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Overview
Preaching is not as simple as it may appear. The preacher today is confronted with a dizzying array of homiletic methods and approaches, each holding important insights into how to proclaim the Good News. While pastors wish to learn from these different ways of preaching, they often do not know where to begin (Who are the best representatives of a given approach? How do the different methods relate to one another? How has the preaching scene changed in recent years?). In The Web of Preaching, Richard Eslinger addresses these and other questions about contemporary approaches to preaching.
Surveying the most important current theories of preaching, he argues that no homiletic method can be understood on its own. The different schools of thought on preaching all intersect at such common points as Scripture, narrative, and the role of preaching in worship. A strength in one compensates for a weakness in another, and seen together they form one comprehensive "web of preaching."
This book is a follow-up to Eslinger's earlier A New Hearing, which has been a standard text in preaching courses since its publication in 1987.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781426764493 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Abingdon Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2002 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Web of Preaching
New Options in Homiletic Method
By Richard L. Eslinger
Abingdon Press
Copyright © 2002 Abingdon PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4267-6449-3
CHAPTER 1
Inductive and Narrative Homiletic Plots: Fred Craddock and Eugene Lowry
A frequent critique of narrative preachers and homileticians is that of the inherent limitations built into their methods by the Scriptures themselves. After all, the critics point out, biblical texts come in all sorts of literary forms—poetry, apocalyptic, discourses, Wisdom sayings, as well as the rhetoric of the Epistles and, of course, narrative. Can it not be the case that narrative approaches to preaching work well with narrative texts, but fail the preacher and people when the text at hand derives from a source other than narrative? The issues raised by this evaluation of narrative preaching's adequacy, of course, need to be aligned with the critique narrative homileticians have raised regarding the adequacy of the old discursive preaching to deal with most any biblical texts. The latter approach—preaching's modern expression in points and themes and main ideas—is perhaps best conceived as a spatial kind of activity in which the preacher constructed sermons from static themes and propositions. Recall, as Eugene Lowry observes, that most of us "were trained to think space and not time, unconsciously of course, when we sit down to begin sermon preparation." Lowry continues, "The result is that without conscious consent we immediately set about to order ideas." The alternative, doing "time" in the pulpit, is to take up a narrative model of preaching with its mobility and emphasis on plot rather than outline. So the question may be sharpened somewhat regarding preaching methods and diverse literary forms of the Scripture: How can the dynamics of narrative biblical texts inform our preaching whatever the literary form we preach? More simply put, we ask about methods in preaching that can "do time" no matter what the lesson or occasion.
The Inductive Homiletics of Fred Craddock
The Old Deductive Preaching
Colleague Eugene Lowry put it this way: "When Fred Craddock's work As One Without Authority was published in 1971, a new era in North American homiletics was born." And as is the case with the other pioneers in preaching's new era, Fred Craddock begins his revolution by critiquing the old homiletic orthodoxy. The prior era in preaching was beholden to a deductive methodology that has held sway for centuries, having its origins in Aristotle. The method derives its name from an internal movement and logic; beginning with a general truth, its goal is to lead to specific applications for a particular situation. Within homiletical tradition, this deductive method has long been established as normative for preaching regarding both the structure of the sermon and its exegetical underpinnings. Structurally, a recognizable form is consistently detected: The thesis of the sermon is stated and broken down into its constitutive "points"; these subtheses are then expanded, illustrated, and applied to some particular life situation. This approach is immediately familiar, expressing "the main stream of traditional preaching."
If the formal characteristics of this mainstream approach to preaching are familiar, so, too, are its uses of Scripture. Deductive preaching has exemplified a minimalist and often arbitrary relationship to biblical material throughout its history. The thesis or topic may or may not be drawn from the Bible, biblical warrant being by no means essential to the deductive method. Rather, Scripture can be found within the range of illustrative material, or may contribute "a governing image or basic vocabulary." Deductive preaching's use of Scripture, however, most often constitutes genuine misuse. Passages evaluated for employment within the deductive preaching model are first boiled down, revealing a thematic residue. Otherwise, serving as illustrations, biblical texts are viewed as merely ornamental to the argument already presented. Such use, according to Craddock, only offers "the illusion rather than the reality of listening to the text."
