The Rev. Fleming Rutledge is a beloved preacher, author, lecturer, and priest-theologian. She has become known for her uncanny ability to combine seriousness about the Bible with keen-eyed social and cultural analysis, as evidenced in her many books, including Help My Unbelief, The Undoing of Death, Advent, and The Battle for Middle-Earth: Tolkien’s Divine Design in The Lord of the Rings. Her magisterial study The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, named by Christianity Today as its 2017 Book of the Year, has attracted readers from across the Christian spectrum.
June 14 of this year marked the 50th anniversary of Rutledge’s ordination to the diaconate. “To honor the occasion, St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Greenwich, Connecticut, in conjunction with Wycliffe College, hosted a two-day conference, “A Celebration with Fleming Rutledge.” (“With,” not “of”: a rendering of thanks to the God who has sustained Rutledge throughout her ministry.) The 60-odd participants were a mix of clergy and laity, academics and students, Anglicans and ecumenical companions, all of them shaped in one way or another by her ministry and friendship.
Not surprisingly, the art of preaching was high on the agenda. Jason Byassee, Senior Minister at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church in Toronto, noted the superficial resemblance between a Fleming Rutledge sermon and the homiletics of mainline Protestantism. In the latter, the preacher typically begins with the news headlines of the day (this generates the “problem”), pivots to the lectionary text (often the gospel lesson), and derives from the latter some more authentic way of living. We should all strive for justice, practice acceptance, welcome the stranger; and with God’s help, we can do these things. The implied Christology of such sermons, quipped Byassee, is “a Jesus almost as inclusive as we are.” Or one might say: almost as Pelagian.
Rutledge, too, often begins with the daily headlines (her first sermon collection was titled The Bible and The New York Times). She, too, has a passion for justice. And yet Rutledge is no liberal correlationist. She breaks the mainline pattern through her unyielding emphasis on the identity and activity of God. Our dark world is held up to the searing light of Holy Scripture, which she reads through her Pauline and Augustinian, not Pelagian, lenses. Her sermons place her hearers in a position that they can hear the divine word of Promise, spoken to one and all in the Resurrection of the Crucified.
And hence, “Rutledge’s Rule” of homiletics: namely, that it is God, not human beings, who should be the subject of the sermon’s main verbs. Like preaching itself, the Rule is more easily modeled than taught. In a discussion of theological education, Rutledge allowed—somewhat grudgingly—that there is a place for seminary courses on preaching, but only insofar as such courses are robustly theological. No level of technique will help if the preacher herself is not convinced by the fiery, radical—call it “apocalyptic”—power of the gospel. Rutledge loves quoting the passage where Paul speaks of God as the One Who “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom. 4:17). This is what the Word does: it gives life to the dead. The preacher cannot make this happen, but she can declare by God’s promise that it will happen.
The two days were punctuated by lectures, panel discussions, worship, and times of conviviality. The St. Barnabas Choir led the group in a beautiful choral Evensong, with a homily by the Rev. Porter C. Taylor, rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Augusta, Georgia. The service was followed by a dinner, and video greetings recorded by various friends of Routledge who were unable to attend in person.
Dr. Taylor is the co-editor—along with Amy Peeler, Associate Professor of New Testament at Wheaton College—of More Anon: Essays in Honor of Fleming Rutledge, plans for which were announced at the conference (it will eventually appear from W.B. Eerdmans Publishers). The title alludes to a favorite sign-off in the preacher’s trademark emails. There are always more ideas to discuss, books to read, friends to make and introduce; Rutledge is a classic “connector” as described by Malcolm Gladwell. More companions. More grace. More anon.
The Crucifixion is widely acknowledged as Rutledge’s magnum opus (weighing in at nearly 700 pages, it is “magnum” in more than one sense). A paper by Rutledge’s friend Katherine Sonderegger, systematic theologian at Virginia Theological Seminary, offered a penetrating analysis of the work. She discerned in Rutledge’s catalogue of atonement images a consistent redoublement, a doubling, of sacrificial and substitutionary motifs. Pushing back against the notion (popular in mainline circles) of Christ as a mere hapless victim of human sin, Sonderegger defended the traditional view that the Father sent the Son so that he might die as a sacrifice for sin; the Lamb of God, who truly takes away the sin of the world. Afterward, Rutledge and Sonderegger engaged in a lively conversation on the penal element in any constructive account of reconciliation. One person remarked that he was “moved by watching Fleming interact with Kate—two mothers in Israel, ammas of the church; one the brilliant preacher, the other the incandescent theologian.”
Besides Byassee and Sonderegger, two other contributors to More Anon gave papers exploring various aspects of the grammar of grace in Christian understanding. The Rev. Jason Micheli, a United Methodist pastor-theologian based in Washington, D.C., offered a friendly amendment to Rutledge’s Rule, arguing that the preacher needs to be the subject of at least some of the verbs. Proclamation is an inherently self-involving activity, for preacher and hearers alike; therefore the “I” of Christian experience matters. Andrew McGowan, Dean of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, spoke on the development of the early Christian calendar, which he showed to be governed by a Paschal apprehension of time. There is no feast without its corresponding fast, no Easter without Good Friday, no consummation without eschatological longing (Rutledge’s beloved season of Advent); and all these moods and seasons coincide in Christ who “is” our Passover.
