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For a number of reasons, a word of explanation and perhaps defense of this portion of the book needs to be offered. In the first place, this Consideration of method may appear to some as discontinuous with Part One simply because traditional seminary structures have implied "practice" stands apart from the main core of academic work. Has not everyone held the private opinion that "Practical Theology" was either not practical or it was not theology? Secondly, there is a commonly held notion that the rescue of the pulpit cannot come at the "level" of method. This implies, of course, that method is without depth, deals only with symptoms, and in general is to be classified as a skill achieved by training, not an understanding gained through education. Why embarrass the university community with courses on preaching when there is a good Toastmasters Club downtown? And finally, a sensitivity about method as such that amounts to an aesthetic reaction against this entire area of discussion is strongly represented in our culture. To ask, "How is it to be done?" seems so proletarian. so mundane, almost vulgar. Those who ask such questions would put shoes on larks, and chop the forest into firewood.

Response to these attitudes draws upon experiences which make sympathetic understanding possible. However, at the risk of being repetitious, it needs to be emphasized that the separation of method of preaching from theology of preaching is a violation, leaving not one but two orphans. Not only content of preaching but method of preaching is fundamentally a theological consideration. For example, the point of contact of the sermon with the hearers is an issue long and fruitfully debated by Karl Barth and Emil Brunner and occupying a foremost place in historical theology. Does one address himself to men dark of mind and heart or is the sermon designed to awaken man’s memory of his true destiny? The answer affects how one communicates, verbally or non-verbally. Or again, why are there often in the pulpit such affected tones and gestures? It is not a problem of hand and mouth alone; it is theological and theologically to be resolved. When the preacher comes really to believe in the incarnation, that God comes to us in the ordinary, that God’s word comes in the usual patterns of the vernacular, he will trust that God can use the local idiom. Until then he will offer up "red letter" editions of himself, a mystery to his frustrated speech teachers. Nothing has so clearly documented the inextricable relation of method and content as has the recent work on the parables by Ernst Fuchs, Amos Wilder, and Robert Funk. Rather than being distilled for their content, the parable communicates as parable, it is the method that effects the experience. The method is the message. So is it with all preaching: how one preaches is to a large extent what one preaches. Looking ahead to what is yet to be discussed, it is not just the destination but the trip that is important.

The theological issues involved in method are innumerable. How one communicates is a theological commentary on the minister’s view of the ministry, the church, the Word of God, sin, salvation, faith, works, love, and hope. And it is probably a clearer and more honest expression of his theology than is the content of his sermons.

As to the aesthetic reaction against the task of considering method, this is a pain with which the minister has to live, a pain he shares with every writer, painter, musician, or other artistic spirit. In fact, that minister who feels every sermon is in a sense a crucifixion between the sky of intention and the earth of performance is a man to be heard with profit. But this pain is not to immobilize the minister. Every artist knows that palette and brush may compromise a vision, and yet to refuse to paint is to confuse purity and sterility. But it is also a delightful discovery that, once at work, the motions, the activity of doing the job often stimulates the mind to greater vision and clearer insight than can ever be known by those who passively protect their untried ideals.

So it is that articulation is as important for the speaker as for hearers. By expressing his thought he becomes more thoughtful; by searching for words to give eyes to his listeners, he himself comes to see more clearly. Some preachers have theological terms for defining this experience, but all who share it know that speaking is such a bosom companion to thought and feeling that the separation of method from content is not only artificial but unfruitful.

One further introductory word: this essay proposes a method of preaching. While the guidelines suggested may inform a variety of sermon shapes, this in no way implies that the method discussed here is the method. In fact, forms of preaching should be as varied as the forms of rhetoric in the New Testament, or as the purposes of preaching or as the situation of those who listen. He who trumpets "Reveille" every Sunday should not be surprised that the congregation ceases to believe a new day dawns; he who sounds "Taps" every week should realize the listeners do not really believe the curtain of life has fallen.

Anyone who would preach effectively will have as his primary methodological concern the matter of movement. Does the sermon move and in what direction? Movement is of fundamental importance not simply because the speaker wants to "get somewhere" in his presentation but because the movement itself is to be an experience of the community in sharing the Word.

There are basically two directions in which thought moves: deductive and inductive. Simply stated, deductive movement is from the general truth to the particular application or experience while induction is the reverse. Homiletically, deduction means stating the thesis, breaking it down into points or sub-theses, explaining and illustrating these points, and applying them to the particular situations of the hearers. Everyone recognizes this as the movement of sermons in the main stream of traditional preaching. This movement is not native to American soil but is as old as Aristotle and to this day prevails in Europe from where it has been mediated to American seminaries and pulpits.

The assumptions which underlie the deductive movement of thought begin to appear when one looks at the form of outline upon which it hangs.

I.

Notice that the main point is given first and then broken down into particulars. In other words, the conclusion precedes the development, 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. And this is precisely the authoritarian foundation of traditional preaching, whether that authority be lodged in the church, the Scriptures, the ordination of the clergy, or in the exclusive ability of the clergy, by virtue of their training, to handle aright the eternal truths. this relationship between speaker and hearer prevailed as long as Christendom as such prevailed, and therefore this was the movement appropriate to it. To have placed more responsibility on the listener, to have left alternatives open to him, to have permitted his response to be the conclusion, would have been to create panic, insecurity, and thus totally frustrate the flock. And, it might be added, there are quarters within the church where this would be true today. But the patterns of thought traffic have radically changed and continue to do so. Recent discussions of preaching among Roman Catholics make this abundantly clear. As early as 1949, Viktor Schurr took a position against Karl Barth saying that Barth’s view of preaching was too authoritative and did not invite the hearer to participate in the sermon. Since the Second Vatican Council, Schurr’s position has gained wider hearing. Wilhelm Weber has lamented the embarrassment and downgrading involved in the older method of deductive preaching to a world invited to a dialogue. And more recently, Bruno Dreher has called for "homiletical induction" which begins with an interpretation of human existence today and then moves to the text. ²

Look again at the skeleton structure above. There is no democracy here, no dialogue, no listening by the speaker, no contributing by the hearer. If the congregation is on the team, it is as javelin catcher. One may even detect a downward movement, a condescension of thought, in the pattern. Of course, this may or may not appear in the delivery, depending on the minister. Some sensitive and understanding preachers modify the implied authority in a variety of ways: voice quality, humor, or by an overall shepherding spirit that marks all their relationships. But even here, a critical eye may detect a soft authoritarianism in the minister’s words to those most obviously dependent upon him. Sometimes a term of affection may be a way of reducing another to a child, or a non-person status. One may recall with what devastating warmth Negro men were once called "boy" or "uncle".

Another glance at the deductive outline reveals a very serious obstacle to movement in the sermon: how does one get from 2b to main point II? That is a gulf that can be smoothly negotiated only by the most clever. Looked at geographically, a three-point sermon on this pattern would take the congregation on three trips down hill, but who gets them to the top each time? The limp phrase, "Now in the second place" hardly has the leverage. He who has had the nerve to cast a critical eye on his old sermons has probably discovered that some sermons were three sermonettes barely glued together. There may have been movement within each point, and there may have been some general kinship among the points, but there was not one movement from beginning to end. The points were as three pegs in a board, equal in height and distance from each other.

It should be pointed out that some who preach have continued by bent of training and habit to outline their sermons as shown above, but in delivery have departed from it. The reaction against the pattern has been almost instinctive, as though such a structure violated the experience of communicating and the sense of community to be achieved. Some have even felt guilty about the departure, feeling they had ceased preaching and had begun to "talk with" their people. Lacking a clearly formed alternative, shabby habits, undisciplined and random remarks have been the result of this groping after a method more natural and appropriate to the speaker-hearer relationship that prevails today. Such casual and rambling comments that have replaced the traditional sermon can hardly be embraced as quality preaching, but the instincts prompting the maneuver are correct.

Perhaps the alternative sought is induction. In induction, thought moves from the particulars of experience that have a familiar ring in the listener’s ear to a general truth or conclusion. ³ Locke Bowman Jr., in explaining different teaching methods sketches the difference between deduction and induction in this fashion: ⁴

(Chart on Page 57:)

(At triangle with the base at the bottom and the apex at the top. The top represents the "General truth", the bottom "Particular applications." This represents "Deduction.")

(A triangle with the base at the top and the apex at the bottom. The top, or base line, represents "Particulars of experience." The bottom, the apex, represents "General truth or conclusion." This represents "Induction.")

As Bowman points out and as the reader has probably already observed, much thinking and speaking consists of these two triangles stacked to form an hour-glass: one moves inductively to a conclusion and then deductively in the applications of that conclusion. However, induction alone is here being stressed for two reasons: first, in most sermons, if there is any deduction it is in the minister’s study where he arrives at a conclusion, and that conclusion is his beginning point on Sunday morning. Why not on Sunday morning re-trace the inductive trip he took earlier and see if his hearers come to that same conclusion? It hardly seems cricket for the minister to have a week’s headstart (assuming he studied all week) , which puts him psychologically, intellectually, and emotionally so far out front that usually even his introduction is already pregnant with conclusions. It is possible for him to re-create imaginatively the movement of his own thought whereby he came to that conclusion. A second reason for stressing inductive movement in preaching is that if this is done well, one need not often make the applications of the conclusion to the lives of his hearers. If they have made the trip, then it is their conclusion and it is their conclusion and the implication for their own situations are not only clear but personally inescapable. Christian responsibilities are not therefore predicated upon the exhortations of a particular minister (who can be replaced!) but upon the intrinsic force of the hearer’s own reflection. For this reason, the inductively moving sermon is more descriptive than hortatory, more marked by the affirmative than the imperative, with the realization, of course, that the strongest of all imperatives is a clear affirmative that has been embraced. Our society hardly knows any clearer contradiction of good sense than that of a speaker, assuming a conclusion that is his by hard work or inheritance but nonetheless his alone, and on the basis of that conclusion, filling the air with "must", "ought", and "should", thinking thereby to produce sincerity, kindness, love, repentance, faith, and finally enthusiasm for the next gathering for more of the same. His hearers, a group including usually his family and good friends, are torn by frustration, embarrassment, apathy, hostility, and pity. Exhausted by his own fruitless efforts, the preacher alternates between writing "Ichabod" over their heads and "Golgotha" over his own.

The inductive process is fundamental to the American way of life. There are now at least two generations who have been educated in this way from kindergarten through college. Experience figures prominently in the process, not just at the point of receiving lessons and truths to be implemented, but in the process of arriving at those truths. Because the particulars of life provide the place of beginning, there is the necessity of a ground of shared experience. Anyone who preaches deductively from an authoritative stance probably finds that shared experiences in the course of service as pastor, counselor, teacher, and friend tend to erode the image of authority. Such preachers want protecting distance, not overexposure. However, these common experiences, provided they are meaningful in nature and are reflected upon with insight and judgment, are for the inductive method essential to the preaching experience.

Fundamental to the inductive movement, therefore, are identification with the listener, and the creative use of analogy. There are no strict rules to guide the preacher in the choice of analogy from the viewpoint of logic; he will be guided by the nature of the experience he wishes to provide in the sermon as well as by the destination he has in view. Analogies not only make an idea vivid but "through analogies we integrate our experiences into our learning. Casually we solve innumerable problems in our daily living simply by comparing them to similar situations we have already experienced." ⁵ The sermon enlarges and informs this experience by providing analogies drawn from the lives of others, those about us and those who belong to history. Of course, from a strictly logical viewpoint, no amount of analogy, however appropriately selected and arranged, constitutes conclusive proof in argument. This is, in the opinion of some, a fatal flaw in the inductively woven fabric, and to this matter attention will shortly be given.

It cannot be overemphasized that the immediate and concrete experiences of the people are significant ingredients in the formation and movement of the sermon and not simply the point at which final applications and exhortations are joined. Recall again the parable which lay at the heart of Jesus’ preaching. Here the whole of life is concentrated into one concrete situation. Jesus does not make a call for faith in general but in relation to a specific life situation. The subject matter is not the nature of God but the hearer’s situation in the light of God. The mundane concreteness of the parable is to be taken seriously as such as such and not as though it were the shadow of the real, an illustration of some "spiritual" realm. Everydayness constitutes the locus of man’s destiny.⁶ If one is not Christian here, then where? If not now, when?

