.[23] The gospel as �antiphon to existence� is required to correlate with this and it turns worldly expectations upside down with divine intervention.[24] Davis shifts the focus of preaching from primarily individualistic to social as well. The sermon may contain various alternatives: judgment and forgiveness, alienation and reconciliation, anxiety and certitude, despair and hope, or transience and homecoming,[25] all leading to a call to obedience.[26] However, Stuempfle calls an overall prescription �from law to gospel� a �distortion.�[27]  

Episcopalian Milton Crum develops a detailed overall movement from law to gospel in his overly-complex Manual on Preaching.[28] He conceives of the sermon as moving from Situation (the human situation �mucked up with sin� after the fall[29]) to Complication to Resolution. The Complication is an analysis of symptomatic behavior that needs transformation by the gospel. The root of this behavior must be identified along with the resulting consequences to help people to understand why they behave in certain ways. The Resolution is the gospel content that �speaks to the root of behavior to effect a transformation in mind and heart.�[30] The preacher points to new results that follow the new way of perceiving or believing, including �new symptomatic behavior on the feeling and/or action levels and new consequences which follow as obedience to faith�.[31] He speaks of four related components of the sermon that may be engaged in any order: biblical situation-complication, present situation-complication, biblical gospel resolution, and present gospel resolution. Crum tries to keep the sermon process very fluid but in trying to accomplish this, his project becomes confusing.[32]  

Nonetheless, Crum understood that law (he preferred the word judgment) and gospel are not just theological terms, they are hermeneutical lenses with which to view biblical texts and homiletical tools with which to structure sermons.  He had a free-flowing organic notion of structure and emphasized that sermons are not just ideas addressed to minds, they also address behaviors, feelings, and perceptions.  

III. Postmodern Trouble/ Grace  

            In the postmodern approach to law and gospel the terms shift to trouble and grace, or other related terms, in part to get away from the negative association of law with Old Testament and gospel with New Testament�God�s Word consists of both wherever it is found. In addition, the dynamic inter-relationship of trouble and grace becomes the focus: they exist in a tensive relationship that characterizes metaphor and generates the theological outcome of the sermon. Major contributors to this third stage are mostly non-Lutherans.  

            Crum anticipated many later developments. His influence on Methodist Eugene Lowry�s The Homiletical Plot[33] may be highlighted in chart form. Part of the clarity of Lowry�s interpretation was envisioning the plot as a kind of loop, the sermon plot proceeds down until it reaches a place of reversal that �turn[s] things upside down,�[34] at which point the good news is disclosed, and the movement ascends towards a climax:  

Milton Crum (1978)                                                   Eugene Lowry (1980)

Situation                                                                        Upsetting the Equilibrium

Complication: symptom, root, resulting

            consequences  [i.e. analysis]                             Analyzing the Discrepancy

Resolution:                                                                    Disclosing the Key to Resolution

   (a) Gospel content                                        Experiencing the Gospel

               (b) New Results: �consequences�                  Anticipating the Consequences

Like Crum, the gospel for Lowry is an event, an experience, not just reception of ideas.  

Crum described the sermon movement as, ��from fallen humanity to redeemed humanity, from sin to faith, from darkness to light, from what Paul calls living �according to the flesh� to living �according to the spirit,� from condemnation to justification, from alienation to sanctification.�[35] He anticipates Richard Lischer, a Lutheran, in his A Theology of Preaching who says the sermon moves through �one or more of the following sets of antitheses: chaos to order, bondage to deliverance, rebellion to vindication, despair to hope, guilt to justification, debt to forgiveness, separation to reconciliation, wrath to love, judgment to righteousness, defeat to victory, death to life.�[36] As he says, the �first word in each pairing is reported as �bad news� for humanity.[37] Like Crum and Stuempfle, he allows a descriptive or horizontal law, not just a vertical, and he clarifies: �The Old Testament�s antiphon to judgment is the gospel of: the covenant, the new covenant, deliverance from Egypt, God�s love for the lowly, the messianic promise, return from exile, the reign of God, the Day of the Lord.�[38] Lischer identifies the law/gospel movement not as a design motif but as a kind of deep structure or grammar that can operate in sermons whatever the design[39] but his point is universally overlooked in homiletical literature.  

