Exile and Return: Trauma and the Unfinished Theological Task of Christian Preaching of the Hebrew Bible

Abstract

David Stark argues the problem of Christians preaching the Hebrew Bible remains stuck in a binary between historical-critical approaches and christological allegorization. I view the problem as also a homiletical-theological one: Christians narrating the two-part canon unidirectionally, e.g., promise/fulfillment. In light of a rethinking of the reception of Jeremiah 31:31-34 in practice, I propose an alternative metaphor, “exile and return,” influenced by Cathy Caruth’s work on trauma, narrative, and history. I then concretize the complexity of trauma and history in the two-part canon itself through David Carr’s Holy Resilience. As for the other part of Stark’s binary, I propose revising our homiletical Christologies to emphasize Jesus’ Jewishness in differentiated relation to us, following J. Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account. My revisions loosen Stark’s binary by relating Christology across differences of identity today within a trauma-informed hermeneutic. I conclude by proposing a homiletical model that (1) embraces a trauma-informed “not yet” in Christian proclamation of the Hebrew Bible, (2) re-focuses preaching “in Christ” as an identity-related homiletical point-of-view, and (3) acknowledges how struggles with trauma and point of view can foreground relations with inter-religious others today.