A hesitation, almost a fear of concreteness runs through the history of the church to the present day. We never cease being surprised that upon the death of a saint, visiting mourners discover at his home brooms, detergents, ironing board, worn sweater, trash can, toilet tissue, a can of tuna, and utility bills. Perhaps a fear of "thingification" has produced this unwillingness to admit concrete and specific things to the credit side of the sermonic ledger. If things appear, they are often robbed of their identity by being made illustrations of some transcendent good (The apple is round, forming a circle, the symbol of eternity, and all that.) We need to listen to the psychiatrists speak of the "therapy of the bare fact". For a person mentally ill and confused, there is healing by just coming into the presence of real objects, ordinary identifiable things.⁷

The plain fact of the matter is that we are seeking to communicate with people whose experiences are concrete. Everyone lives inductively, not deductively. No farmer deals with the problem of calfdom, only with the calf. The woman in the kitchen is not occupied with the culinary arts in general but with a particular roast or cake. The wood craftsman is hardly able to discuss intelligently the topic of "chairness", but he is a master with a chair. We will speak of the sun rising and setting long after everyone knows better. The minister says "all men are mortal" and meets drowsy agreement; he announces that "Mr. Brown’s son is dying" and the church becomes the church.

Perhaps by this time the question has been raised as to the theological presupposition back of this conviction that the experiences and viewpoints of the listeners constitute a part of the experience of the Word of God in the sermon. If so, it should be said first that if the preacher is addressing the church in his sermon, he should recognize them as the people of God and realize that his message is theirs also. He speaks not only to them but for them, and seeks to activate their meanings in relation to what he is saying. And yet, increasingly the problem of unbelief is within as well as without the church and to this the minister offers not just reprimand but an honest expression of that very unbelief: "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief." It is always best to be honest with one’s own and another’s situation. Pretending faith or lamenting the lack of it may impress an occasional unobserving visitor, but it is pure straw to the flock.

In the second place, it is theologically basic to the inductive method that even in missionary preaching, the listener not be viewed as totally alien to God and devoid of Godwardness. This is not to forget that man is a sinner, contradicting and resisting the Word of God nor to approach every man as though he had a religious faculty to be developed.. But neither are we to forget "the light enlightening every man", "the law written on the heart", or the imago dei, however distorted it may be. Bultmann’s explanation of Paul’s anthropology in Romans 5 and 7 captures the both/and nature of men: he has a "memory" of his true destiny but his ability to achieve it is perverted. Because of man’s perverted self-understanding he does come into conflict with the Word of God, but a point of conflict is also a point of contact. Even a perverted relationship is a relationship; were there no relationship there would be no conflict. ⁸ The inductive method operates on this assumption, that man does ask the question of his own being and of his relation to Ultimate Reality. To ask a question is to imply understanding, but to ask is also to imply lack of understanding. As Gerhard Ebeling has put it, "Only a man who is already concerned with the matter in question can be claimed for it." ⁹ Such is the condition of the listener: he can hear and he is to be heard.

In establishing the point that the congregation is, in inductive preaching, more than just the destination of the sermon, two matters essential to inductive movement have been stressed. First, particular concrete experiences are ingredient to the sermon, not just the introduction to solicit interest as some older theories held but throughout the sermon. On the basis of these concrete thoughts and events, by analogy and by the listener’s identification with what he hears, conclusions are reached, new perspectives are gained, decisions made. This experienced and "experienceable" material is not to be regarded simply as illustrative any more than a man’s life is to be lightly handled as an illustration of something. This is the stuff of the sermon and its reality lies in its specificity. This is biblically sound procedure. Read again the Old Testament and note its almost embarrassing specificity. So it is in the New. Paul never wrote: "To whom it may concern: Here are some views on the slavery issue." He did write: "Dear Philemon: Let us talk about Onesimus." The incarnation itself is the inductive method. From experiences with the man Jesus of Nazareth, conclusions about God were reached, usually after painful revision. It is regrettable that sermons about Christ have too often reversed this procedure, as though Jesus had said, "He who has seen the Father has seen me" rather than, "He who has seen me has seen the Father." (John 14:9)

The second matter thus far stressed as fundamental to induction is movement of material that respects the hearer as not only capable of but deserving the right to participate in that movement and arrive at a conclusion that is his own, not just the speaker’s. The conclusion does not come first any more than a trip starts at its destination or a story prematurely reveals its own climax, or a joke begins with the punch line. Perhaps it will not be taken as irreverent to say that the movement of a sermon is as the movement of a good story or a good joke. It may also be compared to the movement of conversation about a table. We have names for those who announce upon drawing up a chair exactly where the conversation is going and with what conclusions, just as we do for those who insult us by explaining the joke and telling it again.

It is no small advantage to this type of movement that it creates and sustains interest, and it does so by incorporating anticipation. Life that is healthy and interesting moves from expectation to fulfillment repeatedly. Of course, sermons that offer expectation without fulfillment can be as cruel as sermons that offer fulfillment without expectation are boring. Both poles are essential to life and when in healthy tension, there is joy. In fact, the greatest single source of pleasure is anticipation of fulfillment. The period between the father’s announcement of a family trip and the trip itself may be the children’s greatest happiness. All of us know there is something about the chase that is a joy apart from the catch. It is this dimension that makes Christmas. Rouse a person on a given morning and say, "It’s Christmas!" and even if it is, to him it is not. He has not anticipated it. The saddest day of Christmas, therefore, is Christmas day. Another analogy: have a meal catered, depriving the nostrils and digestive juices of the anticipation whetted by the odor from the kitchen, and the stomach will resent it. And it will let its resentment be known. Again: watch an old man peel an apple for his grandson. Forget the sanitation problems and watch the deliberate care in beginning, the slow curl of unbroken peel, the methodical removing of the core. The boy’s eyes enlarge, his saliva flows, he urges more speed, he is at the point of pouncing upon grandfather and seizing the apple. Then it is given to him, and it is the best apple in the world. Place beside that small drama a sermon that gives its conclusion, breaks it into points and applications and one senses the immensity of the preacher’s crime against the normal currents of life. The Bible always has its "already" and "not yet". The announcement by the early Christians that the expectation of a Messiah was fulfilled went on to explain that the fulfillment was the basis for a new expectation. He has come; he will come. The absence of this expectation from a tired existentialism that absolutizes the Now made it inevitable that a theology of hope would arise to correct it. This correction is not only justified biblically; it is necessary existentially. If today’s thinking about life and about the church is time-, not space-oriented, then by all means let the sermon reflect this orientation by moving, open and expectant.

This leads us to a third and final comment about the inductive method and the role of the listener: the listener completes the sermon. This has been implied already but needs elaboration because it is on this point that much of the criticism of the inductive method is focused. Now it is customary to say that the congregation completes the sermon, but usually what this means is that the preacher has told the people what has to be done and then they are to implement it. What is here suggested, however, is that the participation of the hearer is essential not just in the post-benediction implementation, but in the completion of the thought, movement and decision-making within the sermon itself. The process calls for an incompleteness, a lack of exhaustiveness in the sermon. It requires of the preacher that he resist the temptation to tyranny of ideas rather than democratic sharing. He restrains himself, refusing to do both the speaking and listening, to give both stimulus and response, or in a more homely analogy, he does not throw the ball and catch it himself. This is most difficult to do, for any preacher full of his subject wants to possess and control only the subject but all who hear it lest it fall to the ground. He wants a guarantee that the word will not be lost between himself and his congregation. It requires a humility and a trust most of us lack to risk not having this control, to be willing to participate in sharing a matter that is bigger than speaker or hearer and which they can only explore together in wonder, humility, and gratitude. The subject that can be exhaustively handled in a sermon should never be the subject of a sermon. And yet how many sermons one hears in which the impression is given that the preacher had walked all the way around God and had taken pictures.

But the temptation to imperialism of thought and feeling can be resisted. The good artist is able to do so. A work of art does not exist totally of itself but is completed by the viewer. Nothing is more disgusting than some religious art that is so exhaustively complete, so overwhelmingly obvious, that the viewer has no room to respond. It is this room to respond that also marks a good drama. Edward Albee the playwright said in a television interview that anyone who bought a ticket to see one of his plays had to assume some of the responsibility for that play.

Let us return again to the parable. C. H. Dodd has defined a parable as

The parable as such would be contradicted and destroyed by being explained and applied. The effectiveness of much of Jesus’ preaching depended not simply on the revelatory power of his parables but also upon the perceptive power of those who attended to them. "Let him who has ears hear."

This same expectation of man’s reaching out, of man’s responding as the completion of communication characterizes the entire biblical story of God’s relation to man. ¹¹ One could almost characterize God as reticent to be obvious, to be direct and hence to overwhelm, even when men called for some clear and indisputable evidence from heaven. Whether or not an event were divine revelation depended not alone upon the objective factors in the event but upon what one brought to that event. It was no different in the ministry of Jesus. The same occasion that moved some to confess faith in him as God’s messenger elicited from others mutterings about the untutored Nazarene. In every situation some were sure God spoke to him; others said, "It thundered."

Those who walk away from the Word of God do so because they "will not", but they excuse themselves saying "I can not." The preacher is moved by this "I can not" and so begins to remove all obstacles in order to usher in faith: art, drama, and parable are fully explained, applications are complete, and exhortations are exhaustive. The poor listener, denied any room to say No is thereby denied the room to say Yes.

Thus far the attempt has been made to say that inductive movement in preaching corresponds to the way people ordinarily experience reality and to the way life’s problem-solving activity goes on naturally and casually. It has been urged that this method respects rather than insults the hearer and that it leaves him the freedom and hence the obligation to respond. In addition, unfolding or unrolling the sermon in this fashion sustains interest by means of that anticipation built into all good narration. But granted a degree of merit in each of these considerations, several objections arise which are of some weight and are deserving of attention.

First, there is the immediate and obvious objection that the method here advocated opens the door to semi-preparedness on the part of the preacher. He can offer up ideas in embryo or appear before his people with a few hastily gathered commas and question marks and smile reflectively over his inductive efforts. To the charge that this method pronounces a blessing over such lethargy there is really no solid refutation, at least no more than there is to the charge that deductive preaching provided the homiletical support for authoritarian and arrogant clericalism. If the inductive method is an umbrella under which the irresponsible and undisciplined can hide, then it must make room for itself among a beach of umbrellas, for there are in the Christian ministry many hiding places. And how are these loafers to be flushed from their secure indolence without denying to the ministry that freedom essential to a strong pulpit and creative servanthood? Perhaps it is best to admit the strength of this objection but still choose the danger over its worse alternative. After all, there is no serious endeavor that is not soon made a game in the market place.

A second objection has more teeth: is there not something fundamentally unethical about the inductive method? Those who voice this charge look upon the traditional procedure of stating the thesis and dividing it into points as straightforward, "coming right out with it", while induction is sneaking up on the congregation and slipping in your biblical material when they are not looking. Now it has to be granted, of course, that there is no end to pulpit tricks and sneak attacks: the manufactured tear, public beating of the breast, slaying dragons on loan from the taxidermist, and thousands more. If the minister resorts to these, then he will find in the inductive method some new devices for hidden persuaders, some new tactics for "getting them in the palm of his hand". But intrinsically, induction is no more unethical than a parable is unethical. It may shock a congregation long accustomed to packaged conclusions to find a decision on their hands, but it is never sneaky to leave a man room to choose. On the contrary, properly conceived, the inductive movement implements the doctrine of the priesthood of believers. Instead of paying lip service to this doctrine once a year on Reformation Sunday, why not incarnate it every Sunday in a method of preaching that makes it possible for the congregation to experience the awful freedom of that tenet? If, however, the preacher is only apparently leaving room for choice and conclusion but in reality has left open only one door, then that process is to be defined by another term: deception.

In light of what was said earlier about achieving higher levels of interest for the hearers, it may be felt by some that herein lies a degree of treason, a compromise of truth in order to be interesting. This Criticism assumes that being true and being interesting are mutually exclusive; if a statement is interesting it must not be true, arid vice versa. This is insupportable. If the air is filled with bland abstractions about "righteousness" and "blessedness ‘ and "redemption" because the truth must out, the sermon is certainly not interesting and stands a fair chance of not being true. What is true does not always hurt or bore one to death, nor is it always true that what a person wants and what a person needs are different commodities. One should not feel guilty or compromise with the world if a parishioner expresses genuine interest in a sermon. The most penetrating analysis of the human condition with the clearest call to repentance can be Interesting. Why? Because most of the people are not interested in ornamentation nor entertainment. They know where to go for that. They are interested in the removal of ornamentation and affectation, in order to be intersected where they live. The old patter about those who dress up on Sunday to sit in church and play the hypocrite is out of date. The reverse is more true. It is the world which six days a week demands pretension and hypocrisy that has become a burden to man. These people come on Sunday hopeful of that which is becoming increasingly interesting these days: the truth, shared in a context where the push to impress and be impressed is absent. The fact that they chose to come to the sanctuary rather than elsewhere is clue enough for the preacher that these whose steady diet is cake still have an appetite for bread.

Before concluding these remarks on the ethics of the inductive method, let it be urged again that the preacher make not only the content but the method of his sermons a matter of conscience and conviction. In a desire to permit his listeners that freedom of choice which is essential for the birth and exercise of faith, he may become guilty of equivocation It may be with the minister as with the student who, unable to remember whether a word is spelled with ie or ei, forms both letters the same, places the dot between them, and leaves the instructor the freedom of choice! On the one hand, there are inhuman forms of confusion; on the other are the diseased forms of clarity and certainty. Between them lies the path of responsible preaching.