When I wrote about law and gospel in 1988, it was as one of several tensions in a sermon.[40] Two ideas, like two wires of a telephone crank generator, are brought into relationship and by the tension generated between the two, a third identity (or spark) is produced. The result is a postmodern language event that the reader must participate in to understand, rather like metaphor. Law and gospel do not cancel each other out�both remain and a third identity is generated that the hearer must enter to resolve, and that resolution is by faith. Both law and gospel claims are true, we are sinners and we are saved, and in the tension between the two we work out salvation in fear and trembling.  

 Most earlier work conceived of law and gospel in modernist ways: their identities were separate and distinct, with the focus on the individuality of each. A postmodern understanding conceives of language not as chunks of preformed thought; rather it is what permits and generates thought. Focus moves from the poles to the tension between them, their interdependence and relationship, their tendency to deconstruct each other, the unity of the system they produce, the flow from one to the other, and the need for each to be rediscovered in each moment, in the manner that faith ever seeks renewal. The juxtaposition between law and gospel produces a tension, dynamic energy, current or spark that with the help of the Holy Spirit that produces a sermon movement that echoes the overall movement of the faith from expulsion from Eden to the New Jerusalem, from the Exodus to the Promised Land, from Good Friday to Easter. Thus even in its overall shape and flow, the sermon begins to tell the Christian story. Lowry�s loop needed the possibility of many smaller loops, each indicating a separate encounter with the biblical text and a move to our situation. One learning was particularly important for me in Imagination of the Heart: unless the focus of the theme sentence is on God�s action, gospel in the sermon will remain remote�and unless this action is grace, the good news will be cast as judgment.  

In The Four Pages of the Sermon I simplified the instructional process to one loop for trouble and one for grace.[41] Preachers could imagine a page as a metaphor for one quarter of a sermon. Page One was Trouble in the Biblical Text, Page Two was Trouble in Our World, Page Three was Grace in the Biblical Text, and Page Four was Grace in Our World. Mission (what the congregation is to do as a result of the sermon) on Page Four becomes empowered invitation. Shuffling the pages to rearrange the sermon was discussed. Crum anticipated me. He took readers through components of the sermon that included, biblical situation-complication, present situation-complication, biblical gospel resolution, and present gospel resolution. He seems to contradict himself in giving no priority to any order: �The order of thought process in practice may correspond to the order of our description, or it may be quite different.�[42]  

Bryan Chapell, of Covenant Theological Seminary, in his Christ-Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon, echoes trouble/ grace. For him, "all of God's Word [is] a unified message of human need and divine provision."[43] He has preachers determine first what is the Fallen Condition Focus (FCF) of a biblical text that points to human sinfulness, our fallen condition, or the world's brokenness (he does not use the word �law�). "A message that merely establishes, 'God is good,' is not a sermon. However, when the same discourse deals with the doubt we may have that God is good when we face trial and demonstrates from the text how we handle our doubt with the truth of God's goodness, then the preacher has a sermon."[44]  

For Chapell, the sermon is based on a proposition yet the goal is not intellectual understanding but transformed lives through appropriation of God�s grace in text-directed ways. Sermon "messages will not simply tell people to hunker down and try harder this week, but will lead them to understand that Christ's work rather than their own provides the only hope of Christian obedience."[45] Chapell adds, "when people walk away from a message understanding that grace both motivates and enables them to serve God, futile human striving and vain self-vaunting vanish."[46] However broken or sinful we are in our fallen condition, God's redemptive work in Jesus Christ is of larger and ultimate significance. Chapell says that such a principle may "seem to stretch the bounds of precise expository preaching"[47] yet every biblical text is predictive of, preparatory for, reflective of, and/or resultant of the work of Christ. Is this hermeneutical approach justified? �Why does all Scripture focus on some aspect of our fallen condition? The clear answer is: to supply the warrant and to define the character of the redemptive elements in Scripture that we can, in turn, apply to our fallenness. The Bible�s ultimate aim is beautifully positive. Scripture addresses features of our incompleteness only because such a focus concurrently signals the work of God that makes us whole.�[48] For Chapell homiletical method is a theological issue, not merely a question of form and function considered separate from the Word we proclaim which is the gospel of Jesus Christ.  

