Preaching As Participation: Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Christology of Preaching (Essay‪)‬

Talk of participation is making a comeback in theology. Theologians are re-awakening to the heart of the mystery of Christianity, which Henri de Lubac calls the mystery "of our participation, through the grace of Christ, in the internal life of the Divinity." (1) This reawakening finds its most articulate voice in the efforts of the movement called Radical Orthodoxy, led by John Milbank. Milbank and others have forcefully, and rightly I think, argued that all knowledge, all the efforts of culture, the works of humans and the works of all other creatures, find their true source and meaning in their being created and held in creation by a God who shares his being with them. Art, music, sociology, sex, and many other subjects have been approached from the perspective of a theology of participation to show that, rightly conceived, these disciplines find their intelligibility in the heart of the Christian mystery, the mystery of creation's participation in the Triune God. (2) Yet I suspect that this return to participation does not have much purchase among pastors and practical theologians concerned with the very real Transformation of the church into the image of Jesus because this account of participation too often appears primarily as an affair of the mind. It can seem unrelated to the mundane tasks of the church, its day-in and day-out affairs of administration, eating, preaching, singing--tasks aimed at the church's own transformation and the transformation of the world. Radical Orthodox has gotten theologies of participation off the ground; pastors and practical theologians are still waiting for them to land. As R. R. Reno has astutely argued, "Whether the focus [of Radical Orthodoxy] rests on Scripture, creed, or tradition, a certain 'ideality seems to govern, a tendency to think theologically in terms of higher, purified, and untainted forms. A formal claim, a 'way of being,' supersedes the determinate particularity of apostolic teaching and practice." (3) In other words, the return to an ontology of participation has been achieved at the expense of the particularities of the church's embodied life.