A third objection to the inductive movement of the sermon is theological and complex in its implications. It raises the question whether this method does not make the Word of God dependent on the listener. Oversimply stated, is not the Word of God the Word of God extra nos, whether we hear it or not? Since the inductive method places so much responsibility upon the ear of the hearer, does not this imply that the Word is the Word only when it is heard?

This issue should not be dismissed casually as no more than the old debate over whether a tree falling in the forest makes a noise if there is no ear to hear it. Important matters are involved, matters that lead one through the discussion by Karl Barth and Rudolph Bultmann A major criticism of existentialism has been its loss of God’s proseity, God’s being and nature quite apart from and independent of our appropriation or understanding replaced by theology that speaks only of God- for- us or man -before-God. The conviction underlying existentialist theology is that there is no direct path from the human mind to God; the path is through existence. This, of course, arouses the fear that truth will be debased to arbitrary taste, and an overriding subjectivism will dismiss every item that is not viscerally authenticated. Are the long treasured notions of correct teaching and orthodox tradition to go by the board so that there can be as many "truths" heard as there are listeners in the room?

These questions are vital and should give the minister pause. The matters can in no way be settled in the brief span of these pages. A few comments may help, however, toward fruitful pursuit of a solution.

In the first place, the charge that every listener hears a different sermon is simply an unnerving fact with which we all have to live. The only way to insure purity of the message is to make it so dull there will be no hearers awake to appropriate and distort. Actually, of course, there is no pure message any more than there is a pure noise; formal and informal interpretation goes on all the time. The issue is how that interpretation is to be evaluated, positively or negatively. Is the appropriation of the Gospel foreign to and in addition to its nature or is the appropriation of it ingredient to its nature?

Certainly the Gospel does not originate with the listener any more than music begins with those who attend to it. Of course, Christ is significant extra nos, but that significance is in his disclosure of himself to us. One’s appropriation is not a distortion of the event but a part of its structure. ¹² It is not a matter of saying truth is subjective but it is a matter of asking whether there is truth inseparable from its appropriation. Whatever may be a man’s theology of the Word as Truth complete and valid and final apart from all human grasp of it, the fact is, he cannot employ such theology as a working principle for preaching. If he does, he will either identify his sermons with that Truth and the messianism implicit in that identification will show itself in many alienating forms, or he will be reduced to silence out of fear of distorting or reducing the package of Truth before him. The fundamental error in this whole approach is the artificiality of the objective-subjective way of thinking. If the biblical text or the Word of God is objective and man the hearer is subjective, then obviously man is secondary, for the Word is the Word even if spoken into an empty room or into the wind. ¹³ But that is a contradiction of what a word is. Whether one views word as call (Buber) , event (Heidegger) , or engagement (Sartre) , at least two persons are essential to the transaction, and neither is secondary. As Manfred Mezger has pointed out, an opera may be right and valid without an audience, but a service of the Word is a call, and a call is meaningless without a hearer. It is, therefore, pointless to speak of the Gospel as Truth in and of itself; the Gospel is Truth for us. ¹⁴

The Gospel, then, is not a self-contained entity out there or back there which is narrated in its purity for ten minutes, with a final ten minutes devoted to milking lessons from it for us today. Those who hear are not just an audience; they are participants in the story. The pure Gospel has fingerprints all over it. Recall how Paul understood the cross in the light of his suffering and understood his suffering in the light of the cross. Or again, God is addressed as Father because our experience has given the word meaning, but at the same time our experience of father is informed by the understanding of God as Father. It would be ridiculous to ask which part is the Gospel and which part is application. Likewise it would be meaningless to ask if the Word is to be located at the mouth or at the ear; Word belongs to communication and communication is listening-speaking-listening. It is in the sharing that the Word has its existence, and to catch it in flight in order to ascertain which part is of the speaker and which of the hearer is impossible nonsense. Let the words be spoken and let them go, trusting God who gave not only the Word but the gift of hearing and speaking.

And if it be objected that this understanding of preaching not only shifts to the listener a portion of responsibility for the effectiveness of preaching but robs it of its thunder and authority, then it should be asked again what constitutes an authoritative word. Is it any word blessed with a proper text? Is it the word voted unanimously at the annual assembly, or the word of one properly ordained? Or is it the word of some prophet without credentials who rails against the institutions and feeds the iconoclast in all of us? Many canons need to be applied, but in the final analysis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was correct when he wrote:

A fourth and final objection assumes the form of a practical question prompted by concern for the mission of the church: Does the inductive method of preaching effect change? Questions of strategy have to be asked by the church serious about her task in spite of the lurking dangers of utilitarianism.

This question about the inductive movement of the sermon draws its strength from two characteristics of the method: one, the inconclusive nature of inductive logic and two, the apparent permissiveness in the hearer’s being left to arrive at his own conclusions.

That induction is inconclusive from a logical point of view is clear. Doubt accompanies all induction. Its use of particular observations, analogy, and identification provide escape hatches that make uneasy those who try to negotiate life logically. Many who are more comfortable with deduction’s tightly-woven syllogisms often forget that their major premise was arrived at inductively or was taken for truth by virtue of the authority of its source. If the time comes, and it has, when men are either uninterested in those major premises of universal and general truth (i.e., "all men are unrighteous") or they question the authority of their source (i.e., church or scripture) , then those whose mission it is to convince others must go into the marketplace prepared to reason inductively. In a pluralistic society that is increasingly secular in outlook, men no longer hang upon every word of a sermon that moves from "All men are unrighteous", through "You are a man" to a triumphant "Therefore you are unrighteous". Even within the church membership, one often meets questioners who want to know how the "first point" was reached, and more often one meets those who paid no attention to it.

The old sermons that roared along the second mile of universal and eternal truths without a single stop might document an interesting and in many ways great period in the life of the church. But the fact of the matter is our generation is walking the first mile of primary data, the seen and the heard, and out of this raw material sermons are built. And this raw material often cannot be forged into major and minor premises. But so what? Only in mental institutions do we find those who live syllogistically. There one finds those poor creatures who have not "lost their minds"; they have lost everything but their minds. Some have impeccable logic; it is life that is confused and confusing for them.

If it is objected, then, that induction does not drive the hearers to the wall with its incontrovertible logic, then the objection underscores a strength not a weakness of the method. If a situation is created in which the speaker and listeners are sparring, there are no winners, only losers, as hostility fills the room. The preaching experience should have as its aim the reflection upon one’s own life in a new way, a way that is provided by the Gospel. If the sermon evokes this reflection, all the while bringing it into the presence of God, judgment and promise become actual doors open to the listener. The man who attends to such a sermon concludes for himself that his present condition is not inevitable nor irrecoverable. Nothing has been decided for him, but now with an alternative, he must decide. Now conditions are such as to make faith, which by its nature involves choice, a possibility.

All that those who sow the seed should ask for is this possibility. Who desires a world for a parish which is so devoid of freedom that only success is possible? It is a child’s world where there can be light without shadow, success without failure, Yes without No. Jesus preached and many walked away. That tense moment dramatized the frightening nature of freedom, but it also laid bare the nature of the decision of the Twelve. The because of and the in spite of were both present. Jesus invited a rich ruler to become his disciple. The man struggled with the alternatives before him and said No. It is a tragic scene, but it happens sometimes in a world where God has made it possible for men to say Yes to him.

This leads us directly into the second half of the question raised about the effectiveness of inductive preaching: the issue of its permissiveness. Admittedly, the word "permission" sounds so casual, so unconcerned, that it seems to have no place in a discussion of our urgent business.

The truth of the matter, however, is exactly the contrary; permitting a decision and demanding a decision are two sides of the same coin. Permit persons to decide and they are compelled to decide. Parents know this. It is extremely difficult for parents to back off to such distance as will permit the son or daughter to make a decision. This love act is not only permission but it is a demand, a burden placed upon the young. Love also wants to protect them from the weight of this responsible freedom.

The plain fact is no one likes decisions. It is easier to relinquish one portion of one’s life to the government, one to the school system, and another to the church. In the wake of this happy maneuver come many pleasantries: not making a wrong decision, not being responsible, and last but by no means least, criticizing all those stupid people trying to run the government, the schools, and the churches. Who has not, in the agony of deciding about an invitation to another post, wished a hundred times that the offer had not come.

But beyond our own discomfort before decisions is the pain of putting others in the position of having to decide. The preacher shares this hesitation and avoids it in a number of ways. Perhaps the method most common is to preach sermons that have the response built into the material. The Yes response is built into sermons that echo popular prejudices and value systems or that tepidly announce that "Jesus was one of the great figures of history". On the other hand, and as a relief from the Yes sermons, a No response can be woven into the material. Such messages assume in advance the congregation will reject them and therefore the people are soundly condemned for doing so. This type of preaching has been called prophetic, and it is, if one has in mind the prophet Jonah. Jonah, assuming all would say No to his sermon, started the countdown. Bitterly disappointed, he refused to celebrate life because he had announced a funeral.

Certainly a decision is permitted; of course there is risk involved. This is no harmless undertaking by any means. But to risk everything is the only way to gain everything.

Footnotes:

1. But this is changing. Werner Jetter, Prof. of Preaching at Tübingen, has written (Wem predigen wir? Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 1964, p. 46) to the effect that the preacher must treat his hearer as a mature man of the world and learn to hear his own words with their ears. Manfred Mezger, Verkundigung heute (Hamburg: Furche-Verlag, 1966) , writes in the same vein.

2. Bruno Dreher, Biblische Predigien. (Stuttgart: Verlag Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1968) pp. 97ff.

3. Dwight E. Stevenson, In the Biblical Preacher’s Workshop. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1967. pp. 200-201) distinguishes deductive and inductive by whether the text comes first or last. By induction I mean the entire movement of the sermon including use of the text which may be approached early in the sermon.

4. Op. cit., pp. 33ff.

5. Elton Abernathy, The Advocate. (New York: David McKay Co., 1964) p. 64.

6. Funk, op. cit., pp. 69-70, 156.

7. W. F. Lynch, Images of Hope. (New York: The New American Library, 1965) p. 169.

8. R. Bultmann, ‘Points of Contact and Conflict" Essays: Philosophical and Theological. trans. James Grieg. (New York: MacMillan Co., 1955) pp. 133-150. An excellent discussion of this problem is to be found in James E. Sellers, The Outsider and the Word of God. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1961)

9. Word and Faith, p. 320.

10. The Parables of the Kingdom (London: Fontana Books, and New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1961) , p. 5.

11. Erik Routley, Into A Far Country. (London: Independent Press, 1962). pp. 20ff.

12. Carl Michalson, "Theology as Ontology and as History. New Frontiers in Theology. eds. Robinson and Cobb. (New York: Harpers, 1963) Vol. I, pp. 143-151.

13. Gustaf Wingren, Die Predigt, 2nd ed. (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1959) pp. 31-32.

14. Op. cit., p. 38.

15. Nathaniel Micklem, The Labyrinth Revisited. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960) p. 31.

16. No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures and Notes 1928-36, ed. from The Collected Works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Vol. I, by Edwin H. Robertson, trans. Edwin H. Robertson and John Bowden (New York: Harper and Row, 1965) , pp. 161-162.

In the words of judgment against the pulpit are to be heard the first stirrings of new life for preaching. To be railed against is to be complimented; to be neglected is the final insult and the clear pronouncement of death. Those of us vitally concerned with preaching, perhaps possessed of unjustified hope, tend to interpret the measure of the depth to which the pulpit has fallen as also the measure of the height to which it should and can rise. Would so much time be given to general criticism of sermons if there were not among us yet a high expectation? Disappointment is registered only against a backdrop of expectation.

How is this general expectation of something vital, clear, and significant from preaching to be explained? Why do people week after week return to their hard chairs before dull pulpits to hear a man thrash about in a limbo of words relating vaguely to some topic snatched desperately on Saturday night from the minister’s own twilight zone? Habit? In some measure, yes, but the sermons they have been hearing have been such as to break even the strongest addiction. The survival of the habit can be partially accounted for by the nourishment it receives from a subterranean hope: perhaps today there will be a word from God. This is a hope born of faith in a God who makes himself known through words.

In a time when many speak of "mere words" so pejoratively, it may seem almost incredible that "words" would be a means of God’s giving himself to us. But over against this disregard for words there is in our time a gathering of concerns and explorations into the meaning of language that has no equal in the history of our civilization. The simple and yet profound act of speaking with one another has become the center for a whole constellation of studies philosophical, theological, biblical, psychological, and practical.

