Beeson Podcast, Episode #513 Dr. Michael Pasquarello Sept. 8, 2020 >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your hosts, Doug Sweeney and Kristen Padilla. >>Doug Sweeney: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I am Doug Sweeney here with my co-host, Kristen Padilla, and we are excited to have a returning guest and beloved Beeson professor on the show with us today to discuss his new book. Let me make just two announcements before we introduce our guest. First, our Lay Academy of Theology begins on September 28th. Due to Covid19 all of our Lay Academy courses will be offered online this semester. This is not ideal, we’re a life together school, but if you live far away and are not normally able to participate in these wonderful classes aimed at friends in the community or local lay people now you can join us and be blessed by our award winning faculty. To learn more and even register online go to BeesonDivinity.com/layacademy. Second, our next virtual Preview Day is September 25th. Preview Day is a great opportunity to meet and hear from faculty, staff, students, and alumni – ask questions about our degree programs and admission requirements and learn more about Beeson Divinity School. Everyone who attends will have his or her Beeson application fee waived. So, sign up at BeesonDivinity.com/previewday. All right, Kristen, will you please introduce today’s guest and help us dive into his excellent new book? >>Kristen Padilla: Hello everyone. We are pleased to have a returned guest and Beeson faculty member, Dr. Michael Pasquarello, III. He is the Methodist Chair of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School where he also serves as the Director of the Robert Smith, Jr. Preaching Institute, and many of you will recognize his voice, because he is the announcer of the Beeson Podcast. So, we’re so glad to have our announcer on the show as our guest talking about his brand new book called, “The Beauty of Preaching: God’s Glory in Christian Proclamation.” Welcome, Dr. Pasquarello, to the Beeson Podcast. >>Dr. Pasquarello: Thank you, Kristen and Dean Sweeney. I’m so pleased to be with you today. >>Kristen Padilla: We’re glad to have you. As we’ve already said, we want to talk about this excellent new book you’ve written. And we want to begin just by asking what sparked your interest in the beauty of preaching? And perhaps as you talk about that you can define for us what you mean by the beauty of preaching and how it’s related to God’s glory? >>Dr. Pasquarello: Yeah. I’d be glad to do that as briefly as I can to try to convey or share what led me to do the book. I’ve been a preacher for almost 40 years. My PhD work is in the history of preaching. So, I’ve always wondered what is it about preaching that is attractive and that draws people? And I’ve really thought about that for a lot of years. And in part of my doctoral work and in research and writing, as well as teaching and preaching, I recognized that God is beautiful. The Word of God, which God speaks to us in Jesus Christ, through Holy Scripture, has a certain beauty by which the glory of God shines forth. There’s something about that, that just draws us and attracts us and stirs in us a desire and delight, and a real longing for me. It’s not limited to the ideas of the sermon, and it’s not limited to the style of the sermon. But the very thing itself, the Word of God as its own particular beauty, its own form that just sort of reaches out and jazzes you. You just want to say, “Tell me more. Tell me more.” And you pay attention. >>Doug Sweeney: Mike, why do you think so few preachers think a lot about the beauty of preaching? And even professional homileticians, people who teach others about preaching, tend not to focus on the beauty of preaching as much as they should. How do you account for that? >>Dr. Pasquarello: Well, we talk about God in terms of being truth, beauty, and goodness. Preaching tends to put a lot of emphasis on the truth. We want to tell you something. And goodness, we want to motivate you to live in a certain way. But in the modern period, beauty has more or less fallen off the table. What’s replaced it is what some people call a kind of aestheticism. And I call it “pretty preaching.” You kind of dress up the sermon by adding on some stuff that you think will make it interesting or entertaining, it might keep people’s attention, but it’s not intrinsic to the sermon itself. It’s just sort of the window dressing that kind of wraps the ideas and the concepts. But the beauty of God is inherent to God’s very being in life and God’s Word. That’s a theological matter. That’s not simply a style matter. That’s why I think that in homiletics it’s just been underemphasized for a long time. >>Kristen Padilla: The Beauty of Preaching deals with many different topics in relation to preaching, worship, biblical interpretation, spiritual and moral formation, pastoral ministry. I wonder if you would share a little bit about how and why you engage with these other topics as they relate to the task of preaching? >>Dr. Pasquarello: Yeah, Kristen, that’s a good question. Well, first of all, to be a preacher you need to be competent in all of those disciplines. And you need to be able to integrate them and pull them together as a whole. In the classical tradition one of the characteristics of beauty is its wholeness, or its fullness, its integrity. So, what I recognized early on, to talk about the beauty of preaching that I couldn’t talk about preaching in isolation but it had to be in light of the whole of our faith and the knowledge of God we receive as in God’s Word. So, that led me to just cross the disciplines, which is something that I thoroughly enjoy doing and that preachers need to do if they’re going to be faithful in proclamation. >>Doug Sweeney: As a church historian, Mike, I was thrilled to see the degree to which you mine the Christian tradition for help in writing this book. In fact, you use several exemplars from the history of preaching, the history of Christianity, to help make the points that you’re trying to make in the book. Would you tell our listeners, who still need to read the book – I’ve read it and loved it and we want others to read it and love it – but before they do, let them know which folks from the tradition did you raise up as exemplars? And why did you pick these people in the writing of this book? >>Dr. Pasquarello: Yeah. Well, one of my teachers, when I was a doctoral student, said that in the Western Church if you’re going to talk about beauty you have to begin with Augustine. And I’ve been reading and drawing from Augustine’s wisdom in my work and in my teaching and in my writing for a long time. So, I went to him, because when he was converted he writes in the Confessions that he refers to God as beauty and who had loved him and had drawn him to himself, and he was just taken by God and the beauty that he saw