Going Public with the Means of Grace: A Homiletical Theology of Promise for Word and Sacrament in a Post-secular age

This article articulates a revisionist homiletical theology of Word and Sacrament for a disestablished church in a disenchanted, post-secular world. Its understanding of the post-secular context, an age of religious resurgence nonetheless impacted by the secular, is grounded in Charles Taylor’s analysis of the Reformation as an engine of cultural change even today: disenchantment, shared vocation, and the “affirmation of the ordinary.” In this context, it seeks to revise Protestant notions of the gospel as promise in the direction of Richard Kearney’s onto-eschatological vision in The God Who May Be. Such a notion of promise, connected to Kearney’s “traversing presence” yet embracing its possibilizing force, pushes against attempts to re-trench and reenchant, as in some postliberal and radical orthodox theologies, in favor of a more apologetic public theology of Word and Sacrament.