Arts and Preaching

An Aesthetic Homiletic for the Twenty-first Century

Sunggu A. Yang

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781532648557, 9781532648564
• eBook ISBN: 9781532648571
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

In our highly sensory and interactive age, how might drawing upon various arts--music, film, architecture, dramatic performance, painting, fashion, and more--expand the aesthetic experience and mode of preaching? This book presents a critical, practical answer to the question. As our society becomes more visually oriented, art-seeking, and body-positive, the practice of preaching is likewise challenged to demonstrate the mind-body, word-visual, and artistic proclamation of the Sacred (after all, isn't the writing of the Bible itself highly art-full and aesthetic?). In this book, Sunggu A. Yang, a seasoned preacher and experienced teacher of preaching, encourages preachers to utilize their unique artistic talents as critical sources of theological and homiletical imagination and as hermeneutical-perspectival tools to aid their rigorous exegetical process of interpreting Scripture, eventually toward artistic-holistic sermon composition and delivery. A sample syllabus, included in the appendix, will greatly assist any preaching instructor who wants to offer a creative course on arts and preaching.

1

A Proposal for Holistic-Artistic Preaching

At first, art imitates life. Then life will imitate art. Then life will find its very existence from the arts.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky1

Introduction

Text-driven, know-how-driven, and topic-driven preaching education produces, with few exceptions, disappointing sermons that are leaden and irrelevant, highly dogmatic, obsessively entertaining, or too performative to give the audience a solid message. The current situation of preaching education seems to be so in many places; the primary homiletic training focuses on how to interpret a text for a good sermon topic, how to structure a sermon, how to deliver or perform a message, and how to analyze the text-driven sermon. Accordingly, in a pedagogical sense the strong, if not sole, emphasis is on the “how” and the “what” of preaching.2

For instance, let us recall how the typical preaching course, especially an introductory course, begins, proceeds, and ends. Most likely, the class will begin with discussion on definitions of preaching and the preacher; namely, the theology of preaching. Then, it will proceed to the practice of sermonic exegesis on the given text as the fundamental preparatory step of preaching. Finally, the class will spend the last weeks of the semester on miscellaneous issues like sermon design, illustrations, body performance, gender issues, social concerns, wedding and funeral homilies, etc. Normally, the students will each preach twice, once in the middle and once toward the end of the course. That is it. In short, the class begins with “theology,” proceeds with discussion on “text,” and ends with quick concerns on “polishing.”

The end result has been quite disappointing. Most seminary students who embark on drafting their first or second sermons tend to be heavily text-driven, dogma-obsessed, topic-oriented, or orality/aurality-focused in their efforts to produce effective preaching. With few exceptions, they eventually end up finding their sermons burdensome and irrelevant, highly dogmatic, excessively entertaining, or too performative to give the audience a well-grounded message. What went wrong? What is still going wrong?

These are rhetorical questions, since I gave the answer at the beginning. Homiletical training over the past decades has focused exclusively on the textual “what” and the literary and performative “how” of preaching (as discussed in detail in the next segment). The sad result is that we have had no time to discuss and act upon the “who” and “why” of preaching in the classroom, which is a, if not the most, fundamental aspect of the preaching activity.3

It seems that preaching education has become merely sophisticated textual reverie or technical workshop. What we urgently need now is the (re)discovery of what we have lost, namely the “who” and “why” of preaching, which can lead us again to the holistic or numinous4 understanding of both preaching activity and its training in the classroom.

Thus, I argue for the recovery of the “who” and “why” of preaching in homiletical training specifically by implementing a numen-participatory, holistic-aesthetic pedagogy of preaching in the classroom. This proposed pedagogical paradigm will greatly help preaching students achieve their multifaceted homiletical intentions of exegetical depth and breadth, theological soundness, spiritual profundity, topical attraction, effective communication, high congregational attention, and more. However, apart from these results, I fundamentally hope that this recovered paradigm will be beneficial for the spiritual formation of the preacher.

Now, what does this new pedagogical paradigm look like? Before answering the question, I want to spend a little more time outlining the homiletical situation in academia today that has resulted in the current “how” and “what” pedagogy of preaching.

What Happened Before and After 1971?

In 1971, Fred B. Craddock published his landmark book, As One without Authority, opening and popularizing the era of the New Homiletic, and thus a new era of the “how of preaching.”5 The key argument of the book was an urgent call to shift from the deductive way of preaching to the inductive way. Craddock pointed out three main reasons for this change. First, listeners of sermons no longer appreciate the authoritative figure at the pulpit who alone purportedly knows and delivers the truth. Second, the inductive way of preaching is good for utilizing images and stories that can help the preacher easily identify with the lives of listeners. Third, inductive preaching invites the listener’s participation in the sermon narrative. In sum, Craddock was seeking a homiletical strategy that could sincerely reflect this cultural turn to the nonauthoritative pulpit and to democratized sermon hearing. Immediately following this call for inductive or narrative were Eugene Lowry’s still-all-time bestseller The Homiletical Plot (1980); Edmund A. Steimle, Morris J. Niedenthal, and Charles Rice’s Preaching the Story (1980); Henry H. Mitchell’s The Recovery of Preaching (1977); and David Buttrick’s Homiletic: Moves and Structures (1987). In a strong alliance with Craddock, they focused on the best inductive or narrative strategy for sermon composition and delivery, and thus strongly emphasized the matter of “how.” Not that there had been no concern for the “how” of preaching before Craddock. There had been, though it was not strictly inductive- or narrative-oriented; just to name a few, H. Grady Davis’s Design for Preaching (1958), John A. Broadus’s On the Preparation of Sermons (1944), Charles R. Brown’s The Art of Preaching (1922), and Ozora S. Davis’s Principles of Preaching: A Textbook Based on The Inductive Method, for Class Use and Private Study (1924; 2010 newly released). As a matter of fact, academics of the New Homiletic have shown in one way or another their scholarly debt to these pre-1971 figures. It was Craddock, however, who truly broke the homiletical convention of deductive preaching and introduced a listener-oriented, induction-based “how” of preaching, which gained much popularity both in the pulpit and in academia. Thus, it was natural that for the last half century we have seen an enormous number of how-to-preach publications on the market, which have gradually gone beyond the simple narrative or inductive approach. A few examples include Thomas G. Long’s Preaching and Literary Forms of the Bible (1988, biblical literary approach), Lucy A. Rose’s Sharing the Word (1997, collaborative approach), Paul Scott Wilson’s Four Pages of Preaching (1999, filmic-literary approach), and Jana Childers’s Performing the Word: Preaching as Theatre (1998, communicative and performative approach). All these publications discuss effective “hows” of preaching from the different approaches listed above. In all of those approaches, the “what” of preaching is the second matter or step that follows the first “more important” matter.

The dominant focus on the “how” of preaching, however, has not quenched entirely the ever-burning zeal for the “what” of preaching in the homiletical pedagogy, that is, the mostly text-driven preachin...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: A Proposal for Holistic-Artistic Preaching
• Chapter 2: Picasso and Preaching (Cubism)
• Chapter 3: Utzon and Preaching (Architecture)
• Chapter 4: Chanel and Preaching (Fashion)
• Chapter 5: A Cinemate Homiletic (Film)
• Chapter 6: Preaching to Episodic Ears (Drama)
• Chapter 7: Beyoncé Mass: Womanist Preaching, Reloaded (Music)
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Bibliography