Preaching Romans From Here

If you only knew…

How long it has taken for Lisa Bowens and Joe Modica, with a little help from me, to bring this new book about preaching Romans to completion. It’s called Preaching Romans from Here: Diverse Voices Engage Paul’s Most Famous Letter. We honor the authors for contributing to this volume, with very little compensation. We also honor the kind donations from some generous folks to cover the cost of the indexing.

The “standard” approaches to Paul’s theology, and therefore to Romans, come from the hands of the dominant culture of almost entirely white males who have come into the power and location through their privilege. Please don’t read that sentence as some kind of social statement. It’s a fact. How we read Romans today echoes the voices of male Bible readers, theologians, authors, professors, and preachers. As I write the Everyday Bible Study volumes I have intentionally worked to engage the voices of men and women, persons of color and whites. It’s much easier to find studies of white men.

So, Lisa and Joe and I intentionally went looking for the following voices to provide a sketch of a given social location’s reading of the Bible in general along with illustrations of sermons on Romans. So, here is what you can find for a class that will generate more conversations than you have time for:

The Puerto Rican Diaspora, by Eric Barreto, with sermons by Carlos Corro and Efrain Agosto.

The African American Voices by Lisa A. Bowens, with sermons by Eric Lewis Williams and Regina D. Langley.

The Asian American as Limited Gentiles by Sze-Kar Wan, with sermons by Raymond Chang and Gerald C. Liu.

The North American Indigenous perspective by Raymond Aldred, with sermons byh T. Christopher Hoklotubbe and H. Daniel Zacharias.

The Feminist perspective by Melanie A. Howard, with sermons by Cheryl Johns and Amy Peeler.

Post-Supersessionist readings by Brian J. Robinson, with sermons by David Rudolph and Joel Willitts.

Romans and the East by Te-Li Lau, with sermons by Jinwook Oh and Sung Uk Lim.

For many the essayists will be secret sauce to the book. For those in preaching classes and wanting to see how this all works out into actual practice, the sermons will be what is most helpful.

For me, the whole package was both affirming — of how important it is to listen and to engage Romans from our own location — and challenging — in that from each of these essays and sermons new light is tossed all over Paul, Romans, and deficits in the history of Christian theology.

My part in the Preface:

In a recent scan of more than a dozen books of sermons on my shelf from a diverse group of preachers, and the names need not be mentioned to save my own skin, I found almost no sermons on Romans. There was not one sermon on Romans 5-8 in these books. I was taken back, if not stunned. I wondered if it was the case that mostly white evangelical men like to preach from Romans. I don’t have an answer to that question, but I do know from experience the evangelical preachers love Romans and Paul and Galatians (if they are in a hurry). Which does answer that question somewhat.

What we have in this collection of sermons challenges both the absence of sermons about Romans for many and the one-sidedness of the white evangelical’s obsession with the categories of Pauline soteriology. An obsession that can avoid the social dynamics and implications of Paul’s theology, not least of Romans, which in chapters fourteen and fifteen, does more than its share of upsetting some tables in early house church divisions over who’s got the best approach to the table life. These sermons as individual sermons and as a collection challenge the standard absence and also show the inadequacy of too many sermons on Romans. The implications of the theology of Romans collide with much of American society, and these sermons will contribute to that collision.

The essays and sermons in Preaching Romans From Here clearly locate Romans in a specific context, and as such the voices in his volume speak words that will prove discomforting for some preachers of Romans. They will challenge social injustices and racisms and classisms and sexisms. But something will come to the surface more than once: these writings will use the very text used by others but this time around they will subvert the dominant readings and sermons about Romans.

         Over the years I have read deeply in Pauline studies and that means in Romans scholarship. The tensions between the Reformation and the new perspectives are noticeable, as is tension also between the apocalyptic approach and the Paul within Judaism theory. What I have been fundamentally surprised by is that when it comes to Romans 5-8 the categories all these proponents use are not only the same (Spirit, flesh, Sin, grace), since if you are doing Romans you have to do it on Romans’ terms, but they are understood in very similar categories. One might search then for unity between Pauline studies today by concentrating conversations on Romans 5-8. Paul would jump up and start clapping if we did because those chapters are designed to bring together the Weak and the Strong in the house churches in Rome.

         The unity one finds in the major terms of Romans will, however, by subtle shiftings of meaning turn many a sermon and many a reading of Paul inside out. For that we can be thankful to those willing to show us their cards in these essays and sermons.