Why this self-consciousness about language has arisen at this time is difficult to explain with certainty. The electronic age with its offering of a wide variety of ways to present the human voice has commanded new attention to oral language.¹ Perhaps the ascendancy of science and the domination of the scientific method has created such a restricted view of language that a reaction in favor of more dimensions to language is to be taken simply as clear testimony to a general degeneration of meaningful discourse, a degeneration in which the church figures prominently. Whatever the cause or causes, the fact remains,

It is difficult to miss the judgment against so many sermons that this attention upon speech carries. It may be a correct observation that we have to become dumb again in order to learn to use words faithfully once more. But it is also difficult not to see in this concentration upon words the raw material for new preaching with power and significance. What one hears in preaching may be discouraging but what one hears about preaching is most encouraging. For example: "The word is something that happens, an event in the world of sound through which the mind is enabled to relate actuality to itself." ³ Or again: "Language enters into the history, personal and collective, of man and shapes it for better or for worse; it simultaneously creates understanding and incomprehension, it binds together and it rends asunder."⁴ If only the possibilities in discussions about preaching could be realized in preaching!

So full of promise for the pulpit are current studies in linguistics, speech, hermeneutics, and communication that a brief sketch of these various approaches is here offered. The general importance of discoveries about the nature and meaning of human communication will be evident to the reader and will hopefully encourage the preacher. Perhaps one of his greatest needs just now is a "theology of speaking", a clear conviction about what happens in a speaking-listening situation. In a later chapter, suggestions for the appropriation of these insights and the translation of this theology into a method of preaching will be offered.

In the first place, it should not be assumed that modern studies of language are dances over the grave with hope of a resurrection. In our culture words are not altogether dead; signs of life appear in a number of ways in ordinary experiences. One has only to recall significant moments such as a baby’s first word, a long awaited telephone call, the few nervous words at the marriage altar, the heavy sentence of a judge, or one’s name over the loudspeaker in a hotel lobby to realize anew how much of life is mediated and even constituted verbally. Perhaps more dramatic illustrations are found in hospital wards where a visitor’s warm "hello" turns on the light, opens the shutters, straightens the linens, and brightens the faces; or in rural America where a major business transaction is sealed by one man giving his word to another; or in the quiet guidance of Anne Sullivan who with the one word "water" brought Helen Keller into the world of human experience; or in the nation-shaping speeches of Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill. In all our relationships, though frayed and torn by suspicion and deceit, there remains the vestige of sacredness about one’s word. To face the charge, "But you gave your word" is to be condemned without excuse or appeal. In a sense, all a man has is his word. In certain moments of his life, he is asked to give it. If in those moments he is separated from his word, then he is separated from himself. He may gain many other words, big important words, words that will get votes, win compliments, elicit applause, gain members, or sell real estate, but having lost his own word, he himself is lost. Let no preacher feel embarrassed that he deals with words. Genuine words are the stuff of our life together.

Secondly, in addition to that importance attached to words which remains a vital part of our common experience, the fields of psychology and psychotherapy have been making us increasingly aware of the role of words in healthy personal and social life. And by "words" we do not here refer to printed or written words on a page which give us the isolated individual, alone with his book, separated from his community. Rather we are referring to words in their original form, their purest form, words that pass orally from man to man, words in their native setting in the world of sound. If this perspective seems primitive and pre-literate, it should be remembered that in the electronic age we have become increasingly sensitive to the oral and the aural. "Voice, muted by script and print, has come newly alive." ⁵ Written words tend to restrict communication to statements, information, and the increase of knowledge. Of course, this is not totally the case, but those writers who have sought to extend the power of written words beyond this limitation have done so by developing an "oral style", seeking to involve the reader in conversation. Novelists work diligently to make the written dialogues between characters in the story seem "real", that is, oral. Certainly the content of communication is important, but it is in speaking words that an event occurs when transcends the informational dimension of the transaction. Something happens, involving at least two people, because spoken words effect participation and communication. "The power of words as an event is that they can touch and change our very life, when one man tells another, and thus shares with another, something of his own life, his willing and loving and hoping, his joy and sorrow, but also his hardness and hates, his meanness and wickedness." ⁶ It is not surprising, therefore, that Marshall MacLuhan, a communications theorist, has called speaking a "cool" medium. By this he means that not all is given by the speaker; much has to be contributed by the listener. Active participation by both is required.⁷

The vitally significant function of spoken words has been shown in work with the deaf. Pedagogical techniques have been developed for introducing deaf-mutes, indirectly of course, to the world of sound because it has been established that if left unattended, the congenitally deaf are more intellectually retarded than the congenitally blind. Parallels are also to be found in the emotional problems of the deaf.

Not only for the deaf but for everyone, silence distorts reality and eventually destroys emotional and social health. Each individual discovers himself and matures in relating to others. These fundamental and essential relationships are developed and sustained by words spoken. By means of the human voice awarenesses are shared; by means of a common language persons are bound into pairs, families, and communities. Words express and incarnate community. This fact is dramatically underscored when words cease, silence falls, and communication breaks down. A husband and wife cease talking with each other and into the gulf of that deadly silence rush suspicion, resentment, jealousy, and misunderstanding. The marriage is ended not only in silence but by silence.

Unlike written words, spoken words create and sustain among us a consciousness of one another and an openness to one another in trust. The reasons are obvious. Spoken words are by their nature dialogical, and in dialogue what one says is not fully predetermined but is in a large measure in response to the preceding comments of the other. The words are never all present at once as in a printed text; on the contrary, words as sound move toward a goal as yet undetermined. Again unlike written words, spoken words are never past or future; sound is always present, always an existential experience. ⁹ Thus there is in the act of speaking a consciousness of movement, change, uncertainty, openness to interruption, and, of course, insecurity. This is true regardless of how carefully one screens and censors words as they pass from the lips.

Without script or rehearsal, words normally shared in communication are more or less spontaneous, open-ended, and revealing of more than was intended. As a result, with the ascendancy of the spoken word over the written in our electronic age, several developments have followed naturally. In the first place, an open-ended style of life featuring dialogue and discussion of issues, a lack of finality, and the spontaneity of conversation characterizes our way of life. Second, the value of open-ended discussion and conversation has been seen by those who seek to heal faulty self-images and broken relationships; hence, therapy by group dynamics as well as one-to-one conversation. Third, the introduction of openness into the most interior areas of human life, those of faith and value judgment, is on the painful but steady increase in our society. Fourth, pedagogical method has been profoundly affected by the embrace of the spontaneous in the dialogical process. The instructor comes prepared and unprepared, willing to listen to what he could not hear in the privacy of his own study and to respond to it. And finally (for our purpose here) , preaching has been affected by our movement into the oral-aural world. Inevitably the pulpit has been re-visited and re-evaluated by psychologists, therapists, communication theorists, and, of course, by the preachers themselves. ¹⁰

While considerations of method will be delayed until a subsequent chapter, still it is apparent at this point that a change is called for. In a world oriented around printed words, the sermon competed for attention by seeking to possess the qualities of a written text: logical development, clear argument, thorough and conclusive treatment. In other words, the sermon carried the entire burden; the listener accepted or rejected the conclusions. Many great sermons of the past were ready for the press shortly after, or even before, delivery because these sermons were essentially unaffected by the contingencies of the situation. They spoke but did not listen; they were completed at the mouth, not at the ear. These sermons presupposed passive audiences, and because other ministers could also presuppose passive audiences, these printed sermons were borrowed for their own pulpits. A speech to an audience can be repeated in many places by many people with a minimal change in effectiveness; speaking with a participating group is unique to each occasion.

In the present atmosphere of open-ended dialogue, sermons in the classical tradition will less and less be accepted. This fact is unsettling to many preachers, of course, because in the traditional method, the preacher was safe, free from all the contingencies and threats of dialogue. Now to be effective, a preacher must expose himself to all the dangers of the speaking (rather than the speech) situation. He not only trusts his words to the hearers but he opens himself to their response. He believes the sermon needs the hearers to be complete. Conversation is not an individual production. The event of the Word of God needs the ear, for faith comes by hearing (Rom. 10:17).

This adjustment to the new atmosphere of the oral-aural world is or will be radical and painful for many who preach, for it demands an altered image of the preacher and of what he is doing when he preaches. Some may feel they have too much to lose to expose themselves; others may feel to do so would be to sacrifice the non-contingent and authoritative nature of God’s Word which calls not for discussion but for decision. Perhaps so; we will have to discuss this later. If, however, the minister laments the loss of former clerical prestige due to the processes of dialogue, he has reason to celebrate the recovery of the sense of the church as community. The words "community" and "communication" must not lose sight of each other. In fact, "the renewal of the preaching ministry is the rediscovery of its communal character".¹¹

We come now to the third of the converging lines of current study and investigation which put "word" and "speaking" in the spotlight and therefore offer fresh possibilities for new power in the pulpit. We considered first the residue of power in words in all social intercourse in spite of the abuse and degeneration of language. Next the central role of oral communication in personal and social health and in the formation of community was briefly noted. Now we turn to philosophy to survey several significant approaches to the problem of language and the nature of the experience of communication.

The meaning of words and the phenomenon of speaking is at present a pre-occupation of philosophy. Approaches and conclusions differ widely, of course, but there is a general conviction among philosophers that one of their primary tasks is to come to clarity about language, to analyze the uses of language to shed light on the major problems that always confront philosophy. This is not to say that this is entirely a new concern for philosophy. Approaches and conclusions differ widely, of course, but there is a general conviction among philosophers that one of their primary tasks is to come to clarity about language, to analyze the uses of language to shed light on the major problems that always confront philosophy. This is not to say that this is entirely a new concern for philosophy. Precision and clarity of terminology is of critical importance for any respectable discipline. But beyond this, the phenomenon of speech has received special attention. For example, it is generally recognized that sound is the most immediate sensory coefficient of thought, and speaking is very closely related to thinking. ¹² If thought is nested in speech, then perhaps investigation would reveal an organic connection between the brain and the vocal folds. Such investigations were once vigorously pursued. Alfred N. Whitehead has called attention to the part of the body from which speech comes to help explain sound as the natural symbol for the deep experiences of existence. ¹³ Whitehead regarded speech as human nature itself without the artificiality of writing, which is a relatively modern phenomenon. He was prophetic of more recent perspectives on speaking in his well-known comment, "Expression is the one fundamental sacrament."¹⁴

Of the more recent philosophical investigations of language, there are, in the main, two approaches. One approach acknowledges the validity of the scientific method and its insistence that words signify meanings that are verifiable. This perspective is primarily concerned to eliminate nonsensical statements, or at least to distinguish between nonsense (non-verifiable) and sense (verifiable) Under the pressure of this demand by logical positivists, those who speak and write in the field of religion have not only felt called upon to clear up the fuzzy and meaningless jargon that often characterizes their field, but many have relinquished all terms that refer to the non-verifiable. In general, this means neutrality toward, if not denial of, the entire realm of metaphysics. Since the word "God" has been so long associated with metaphysics, it has in some quarters been abandoned.

An interesting and significant variation within this general approach to language is that of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s linguistic analysis. Wittgenstein has insisted that no theory or perspective be forced upon language but rather it should be analyzed in its everyday use. Words and expressions are to be understood when they are at work, not when they are idling, because speaking is part of an activity, a form of life and is to be understood within that context. To illustrate the importance of the "form of life" context for language he imagined the situation of a lion suddenly using familiar human expressions. In such a case, there would be no meaning because of the radical discontinuity between the words and the form of life in which they were used. Wittgenstein classified various language settings and activities as "language games".¹⁵

Wittgenstein’s insight is important for the preacher to the extent that it liberates language from the restrictions of the single perspective of the scientific method. Wittgenstein is, however, still bound by the overarching principle of verification, and the preacher simply must refuse to be thus restricted.

The second of the recent philosophical approaches to language is to a large extent an attempt to overcome the tyranny of the single perspective, to break the domination of empiricism and the insistence that words serve only as signs pointing to the discovered or discoverable data. Convinced that words have a richer and wider range of power than can be understood in any single perspective, there has arisen a strong "primitive" movement in language study. This is an attempt to recover the power possessed by words before they were smothered by a scientific and technological culture, words that once rendered immeasurable services to the human spirit, words that danced, sang, teased, lured, probed, wept, judged, and transformed, words that joined hands artfully into analogies, metaphors, riddles, paradoxes, parables, poems, legends, and myths.

Of course, not all who are here called "primitives" are saying and doing the same things, but they hold at least two common convictions. First, there is the suspicion of speculative metaphysics with its terminology charting ideal or ultimate reality. Instead, the primary concern is human existence, the concrete, lived experiences of individuals and societies. This philosophical stance is both creative of and expressive of the general orientation of our time, although an existential preoccupation with the present is fading before a growing appetite for words about the past and especially about the future. Second, there is a general acceptance of the priority of words or speaking in the constitution and expression of reality. "Man is a speaking animal" is the beginning definition. Words are regarded as transcendent in that they create and give meaning to human experience against the background of mute nature. Jean Paul Sartre appropriately entitled his autobiography, The Words. Georges Gusdorf, a leading French existential phenomenologist, has said that whoever finds and speaks the right word is involved in creation out of chaos, and whoever keeps his word creates value in the world. ¹⁷ In a similar vein, J. L. Austin has reminded us of the creative or performative power of words. Words not only report something; they do something. Words are deeds. Illustrations are shared abundantly: words spoken at the marriage altar, by the judge passing sentence, in the ceremonies of christening and knighting, to name only a few.¹⁸ These examples of dynamistic and creative functions of language are the residue of a primative view of the power of speech before words became impoverished.

