David Schnasa Jacobsen – författare

Most preachers have little fondness for apocalyptic texts because of their scathing language, surrealistic plots, and enigmatic symbols. David Jacobsen helps preachers move past these barriers with clear step by step directions and insightful analysis, showing how to move from text to sermon for the apocalyptic texts included in the lectionary.

Homiletics is taking a theological turn. But what does the preaching task look like if we think of it not so much as a mastery of technique, but an exercise in theological method? Homiletical Theology in Action: The Unfinished Theological Task of Preaching tries to envision the work of homiletics as theological in root and branch. By placing theological questions at the center of the process, the authors, some of the leading lights of the field of homiletics, try to show how their work as preachers and homileticians is a thoroughgoing theological activity. By beginning with troublesome texts and problematic doctrines, they seek to show how preachers and homileticians engage in theology, not as consumers, but as producers--and in the thick of the kinds of questions that preachers have to ask. Practitioners and theological educators alike will catch a glimpse of how they too are residential theologians in their own preaching praxis.

Many preachers and teachers of preaching talk about the gospel; few name it. Theologies of the Gospel in Context assembles a gifted group of homileticians who think that preachers need to be able to articulate the gospel not "in general," but in a certain time and place, in context. They consider what gospel sounds like for people under oppression, in capitalist economies, in neocolonial contexts, for survivors of trauma, and for disestablished mainline churches marred by racism. Preachers will appreciate these preacher/scholars'' desire to articulate the gospel with clarity, especially since the term is so often left unexplained. Homileticians will see a new genre of doing their work as teachers and researchers in preaching: a vision that helps preaching see itself not just as an adjunct to exegesis or communication, but a place of doing theology. In these pages homiletics is more than technique, it is a truly theological discipline.

Promise has a long pedigree in the history of Christian understandings of the gospel. This volume gathers together leading homileticians to consider the breadth of its understanding today in light of the struggle to reconcile God''s grace with God''s justice. Assuming that promise is a core sense of the gospel, how does this relate to the variety of contexts in which homiletical theology is done? In this final volume in the series, six homileticians from a variety of contexts and perspectives try to move specifically toward a homiletical theology of promise as a way to articulate the central theological gift and task that is preaching the gospel today.

Karl Barth famously argued that all theology is sermon preparation. But what if all sermon preparation is actually theology? This book pursues a thoroughgoing theological vision for the practice of preaching as a way of doing theology. The idea is not just that homiletics is the realm of theological application. That would leave preaching in the position of simply implementing a theology already arrived at. Instead, the vision in these pages is of a form of theology that begins with preaching itself: its practice, its theories, and its contexts. Homiletical theology is thus a unique way of doing theology--even a constructive theological task in its own right. Homiletician David Schnasa Jacobsen has assembled several of the leading lights of contemporary homiletics to help to see its task ever more deeply as theological, yet in profoundly diverse ways. Along the way, readers will not only discover how homileticians do theology homiletically, but will deepen the way in which they understand their own preaching as a theological task.