Orthodox Preaching as the Oral Icon of Christ

James Kenneth Hamrick

• Publisher: Orthodox Logos
• Year: 1905
• eBook ISBN: 9789492224019
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Iglesia cristiana

Father James K. Hamrick is a priest in the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America and currently serves as the founding pastor of St. John the Baptist Mission in Lewistown, Maryland. During his two decades of pastoral ministry, Father James has received numerous invitations to preach and speak at various venues. His sermons are aired each Sunday morning on The Source Christian Radio (AM 1450 and at www.wthu.org) where he had previously served as a founding member of the radio station's Board of Directors. Father James holds masters' degrees from Holy Trinity Theological College & Seminary and from the University of Balamand. He is a life member of the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, a Knight of the Order of St. Ignatius of Antioch, and a member of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius in Oxford, England. Father James and his wife, Pamela, reside in Thurmont, Maryland, and enjoy visits from their four grown children and young granddaughters. Father James may be reached at [email protected]. In a relativistic postmodern age that is skeptical of propositional truth claims but that is "wired" for images and stories, the iconic nature of Orthodox preaching offers a compelling answer for effectively communicating the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Though preaching styles have varied widely across history and cultures, it is Orthodox preaching, by virtue of its faithfulness to the sacred apostolic and patristic traditions, its integral connection to the sacramental and liturgical life of the Church, and its functioning in tandem with Orthodox spirituality which conveys itself as iconic. Orthodox Preaching as the Oral Icon of Christ addresses the current crisis of preaching in our age and approaches the homiletical discipline from an iconological perspective, revealing how Orthodox preaching sacramentally mediates the presence of the Risen Lord in the midst of the assembly through artful and imaginative word images whereby lives are personally touched and transformed. Just as Orthodox icons are understood to be "windows into heaven, " so effective Orthodox preaching may be understood to transport the listener into the realm of the Holy where lives may be interpreted and transfigured in the light of the Gospel and indeed in the very presence of Christ.

Chapter 1

Preparing the Icon:
Toward a Christological Hermeneutic

If we are truly to understand Christian preaching, we must see Jesus Christ at its center. First we must see Jesus as the fulfillment of generations of preaching and teaching that went before him, and second we must see Jesus as the type, or perhaps prototype, of generations of preaching that have followed him. He is both the pattern of preaching and the gospel to be preached.

— Hughes Oliphant Old,
The Reading and Preaching of Scripture in the Worship of the Christian Church, The Biblical Period

Since Christ is the source, subject, and end of Christian preaching, and also stands as the fullness of God’s self-revelation, then it is quite appropriate that the preacher’s work of discerning a “word from the Lord” begins from a Christological center. Preparing the oral icon of Christ necessarily entails a prayerful and contemplative approach to Scripture which in Orthodoxy has often been proclaimed as the verbal icon of Christ.12 The Bible as the verbal icon of Christ serves as the principal source of sacred Tradition from which the preacher prepares his homily which will serve as the oral icon of Christ. However, the task of accurately interpreting a divinely inspired human literary work that spans many centuries and cultures is no easy accomplishment. And with the application of the historical-critical method which is taught in many seminaries today, the task of biblical interpretation has potentially become even more daunting. The presentation of an accurate and effective oral icon of Christ in preaching presupposes an accurate and effective rendering of Scripture. It is therefore imperative that the preacher gets it right; and that certainty of accuracy and faithfulness to the Gospel text only exists as the preacher, illumined by the Spirit of Christ, interprets Scripture with the mind of the Church. It indeed follows that a hermeneutic appropriate to the Church, the Body of Christ, is necessarily a Christological hermeneutic since, as Florovsky notes, “The true theme of the whole Bible is Christ and his Church, not nations or societies, nor the sky and the earth.”13

Accurate and faithful biblical interpretation does not proceed from mere academic rigor and literary criticism or from creative innovation, but from creative adherence to the apostolic and patristic Traditions of exegesis in submission to the authority of the Church so that a proper spiritual sense of Scripture may be discerned. Emmanuel Hatzidakis argues this point from the placement of the sermon in the Liturgy: “By establishing the sermon immediately after the Readings from the Holy Scripture, we see that Church does not leave the interpretation of the Holy Scripture up to each one of us, but wants to make sure that our interpretation is that of the Church, who wants to guide her children always to the truth.”14 In a similar vein, Florovsky asserts, “Revelation is preserved in the Church. Therefore, the Church is the proper and primary interpreter of revelation.”15 Beyond the preservation of divine revelation, Florovsky stresses the coherence in the body of traditional doctrine in the Church which “can be apprehended and understood only in the living context of faith, by which I mean in a personal communion with the personal God. … For Christ is not a text but a living Person, and he abides in his body, the church.”16 The preparation of the oral icon must therefore proceed from a Christological hermeneutic that derives from and is informed by the Church and its Orthodox Tradition. The patristic exegetical Tradition of the Church is perhaps no better embodied than in the writings Saint Irenaeus of Lyons. Arguing against the heresies of the Valentinians who distorted Scripture toward their own impious ends, Saint Irenaeus metaphorically describes the Scriptures as a mosaic; a “beautiful image of a king…constructed by some skillful artist out of precious jewels….”17 The clear implication is that these holy Scriptures as a beautiful mosaic of Christ the King may only be rightly divided and interpreted by the preacher as he understands and acknowledges what is before him, and as he interprets with the same divinely inspired creativity which fashioned the mosaic in the first place. Vladislav Andrejev states, “Iconic creativity issues out of the entire church’s dogmatic heritage, which is founded on divine revelation.”18 This certainly applies to the iconic creativity that is involved with the interpretative work of the preacher as he sets out to prepare the oral icon of Christ in a homily.

