Every year I have the privilege of introducing the Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale Divinity School. This is one of the most famous lecture series on homiletics in the world. The series was founded in 1871 through a gift by Henry W. Sage of Brooklyn, New York, as a memorial to Lyman Beecher. The first three lectures were given by Lyman Beecher's famous but irascible son, Henry Ward Beecher. No one has ever done a better job of introducing the lectures than Frederick Buechner who delivered them in 1977. Drawing from Beecher's biography, Buechner noted that Beecher had been so distraught by the trouble that he was facing over his affair with the wife of a parishioner that he had not been able to decide on the content of his first lecture. While shaving, the lecture suddenly came to him in a flash. In his haste to write it out while shaving he cut himself badly. Buechner wrote:
Henry Ward Beecher cut himself with his razor and wrote out notes for that first Beecher Lecture in blood because, whatever else he was or aspired to be or was famous for being, he was a man of flesh and blood, and so were all the men (sic) who over the years traveled to New Haven after him to deliver the same lectures.[1]
We still have the Beecher Lectures each fall. We now also have an annual Buechner prize that we award to a student for a literary composition. In this short essay, I would like to recognize the remarkable talents of Frederick Buechner by reflecting on his Beecher Lectures, drawing on the volume in which he published them, Telling the Truth: the gospel as tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale (1977).
Buechner's Modus operandi
Buechner read the Bible in much the same way that he read literature: he read both as reflections on human existence. Whether he read Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Melville, or Hopkins, he read them for how they illuminated the human condition. He read the Bible in the same way. In this regard he is quite different than modern scholars who have cultivated the literary approach to the Bible by applying literary theories to the interpretation of the biblical text. Buechner's focus was on the human condition and how the text he read reflected on it. In reflecting on Shakespeare's work on King Lear, he said of the bard: "He looked into the dark heart of things, which is to say into his own heart and into our hearts, too, and told as close to the whole truth as he was able".[2] This means that his use of literature is not ornamental, but fundamental: he read Camus, Lewis, and Tolkien with the same curiosity and intensity that he read the biblical text. It is for this reason that Buechner began each chapter with an analysis of literature or a story. They were an entrée to reading the biblical text because they are about life as it is.
Buechner was independent in his thinking. On several occasions in my career, I have read through a series of works and then found an author who was fresh. On one occasion, I needed to review six scholarly books. I thought that the first five were largely rearrangements of existing scholarship with slight tweaks —an all-too-common feature of scholarship —, but the sixth was refreshingly original. The author was not bound by previous scholarship — although he knew it well — yet moved in a new direction. I also remember reading through a large number of Middle Platonic thinkers and then reading Plotinus. The founder of Neoplatonism did not simply interpret the Platonic tradition but transformed it. Buechner's work falls into the category of a fresh thinker. It is an intellectual pleasure to read him because he has read and thought about the Bible and literature with painstaking care and formulated his own framing of the material.
He also cast his thoughts in beautiful English prose. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, wrote "Le style c'est l'homme même" ("the style is the person themself").[3] While Leclerc was discussing the place of a human being versus other animals in his 1753 speech, the phrase has been used to mean a number of things including the revelation of the inner person by the spoken or written word. Buechner was a learned and sophisticated thinker who disclosed the subtlety of his thinking with the turn of a phrase, a reversal of perspective, and the use of surprise to force a reader to think from a different perspective. Eloquent, flowing syntax combined with a large vocabulary and a highly refined art as a storyteller make his work a pleasure to read.
The Content
Buechner offered four chapters in Telling the Truth — I do not know if he gave four lectures; today there are three lectures, but three chapters do not a book make. The four move sequentially through Buechner's understanding of the task of preaching (pp. 6–8, 23, 98). The first, "Telling the Truth", sets the stage while the last three reflect his literary orientation: he entitled them the Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. It would be possible to capture the essence of the four chapters in four words: silence, tears, laughter, and mystery.
Buechner urges homilists to envision their audience and offers—in a counter-intuitive fashion—a modernized Pontius Pilate as an exemplar. He has, of course, a good reason for selecting Pilate: he wants to raise Pilate's question "What is truth?" He notes that Jesus is silent in response to the governor's question and concludes: "The one who hears the truth that is silence before it is a word is Pilate, and he hears it because he has asked to hear it … because in a world of many truths and half truths, he is hungry for truth itself or, failing that, at least for the truth that there is no truth".[4] Buechner then makes his point: "We are all of us Pilate in our asking after truth, and when we come to church to ask it, the preacher would do well to answer us also with silence because the truth and the Gospel are one, and before the Gospel is a word, it too like truth is silence".[5] The truth that Buechner has in mind is not the particular truth that can be articulated, but "what is, the good with the bad, the joy with the despair, the presence and absence of God …"[6] which is best pointed to by poetry.[7] The minister should therefore begin in silence, even if she cannot remain in it: "Let him use words which do not only try to give answers to the questions that we ask or ought to ask," but also words "which help us to hear the questions that we do not have the words for asking and to hear the silence that those questions rise out of and to hear the silence that is the answer to those questions".[8] Buechner, who was a master of words, ironically but deliberately begins with silence.
