Beyond the Tyranny of the Text: Preaching in Front of the Bible to Create a New World

By James Henry Harris

Preachers and students of preaching need help communicating hope! They want their sermons to communicate the promises of scripture, so that people can envision a new world in which their lives will be transformed. Preachers want to experience a new sense of freedom in their preaching, and to extend liberation based on their reading and interpretation of the scripture.

James Henry Harris introduces interpretation theory and continental philosophy as a resource for preachers to resist and overcome interpretive oppression, and lays out a new theory of scriptural interpretation. He analyzes philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics as a helpful guide for modern preachers, and incorporates in his analysis of the lived experience of the Black church. Harris highlights the preaching of several 19th and 20th century Black women, including Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, and Mary Evans.

Beyond the Tyranny of the Text develops a five-part method for preaching that stretches from preparation to proclamation, and demonstrates how this method for interpretational creativity emerges from fidelity to the text. Harris demonstrates his method with sermonic exegesis of the Book of Jonah. With this new process of reading, rereading, un-reading, writing, and un-writing the text, the author offers wisdom and tools for reflection and illumination.

At its core, Beyond the Tyranny of the Text challenges the field of homiletics and all preachers to un-write like Jesus Christ: to get in front of the text, to understand preparation and preaching as a creative and transformative enterprise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abingdon Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781501889073

James Henry Harris

James Henry Harris is the Distinguished Professor and Chair of Homiletics and Practical Theology and Research Scholar in Religion at the School of Theology, Virginia Union University and pastor of Second Baptist Church (West End), both in Richmond, VA. He has a passion for teaching, preaching, and helping the poor and the oppressed. He earned the Master of Arts in philosophical theology from the University of Virginia, the Master of Arts in English and African-American Literature from Virginia Commonwealth University, and the Master of Arts in philosophy from Old Dominion University where he also received the Ph.D. in Urban-Studies. He earned the Doctor of Ministry degree in Preaching and African-American Church Studies from United Theological Seminary in Dayton, OH as a Samuel DeWitt Proctor/Charles Booth Fellow. Harris has taught preaching at the National Baptist Congress of Christian Education, the American Baptist Churches of the South, and for loc

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INTRODUCTION

Make an effort to present yourself to God as a tried-and-true worker, who doesn’t need to be ashamed but is one who interprets the message of truth correctly.

—2 Timothy 2:15

There are those who believe that preachers, like other leaders, are born and not made. Robert J. McCracken, in the Lawrence Stone Lectures at Princeton given around the time I was born, said that preachers are born and not made.¹ But I say to you that preachers are made and not born! They are made through the hard and laborious work of study and praxis, the basic practices of interdisciplinary reading and writing sermons over and over again. They are made and shaped by the mind and Spirit.

There are those who possess what are often termed natural gifts, such as height, complexion, skin tone, beauty, good looks, or voice (whether bass, baritone, alto, or soprano). These gifts are from God and heaven above by way of DNA, ancestry, and geography. Yes, there are those born with certain gifts or attributes, and while all of these aesthetic qualities are blessings and assets, they can also be curses and liabilities. I say this because those who are born with these attributes and qualities did not have to do anything to earn them and often do not do much of anything to develop them. That is the sin of giftedness because it tends to separate the gifted preacher from the God who blesses him or her. Certain skin tones and hair texture are natural attributes, and the preacher who possesses these often has an edge on those less endowed because the Black church is emotionally drawn to certain physical traits and characteristics that have little to nothing to do with intellectual ability, scholarship, spiritual maturity, commitment, or any godly trait. It has only to do with the perceived aesthetic, the peripheral and ancillary attributes of being human. But even what appears ancillary may, in fact, be essential; and conversely, what appears to be essential may, in fact, be ancillary.

I am honored to stand on the shoulders of some of my mentors—Samuel DeWitt Proctor, Miles Jerome Jones, and others. Some of my students have encouraged me during the time I have been teaching preaching to one group or another, since I was twenty-four years old in the Norfolk extension of the Evans-Smith Institute, sponsored by Virginia Union University and the Baptist General Convention of Virginia. Some of these preachers and teachers have raised the bar for me and others before crossing the bar into the sunset of the promised land, in the language of Alfred Lord Tennyson, quoted so often by Black