A reading of one of a number of excellent surveys of the role of words in primitive societies ¹⁹ would help the preacher recover respect for the words he often handles carelessly. Such reading takes one into primitive cultures where magic dominates. Here one meets the power of a word to effect change in earth, sky, and man. In a way defying rational clarification, words were believed to contain something of the object for which they stood. Hence a man’s name was indissolubly linked to the man himself so that his name was his property to be carefully guarded and cautiously used. The survey leads to Egyptian and Babylonian creation myths in which the pre-creation chaos is described as a time of the "unspoken", when there was no name for anything. Likewise in India, the Spoken Word was exalted above the gods, for on the Spoken Word all gods, men, and beasts depend.

And, of course, this study leads into the Bible itself. Here, too, it is the Word of God that brings order out of chaos, separates light and darkness, and produces the heavens and the earth (Gen. 1; Psa. 33:4, 6, 9) Man shared in this creation, taking physical and intellectual possession of the world by his giving names to all living creatures (Gen. 2:19) Throughout the Old Testament, in ordinary and sublime statements, in magic or prophecy, Israel took as her starting point the conviction that a word possesses creative power. ²⁰ Therefore, the Word of Jahweh is an event, a happening in history. Perhaps the most comprehensive as well as one of the most beautiful expressions of this understanding is found in Isaiah 55:10-11:

Later Judaism, taking a philosophical turn in its dialogue with Hellenistic religion, came to speak of Word as an hypostatic entity separate from God, but mediating in the business of creating, sustaining, and guiding the world. ²¹ These speculations on the Divine Word were to be significant in forms of Hellenistic Judaism and in early Christianity. This could hardly have been the case had not ancient cultures the preparation, recognition, and appetite for such an elevated view of Word. The idea of the primary significance of the Word was durable enough to survive transitions from philosophy to mythology and back again.

The spoken word is of such vital importance in the ministry of Jesus and the apostles and is so crucial for understanding the New Testament itself that a subsequent portion of this chapter will be devoted to it.

We are at present calling attention to the return by certain philosophers to primitive understandings of the spoken word in order to revive language smothered under the small heading of verificational analysis. Perhaps foremost among these primitives is Martin Heidegger. For Heidegger, language is not a bag of tools, a pile of raw material to be used by man, the master of his world. For him, the capacity to hear and speak language is primordial. In his later writing, Heidegger has become more passive, more receptive, more concerned with man as listener and not so much with man the interpreter, for he has come to believe that Being itself comes to us in a "clearing-concealing" through language. In language, Being itself is at stake, not just our use of words to discuss Being. Language precedes man; language is the loudspeaker for Being. Reality is linguistically constructed, for language is "the house of being". Quoting Hölderlin, Heidegger says, "Therefore has language, most dangerous of possessions, been given to man. . .so that he may affirm what he is." ²² Language is, therefore, not only "the supreme event of human existence" but the very being of man is founded in language. In short, "Man is a conversation".²³

Naturally some critics of Heidegger feel that he has become too mystic in his view of language, that his turn to poetry as the clearest means of establishing man’s being through the word represents capitulation in the philosophical quest. Whether or not this is the case will not be debated here. It may very well be that he has unwarrantedly blurred any distinction between "mode of being" and "mode of expression", actually replacing a metaphysic of substance with a metaphysic of sounds. Perhaps the more cautious W. M. Urban is to be followed here:

Whether one prefers Heidegger’s or Urban’s formulation of the importance of words is immaterial here; what is central is the recognized irreplaceable value of human speech in laying hold of and bringing to expression Life itself. The preacher can expect to hear nothing more humbling nor more elevating than Heidegger’s affirmations concerning Being’s coming to expression in words. It approaches, or is, a sacramental view of speaking; provided, of course, the speaker is a listener.

We pause to note it is becoming increasingly obvious that our discussion is moving us farther and farther away from those exercises referred to as "getting up a sermon or "preparing a speech" and "giving a sermon" or "making a speech". Those expressions already seem gross and insensitive violations of the high task of which we speak, that of "saying the right word".

We come now to the fourth and last of the lines which converge upon the pulpit and, potentially at least, elevate it into prominence: that of theological and biblical studies. Here again the speaking of the Word is the center of discussion. Preaching may not welcome all this attention from the scholarly world, but after years of being shunted to the back of the catalog under a few faded listings taught by "staff", it should provide occasion for celebration.

Theological and biblical studies are here considered together for two reasons. Historically they belong together because any discipline within the Christian orb must deal primarily with word the word of revelation, the Word of God. Against a background of silence, in a world where men lifted hands of prayer to Silence. Christianity came announcing. proclaiming. Silence is broken by Good News. As Ignatius of Antioch expressed it. Christ is "his (God’s) word proceeding from silence" (Magn. 8:2) "He is the mouth which cannot lie. by which the Father has spoken truly" (Rom. 8:2) It is inherent in the nature of the Christian faith that its adherents not keep silent. Theologians and exegetes are concerned about the word that has been and is to be spoken.

Secondly, characteristic of theology and biblical exegesis in our time is the focus upon hermeneutics. Two disciplines that have often in the past pretended lack of awareness of each other, dogmatics and exegesis, now share a preoccupation with principles of interpretation. And what is most significant from our present perspective is that this general concern with interpreting the word is not confined to the written word: it is in the spoken word that the interest is most keen. By "spoken word" we refer not only to the long oral tradition back of the texts of Scripture, but the word spoken in the proclamation of the church today.

In spite of the intramural scuffling over the extent to which preaching is theology and theology is preaching, there is a widespread acceptance of the inseparable relation of theology and preaching. Theology is responsible reflection on the proclamation. Expressions of gratitude and responsibility are due, each to the other.

The two men about whom theological discussions for the last three decades have revolved, Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann, entered into their monumental labors in the service of the sermon. That God’s Word be a living word, a real summons of a real God to real persons has been the central concern of both. To the differences between them in the achievement of this end some attention will be given in the next chapter, but these differences in no way abrogate for either their common subscription to the Later Helvetic Confession: "Preaching the Word of God is the Word of God".

Why this attention on the Word and preaching at the present time? It is in large measure, of course, the heritage of the Reformation with its concentration on the Word of God. This concentration inevitably conferred importance upon hermeneutics and proclamation. But this focusing of attention on the Word of God gave new prominence to the oldest nemesis of preaching: how can the distance, geographical. intellectual, psychological, and linguistic, between the Scriptures and modern hearers be negotiated without the sacrifice of either? All the old attempts: allegory, levels of meaning, symbolism, literalism, mysticism, seemed unsatisfactory. Although warned by the heresy of Ebionitism against sacrificing the present for the past, post-Reformation biblical scholarship let its course be determined by the most intensely felt need of the hour: a ground of authority from which to debate with Rome. The Scriptures, against their own will, intention, and warning, became the "paper pope" with the result that the present was sacrificed, immediacy in preaching was lost, and congregations became accustomed to being sacrificed weekly on the altar of "sacred history"

During this period we learned more about the Bible than we had known, thanks to new biblical disciplines: literary, historical, textual, and form criticism. All subsequent Christian scholarship would be, and is, profoundly indebted to this period of scientifically critical biblical investigation. But the sad fact in the midst of it was that all this attention on the Bible moved it farther and farther from those with whom it was shared in lesson and sermon. A deep resentment and discontent began to emerge in the churches as many sensitive Christians rejected that "Divine economy" which the situation implied: in Bible times the people had God; we have only the Book. No one can be content bearing the brunt of some cosmic joke that says "You were born too late to be where God’s action is". Imaginative preachers tried: "This morning let us go back to old Jerusalem", but the benediction burst the bubble and the sanctuary doors opened upon a world that looked precisely like it did prior to the sermon. Pentecostal movements arose, as they always do in such barren times, hopeful that the strong winds of God would blow the dust from the sacred book and sacred desk. On a more sophisticated level, liberal Protestantism refreshed weary spirits with the announcement that all those ancient obscurities in the Bible were really intended to say no more than that we should love, forgive, be charitable, promote justice, and usher in the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God. Some pulpits embraced this idea and momentarily came alive with new "relevance", but most preachers knew that major problems are not really solved by winking at them.

Then the existentialism of the early Heidegger seemed to provide the key to the problem of interpreting Scripture meaningfully for modern hearers. It appeared now that preachers no longer had to choose between Scriptural sermons or relevant sermons, thanks to the epoch-making work of Rudolf Bultmann. By existentially interpreting the New Testament, the texts could now be shared with immediacy and with the conviction that the Gospel was being preached, not first-century pre-scientific perspectives on the world, demons, the abyss, descents, ascensions, etc. The preacher had found a scholarly friend, no doubt about it.

However, there were areas in Bultmann’s program that gave cause for anxiety. Why the pre-occupation with Paul and John to the exclusion of much that is in the New Testament, however unappetizing? Does everyone have the right to frame a canon within the canon? Is what Paul says to modern man really what Paul said? In other words, what we see as myth did Paul see as myth? Would it not be more honest just to disagree with Paul than to make everything he said so existentially relevant? And why the almost abnormal fear of historical exploration into the career of Jesus? Certainly we are saved by faith, not historical legitimization, but does not opening the door to the contingencies of historical discovery make more, not less, room for unsecured faith? Making a place for faith beyond the support of historical research is also removing faith from the threat of historical research, which means security par excellence. But most disturbing of all was the spectre of anthropocentrism. "Modern man", whoever he was, seemed to be the measure of all things; he took his chair first, then the biblical furniture was arranged accordingly. Something upon which Karl Barth had insisted seemed to be needed: the Word of God precedes us; certainly we interpret, but first we listen.

Interestingly enough, it was Heidegger again who offered help. In his later years Martin Heidegger has focused more and more upon language, not as a tool of man for apprehending and articulating Being and Truth, but language as it belongs to the nature of Being itself. That which is ultimate, Being itself, comes to expression in language. It is not a case of our understanding and then finding words: the words precede the understanding. Life for us is linguistically constituted and that man can hear and speak words is his primary gift. If, however, Being or Reality comes to expression in words, then the primary posture of man is that of listener, concerned to know the reality that comes to understanding through words.

Applied to biblical studies and to preaching, ²⁶ a shift from Bultmann’s approach is evident. Here we meet the primary concern not of understanding language but understanding through language. One does not begin with the idea that we have in the New Testament verbal statements that are obscure into which we must introduce the light of understanding; rather, one listens to the word hopeful that it will shed light on our own situation which is obscure. The Word of God is not interpreted; it interprets. Here a radical reversal in the direction of traditional hermeneutics occurs. The goal of biblical study is to allow God to address man through the medium of the text. ²⁷

Three implications for the preacher need at this point to be fixed clearly in mind. First, if God addresses man through the text, the Word of God must, by its very nature, be spoken. The church is compelled by its own understanding of a God revealing himself through words to share its message through the personal contacts effected most basically by the spoken word. The church is driven by the Word to achieve at all times maximum communication. The burden this lays upon the preacher is obvious, but the point here is, he is not to see himself stammering along in some peripheral exercise. In and out of the pulpit his primary business is to communicate. Let those who oppose the preaching ministry with phrases such as "the acts of God" and "salvation events" recall the role of spoken words within those events that gave them their character and the role of spoken words in sharing the benefits of those events. There is in our experience no event so profound as speaking one with another. At the time of this writing, a nation weary with an ambiguous war waits prayerfully and hopefully for a good word from "the Paris talks". The clearest prophecy of a cease-fire is the fact that the delegates are speaking with each other.

