A Reader on Preaching

Making Connections

David Day, Jeff Astley

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351961967
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Every Sunday all over the world people rise up and claim to speak in the name of God. It is an astonishing thing to do and an astonishing claim to make. It is small wonder that the sermon has been the focus of debate, discussion and investigation. It has been dismissed as irrelevant in today's culture and has become the butt of numerous jokes and caricatures. Yet the claim persists that these human words in some way can become God's message to these hearers. This collection of twenty-nine articles by international experts in the area of homiletics coincides with the revival of interest in preaching over the last twenty-five years. It is practical without being merely tips for preachers; and it offers the necessary theoretical discussion for anyone who wants to take the art of preaching seriously. No important issue has been omitted and, taken as a whole, the book constitutes a first class introduction to the principles, processes, context and theology of preaching. Contributors include: Walter Brueggemann, David Buttrick, Fred Craddock, Edward Farley, John Killinger, Richard Lischer, Thomas Long, Elaine Lawless, Jolyon Mitchell, Cheryl Sanders and Thomas Troeger.

Part 1
TRENDS IN PREACHING

Introduction to Part 1

In the first article in this reader, Thomas Long traces the developments in preaching over the 21 years between 1962 and 1983. He examines four key elements: the Bible, the congregation, the preacher and the sermon. Long notes the revolutionary impact which new emphases in biblical studies have had on the perception of the preacher’s task, discerning a new respect for the canonical form of the text, its social context and literary character. As far as the congregation is concerned, homiletics is increasingly inclined to see listeners as active participants in the sermon rather than passive recipients. This has led to a new interest in the dynamics of communication and the congregation as ‘co-artists’. At the close of the article Long explores the image of the preacher as explorer, contrasting this with the traditional image of ‘herald’. The analogy of the explorer, excitedly calling his hearers to follow him on a journey which he has already undertaken, suggests that the sermon has an unfinished aspect and functions, like the preacher, as witness to an encounter.

Many of these insights were later developed by Long, notably in his Preaching and the Literary Forms of the Bible (Philadelphia, Fortress, 1989) and The Witness of Preaching (Louisville, KY, Westminster/John Knox, 1989).

Thomas G. Long, ‘The Distance We Have Traveled: Changing Trends in Preaching’ was first published in Reformed Liturgy and Music, 17, 1983, pp. 11–15.

In the second article, Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament specialist and theologian, surveys the present situation under 16 theses. He argues that many features of the contemporary scene – knowledge as the servant of those who wield power, the tendency of the historical-critical understanding of the Bible to distance text and interpreter, the pluralism of the local congregation, the diversity of possible meanings to be found in any biblical text, the power exercised by the dominant account of reality, the way in which human transformation occurs – require a different kind of preaching. Individual and specific biblical texts are construed as alternative visions of how the world is, subverting the dominant script and grasped through the imagination. Preaching is therefore the offer of images by which experience can be reorganized, the congregation is an audience which may at any point become participants, and narrative is the primary mode by which such world-making takes place. Preaching invites listeners to hear ‘a counter-script which, over time, may authorize and empower counter-life’. Preaching would do well to take on this role since the ‘old givens of white, male, Western, colonial advantage no longer hold.’

See also Brueggemann’s The Bible and Postmodern Imagination: Texts Under Negotiation(London, SCM, 1993).

Walter Brueggemann, ‘Preaching as Reimagination’ was first published in Theology Today, 52, 3, 1995, pp. 313–29.

1 The Distance We Have Traveled: Changing Trends in Preaching

Thomas G. Long

Sometimes when we are cleaning out a cluttered desk drawer or leafing through a scrapbook rediscovered in a box in the attic, we run across a long-forgotten snapshot, a photograph which not only brings back memories but also marks the distance we have traveled between then and now. There is our son, now in college perhaps or maybe the Navy, bravely but wobbly peddling down the driveway on a new Christmas bicycle. There is a picture of the house before we added the porch. Or there we are, pounds lighter, wearing yesterday’s dress or a five-inch-wide tie, standing in front of a convertible with the ‘top down’. One comes face-to-face both with life’s continuities and with its immense changes.

Not long ago I reread Professor J. J. Von Allmen’s seminal essay on Reformed preaching, Preaching and Congregation¹ and felt as if I had found a photo under the yellowed papers in the desk drawer. Published over twenty years ago – before the winds of the sixties had achieved full strength, before Vatican II, before SALT talks, before Apollo moon shots, before acid and punk rock, before Watergate, before preaching itself went from bullish to bearish and back to a chastened bullishness – Von Allmen’s work stands as a reassuring reminder of that which endures about preaching in the Reformed tradition and a somewhat startling indicator of how very much has changed in two decades about our understanding of preaching.

What I want to comment on are some of the differences I think can be observed between preaching as it is now practiced and the 1962 snapshot found in Von Allmen. I do this not because I believe Von Allmen’s work to be obsolete but, rather, because of my profound respect for it as a high water mark in Reformed homiletics.