Beyond deductive preaching's exegetical deficiencies, two other serious problems have flawed this mainstream tradition. Craddock notes that the thesis of the sermon first is expounded and only later is related to particular situations. He then adds that such an approach is "a most unnatural mode of communication, unless, of course, one presupposes passive listeners who accept the right or authority of the speaker to state conclusions which he then applies to their faith and life." There is, therefore, an inherent bias in the whole project of deductive preaching, which assumes authoritarian address of God's Word and passive reception. What is lacking in such a downward movement of truth is any possibility of dialogue or democracy. There is "no listening by the speaker, no contributing by the hearer. If the congregation is on the team, it is as javelin catcher." Such an attitude is seriously out of touch with contemporary American congregations, Craddock believes. Some other, less autocratic method of preaching should replace the deductive sermon's condescending manner.
A second major flaw in deductive preaching relates to issues of structure and movement. As the main thesis is broken down into subsidiary points, a structure emerges that presents almost insurmountable problems regarding homiletic movement. The hearers of a traditional three-point sermon frequently experience three sermonettes instead, since the transition from the end of one point to the beginning of the next is usually unsuccessful. "There may have been movement within each point," Craddock observes, "and there may have been some general kinship among the points, but there was not one movement from beginning to end." Points that are conceptually equal in force cannot evoke a sense of sermonic movement and unity. Attempts at communication through such a static system are experienced by people in the church today as unnatural and as a violation of a sense of community.
Bridges to the New Era in Preaching
As is the case with the other pioneers in the new homiletics, a series of cultural and intellectual movements have been identified that served to bridge the chasm between the old era in homiletics and the new. For Fred Craddock, three of these are especially noteworthy—the rapidly shifting nature of public language, the new biblical studies, and contemporary hermeneutics. Each involves a look back at what has gone before and an assessment of what is new. Of course, Craddock would argue, if communal language, biblical studies, and hermeneutics have all experienced a Copernican revolution, so, too, will the practice of preaching.
1. Language in transition
There is a crisis in language, a diminution in the ability of words to express potency: "to create or to destroy, to bind or to loose, to bless or to curse." Affecting both the culture in general and the church's language as well, the crisis is experienced as a loss in the power of words. Several factors contribute to the phenomenon. First, Craddock invites his readers to assess the impact of the media on social language; they are bombarded by words day in and day out. "The eyes and ears have no relief, and all the old silent haunts are now scarred with billboards and invaded by public-address systems." Without a necessary silence, the power of words decays, again, within both a social and ecclesial context. Biblically speaking, the Word of God is born in silence, and when silence is lost, words and the Word seem to lose their potency: "How one understands a word as an event in the world of sound depends to a great extent upon whether that word is experienced against a backdrop of silence or in a room of many words." Most of the time, we live in rooms of many words.
A second factor relates to the lost efficacy in the traditional language of the church. Although a crisis of culture-wide proportions, the language of the church seems most susceptible to this infection. On one level, this may relate to the inability of the church to slough old and worn-out words that functioned effectively at one time but that no longer communicate the faith. These words "fought well at Nicea, Chalcedon and Augsburg," but "they are kept in the line of march even if the whole mission is slowed to a snail's pace and observers on the side are bent double in laughter." This loss in efficacy related to the church's traditional language may also stem from the radical shift in the way persons access information and express thoughts and feelings.
In spite of these losses with regard to the linguistic support for the task of preaching, there are signs of hope. In particular, Craddock notes the contributions of Martin Heidegger who insists on the centrality of language. Language precedes human existence and gives rise to it. Viewed from this perspective, language is constitutive of human existence and is essential to it. A person, Craddock notes, "is a conversation." And since preaching is by its very nature born out of an oral tradition and becomes an event by returning the Word to its oral/aural immediacy, the performative power of its language is now being reaffirmed. Recalling the insights of Carl Michalson, Craddock concludes that "preaching is by its nature an acoustical event, having its home in orality not textuality."