The second implication for the preacher from what has been said about hermeneutics is that he see himself first of all as a listener to the Word of God. Granted the extreme difficulty of this posture for him, its importance cannot be overstressed. The preacher has often seen the congregation as the listeners; they tune in on his broadcast. He prepares sermons for them; he interprets the Scriptures for them; he tells them what God wants them to do. He retails what he has somewhere, somehow, gotten wholesale. But one hardly needs the new hermeneutic to know that prior to all meaningful expression is impression. Paul outlined the plan of world evangelization. beginning not with the preaching but with the listening. "Faith comes by hearing" (Rom. 10:17) Robert Funk has succinctly expressed it: "He who aspires to the enunciation of the word must first learn to hear it: he who hears it will have found the means to articulate it." ²⁸ But this is not new insight; the prophet of Israel reflected the same sensitivity when he wrote:

The third implication for the preacher is the underscoring of what has been said earlier: the primary and fundamental nature of word is spoken word. The spoken word is never an isolated event; it takes place where at least two or three are gathered together. It presupposes that which it also creates: community. Spoken words that do otherwise are disruptive and violate the very nature of the church. Paul so informed the speakers-in-tongues at Corinth (I Cor. 12-14) Speaking is to be in love, he said, for, properly understood, speaking and love travel the same street -- from person to person. The homiletical definition of love is communication. Spoken words also set in motion intellectual activity. The sounds mean something is going on; there is movement and change. Spoken words thus belong, as our lives do, to time, not space. The Hebrew feeling for word is legitimate and sound: word means primarily the spoken word, not a lifeless record but an action, something happening. ²⁹

This recovery of the oral quality of words has stimulated lively new approaches to the Scriptures, making "listening" a real possibility again. From the beginning oral speech has not only had a primal role in the spread of the Gospel; it had a theological significance as well. In contrast to writing, speaking is direct, personal, engaging, and demanding. In addition, speaking, unlike writing, is committed to the time being, existing only in the present. A spoken word is, therefore, precarious, without secure continuities with past or future. Spoken words were thus appropriate to the nature of Jesus’ life, his announcement that the time of the Kingdom is now, and the terms he issued for discipleship.

Of course, the oral style of Jesus and his early followers eventually submitted to the need to preserve and to repeat correctly. Written records appeared.

Ernst Fuchs has pointed out that Jesus wrote nothing and Paul wrote with reluctance. When Paul did write it was as a speaker rather than as a writer. He repeatedly expressed regret that he was not present to speak in person and almost invariably spoke of his coming soon, to complete and to clarify. ³¹ Paul understood that the Word was not just a certain content of meaning but an act, from person to person, which did something, which effected change.

In view of these insights into the inseparable relation of the Gospel and the forms of its communication, the preacher would do well to ask with Amos Wilder, "What modes of discourse are specially congenial to the Gospel?" ³² Wilder himself has offered invaluable aid in the pursuit of his own question by analyzing the modes and genres of New Testament discourse. In further detail Robert Funk has analyzed the parable and the epistle as oral speech.³³ It will not take a lengthy exposure to such studies of the lively modes of discourse used by Jesus and the early Christian evangelists to cause the average preacher to look upon his own standardized sermon outline with a new lack of appreciation. When he begins to ask himself why the Gospel should always be impaled upon the frame of Aristotelian logic; when his muscles twitch and his nerves tingle to mount the pulpit, not with three points but with the Gospel as narrative or parable or poem or myth or song, in spite of the heavy recollection of his training in homiletics, then perhaps the preacher stands at the threshold of new pulpit power. When he ceases to wail about preaching being sick and confesses that his preaching is sick, then the preacher will be willing to do something constructive: not simply choosing more controversial topics and more clever titles to divert attention from his monotonous method of outlining, but choosing a mode of discourse appropriate to the content to be shared and the experience he hopes will occur.

It should be said that there is no attempt here to imply that significant and fruitful insights into preaching are limited to Protestant scholarship. Prior to and especially in the wake of the attention upon preaching in the Second Vatican Council, Roman Catholic contributions are numerous and noteworthy. Thomas Aquinas’ dictum, "The primary duty of the priest is to preach the Word of God", is circulating again, and to render the new preaching more effective, excellent studies in the theology of preaching are appearing. ³⁴ As would be expected, these studies are following those lines that must be considered if room is made for a strong sense of the significance of preaching: church and Scripture in preaching, the faith and character of the priest and the efficacy of preaching. word and sacrament, and the perennial problem of archaic language. Most of these issues are not peculiar to the Roman Catholic church, of course, but they are addressed vigorously within that fellowship. The central issue is, what happens in preaching? Is there an affective grace operating here or are the contingencies too great to speak with certainty about anything happening’? In other words, is preaching a sacrament? There seems to be at present a tendency to speak of preaching as sacramental in the sense that Christ is present speaking his Word, but not a sacrament in the sense of ex opere operato. Preaching lies very near the sacrament and is to be understood as opening mind and heart in faith to receive the sacrament. But since the Word is effective in itself, the function of preaching is not merely preparatory. Unlike the sacrament, the contingencies related to the speaker and the hearer assume greater significance in defining what takes place. Hence the priest who preaches must give attention not only to the Word of God as though repeating sacred words would in itself be efficacious, but also to the words of man. The Word of God comes in the ordinary vernacular; hence the priest is responsible for choosing his words and preparing carefully his sermon. This view of preaching is incarnational: as The Word came in the flesh, so the Word comes in the form of human speech.

This statement about the general direction of Roman Catholic studies in preaching is unjustly brief, but it is given with a strong urging that the Protestant minister read in this area. It may be that the sacramental and incarnational approaches will aid him in dealing with the primary question in his own preaching ministry: what happens in the preaching event itself?

This particular essay is suggesting that it would be fruitful if the minister would explore the profundity of the ordinary experience of conversing, talking, listening-speaking. It is not illogical to look for the God-man encounter within the channels that are already available and are already serving the most human experiences we have. And by no means should speaking be disparaged because it is so "every dayish". That same criticism could be leveled against the Bible, Jesus of Nazareth, and the Church in her better moments. Is this not the point of it all?

We have surveyed the several lines of scholarship that converge upon the pulpit today and provide the minister with adequate raw material for the framing of a theology of preaching which will not only withstand the current ridicule of the pulpit but which will perhaps effect improvement sufficient to silence it. Perhaps this attention upon the primacy of the spoken word has prepared us to hear the word of Jesus in this regard.

In Matthew’s Gospel this strong teaching regarding the eternal significance of what one says is prefaced by an even stronger one: the passage concerning the unpardonable sin. (Matt. 12:31-32) This statement has served as a cannon to blast every foul and loathsome sin that ever crawled up into the human heart. Most likely the passage circulated in the early Christian community in defence of the function of the Christian prophet whose preaching was in the Spirit, announcing the Word of the Lord in a given situation. But what is surprising and awesome here is that the one sin placed by the New Testament beyond the reach of forgiveness is a sin of the mouth: "But whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit". Set against this text, the worn expression "mere words" steals away in embarassment.

We move now in Part Two to a series of considerations related to a method of preaching that seeks to heed the warning and implement the insights that have been shared.

Footnotes:

1.Ong, op.cit.. pp.292-293.

2. Iris Murdoch. Sartre (New Haven: Yale Univ Press, 1953) p.27.

3.Ong, op. cit., p.22.

4.Funk, op. cit., pp. 1-2

5.Ong. op. cit., p.88.

6.G. Ebeling. The Nature of Faith. trans. R. 0. Smith. (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press. 1961) p. 186.

7.Understanding Media. (New York: McGraw-Hill. 1964) pp. 22-23.

8.Clemens E. Benda, Language, Consciousness, and Problems of Existential Analysis,’ American Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol. 14.no. 2 (April, 1960) , quoted by Amos Wilder, Early Christian Rhetoric. The Language of the Gospel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970) , p. 19.

9.Ong. op. cit., pp. 200-299.

10.For pursuit of these directions consult The Journal of Pastoral Care, Pastoral Psychology, and Edgar N. Jackson, A Psychology forPreaching. (Great Neck, N.Y.: Channel Press, 1961)

11.Albert H. van der Heuvel, The Humiliation of the Church. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966) p. 71.

12.Ong. op. cit., pp. 138-144.

13.Modes of Thought. (New York: Capricorn Books. 1938) pp. 45-57.

14.Religion in the Making. (New York: MacMillan, 1926) p. 131.

15.W. D. Hudson, Ludwig Wittgenstein. (Richard: John Knox Press, 1968) pp. 46-47

16.Sam Keen, Gabriel Marcel. (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1967) p. 47.

17.Speaking. trans. Paul T. Brockelmann. (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1965) pp. 119-127.

18.Philosophical Papers. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961) pp. 222-224. Also, How to Do Things with Words. ed. J. 0. Urmson. (New York:Oxford Univ. Press, 1965)

19.Cassirer, Gusdorf, Austin, all referred to earlier, give such surveys.

20.Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology. trans. D. M. G. Stalkes (New York: Harpers, 1965) Vol. II. p. 86.

21.Cf. espec. Wisdom of Solomon. chs. 6-9.

22. Existence and Being, trans. Stefan Schimanski. (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949) p. 270.

23.Ibid., p. 277.

24.Language of Reality. (London: alien and Unwin, 1939) p. 49.

25. C. Ebeling, Word and Faith. trans. James W. Leitch. (London: SCM Press, and Philadelphia: Fortune Press, 1963) P. 329.

26. Especially by Ebeling and Funk (cf. above) , and by Ernst Fuchs of the University of Marburg.

27. Funk, op. cit., p. 11.

28. Ibid., p. 7.

29. Ong, op. cit., pp. 12-13.

30. Wilder, op. cit., p. 24. cf. pp. 18-24.

31. Ibid., p. 22.

32. Ibid., p. 11.

33. Op. cit.

34. Cf. the bibliography in Domenico Grazzo, Proclaiming God’s Message. (South Bend: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1965).

We are all aware that in countless courts of opinion, the verdict on preaching has been rendered and the sentence passed. All this slim volume asks is a stay of execution until one other witness be heard. The tardiness of this witness is not to be construed as dramatic timing. It is rather due to a cowardice born of that familiar fear of rising to defend that which has been derided by close and learned friends. And, in addition, one is painfully hesitant to speak in behalf of a defendant who is not entirely innocent of the charges brought against him.

The alarm felt by those of us still concerned about preaching is not a response solely to the noise outside in the street where public disfavor and ridicule have been heaped upon the pulpit. On the contrary, most preachers are quite skilled at translating such criticism into "crosses to be borne" and appropriating for themselves the blessing lodged in some proper text, such as "Beware when all men speak well of you". These are not new sounds; to a large extent, the pulpit has from the first century received poor reviews (2 Cor. 10:9-10) To explain this general reaction perhaps one need not look for reasons profound; it may be simply that these critics have heard us preach!

More disturbing has been the nature and character of those who have been witnesses for the prosecution. Increasingly, the brows that frown upon the pulpit are not only intelligent, but often theologically informed, and quite often deeply concerned about the Christian mission. Their judgments about preaching cannot be regarded as reflections of a general disinterest in religion, not dismissed as the usual criticisms hurled at the familiar caricature in the pulpit, droning away in stained-glass tones with pretended convictions about matters uninteresting, unimportant, and untrue. Some of these men have themselves been preachers in the churches. In short, the major cause for alarm is not the broadside from the public, nor the sniping from classroom sharpshooters, but the increasing number who are going AWOL from the pulpit. Some of these men move into forms of the ministry that carry no expectation of a sermon, or out of the ministry altogether. In addition there are countless others who continue to preach not because they regard it as an effective instrument of the church, but because of the combined force of professional momentum and congregational demand.

It is the sober opinion of many concerned Christians, some who give the sermon and some who hear it, that preaching is an anachronism. It would be granted, of course, by all these critics that the pulpit has, in other generations, forcefully and effectively witnessed to the Gospel, initiating personal and social change. It would be regarded by them as proper, therefore, for the church to celebrate the memory of preaching in ways appropriate to her gratitude and to affix plaques on old pulpits as an aid to those who tour the churches. But the church can not live on the thin diet of fond memories. New forms of ministry are being forged and shaped overnight to meet the morning’s need. And these ministries are without pulpit.

One need only look into the seminaries to get a clear picture of the tenuous position of preaching. Some seminaries offer little, or, at best, only marginal work in homiletics. It should be said immediately, however, in defense of such lacunae, that there is, in some quarters, a serious reexamination of the wisdom of having instruction in preaching as a separate curriculum item. This re-appraisal is due in part to an appreciation for the complexity of preaching and its inextricable relation to the other disciplines. It is in this mood that Joseph Sittler has written:

All too frequently, however, seminary education in preaching consists of training under a speech teacher or exposure to the toothless reminiscences of a kindly old pastor re-activated from retirement. In the former case, preaching is quite aside from the rest of the seminary curriculum because preaching so taught has its form defined not by the content of the Gospel nor the nature of Christian faith but by Greek rhetoric. As will be discussed later, the separation of form and content is fatal for preaching, for it fails to recognize the theology implicit in the method of communication. When a man preaches, his method of communication, the movement of his sermon, reflects his hermeneutical principles, his view of the authority of Scripture, church, and clergy, and especially his doctrine of man. This is revealed verbally and non-verbally in the point of contact made with the listeners and the freedom to respond permitted them. It is a fact that much preaching contradicts by its method the content of its message. It is not reasonable to expect a speech teacher to guide a seminarian in the method of preaching that incarnates the message. The discussion of such a method is the major burden of this book. And, of course, when preaching is taught by a pastor, retired or active, the course suffers, deservedly or not, from that particular brand of harsh laughter reserved by students and faculty for that which lacks academic respectability. As a natural consequence preaching continues for another generation as "a marginal annoyance on the record of a scientific age." ²

This characterization of the minor role of preaching in some seminaries is not intended as an accusation of the seminaries as the source and cause of a poor pulpit. Seminaries not only create but reflect the general condition of the churches they serve and the cultures in which they live. It is in this larger context that the major reasons for the disrepute into which preaching has fallen are to be found. A brief examination of some of these reasons may function as the diagnosis that leads to recovery of health and power.