Others homileticians can be identified in the trouble/ grace school. For example, Mary Catherine Hilkert, a Dominican, wants preaching to retain from Protestant dialectical theology the word of judgment, and from Roman Catholic sacramental theology the art of naming grace in the depths of human experience. She calls this act of sacramental imagination, �seeing the world through an alternative lens.�[49]  

Most important however is African-American preaching. Trouble/ grace as it appears in these traditions arises out of centuries of oppression influenced by ancient African religious expression. As Henry H. Mitchell says in Preaching as Celebration and Experience,[50] the sermon moves from a description of suffering and brokenness to celebration of what God has and is doing. Thus if black preaching resonates with the trouble/ grace school it does so out of similar discovery that for people to be uplifted, the sermon needs move to hope. Celebration is a theological movement at a deep structural level that manifests itself in performance of the gospel.  

Various writers speak of this in different ways. Samuel Proctor employs Hegel�s thesis, antithesis, synthesis; as does James Harris, but it is linear logic with a transformative difference.[51]  Mitchell speaks of narrative sermons involving �setting, plot-conflict, protagonist and cast, resolution, and celebration.�[52] He speaks of the flow of the sermon in David Buttrick�s terms, as being �like acts of a play, which now are often referred to as �moves��.[They] may look like the old outline of abstract points or general statements, but they are radically different. They are movements in consciousness made real by the supply of details crucial to the development of the plot.�[53] Sermons may admonish and discuss the sins, i.e. the �don�ts and other negatives�, but the opening should not consist of these and no more than a third of the entire sermon ought to be in this vein.[54] Frank Thomas combines Buechner, Crum and Wilson, �What is the �bad news� in the text? What is the �bad news� for our time?� and �What is the �good news� in the text? What is the �good news� for our time?�[55] For him, �the sermonic design is an emotional process that culminates in a moment of celebration when the good news (the assurance of grace) intensifies in�a feeling of empowerment.�[56]  

Cleophus LaRue of Princeton Seminary says that people in his tradition gather in worship �to be assured and reassured that God has acted and will act for them and for their salvation.�[57] La Rue looks for the divine initiative in a biblical text, looks for some area of congregational experience the text addresses,[58] and determines whether, �God�s power is used to liberate, deliver, provide, protect, empower, or transform.�[59]  

Assessment  

Trouble/ grace is not often recognized as a school of deep homiletical structure. Rather it is assessed as one method among many.[60] Or it is seen as Lutheran and as essentially identical to �an evangelistic sin-to-salvation paradigm, or a therapeutic brokenness to wholeness model�.[61] Or it is interpreted as a way of circumscribing biblical texts with one interpretative method�in fact it ensures that both the divine and human dimensions of texts are identified. Or it is seen as a problem-solution approach�in fact any solution it suggests comes only as an extension of a living relationship with God. Such assessments reduce the trouble/ grace theological paradigm to one model and fail to acknowledge the difference between anthropocentric sermons and those that center on God.  

The purpose of this paper is to facilitate discussion and to improve the teaching of preaching. Such discussion directed at trouble/ grace will ask crucial questions such as: Ought sermons to be hopeful even if a text (or a preacher) is not? Are texts legitimately to be read from the perspectives of trouble and grace? Does law to gospel restrict and reshape a biblical text or does it honor it? Ought preaching a text to be compatible with preaching the gospel? What notions of text are best upheld in preaching? Are there other ways sermons legitimately produce hope? What is the role of theology in reading texts? Is preaching grace compatible with preaching ethics? Such discussion will help homiletics move to new ways of rendering Scripture and God. 

[1]This paper is a condensed version of two chapters in my forthcoming, Preaching and Homiletical Theory, Preaching and Its Partners ( St. Louis , Missouri : Chalice Press, 2004).

[2]C. F. W. Walthers, The Proper Distinction Between Law and Gospel, trans. Herbert J.A. Bouman  (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1981 [German, 1897]).

[3]Ibid., 17.

[4]Ibid., 16.

[5]Ibid., 15.

[6]Ibid., 23.

[7]Ibid., 27.

[8]Reu, 141, 147-48, 156, 158.

[9]Ibid., 143.

[10]Ibid., 140-41.

[11]Ibid., 143. This is a  theme of Walthers: see, 64.

[12] Reu, 420.

[13]Ibid., 27.

[14]Richard R. Caemmerer,  Preaching for the Church (St. Louis, Missouri: Concordia Publishing House, 1959), 15-20.

[15]Ibid., 88.

[16]Ibid., 27-33; 89-90.

