The Beauty of Preaching: God’s Glory in Christian Proclamation by Michael Pasquarello III.

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Beauty of Preaching: God’s Glory in Christian Proclamation by Michael Pasquarello III. Mark Mattes The Beauty of Preaching: God’s Glory in Christian Proclamation. By Michael Pasquarello III. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020. xxxiii + 254 pp. No doubt, some church leaders are apt to associate “beauty” with “pretty.” The concept of beauty carries entirely different connotations for Methodist homiletics professor Pasquarello. What he does instead is to situate preaching within the life of worship. This is no manual on how to preach better. For Pasquarello, worship is not primarily to be understood as communal and diachronic social behaviors but instead as joyous, life-enhancing participation in the triune life of God. To unfold his thesis, he appeals not only to scripture but also to Augustine, John Wesley, and Luther. In his judgment, preaching and worship as currently practiced are too programmatic. They convey moralistic and utilitarianian dispositions that simply feed American self-absorption. Without delight in beauty, the true and the good are subject to instrumental and functional uses (xvi). Preaching succumbs to topical teaching, motivational speaking, or social and political analysis as substitutes for the [End Page 354] gospel. He commends beauty not to prettify preaching but instead to situate preaching within the reality of God’s generosity, goodness, and glory. Pasquarello develops his case first by unfolding the generosity of the poor widow who contributes her last mite to the temple treasury as a beautiful sign indicating that “now is the time to share the gift of divine abundance with the world in the community created by Jesus” (39). Indeed, “the poor widow’s gift was a sign of the Father’s giving away, of God’s freely giving up his beloved Son for the life of the world” (40). Similar to a Lutheran theology of the cross, he highlights beauty as “strange”: “The beauty of God is often revealed under circumstances that we could find offensive: the ugliness of the cross is the strange beauty par excellence. The paradox of this ugly beauty of the cross is that it evokes hope: in ugliness and suffering, beauty shines through and new possibilities are born” (43). Beauty conveyed through generosity is also found in Mark 14 where the unnamed woman “anointed Jesus with expensive perfume as an act of loving devotion and preparation for his death,” which Jesus describes as “beautiful,” a type of God’s generous, costly love” (xxvii). He then turns to Augustine, Wesley, and Luther. In Augustine we encounter the “wonder of God’s good creation, to see all things from the perspective of the love in which it was created” (93). Again, this mystery is paradoxical: “we ascend by descending; we are exalted by humbling ourselves, by true self-knowledge, confession and repentance of our pride” (93). Following Pope Francis, Pasquarello notes that “preaching the truth, then, draws listeners to the beauty of divine love as manifested, although partially and incompletely, in the preacher’s thinking, loving, and speaking as a ‘sign’ of Christ” (116). We learn no steps from Augustine for successful preaching; instead “he offers us a vision of the wisdom of preaching that serves the church on pilgrimage toward its final completion in knowing, praising, and loving God” (135). From Wesley, Pasquarello sees that the sheer generosity of God lends itself to a preaching that attends to personal holiness and the striving for amelioration of social ills. Referencing Luther, he expands on work written by myself and Miikka Antilla which acknowledge the paradoxical strangeness of God’s generous beauty that takes on [End Page 355] human sin all so as to beautify and justify sinners. The book culminates by acknowledging Augustine’s “homiletical beauty . . . the wholeness of his capacity with language to reach all levels of people and society” (218). This book is valuable precisely because it is no “how to” manual but instead a confident recommendation that the gospel is compelling, that it invites us into the life of God, and that nothing is more pertinent or relevant than to deliver this message and welcome people into God’s goodness and beauty. Mark Mattes Grand View University Des Moines, Iowa Copyright © 2021 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran...