Book Summary: "Preaching After God: Derrida, Caputo, and the Langauge of Postmodern Homiletics"

 Title: Preaching After God: Derrida, Caputo, and the Language of Postmodern Homiletics

Author: Phil Snider

Type of Work: Practical theology / homiletics; constructive proposal engaging deconstruction and “weak theology”

First Published (Date): 2012 (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books/Wipf & Stock), 240 pp.; ISBN 978-1-61097-498-1.  

Principal Ideas Advanced:

  • Postmodern philosophy’s “return of religion” (Derrida; Caputo) offers resources for preaching rather than threats to it.  
  • A homiletic of the event: proclamation attends to what comes “without alibi” or program—grace as an event that surprises rather than a metaphysical certainty we control.  
  • Weak theology (Caputo): God as the call, promise, or perhaps—an insistent claim on us rather than coercive power; preaching should give voice to this call.  
  • Critique of the domestication of transcendence in modern homiletics (overconfident claims, marketable certainties); recover risk, openness, and hospitality in the pulpit.  
  • Engage late-modern skeptics and “nones” by shifting from defending propositions to performing forgiveness, gift, justice, and hope in sermon language and church practice.  
  • Theory-to-practice bridge: the volume includes six lectionary-based sermons and chapters on risk, future, gift, and wonder to model the approach.  

Narrative Summary:

Snider’s aim is pastoral and constructive: to translate key insights from Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and John D. Caputo’s “weak theology” into a practicable homiletic for preachers who serve communities filled with the spiritually ambivalent and the religiously disenchanted. He begins by naming a widespread domestication of transcendence in contemporary pulpit practice: sermons often secure God as a predictable object or guarantor of our agendas, trading in certainty and utility. Against this, Snider proposes preaching that expects surprise—attentive to the irruptive character of grace as event rather than as a commodity to be managed. (Ch. 1, “The Domestication of Transcendence.”)  

The philosophical groundwork takes shape through short, accessible engagements with Nietzsche and contemporary atheisms (“Why Nietzsche Matters”; “Religulous?”). Here Snider neither concedes the sermon to skepticism nor treats doubt as a foe to be vanquished. Following Derrida’s accounts of gift, forgiveness, and the messianic ‘to come’, and Caputo’s rendering of God as call rather than coercion, he reframes proclamation as hospitable speech that welcomes the event—that which cannot be guaranteed in advance yet summons concrete acts of justice, mercy, and truth-telling. The sermon’s authority is thus performative (what it does and invites) more than apologetic (what it proves).  

At the book’s center stands a constructive chapter, “A Homiletic of the Event,” which gathers these strands into guidance for sermon preparation and delivery. Preachers are urged to craft language that makes room for the event (the unforeseeable coming of grace) by resisting overdetermined claims and by leaning into images, parables, and invitations that open hearers to God’s perhaps. This does not entail vagueness; rather, it shifts the sermon’s energy from control to responsiveness, from certainty to faithful risk. (Chs. “A Homiletic of the Event”; “The Risk of Preaching.”)  

Subsequent chapters work out thematic implications. “On Not Planning for the Future” explores the biblical and theological difference between managing outcomes and hoping in the future to come—a future that interrupts our scripts. “Nourished by Our Hunger” and “Impossible Gifts” apply Derrida’s reflections on the gift and forgiveness: truly evangelical preaching neither calculates return nor trades in transactional moralism; it names and performs gratuity in speech, gesture, and congregational practice. “Lost in Wonder, Love, and Praise” insists that doxology—not demonstration—is the fitting culmination of preaching that has made space for God’s advent.  

In a playful yet pointed case study, “Grilled Cheesus; or, the Gospel according to Slavoj Žižek,” Snider engages popular culture and critical theory to show how sermons can converse with late-modern irony without capitulating to it. The homiletical task is not to baptize every cultural meme but to discern where longing, justice, and joy break through the cracks of cynicism—and to invite hearers to inhabit practices that answer that longing.  

Crucially, Snider moves from theory to practice: the book includes six lectionary-based sermons that exemplify a postmodern homiletic voice—risky, invitational, attentive to the stranger, hospitable to uncertainty, and oriented toward concrete enactments of mercy and justice. Reviewers in Homiletic and elsewhere have noted the book’s dual virtue: it introduces complex thinkers (Derrida/Caputo, with occasional nods to Žižek and Marion) in preacher-friendly prose and then models what such thinking sounds like in the pulpit.  

Across the volume, the through-line is pastoral realism: in a culture of “nones,” preaching after God will be less about shoring up metaphysical guarantees and more about bearing witness—with words that invite rather than coerce, that risk the perhaps of faith, and that help congregations practice the impossible possibilities of the gospel: gift without return, forgiveness without remainder, justice beyond calculation, hope that does not disappoint. 

See my "short" introduction to "Preaching After God"

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