Spring 2021 · Vol. 50 No. 1 · pp. 109–112
Book Review
Suffering the Truth: Occasional Sermons and Reflections
Chris Huebner. Winnipeg, MB: CMU Press, 2020. 111 pages.
“Sermons are, at their best, excursions into difficulty.” That quotation from Marilynne Robinson is found in the sermon, “Suffering the Truth,” the homily whose caption serves as the title of this collection from Chris Huebner, Associate Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Canadian Mennonite University. If we can assume that Huebner takes that sermon to be central to the collection, perhaps we can take Robinson’s statement as defining the essential theme that runs through these short, elegant, but sharp excursions in Christian thinking. If Robinson’s view is correct, then these are, indeed, sermons at their best. {110}
Preached at various churches and at chapel services at CMU, these sermons and reflections follow the liturgical year, beginning at Advent and ending with Peace Sunday, which the Mennonite Church observes in November. This provides a useful structure to the collection and any lay or professional reader of these sermons will find them a welcome occasional guide for meditation as they journey through the Church year.
But read through from start to finish, these “excursions into difficulty” amount to a short course in biblical theology. (And these sermons are biblical. They treat the texts assigned for each occasion with care.) They pursue one essential line of thought, namely, the ever-present danger of idolatry lurking in both thoughtless piety and comforting but abstract doctrine. Huebner is a relentless critic of domesticated religion. Advent, for example, is, in his view, not a cosy preparation for the good news of Christmas. Rather, it is a dangerous time in which the Church is reminded that the Jewish horror of idolatry should prepare Christians for the Christ—whose birth they anticipate—to be a question before he is an answer. And if we did think for a moment that Christmas, when it does finally arrive after the harrowing pilgrimage through Advent, offers some kind of closure or comfort, Huebner reminds us that the Feast of Epiphany is inconveniently jammed up against Christmas. One feast about which we know too little forces us to leave the feast we know too well and want to linger over, forcing the Church to keep moving into the ecstatic but unsettling realisation that the messianic expectations of Israel open onto the far horizon of hope for the Gentiles. As God cannot be contained within the messianic expectations of Israel, so God cannot be confined to the Christmas piety of an over-confident Christianity.
The rest of the sermons explore this same difficulty, the temptations of a man-made religion of comfort, through the lens of various Christian doctrines. In general, what is Christianity? “Christianity is an entirely strange . . . phenomenon” (81). More specifically, who is Christ? Christ is a stranger (91), the inexplicable king “who dared to tread on the rough ground of ordinary human existence” (71). What is faith? Faith is something that harbours an essential “dislocation and unsettlement” (75). What is sin? “Sin names a refusal to allow ourselves to be put in question” (72). What is society? Whatever it is, it is not a social order preserved by the ascended Christ (81). It is rather that time, lying outside the time of the risen Christ, offers the false hope of human progress and falsely claims to know the meaning and direction of history (68f). What, then, is the Church? The Church is a people who do not entirely know what it is that establishes them as a church and do not, therefore, claim to know exactly who or what they are (39). And what of its ministry? As Karl Barth explains: “The task of the minister is the word of God. This spells the certain defeat of the minister” (44). {111}
The perplexity that haunts the ministry, that makes of preachers unhappy happy servants, runs through every topic explored in these sermons, including, in the final sermon, the topic of peace. In the last sentence of the book, Huebner makes it clear that nothing is so dear to any Christian tradition that it cannot be deepened, converted, made more honest and useful by careful interrogation. And so, this leading Canadian Anabaptist theologian concludes his final sermon with this: “there is no more sure way to guarantee that we will fall back down into the forest of darkness and violence than to set out on a straight path for peace” (108).
What then are these sermons? They are an apophatic therapy for the heart of the Church. The sermons often refer to Rowan Williams in pursuing this theme. But unlike the Anglican who turns to the tradition of negative theology to defend the ancient creeds on the grounds that they keep open the mysterious otherness of God in a way that modern, flattened versions of the Christian doctrine cannot, Huebner, the Anabaptist, turns to the ancient tradition of martyrdom to make a similar point about Christian practice. This apophatic stance is sharpened by the coincidence that there is neither a Christmas nor an Easter homily in this collection.
Even so, if this theologian tends to stress “the absence and mystery of God” (21) with an uncommon astringency, that is only so that, freed from spiritual and doctrinal idols, he might help us “to cultivate a posture of receptivity to the overflowing goodness of God” (9) and open us to “the nurturing spiritual truth of the Gospel” (2), as he says in his introduction to the book.
And here the reviewer ought to say a specific word to the preachers who will read this book. Not the least among their merits, these sermons have provided Huebner with a reason to write a compelling introduction on the meaning and art of preaching as suggested by Beatrice in Dante’s Divine Comedy. What preacher will not be grateful to hear a theologian carefully describe how and why their task is so demanding, so anxiety producing, so seemingly impossible. Preaching, he assures us, indeed Beatrice assures us, is necessary just because we are creatures, not gods, and so it must necessarily fail of its purpose. The preacher has the unenviable task of explaining why she must speak about the thing that cannot be spoken about and must speak about why it cannot be spoken about, since our lives depend upon her speaking about it.
Pastors who invite this theologian to their pulpits will not find him to be grateful for the invitation. He finds it a terrifying business. But they will be glad for the companionship of a theologian who knows what they are up against week by week. While he may not thank them for the {112} invitation, their congregations most certainly will. For if the disciples of the Anabaptist tradition know anything at all about the Christian faith, they know that it requires nothing if not inescapable “excursions into difficulty.”