2. Cultural factors influencing the state of preaching
Fred Craddock joins with the other first-generation shapers of the new homiletics in pointing to the profound changes that have undercut the foundations of preaching. He singles out a philosophical shift from an interest in metaphysics to a focus on ontology and historicity. Resulting from this transition is a setting aside of a perspective that saw reality as substance within a static modality in favor of positions emphasizing being (ontology) and time (historicity). The ordered and changeless qualities of a previous era are gone, replaced by art and literature that expresses rapid change and even fragmentation. Architecturally, Craddock adds, even churches "do not look like churches any more." Within such a worship space, where the cultural winds have swept through even the church's liturgy, the static and timeless verities contained within a three-point sermon seem oddly out of place and out of touch. The hearers of such preaching receive it as the imposition of a false symmetry on contemporary life, caught up in rapid and discordant change.
But on the other hand, Fred Craddock suggests that it is precisely this erosion of the old cultural stasis that ironically creates a new environment in which the spoken word may well be heard anew. Resonating with the new cultural situation is the fact that "sound is always present, always an existential experience." Moreover, the spoken word in a nonrehearsed context such as preaching conveys the qualities of openness, polyvalence, and spontaneity, qualities held in high favor within the contemporary culture. The polyvalence in preaching means that more may be received in such an oral/aural event than was initially intended. This "more than was intended" opens up a new future; the spoken word is capable of leading "toward a goal as yet undetermined."
3. The role of media
If human perception "is no longer polarized around sound and person but rather around sight and object, the difficulties for the preaching task are all too obvious." These difficulties for preaching, as noted earlier, derive from a prior shift in language's center of gravity. With the advent of a print-oriented culture, oral communication was viewed as subsidiary to the written word, radically altering the previous experience of Scripture: "Words fixed in space by print tended to create the idea that the meanings of these words were fixed also. As a result, the written word was more authoritative than the spoken." Now, this more recent shift from a literary to a visually oriented culture in fact represents the second profound shift in social consciousness away from the primacy of oral communication. The situation, however, is not this neat in its cultural and linguistic manifestations, and this is a sign of hope for Craddock. With this caveat in mind, it is now appropriate to assess those factors that are borne within the new cultural situation and that are making for the renewal of the ministry of preaching.
4. Biblical studies
Once again, Fred Craddock identifies a sequence in which a prior situation that was detrimental to the task of preaching has moved to a new, much more supportive location. In this case, the situation is that of modern biblical interpretation. The dominant tenor of the relationship between biblical studies and preaching had been somewhat negative and abrasive during the ascendancy of historical-critical interpretation. Ironically, while one of this discipline's objectives had been the understandability of the Bible by the church, the reverse became the norm. What was conveyed to the church, and especially to the preacher, by the probings of historical criticism was an increasing awareness of the differences between the contemporary world and the biblical world. As it was dissected by historical research, the text seemed to recede further and further, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. An experience of distance was the outcome: The preacher felt a disturbing distance from the biblical world and a confusing distance from the scholarly one. Faced with this quandary, some preachers reverted to preseminary methods of dealing with a text and simply ignored the critical apparatus a seminary education sought to impart. More to the point was the insight that "biblical studies always moved [the preacher] backward, behind the texts to sources and antecedent, while [the preacher] at the same time sensed that in actuality, the story of the Gospel had always moved forward." What was needed was "a new angle of vision" within biblical interpretation that would allow the preacher to transverse this distance between himself or herself and the world of the biblical text.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Web of Preaching by Richard L. Eslinger. Copyright © 2002 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Introduction,
1. Inductive and Narrative Homiletic Plots: Fred Craddock and Eugene Lowry,
2. The Narrative Center,
3. Narrative Preaching in the African American Tradition,
4. Moves and Structures: The Homiletics of David Buttrick,
5. The Sermon in Four Pages: The Homiletic Method of Paul Scott Wilson,
6. A Homiletics of Imagery: Rhetoric and the Imagination,
Notes,
Contributors,