In order to spot the changes which have occurred we will need some categories, and Von Allmen is helpful here. He provides us with something of a line drawing of the preaching event itself. Imagine two dots spaced some distance from each other on a sheet of paper. One of these dots we will label ‘The Word of God’, by which Von Allmen would mean the story of God’s mighty acts as given in the Bible. The other dot will be labeled ‘The Congregation’, the hearers, those to whom the Word is addressed. Now imagine a bold arrow drawn from the dot labeled ‘The Word’ to the dot labeled ‘The Congregation’. This arrow marks the path traveled by the preacher in the preparation and delivery of the sermon. The arrow is, in a sense, the sermon itself, and it is important to note that it moves in only one direction: from Word to Congregation. There you have it: a simple picture of the essential ingredients of preaching – Bible, Congregation, Preacher, and Sermon – bound together in a system of interrelationships.² Let’s take each of these ingredients and explore some of the transformations which have occurred in the last two decades.

The Bible in preaching

For Von Allmen the Bible is the source of all authentic preaching, and the role of the Bible in the preaching of the Church is as a dynamic, event-provoking presence. Preaching cannot claim to be biblical simply because it gums together a lot of biblical quotes, like peanuts in a Snickers bar. Nor can it claim to be biblical by virtue of its presentation of great biblical doctrines, like ‘salvation’ or ‘providence’. Preaching is biblical when it somehow makes the biblical events present for contemporary hearers, when it enrolls the congregation in the biblical story.

In my view, the past two decades have, if anything, underscored and solidified Von Allmen’s claim for the primacy of the Bible in preaching. While it is still possible, of course, to find preachers who use the Bible as a whip or a sourcebook for scholastic doctrines or who bounce around like a ball in a roulette wheel from one ‘culturally relevant’ issue to the next, only occasionally stumbling across a biblical text in an embarrassed moment of half-recognition, more and more preachers are finding renewed excitement in honest struggling with the biblical materials. Part of this is due, no doubt, to the emergence of an (almost) common lectionary and to the accompanying wealth of relatively inexpensive exegetical aids which the new lectionary has fostered.

But most of the renewed enthusiasm about biblical preaching has resulted from recent developments in the methods of biblical interpretation, and here we begin to mark some of the distance between us and Von Allmen:

(1) First of all, redaction criticism is finally making its way into the preacher’s tool box. Twenty years ago most well-trained preachers would begin their work on, say, a passage in the Gospel of Luke like a medical pathologist. First they would remove the passage in question from the corpus of Luke, and then they would proceed to dissect the text using the instruments of historical criticism. They would unpack the structure of the sentences, do definitive examinations of each of the major words in the passage, measure the scars inflicted on the passage during its journey through the oral tradition, and reconstruct the impact the text may have had upon the original Lukan audience. The goal of all of this inquiry was to discover the theological center of gravity of the text, the main theological claim which governed the shape of the entire text. Von Allmen put it this way: ‘… [We] should identify the main point, the principal scopus of the text and make it the governing aim of our sermon’.³

This process was not bad, of course, but it was severely limiting. What was lost was a sense of how this one passage fit into the whole fabric of Luke’s gospel. If Luke is simply stringing texts together like beads on a string, then we can remove one of those beads and study it alone without regard for the rest. But if Luke is an artist, carefully choosing, polishing, and arranging the beads, then we must appreciate the function a single bead plays in the whole necklace.

Redaction criticism attempts to approach biblical texts with an eye to the way in which a writer has utilized those texts in the totality of his literary document.

One impact of the use of redaction criticism is the tendency among preachers to respect the canonical form of a biblical text, that is to say, the way the passage comes to us in the Bible. Preachers are far less tempted to use the methods of historical criticism to strip a text down to ‘what Jesus really said’ before Luke got hold of it. Moreover, preachers are more sensitive to the variety of witness in the scripture. Preaching on the parable of the Lost Sheep, for example, becomes a different experience when one uses the Lukan text (where the parable is given as a counter to the grumbling of the Pharisees and the scribes) rather than the Matthean text (where the parable appears as part of an address to the disciples about pastoral care).

(2) A second change which has occurred in biblical interpretation in the last twenty years involves an increased recognition of the social and political contexts of the biblical documents. The emphasis in the Reformed tradition upon the theological content and value of the Bible often pushed Reformed preaching toward a sort of disembodied biblical theology, abstracted from the social forces which gave it birth. Congregations would hear sermons on the freedom from bondage offered in Christ or the ethics of ‘rendering unto Caesar’ with little awareness of the political issues of slavery and imperial power which originally gave those texts their bite.

Preachers are being increasingly exposed to biblical commentaries and other resources which make it abundantly clear that the Bible was not written in a theological think tank but by people whose faces were weathered by the economic, political, and social climate of their day. To be sure, older critics were not blind to the social forces at work in the Bible, but the surprise has been the discovery of just how fully the biblical documents are embedded in the sociological context. To try to understand and preach from the Bible without using sociological categories would be like trying to understand Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech without taking into account the civil rights movement.

An example of the sort of sociologically-grounded resource available to preachers is John Elliott’s study of I Peter, A Home for the Homeless.^4...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Foreword
• Six Feet Above Contradiction? An Overview
• Part 1 Trends in Preaching
• Part 2 Preaching Scripture
• Part 3 Structure and Communication
• Part 4 Personal Qualities and the Preacher
• Part 5 Story, Parable and Imagination
• Part 6 Preaching and Worship
• Part 7 The Woman as Preacher
• Part 8 Effectiveness and Evaluation
• Acknowledgements
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Names