It is generally recognized that many blows struck against the pulpit come not because of its peculiar faults but because it is a part of a traditional and entrenched institution, and all such institutions, religious, political, or otherwise, are being called into question. Strong winds of change blow over the land and strange new shadows fall across the comfortable hearths where we have taken long naps. Some pulpits feel threatened as the novelty of the new obscures distinctions between apparent and real values. Reactionary idealism, as the cutting edge of change, necessarily makes large room for error, but in the midst of uncertainty, it must not be overlooked that many pulpits have welcomed the interruption of triviality and are grateful for the chance to be faithful in such a time.

A primary reason, both in point of time and significance, for the general low estimate of preaching is to be found in the nature of American Christianity. Perhaps the most characteristic mark of the American church as distinguished from the church elsewhere in the world has been activism. The Social Gospel Movement was native to this soil and to that understanding of the Christian faith which is captured in the motto, "Deeds, not words." After the churches in Europe have heatedly debated the truth claims of a theological position, the American churches appropriate that portion of it which will "work." In critical times, the demand for relevance becomes so strong that the sole canon by which a ministry is measured is the degree of its participation in the skirmish of the day. When this atmosphere prevails, the whole Bible is reduced to Matthew 25: 31-46 and criticisms against preachers as those who "just talk" create a reaction of silent busyness. While this accent has been not only the power of the American church but its fundamental witness to the church elsewhere, it has at the same time unfairly obscured the place of the sermon. In fact, the power of the sermon to initiate and sustain movements for social change has often been overlooked because sermons were "words, words, words." While some American pulpits have been outstanding, on the average corner on an average Sunday, preaching has been tolerated and the ministers have given sermons that were tolerable. Where the expectation is low, the fulfillment is usually lower.

Implicit in what has just been said is the minimization of the power of words to effect anything: to create or to destroy, to bind or to loose, to bless or to curse. This common denial of the efficacy of words has been with us long enough to be enshrined in a number of proverbs: "Talk is cheap"; "It is not what you say but what you do that counts" "I’d rather see a sermon than hear one any day"; "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words..." Obviously there is enough truth in these expressions to keep them alive. In them is some deserved judgment against a church that gives recitations, lifeless words cut off from the hearts and minds of those who speak and those who listen. Kierkegaard captured this state of affairs in his parable of the man who saw in a shop window a sign, Pants Pressed Here. He went in and immediately began removing his pants. The startled shopkeeper stopped him, explaining that he did not press pants: he painted signs. Beneath these deprecatory statements about words lies a view of speaking which, if subscribed to, is fatal for preaching. Certainly no one can preach who has no respect for words, who allows them to creep over his tongue and sneak out the corners of his mouth, self-conscious and sheepish, as though hoping to fall to the ground and steal away unheard.

That there is in our time a language crisis, a general experience of the loss of the power of words is all too evident. Needless to say, this means a crisis in preaching. The starting-point for the study of homiletics has been radically shifted. All considerations of structure, unity, movement, use of text, etc. must wait upon the prior consideration of what words are and what they do. Any young preacher who does not take time to develop for himself some grasp of the nature and meaning of words and of what happens when words are shared in communication will soon fall silent, frustrated, disenchanted, weary of the sound of his own voice, and convinced that what descended upon him was not a dove but an albatross. In these primary considerations, he will find many resources, for the study of the meaning of words is a central issue in contemporary philosophy, theology, and Biblical interpretation. This fact alone indicates the immensity of the problem, but gratefully it also holds rich prospects for the renewal of preaching.

Why in our time is man "the victim of linguistic estrangement from his tradition and linguistic confusion among his contemporaries"? ³ Why the sickness of language, the degeneration of the streets and avenues of communication into "slum districts"? ⁴ Some partial answers lie near at hand.

No doubt the fact that we are today bombarded with words has contributed to decay of meaning. By limitless new forms, made possible primarily by electronic media, we are surrounded by words. The eyes and ears have no relief, and all the old silent haunts are now scarred with billboards and invaded by public address systems.

A second reason for the loss of power and meaning in words may lie in the nature of traditional religious language. Gerhard Ebeling has properly observed that "out of mistrust of religious words there grows contempt for words as such." ⁶ But why this mistrust of religious language? It is in part, of course, due to the language-lag that has always plagued the church, a hesitation to lay aside old terms and phrases for fear of laying aside something vital to the faith itself. Hence unfortunately, the church has no retirement program for old words that fought well at Nicea, Chalcedon and Augsburg; 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.

In our time, however, the failure of the church’s language has been accelerated by the ascendancy of the language of science. By this is meant not simply the vocabulary of science but the fundamental understanding of what words are and what they can and cannot do.

One’s immediate response is favorable if this means simply that the church must do her homework, choose carefully her words, and be clear in her proclamation. But more than this is meant, for the model of the scientific method understands words as signs, as indicators pointing to information that can be verified. For language to be meaningful, it is said, it must keep itself to this task. Were the pulpit to acquiesce and promise to speak according to these rules, it would have to forfeit its evocative use of words, its use of language to create new situations, its use of the parable and the myth. Under such editorship, the church’s language would be "cleaned up," striking all symbolic and mythological uses as pre-literate, primitive, and meaningless. The results would, of course, be tragic. While the scientific use of language to designate is an important function of words and necessary to some disciplines, to permit words only this function would be sterilizing reductionism. Words have too many other rich and full functions in all human thinking, learning, feeling, and sharing to be pulled through this small knothole.

It is a tragic fact, however, that the pulpit in many places accepted this restricted and restricting view of language. Perhaps these preachers at first felt secure in the scientific world because it reinforced their view of their task: to communicate knowledge, a special kind of knowledge, information about God and eternity. Recently, however, some pulpits have discovered that this very definition of words, that is, as signs to point to verifiable information, has made highly questionable the legitimacy of even using the word "God". Suddenly feeling trapped, some have unwisely reacted in antiscience belligerence while others have silently tossed in the towel. On the other hand, there are signs here and there that the church is discovering it is neither anti-scientific nor anti-intellectual to refuse to abide by a single definition of the function of words. No longer overawed, the church is discovering that science also has its limitations. After all, the "schemata which science evolves in order to classify, organize, and summarize the phenomena of the real world turn out to be nothing but arbitrary schemes which express not the nature of things, but the nature of mind." ⁸

In the opinion of some observers a third reason for the current word-sickness lies in the changed shape of the human sensorium as a result of television. According to this interpretation, the visual has removed the oral from the field, or at least has created a crisis between eye and ear. The pulpit has traditionally used word and story and history, but now television has re-organized the sensorium for image and picture. In the opinion of some, the success of the Christian proclamation depends upon the church’s ability to make the transition so men can see. Against such a view, however, it should be kept in mind that the Bible favors the ear over the eye in attempting to present its message about God who communicates. If it be objected that this can be explained by reference to the Bible’s primitive context, then one should remember that in the same primitive context, the Hellenists gave ascendancy to the eye. Perhaps the difference can be explained by the fact that the Hellenists were concerned with the static conditions of the nature and being of reality while the Judeo-Christian interest was in the dynamic activity of God. ⁹ In a way unequalled by any of the other senses, the ear receives the temporal sequence of sensations appropriate to the communication of activity and the unfolding of the history of a people. One has to raise the question whether there is involved here something so fundamental to the Christian faith that, television to the contrary, the oral must remain in the center of the field of Christian proclamation.

Whatever conclusion one reaches on this point, no one could be more affected than the preacher by the changes in the structure of the human psyche and the shifts in the areas of sensitivity within modern man’s sensorium. If man’s capacity for receptivity is no longer polarized around sound and person but rather around sight and object, the difficulties for the preaching task, are all too obvious. Perhaps the expression "God is silent" really is a reference to the deafness of modern man. ¹⁰

That changes in the human sensorium have taken place in the past is well documented in Western civilization. Consider, for instance, the effect of the invention of alphabetic script and movable type upon man’s relation to his world and to his fellows.

With the minimization of the socializing effects in voice and sound, individualism came into its own. The universe grew silent with the development of a literal culture. The spoken word came to be regarded as a modification of the written rather than vice versa. The understanding of the Bible, coming as it does out of long oral tradition, was radically altered. 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. What was read in a book was accepted as true while serious attention to spoken words waned. If a speaker is really serious about what he is saying, let him "put it in writing".

The question is, of course, where does an oral presentation fit into a civilization that has moved from oral to literal and now perhaps to aural receptivity? Or does it? Is there reason to believe that the human voice, with its personalizing and socializing effects, has never really lost its place in our culture, and now in a mechanized and impersonal world, is more than ever needed and longed for? To this question we will return in a later chapter.

We have been considering possible causes of the present degeneration of language, a fact which is a contributor to the decline of the pulpit. Perhaps our discussion of the sickness of words should conclude by hesitantly entertaining the possibility that the reason is more profound, transcending all our analyses. This may be a time in which God has actually grown silent, weary with so many empty and careless uses of his name. If so, surely healing and recovery of meaning will come out of such silence. But man keeps talking, and "when God is silent, man becomes a gossip". ¹²

A fourth cause back of the current sag in the pulpit is the loss of certainty and the increase of tentativeness on the part of the preacher. Rarely, if ever, in the history of the church have so many firm periods slumped into commas and so many triumphant exclamation points curled into question marks. Those who speak with strong conviction on a topic are suspected of the heresy of premature finality. Permanent temples are to be abandoned as houses of idolatry; the true people of God are in tents again. It is the age of journalistic theology; even the Bible is out in paperback. The transient and the contingent have moved to the center of consciousness.

Basic to this feeling of temporariness and the attendant loss of certainty (whether it be cause or effect in relation to other factors is not of consequence here) is the shift of the church’s concern from space to time. The traditional space-consciousness was fundamental to the church’s proclamation, its evangelism, and its relation to culture. The church saw her task as that of increasing her place, her territory in the world. Now the church is more and more concerned with time. Pulpits are announcing what time it is -- "the time is fulfilled". ¹³ The entrance of time, change, flexibility means the exit of old forms of certainty and fixity.

This almost frightening awareness in our time of the contingency and creatureliness of all things pervades every serious grappling with reality and meaning. Philosophical studies have experienced a radical shift from considerations of Substance to those of Being and Time. The process philosophy of A. N. Whitehead and the natural evolutionary eschatology of Teilhard de Chardin not only create but reflect the thought of our age. The most significant recent theological formulations have been to some extent structured on existentialism which insists that the only path from thought to reality is through existence, my existence, with all the variables of my experiences coloring the picture. In view of this, many have thought it most honest if they spoke only of that which was verified in experience and remained neutral and silent about metaphysics. If God is mentioned, it is either in the passive voice or only in terms, not of his being, but of our experience of his "toward manness".

It is an error to blame theology for the powerlessness of the traditional pulpit language; we preach in a radically changed situation. "The traditional metaphysical understanding of reality is being replaced by the historical understanding of reality." ¹⁴ Sermons that respond to this change simply by turning up the volume fall fruitless to the ground. "The resultant anxiety and underlying insincerity show that faith has been disastrously changed into the work of appropriating the incredible." ¹⁵ On the other hand some have sought to avoid the difficulties for preaching that have come with the radical historicization of man by trying to secure an area for faith free from the contingencies of historical investigation. The call to live "by faith alone" seems at first to capture the essence of perfect trust since it does not depend upon the authentication of historical evidence. As a matter of fact, however, this position is a high and beautiful nest, for while it is not dependent on historical verification, neither is it threatened by any new discovery.

Lest any one feel that the conditions just mentioned are confined to the university world of discourse, let him look at modern art. Whatever may be the aesthetic judgment, this art reflects the break up of old perspectives with their confident delineations of reality and captures the fragmentation that accompanies rapid change. Or look at modern architecture. Churches do not look like churches any more! Church architecture captures the flexibility and changing structures of our world while celebrating trust in a God of the present. Within such buildings, a neat three-point sermon is highly suspect. In a world such as this, what right has the preacher to impose a symmetry that he alone can see. Or does he? Every work of art, music, or literature of our time has suffered the loss of neat and isolated beauty because the shadows of once remote cruelties and injustices are brought by modern communication media to fall across every page and every easel. While these shadows remain, and while the reality we experience continues in transit, the old art forms will be inappropriate and inadequate.