When the minister speaks, Buechner urges her to start with "Come unto me all you who labor and are heavy laden" and to pause at this juncture.[9] The preacher needs to stop here because this is where the absence of God is felt. Buechner defines God's absence as "that which is not livable".[10] The task of the minister "is to make God real to them through the sacrament of the words as God is supposed to become real in the sacrament of bread and wine, and there is no place where the preacher is more aware of his own nakedness and helplessness than here in the pulpit as he listens to the silence of their waiting".[11] This is why he thinks that the most powerful preachers are poets, playwrights, and novelists who speak honestly about the absence of God.[12] It is hard for me not to think of Christian Wiman's My Bright Abyss (2013) or a number of his poems and essays which use brutal honesty to address difficult human experiences and situations.[13] We can only appreciate light if we understand darkness.
The darkness that is the source of tears can also be the source of laughter: "As much as tears do, it (laughter) comes out of the darkness of the world where God is of all missing persons the most missed." There is, however, a difference: "it (laughter) comes not as an ally of darkness but as its adversary, not as a symptom of darkness but as its antidote".[14] Like Elton Trueblood's The Humor of Christ (1964), Buechner finds comedy within the gospels, especially in the parables.[15] This is not the comedy of hilarity, but of astonishment. Buechner summarized by suggesting that tragedy was inevitable and comedy unforeseeable (pp. 56–57, 71–72), but then reversed the two by asking us to think about them from God's perspective or as the grace of God permits us to see them. In this case "the comedy of God's saving the most unlikely people when they least expect it … this is what is inevitable".[16]
But how is the gospel like fairy tales? Buechner does not offer a literary version of Rudolf Bultmann's demythologizing program.[17] Rather he suggests that fairy tales offer a glimpse of the possible when facing the impossible.[18] There is, however, a critical difference: "the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still".[19] If I may express this in philosophical language: the protological is the universal. Buechner's point is that we cannot take the magic or mystery out of the gospel — a point that I believe needs to be underscored. He notes that we are children still. Just as children gravitate to the most spectacular stories in Bible like Jonah or the Court Tales of Daniel, so we long for a power beyond us. He concludes: "So let the preacher remember this and preach to us not just as men and women of the world but as children, too, who are often much more simple-hearted than he supposes." Buechner continues that adults are "much hungrier for, and ready to believe in, and already in contact with, more magic and mystery than most of the time even we are entirely award of ourselves".[20] We cannot take the mystery out of the Gospel without destroying the Gospel!
Conclusion
While no one will agree with all of Buechner's interpretations of texts — I do not share his minimization of the social gospel in the message of Jesus (pp. 62–63, although Buechner sees it in the prophets, pp. 18, 34) — he is extraordinarily talented. If I may borrow the Horatian platitude, Buechner "has mixed the useful and the sweet, simultaneously delighting and advising the reader."[21] It is unusual for someone to be able to accomplish this orally. It is rare for a writer to do this literarily. The number who can do this both orally and literarily is severely limited. Frederick Buechner was one of those rare individuals. We miss his voice and his pen.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Thank you for reading The Buechner Review. If you would like to receive future articles in your email inbox you can sign up here.
Works cited:
[1]Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale (New York: HarperOne, 1977), p.2.
[2] Buechner (1977), p.6.
[3]Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Discours sur le style prononcé a l'Academie française. Précédé d'une notice historique, des jugements de MM. Villemain, D. Nisard, Damas Hinard, et accompagné des notes littéraires par M. Noel (Paris: E. Belin, 1866).
[4] Buechner (1977), p.14.
[5] Ibid., p.14.
[6] Ibid., p.16.
[7] Ibid., p.19, p.25.
[8] Ibid., p.29.
[9] Ibid., p.33.
[10] Ibid., p.41.
[11] Ibid., p.40.
[12] Ibid, p.44, p.47.
[13]Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). Two of my favorite works of Wiman's are Every riven thing (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) and Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries against Despair (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023).
[14] Buechner (1977), p.56.
[15]Elton Trueblood, The Humor of Christ (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).
[16] Buechner (1977), p.72.
[17]Buechner (1977), p.92; Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958).
[18] Buechner (1977), p.81-2.
[19] Buechner (1977), p.90.
[20] Ibid., p.97.
[21]Horace, Ars poetica, 343–344.
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