Walter Brueggemann, Finally comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1989), 162 pp., $8.95, paper.

James Forbes, The Holy Spirit and Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 1056 pp., $7.95, paper.

The Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale Divinity School are doubtless the most familiar annual lectureship in the American religious world. Founded in honor of Henry Ward Beecher, the lectures were named for Lyman Beecher, Henry's esteemed father, at Henry's insistence. Henry Ward Beecher did present the first series of lectures.

The Beecher Lectures, always addressed to the preaching task, have been presented by a succession of pulpit figures of world renown, and by some of little fanfare. Some series have been almost instantly forgotten, but most have been the focus of considerable attention -- their influence multiplied by the publication of the lectures in book form. Several have become mainstays of homiletic discussion, from George Buttrick's lectures published as Jesus Came Preaching (1930) to Fred Craddock's Overhearing the Gospel (1978).

The publication of Finally the Poet and The Holy Spirit and Preaching will add to the reputation of the Beecher Lectures -- and to the stature of their respective authors.

Walter Brueggemann, professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta, has established an international reputation as a biblical scholar and exegete. His books and monographs are found among the stacks in thousands of preacher's bookshelves. He is also president-elect of the Society of Biblical Literature.

Preaching has never been far from view in Brueggemann's writings, and though few biblical scholars have been chosen to present the Beecher Lectures, Brueggemann was a natural choice. His lectures were sure to combine biblical scholarship with homiletical insight.

Readers of Finally the Poet will not be disappointed. Indeed, the reader will find the quality of biblical insight expected of an exegete of his stature but combined with brilliant exegesis of the human subject, the hearer of the text.

In his 1989 Beecher series Brueggemann "sought to address the crisis of interpretation the preacher faces in our culture." As he suggests: "Preaching as an act of interpretation is in our time demanding, daring, and dangerous." This context is shaped by twin crises, according to Brueggemann, a crisis in interpretation and a "crisis of categories in scripture study."

Brueggemann's suggestive title points to the central thesis of his lectures: The world, its cynicism and ideologies, have reduced the biblical message -- and the gospel -- to prose, when only poetry can save. The gospel is, he states, "a truth widely held, but a truth greatly reduced." It has been, he suggests, "flattened, trivialized, and rendered inane."

Such a situation calls upon preachers to be "poets that speak against a prose world." Ideologies, with their "uncriticized absolutes," distort and conceal the gospel, whether from the ideological left or the right. This leads to the reduction of the gospel and of all human speech as well. By prose, Brueggemann refers to "a world that is organized in settled formulae, so that even pastoral prayers and love letters sound like memos." By poetry Brueggemann identifies, "not rhyme, rhythm, or meter, but language that moves like Bob Gibson's fast ball, that jumps at the right moments, that breaks open old worlds with surprise, abrasion, and pace."