[17]Ibid., 96.

[18]Ibid., 79-111.

[19]Ibid., 97.

[20]H. Grady Davis , Design for Preaching (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Fortress Press, 1958), 49.

[21]Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth, The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 7.

[22]Ibid.,7.

[23]Herman G. Stuempfle, Jr., Preaching Law and Gospel (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Fortress Press, 1978), 23-32

[24]Ibid., 47-61.

[25]Ibid., 48-58.

[26]Ibid., 62-75.

[27]Ibid., 76.

[28]Milton Crum, Jr., Manual on Preaching: A New Process of Sermon Development (Valley Forge, Pennsylvania: Judson Press, 1977).

[29]Ibid., 76.

[30]Ibid., 78.

[31]Ibid., 21. Italics my own. Previous italics in this paragraph identify Crum�s five �dynamic factors�.

[32]See for instance the sketch in, Ibid., 80.

[33]Eugene Lowry, The Homiletical Plot: The Sermon as Narrative Art Form (Atlanta, Georgia: John Knox Press, 1980) ,

[34]Lowry, 48. Lowry recently revised his plot by reducing his former five steps to four in one loop: conflict, complication, sudden shift, and unfolding. The strategy formerly designated as �experiencing the gospel� may happen anywhere from the second to fourth stages, but he recommends, �about three-fourths into the sermon. Perhaps five-sixths is better. On rare occasions it may happen on the last line�. Eugene L. Lowry. The Sermon: Dancing the Edge of Mystery. (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 1997), 78.

[35]Crum, 19.

[36]Richard Lischer, A Theology of the Gospel: The Dynamics of the Gospel. Abingdon Preacher�s Library, William D. Thompson, ed. (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 1981),  p. 50. Quotations are from this edition. Revised edition published by Durham , North Carolina : The Labyrinth Press, 1992; reprinted revised edition by Eugene , Oregon : Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2001.

[37]Ibid., 50.

[38]Ibid., 52.

[39]Ibid., 49-50.

[40]Paul Scott Wilson, Imagination of the Heart: New Understandings in Preaching (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Pres, 1988).

[41]Paul Scott Wilson, The Four Pages of the Sermon: A Guide to Biblical Preaching (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 1998).

[42]Crum, 80. In a concluding chapter to my The Four Pages of the Sermon I talk about various possibilities for reshuffling the pages, 243-251. It also sounds like Foster McCurley�s 1996 variation, although McCurley does not focus on grace: Introduction, Situation Now, Situation Then, What God is Doing Then, and What God is Doing Now. See: Foster R. McCurley, Wrestling with the Word: Preaching from the Hebrew Bible (Valley Forge, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International, 1996), 195.

[43]Bryan Chapell, Christ-Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1994), 12.

[44]Ibid., 47.

[45]Ibid., 289.

[46]Ibid., 310.

[47]Ibid., 289.

[48]Ibid., 267.

[49]Mary Catherine Hilkert, Naming Grace: Preaching and the Sacramental Imagination (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1997), 25.

[50]Henry H. Mitchell, Preaching as Celebration and Experience (Nashville, Abingdon Pres, 1990).

[51]James Harris, �Thesis�Antithesis�Synthesis,�  in Ronald Allen, ed., Patterns of Preaching: A Sermon Sampler (St. Louis, Missouri: Chalice Press, 1998), 36-42.

[52]Mitchell, 57.

[53]Ibid., 57.

[54]Ibid., 63.

[55]Frank Thomas, They Like to Never Quit Praisin� God: the Role of Celebration in Preaching (Cleveland, Ohio: United Church Press, 1997), 75.

[56]Thomas, 31.

[57]Cleophus J. LaRue, The Heart of Black Preaching ( Louisville , Kentucky : Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 69.

[58]Ibid., 70.

[59]Ibid., 71.

[60]See: Ronald J. Allen, ed., Patterns, 80-87; Mark Barger Elliott, Creative Styles of Preaching ( Louisville , Kentucky : Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 77-83; Richard L. Eslinger, The Web Of Preaching: New Options in Homiletic Method ( Nashville , Tennessee : Abingdon Press, 2002), 201-245.

[61]L. Susan Bond makes this comments and attributes it also to David Buttrick in her �Taming the Parable: the Problem of Parable as Substitute Myth,� Paper to the Academy of Homiletics , Denver , Colorado , 1999, 6