About
David Schnasa Jacobsen is Boston University School of Theology’s preaching professor. In that capacity he teaches M.Div., STM, and Homiletics PhD Concentration (Practical Theology) students to be “theologians of the Word.”
As Director of BUSTH’s Homiletical Theology Project, he is dedicated to encouraging “homiletical theology,” a way of doing theology that takes seriously the relationship of gospel, culture, metaphor, image and rhetoric to the homiletical task. He is excited to explore this and other aspects of their relationship at various intersections of theology and preaching. Over the years, his work has traversed several of these intersections.
His m
ost recent book is latest volume of the HTP consultation, Toward a Homiletical Theology of Promise. This book is the fourth in a four-volume series with Cascade.
What’s ahead? Prof. Jacobsen is working on a new book on a theology of Word and Sacrament for Eerdmans: Promising Signs: A Public Theology of Word and Sacrament for a Disenchanted Age. In future, he intends to develop a homiletical theology of promise that will ground both a basic preaching text and future research on preaching as a theo-rhetorical act.
Along the way, Prof. Jacobsen hopes as well to do more consultation-inspired work on topics like the Christian preaching of the Hebrew Bible and homiletical-theological pedagogy. For an example of these more occasional cooperative projects related to the research trajectory HTP, see the work of the “consultation” tab. Together with BU homiletics doctoral students Yohan Go and Duse Lee Jacobsen has edited a series of essays on preaching and postcolonial theology for the journal Homiletic 40:1 (2015). The essays and the consultation that produced them were sponsored by BU’s Center for Practical Theology.
Theologies of the Gospel in Context: The Crux of Homiletical Theology. This book is the third in a four-volume series with Cascade, The Promise of Homiletical Theology.
Homiletical Theology: Preaching as Doing Theology. This book is the first in a four-volume series with Cascade, The Promise of Homiletical Theology.
The edited volume of the 2014 HTP consultation, Homiletical Theology in Action: The Unfinished Theological Tasks of Preaching. This book is the first in a four-volume series with Cascade,The Promise of Homiletical Theology.
Faculty-Author Interview:
Prof. Jacobsen’s new commentary on Mark
Mark, published in 2014 in the Fortress Biblical Preaching Commentary Series, not only offers historical and literary insight into Mark’s mysterious, apocalyptic gospel, but also relates that text to its shape and use in the Revised Common Lectionary. The commentary also explores the Gospel’s potential homiletical-theological implications for today’s mainline church in light of the strange ending of Mark 16:8.
His first book, Preaching in the New Creation: The Promise of Preaching New Testament Apoclayptic Texts (Westminster/John Knox, 1999) focused on the difficult hermeneutical and theological problems posed by apocalyptic texts for the contemporary mainline pulpit. It wrestled with the struggle of relating eschatology to the context of the disestablished mainline Protestant church.
His second book, co-written with German NT scholar Günter Wasserberg, was Preaching Luke-Acts (Abingdon, 2001) struggled in particular with Luke’s narrative-theological vision and sought to relate it to post-Holocaust Biblical interpretation for today.
Prof. Jacobsen's third book, New Proclamation: Year C, 2007, Easter through Pentecost, (co-author, Fortress , 2006) continued along the same lines with lectionary readings from Luke as well as other books from the Bible.
Kairos Preaching: Speaking Gospel to the Situation was written with his one-time Lutheran systematics colleague Robert Kelly. In the book they develop a contextual-theological approach for the mainline church’s understanding of the gospel in situations of church and public life. It asks the question: what does the gospel sound like in our context at funerals, weddings, or at moments of public crisis like the Sunday after 9/11?