Before proceeding with an examination of the tools and methodologies of Orthodox exegesis and those particular aspects which characterizes a Christological hermeneutic, the question regarding the place of modern literary criticism in Orthodox exegesis should be considered. While the modern historical-critical method of biblical interpretation may certainly serve the preacher well in understanding something about authorial intent, the original audience, the historical context, and literary form and construction of the biblical text, from an Orthodox perspective, such a methodology is never an end of itself. Instead, it is merely a tool which serves the interpreter rather than the interpreter serving the methodology. The modern historical-critical method represents a shift from the moorings of patristic exegesis, and is therefore potentially problematic, particularly as it is applied as a stand-alone interpretative methodology divorced from the mind of the Church. Craig Satterlee argues:

While the patristic approach to Scripture provided a sort of conceptual unity to the Church even while allowing for significant differences, the historical-critical method has produced fragmentation, rendering Scripture unintelligible to anyone except trained experts in the history, language, culture, and beliefs of the centuries and peoples spanned by the Bible, thereby distancing the Church from its Scriptures….The problem is not that the historical-critical method is in use; the problem arises when it displaces all other methods and comes to be seen as an end in itself, the final step in the process of interpreting Scripture.19

While the modern historical-critical method may have value, it clearly becomes problematic when the interpretative method operates apart from the Church and Her sacred and patristic Traditions of biblical interpretation. To labor under a purely empirical and scientific approach to biblical interpretation is to miss the divine nature of Scripture (as well as the divinely inspired work of interpretation) and to consequently succumb to the spirit of this age, as articulated by Raniero Cantalamessa:

…we in the West have witnessed a massive relapse into the letter and flesh. The prevailing rationalism requires Christianity to present its message in dialectical form, that is, subjecting every aspect of it to discussion and research, so that it can fit into the general, philosophically acceptable picture of an effort on the part of human nature to understand itself and the universe.20

Certainly, such acquiescence embodies the warning conveyed by St. Paul to the Church in Colossae: “See to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.”21 Indeed, it is a Christological hermeneutic which St. Paul implies as a response to the vain and empty rationalism intrinsic to the world and the academy. In fact, St. Paul’s phrase, “according to Christ,” signifies the heart of Orthodox exegesis.

Grounded in the very Person of Jesus Christ, the apostolic and patristic approach to biblical interpretation “according to Christ” serves as the unifying center to the hermeneutical work of the Orthodox preacher. Robert Louis Wilken distinguishes this patristic approach from a mere philosophical worldview: “For the Greeks, God was the conclusion of an argument, the end of a search for an ultimate explanation, an inference from the structure of the universe to a first cause. For Christian thinkers, God was the starting point, and Christ the icon that displays the face of God.”22 Inarguably, Wilken’s reference to Christ as the icon of God hearkens from the explicit Pauline teaching concerning Christ as the image of the person (hypostasis) of God.23 So it is Christ, the icon of God, which serves as the starting point and the spiritual vision for the work of the preacher who endeavors to craft an oral icon of Christ through preaching and the faithful interpretation of Scripture. Indeed, it is the very Person of Jesus who gives us the Christological hermeneutic utilized in the apostolic and patristic approach to scriptural interpretation and preaching, as indicated by Hughes Oliphant Old, “It was Jesus himself, as summed up in the story of the Emmaus road, who opened to his disciples the Scriptures (Luke 24:32). It was Jesus who established the Christian interpretation of the Scriptures, and it was from Jesus that the apostles learned this interpretation.”24 This Christological method of interpretation, as a matter of devoted succession of the Faith, passed from the apostles to the patristic age of the Church, and to the Orthodox exegesis of our day. It is this Christological method which derives from the iconic nature of the apostolic witness, as Florovsky explains, “The Evangelists and the Apostles were no chroniclers. It was not their mission to keep the full record of all that Jesus had done, day by day, year by year. They describe his life and relate to his works, so as to give us his image: an historic, and yet divine image. It is no portrait, but rather an ikon — but surely an historic ikon, an image of the Incarnate Lord.”25

From this historic “ikon” of Christ, we now consider the particulars of patristic hermeneutics, passed on from the apostolic age, which abides as the foundation upon which our Orthodox exegesis is built. To adopt a patristic view of biblical interpretation is, in essence, to adopt a Christological hermeneutic. Such a Christological hermeneutic is not simply ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Conclusion
• Bibiography
• Endnotes
• Book Endorsements
• Book Cover Icon
• Father James K. Hamrick