Among the high points of the proceedings were Rutledge’s impromptu interventions in the form of questions, clarifications, and expressions of thanks. She spoke of the people who had most influenced her, especially her teachers at Union Theological Seminary in the early 1970s: among them J. Louis Martyn, Raymond Brown, Edmund Steimle, Paul Lehmann, and Christopher Morse. She said it was Martyn who first put her in touch with Jim Holloway, editor of Katallagete: The Journal of Southern Churchmen, that somewhat anarchic journal of Christian politics, which published her early essay “In Search of an Authentic Biblical Feminism” (1978). She recalled the formative role played by her ministry at Grace Episcopal Church in Manhattan, and the enthusiastic response to her preaching at St. John’s Church in Salisbury, Connecticut, which led to the publication of The Bible and The New York Times. She also paid touching tribute to her husband, Dick Rutledge, for his support and encouragement across the years.
But while there were some valuable moments of oral history, the overall mood of the gathering was forward-looking. Justin Stratis, Academic Dean of Wycliffe College, said that Rutledge’s words felt “less like a ‘last will and testament’ and more like the urgings of a passionate fellow worker in the gospel.” Stratis’s colleague Kristen Deede Johnson, the new Principal of Wycliffe, remarked on Rutledge’s “significant ministry of encouragement of younger clergy and theologians—through her writing, through social media, and in person.” Bishop George Sumner of Dallas also remarked on this phenomenon, calling Rutledge’s mentees her “spiritual grandchildren.” These progeny cross church boundaries: among those present at the conference and joining by video were Episcopalians, Reformed, Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists, and Free Church evangelicals.
Rutledge is an advocate for robustly ecclesial theology, theology in service of the church. And yet not only the church; the world—the world of The New York Times, of Israel and Gaza, of Russia and Ukraine—also belongs to God. Just as the conference was drawing to a close, the participants learned of the killing of a state senator and her husband in Minnesota—the same day military hardware was being paraded in Washington, and the No Kings protests were unfolding across America. These were sobering reminders of a world still under the sway of the Principalities and Powers; a favorite Rutledge theme, reflecting her indebtedness to apocalyptically minded thinkers like Jacques Ellul and William Stringfellow.
How should the Christian preacher engage the public realm, especially in a time of intense political polarization? Rutledge did not pretend to have an answer to this question, other than to say that preachers must not engage in moralistic finger-wagging, or tell their congregations how to vote. That way lies legalism and self-righteousness. Sermons, rather, are—or by God’s grace can be—revelatory moments, “events” of the Word of God. Rutledge invoked Matthias Grünewald’s renowned altarpiece, in which John the Baptist’s grotesquely enlarged index finger directs the viewer to the figure of the Crucified.
Is there a future for preaching of this sort? Rutledge fervently hopes so. But she is inclined to believe that the cause is often hampered by modern biblical scholarship, which too often shrinks back from a penetrating theological engagement with the text. She admitted to having given away most of the critical commentaries in her library, while retaining Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Spurgeon, Barth, and other masters of the Sacred Page. In an autobiographical sketch prepared for the Greenwich event, she wrote:
More and more in my nearly 50 years of preaching and pastoring, I have come to believe that the way forward lies in a far more robust and committed attachment to the study of Scripture hand in hand with theological work. In light of all of this, I came to the conclusion that of all things I would like to bequeath, my primary and overriding wish would be to support the teaching of robustly biblical theology, in the form of a [professorial] chair devoted to that end.
If realized, the endowed post will be known as the “Fleming Rutledge Chair of Biblical Theology at Wycliffe College.” It reflects Rutledge’s longstanding ties to the Toronto institution, where she taught preaching in 2008, and from which she received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree in 2018.
One hears a great deal of talk nowadays about the “theological interpretation of Scripture”; in fact, a redundant expression, for how else would one read Scripture except theologically? Thomas Aquinas spoke of sacra doctrina, Holy Teaching, a phrase he used more or less interchangeably with sacra scriptura, Holy Scripture. Thomas moved easily between exegetical and doctrinal (for that matter, philosophical) registers, a freedom exercised by faithful readers across the Christian interpretive tradition.
Rutledge’s “biblical theology” locates us in much the same space. It is a theology that honors Scripture as the Word of God, that reads it in company with the saints and sages of the Christian past, and that knows how to interpret our evil times in light of the great Promise to which the Bible bears witness. It would be wonderful to have a chair devoted to the recovery of just this kind of integral sacra scriptura. Will the effort bear fruit? More anon.
Joseph Mangina, PhD is professor of theology at Wycliffe College, Toronto. His published work includes Karl Barth on the Christian Life (Peter Lang, 2001), Karl Barth: The Ecumenical Promise of His Theology (Ashgate, 2004), and the Brazos Commentary on Revelation (2010). From 2008 to 2017 he was the editor of Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology.