in Jesus Christ. So, I spent a lot of time with Augustine, trying to understand his vision of God’s glory and the way that’s its manifested in the beauty of Christ, who is the very form that God’s beauty takes as our fully divine and fully human Lord and Savior. So, I have two chapters on Augustine. I could have written more. I could have actually written a whole book around him. There’s just so much to do. I also chose to include John Wesley, because I’m a Wesleyan. Wesley had a way of looking at reality. He liked that aesthetic. He likes to talk about seeing and perceiving. He was a contemporary of your friend, Jonathan Edwards, and they use a lot of similar language about seeing, and about God’s beauty and how God’s beauty shines through God’s love, and how it manifests itself in us. The beauty of holiness, in particular. So, I found it was a wonderful opportunity to really revisit my own tradition and look at it from a different angle, and to include a chapter on Wesley, and I hope that Wesleyans would find it to be very helpful. Then I did a chapter on Martin Luther who typically, as you know as a Lutheran, is not associated with beauty. The modern theologian who’s written most about beauty, Hans Urs von Balthasar, a Catholic theologian, in his “The Glory of the Lord,” says that Luther has absolutely nothing to offer in terms of a theology of beauty. And that that tradition just sort of jumps over Luther and skips him completely. But a really fine Lutheran scholar named, Mark Mattes, wrote a book, “Martin Luther’s Theology of Beauty, A Reappraisal.” And it came out as I was writing the book and I already put together the chapter on Luther because just in my reading of Luther, especially in his commentaries on the Psalms, I found that beauty language just abounds. It’s everywhere. So, Mattes just encouraged me to go forward and use that chapter. I think the difficult thing in writing the book is all the other people that I could have included, but couldn’t. And that was the most difficult thing in trying to decide who to include. And as you said, there are exemplars. My hope is the book will encourage others to continue in this kind of work and find more exemplars and figures, both past and present, who can contribute to the beauty of preaching. >>Kristen Padilla: Mike, I wonder if you could say a little bit about what you hope preachers will gain from your book and perhaps even some things that you’re trying to correct with preaching today that you hope will be helpful to preachers? >>Dr. Pasquarello: Yeah, Kristen, thank you. I’ll have to say that what’s most important to me is that if they read the book they will love God more truly and more deeply. And that they will just be in awe of God, of the beauty of God, and the glory of God. That’s my first hope, that it will be good for them in their formation as pastors, as Christians, and spiritually it will benefit them and edify them. The second thing is I hope that it would encourage them just to be able to resist the fierce temptation to make preaching utilitarian. Because beauty in its essence is useless, it simply is. And it doesn’t have to justify itself. When we see something that’s beautiful, we’re just taken by it. We’re drawn to it, we’re attracted to it, we delight in it. We don’t say, “Is it useful?” We see a baby and the beauty of new life that shines forth from that baby. Do we ask ourselves, “Well, how is that baby useful to us?” We don’t do that. We just enjoy the beauty of the baby. Well, I hope preachers will see that the Word of God is like that. It really is useless. And in being useless in its beauty it actually is free to do God’s work in and with and through us. Rather than us trying to control it. >>Doug Sweeney: What about your own personal life, Mike? Has your research on this book, has your writing of the book, has your thinking about the topic of the beauty of preaching benefitted your spiritual life, helped you in your preaching? Has it made your life, your discipleship, or your preaching more beautiful? >>Dr. Pasquarello: Well, Doug, I’ll confess it’s been life changing for me. Writing the book was delayed several times because of family matters. And so I spent more time on this than any book that I’ve written in the past. So, I lived with it for a long time. And so it was more than just research and writing in an academic way. It really took on a very personal dimension. It opened my eyes to see God in his goodness and God in his glory in ways that I just had not seen previously. And I really did fall in love with God and also am much more able to appreciate the beauty of God’s goodness that I see in everyday life, and in my life, and the lives of other people. So, yeah, I have to say I was somewhat surprised at the real deep impact it has had on my personally. But I’m thankful. I’m deeply thankful. >>Kristen Padilla: Well, Doug and I would like to encourage you who are listening to go out and get this book. It is now available on Amazon and wherever else you buy books. It’s called, “The Beauty of Preaching God’s Glory and Christian Proclamation.” We are so grateful that you have written this book, Dr. Pasquarello, and we always want to end our podcast just by hearing the good work that God’s doing in your life these days. We are recording today’s episode at the end of week two of classes at Beeson Divinity School. I know you are teaching, you’re in the classroom. Could you just share a word of what God is doing in your life and teaching you these days? >>Dr. Pasquarello: Oh, sure. I’d be glad to. I’m teaching two courses this semester: History and Doctrine, from John Calvin to John Wesley, and then Pastoral Theology. Both classes are good. The students are very invested in what we’re doing. And even though we have certain restrictions because of Covid and we have a protocol we need to follow it doesn’t really seem to be inhibiting us or holding us back at all. It really is a joy to be back in the classroom. I’m really thankful that we’re able to be together once again. >>Doug Sweeney: I am, too. And I’m grateful to you, Dr. Pasquarello, for writing this book on the beauty of preaching and being with us again on the show to let our listeners hear about it. Listeners, you have been listening to Dr. Michael Pasquarello, the Methodist Chair of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School, and the Director of our Robert Smith Jr. Preaching Institute. He is a dear friend and a cherished colleague. And we sure are grateful to him for being with us. We’re grateful to all of you for listening and for your prayers as we continue to navigate classical theological education during Covid19. We’re praying for you. We appreciate your support. Thank you for joining us. Good bye for now. >>Kristen Padilla: You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our co-hosts are Doug Sweeney and, myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.