Is Silence Violence? Or, Knowing When (Not) to Shut Up [3 of 5]
Preaching What We Practice
Part 1: What Use Entering the Fray?
Part 2: Confronting Our Confusion
Practice what you preach is another slogan, or at least a trope, among Christians. Of course, obedience is an important dimension of discipleship to Jesus, and hypocrisy is a spiritual cancer. But if we’re asking ourselves about when to speak up, I believe we need to give more attention to the converse: preaching what we practice.
On the one hand, many Christians seem content to practice their religion privately, with no public account of their choices at any level of dialogue beyond the local congregation (and I do not view position-taking on social media as such an account!).
Granted, being "preachy" is a social faux pas in our hyper-privatized religious context. And granted, the language of "preaching" is terribly loaded. Whether the word preach provokes us to imagine a sketchy televangelist, an out-of-touch pastor, or an overzealous Bible-banger, there is reason to suspect the idea of preaching as public discourse. Little is to be gained by public speech that alienates others. Yet, biblically speaking, preaching is essentially a proclamation (a public announcement) of the message of the Apostles about Jesus Christ, without reference to medium, vocation, or style.
The question remains: What should Christians say publicly about their way of life?
On the other hand, we inevitably preach something. Humans talk constantly. We instinctively explain our choices. We defend our way of thinking. What Christians choose to say about their way of life is a function of integrity—the integration of our thinking and doing in a view of the world.
At a basic level, the challenge we face is that our thinking and doing are often unintegrated. We manage to act without much thought. Obedience becomes a leap of faith that requires no explanation—at least not one that we are willing to offer others. This is understandable! God is perfectly able to get ahold of us apart from so-called rational explanation. And rationalism does not set the terms of Christian proclamation. Instead, we must decide how best to bear witness to the truth that grips us. This decision is vital because we will bear witness to something, one way or another.
But if resistance to privatization and inarticulate practice is a consideration as we decide whether to enter the fray, what might preaching what we practice entail? Certainly not preaching "at" the public, as though they should listen. Certainly not making Sunday sermons available to a wider audience, as though they should care. They shouldn't and they don't. In their place, I wouldn't.
It might seem as though these concessions point toward matters of posture and style. But I'm not suggesting that the real issue here is that Christians need to make their "preaching" more approachable, relatable, or digestible. These are legitimate challenges, but they are far from fundamental.
What Christians need, if and when they decide to enter the fray instead of holding their peace, is courage. The courage to overcome the impulse toward deference to the public-private dichotomy. The courage to give voice humbly and sincerely to a perspective that others need not value, much less heed. The courage to speak both grace and truth, even when the tension between them is too much for many to accept. The courage to bear witness to the truth as we understand it, from a position of vulnerability. The courage to admit the limits of our understanding and the fragility of our attempts to represent the God who has ahold of us. Because silence may not be violence, but it can be cowardice.
Another martyr comes to mind: Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His classic book The Cost of Discipleship expresses the truth that his—and the Confessing Church's—resistance to Naziism attempted to practice. My point is not that book-writing is the prescribed model of preaching what we practice. Nor is the Confessing Church's Barmen Declaration paradigmatic, though it is instructive. Rather, Bonhoeffer exemplifies the sort of theological courage that late modernity demands given Christians' obligation to preach what we practice. His writing is characterized, foremost, by a willingness to call out the church's own failings and express the high calling of our confession. The introspective nature of such "preaching" is critical. Declaring publicly what we are aiming for, in contrast to what we are actually practicing, is powerful. The courage to admit that the cost of discipleship is often higher than we are willing to pay bears witness to the truth more than any pretentious claim to moral superiority ever can.
In Letters and Paper from Prison, compiled after Bonhoeffer’s execution in a Nazi concentration camp, he says this:
Here and there people flee from public altercation into the sanctuary of private virtuousness. But anyone who does this must shut his mouth and his eyes to the injustice around him. Only at the cost of self-deception can he keep himself pure from the contamination arising from responsible action. In spite of all that he does, what he leaves undone will rob him of his peace of mind. He will either go to pieces because of this disquiet, or become the most hypocritical of Pharisees.
Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God—the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God. Where are these responsible people?1
In the last extreme, Bonhoeffer did practice what he preached. There are moral quandaries to explore in his decision to participate in an assassination plot against Hitler. But at a basic level, anyone who bothers to listen to him can understand why he did what he did because his writing explains it. Bonhoeffer's life and death bear witness publicly to Christian faith because he wrote (and spoke) openly about his discipleship to Jesus. He perceived the need to enter the fray and spoke with tremendous courage into the reality that confronted him. He was a professional theologian, a scholar, but his example can teach the whole church a great deal about how to take up the cross as we preach what we practice.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge, enlarged ed. (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 5.