Homiletical Peonage: The Pedagogical Dilemma Whiteness Creates

This article revisits a key theme in retired Princeton Seminary homiletics professor James F. Kay’s work, preaching as a promissory-kerygmatic saving event. Kay calls for a disciplinary turn in theoretical focus in homiletics, lamenting homiletics’ over-reliance on theories of rhetoric to account for its distinctiveness and argues that theological analysis of preaching leads us to a better understanding of preaching’s essential core and function as Christian proclamation. After briefly summarizing Kay’s proposal on this topic, I bring to bear upon it a central criterion of Black preaching theory and praxis: groundedness in the concrete experience and ongoing legacies of racial injustice. This article’s fundamental question is, “In view of its European developmental origins, does promissory kerygmatics offer a theological theorization of preaching adequate to the demands of Black preaching pedagogy and praxis today?”