Amid all this, the sermons of our time have, with few exceptions, kept the same form. What message does such constancy of method convey? Either the preacher has access to a world that is neat, orderly, and unified which gives his sermon its form, or he is out of date and out of touch with the way it is. In either case, he doesn’t communicate.

As a rule, younger ministers are keenly aware of the factors discussed above, and their preaching reflects it. Their predecessors ascended the pulpit to speak of the eternal certainties, truths etched forever in the granite of absolute reality, matters framed for proclamation, not for discussion. But where have all the absolutes gone? The old thunderbolts rust in the attic while the minister tries to lead his people through the morass of relativities and proximate possibilities. And the difficulties involved in finding and articulating a faith are not the congregation’s alone: they are the minister’s as well. How can he preach with a changing mind? How can he, facing new situations by the hour, speak the appropriate word? He wants to speak and yet he needs more time for more certainty before speaking. His is often the misery of one who is always pregnant but never ready to give birth. Is not every sermon delivered too soon or too late and hence a compromise of his commitment to speak the right word at the right time? Does not the fact that each sermon can in the nature of its limitations, say only one thing and hence be partial in its content, make the preacher a heretic every Sunday, under judgment for all he did not say? Does the fact that his own faith is in process, always becoming but never fully and finally arrived, disqualify him from the pulpit? Not really feeling he is a member of the congregation he serves, he is hesitant to let it be known when his own faith is crippled for fear of causing the whole congregation to limp. It is this painful conflict between the traditional expectation of him and honesty with himself, a conflict so dramatically heightened in our time, that gives the minister pause and often frightens him from the pulpit.

A fifth reason for the current decline of the strong pulpit has already been touched upon: the completely new relationship between speaker and hearer. There are many ways to look at this. One hears a great deal these days about the fall of Christendom, a fact sometimes lamented, sometimes celebrated. Whatever else it may mean, the collapse of Christendom means the church’s loss of the scaffolding of a supporting culture. No longer can the preacher presuppose the general recognition of his authority as a clergyman, or the authority of his institution, or the authority of Scripture. An examination of great evangelistic sermons of the past makes it clear that the speaker assumed at the outset that the hearers were part of a culture that was Christian and the appeal to them was simply not to be "holdouts". This condition is rapidly disappearing and the claim of the Gospel must be presented on its own terms with the understanding that the hearers stand amid several alternatives. In this respect, the fall of Christendom is to be welcomed by the preacher, for when assumptions give way, faith can be born. Unless there is room to say NO there is no room for a genuine YES. And yet it is apparent that the new situation in which preaching occurs is critical, and unless recognized by the minister and met with a new format, his sermons will at best seem museum pieces.

Unfortunately, the physical arrangements for preaching make it difficult for the minister to implement the changed relation between speaker and hearer. The very location and elevation of the pulpit imply an authority on the part of the speaker or his message which the minister is hesitant to assume and the listeners no longer recognize. Not only this but

Many congregations, no longer passively accepting this stereotype, refuse to listen to the Word shared under this arrangement. The vigorous processes of democracy are undermining high places, including pulpits.

The younger minister feels most acutely this changed relationship between speaker and hearer because of the nature of his own seminary education. The seminary experience has increasingly become one of seminars, discussion and participation groups where all speak and all listen. His training in education, both in and out of the church, has warned him of the sterility of a setting in which one speaks and many listen. When a minister thus educated enters a parish, he feels equipped to function as pastor, counsellor, and teacher, but he may feel awkward and ill at ease in the pulpit. He feels he appears a different man in the pulpit, a contradiction of his seminary experience and of the other aspects of his ministry. On the continent, the education of the ministry is still quite deductive with all the built-in authority structures. To the extent that American seminary education has been dependent on the European, this has also been true here. However, the development of an American educational philosophy has produced a new breed of leaders. The conflict between the two modes of thought and the two perspectives on the speaker-hearer relationship has often appeared as a conflict between a minister (deductive, authoritarian) and his educational director (inductive, democratic) , between sermons and adult education. It also appears within the young minister as a conflict within himself as preacher and teacher. ¹⁸ He seriously asks himself whether he should continue to serve up a monologue in a dialogical world.

A sixth and final reason here offered to explain what is often called "the crisis in Preaching" is not new at all but is inherent in the very nature of preaching itself. Preaching lies within the general category of communication and therefore shares the painful difficulties characteristic of that category. "Talking", for most people, is relatively easy, but meaningful and important communication is difficult for everyone. Thus we understand husbands and wives, fathers and sons, delaying indefinitely those important conversations. Thus we understand ecumenical organizations making great strides in "Life and Work" projects long before serious conversation about "Faith and Order" can get underway. Such sharing with each other is rewarding, of course, but it is also very demanding. Saying words can belong to the deepest level of human relationships. While there are those who hesitate to preach because preaching is "only words", there are others who hesitate because preaching is words. These are the ones who understand that any violation of preaching, however dull and insulting, is a felony of such magnitude as to justify a blanket dismissal of the pulpit. In fact, it just may be the case that the turning of some young ministers from the pulpit is strange and indirect testimony to the truth about Christian preaching: it is demanding, exhausting, painful, and for all involved, creates a crisis, a moment of truth, a decision situation of immense consequence. Quite consistently the Scriptures declare that presenting the Word of God effects a decision to accept or to reject. Read again the terms of Isaiah’s ordination. The message will be effective: hearts will be opened and hearts will be closed; men will draw near and men will turn away. So are we to understand the strange words of old Simeon at the dedication of the infant Jesus: "This child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel", (Luke 2:34) and this is the frightening logic of the words of Jesus reported in John 15:22: "If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin; now they have no excuse for their sin."

Anyone who is a bearer of light is thereby the creator of the possibility of a new kind of darkness. He who sees himself as a bearer of the light of democracy and freedom must occasionally shudder at the realization that he is helping make room for the riot of excesses that freedom makes possible. Whoever carries the light of learning to dark minds can only hope that the new uses of the mind will be true and honest. It is possible to understand if not sympathize with Mahatma Ghandi’s rejection of Frank Laubach’s literacy program for India. He reasoned it would be better not to be able to read than to read the trash that would flood India. He was wrong, of course, because every man has the right to be fully human and this means the right to choose for himself. But it is disturbing to remember: "This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men have loved darkness rather than light." (John 3:19)

Wherever such sensitivity about the task of the pulpit prevails, there may be fewer preachers but there will be more preaching.

As would be expected and hoped, there have been a variety of serious efforts to meet the problems that beset the pulpit and to bring about recovery of power of preaching. These have effected varying degrees of limited success.

The most immediate and most natural response to the problem has been for some pastors and churches to call upon the seminaries for more homiletics. Surely more required hours in homiletics would correct the slippage! But where the homiletics offered was more of the same, unaware that preaching in a changed context demands something different, not just something more, the result has been the solidifying of old errors. A variation of this quantitative approach has been the demand for more Bible and more theology. But in some cases there has been the charge that preaching is too full of Bible and theology; weaken the formula. Whereas individual tastes here and there have been satisfied by adjustments in "more matter and less art" or "less matter and more art", the general lift given the pulpit has been slight.

A more noticeable attempt to infuse life into the pulpit has been the revival of topical preaching, a form which, on the face of it, seems to allow more relevance, more contact with the daily press. Expository or Biblical preaching has been found guilty of archaism, sacrificing the present to the past. One should, according to this view, choose relevant topics for treatment. Scriptures can be read in the service for mood or atmosphere or to satisfy those who feel it should be included, but this should not be allowed to shackle the minister.

Some marked improvements have been noted, with some real Christian sermons on current issues being heard. Preachers of smaller calibre, however, have been thus lured into forgetting that they have the right to preach, not because of what they get from the newspaper but because of what they bring to it. Relevant sermons we all want and need, but what is painfully lacking is a mode of proclamation that is relevant to the present speaker-hearer relationship. Why is it that on occasion when the topic of the sermon is relevant, vital, and interesting, the listener feels a poorly defined but very real resistance to all that is being said? The young prophet in the pulpit feels this resistance, and extends his "prophetic" role to include the condemnation of those who do not go along with him. Quite often the problem is in the method of preaching, in the downward movement of the sermon with an implicit view of the hearer that is not acceptable to him. Even the angry preacher, deliberately iconoclastic and anti-clerical, preaches relevant sermons in a way no longer relevant. He is still saddled with the traditional image of preaching with its clearly discernible authoritarianism being communicated nonverbally not only in voice and manner but also in the form and movement of his sermon. He may have radically re-arranged the furniture and removed the lofty pulpit, but the distance between speaker and hearer is still successfully maintained by an arrogant, and perhaps learned, smirk. It may be that the old way of keeping the distance was easier to take.

In recent years a number of techniques have been employed to overcome a fundamental weakness in traditional preaching, its monological character. Without question, preaching increases in power when it is dialogical, when speaker and listener share in the proclamation of the Word. This fact has been understood by really effective preachers for a long time, but we have of late seen a host of new implementations. Some ministers have sharing sessions with lay people prior to the final preparation and delivery of the sermon. A number of others have feed-back following the sermon in a variety of formats. Efforts to build dialogue into the actual delivery have taken the forms of forums, dialogue between pulpit and lectern, press conference sermons, planned interruptions from the congregation, and other variations doubtless already familiar to the reader. Responses have ranged from mild enthusiasm to "at least it’s different". Disappointments felt by preachers and listeners are probably due to the fact that dialogical methods are rather easily postured while embracing the dialogical principle requires a radical reassessment of one’s role as a preacher, one’s view of the congregation as the people of God, one’s understanding of whether the sermon is the preacher’s or the church’s, and one’s theology of the Word; that is, does the Word of God occur at the lips, at the ear, or in the sharing of it? These are profound and complex issues, but they have to do not just with what is preached but how one preaches. This is the meaning of an earlier statement insisting that effective preaching calls for a method consistent with one’s theology because the method is message; form and content are of a piece. A perfectly good sermon, content-wise, on "The Priesthood of All Believers" may in effect be contradicted by the method of presentation. And here method of presentation does not refer simply to the minister’s attitude or disposition; it refers to the fact that the movement of the shared material may not allow the hearers room to be priests at all in any responsible sense.

This difference between method and principle of dialogue is extremely important. Reuel Howe has reminded us that

Multiplying references to the world as such hardly succeeds as a dialogue with the secular.

In much of the "new preaching", one can detect a longing, not just to be heard and understood, but to be accepted by a world that has been alienated by the religious jargon of a self-addressing church. The guilt for this alienation must be accepted and confessed. However, offering slang and fashionable jargon as "renewed" preaching, celebrating the secular embrace of certain Christian symbols (i.e., use of crosses as warnings at highway danger points, putting Christ in Christmas, etc.) , or reducing the Gospel to the lowest common denominator of acceptable faith and ethic will hardly be received by a serious world as adequate penance. The ease with which some ministers speak of the world’s problems today arouses suspicion. Are these problems of unrest, injustice, and violence being addressed or celebrated? Franz Kafka’s parable comes to mind:

Weaving a man’s pain into the litany hardly relieves the agony. Nor is it of real consequence for the future of preaching to spend time bragging on the world for its honesty, frankness, and integrity while clubbing the church for hypocrisy and pretension. This gross oversimplification is full of error, failing to see how men pretend irreligion as well as religion. The world gets no great lift from this dubious favor of having the Pharisee back away and beat his chest awhile so the Publican can stand to boast of his pride. "In our effort to correct the monologue from the church to the world, let us not fall into the trap of substituting the monologue from the world to the church . . . that is, of offering it as the preacher’s sermon." ²¹

The renewal of preaching calls for something more than a different interpretation of our world, even if that interpretation be a correct one. We will know power has returned to the pulpit when and where preaching effects transformation in the lives of men and in the structures of society. There are reasons to believe that this renewal is not far away. We turn now to examine some of the signs that arouse this expectation.

Footnotes

1. The Anguish of Preaching. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966) Pp. 7, 12.

2. Quotation from an address entitled Preaching is a Post-Christian Age" by Dr. John R. Killinger, Jr. at Vanderbilt University, November 3, 1964.

3. Gerhard Ebeling, God and Word. trans. Jas. w. Leitch. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967) p.S.

4. Dallas M. High, Language, Persons and Belief. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, i967) p. 137.

5. Max Picard, The World of Silence. trans. Staley Godman. (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952) p. 41.

6. Op. cit., p. 7.

7. High, op. cit., pp. 8-9.

8. Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth. trans. Susanne K. Langer. (Dover Publications, Inc., 1946) P. 7.

9. Kendrick Grobel, "Revelation and Resurrection", New Frontiers of Theology. eds. Robinson and Cobb. (New York: Harpers, 1967) Vol. III, p. 158.

10. Waiter J. Ong. The Presence of the Word. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1967) pp. 15-i6.

11. Ibid., p. 54. Ong has persuasively developed the idea of the change in modern man’s sensorium.

12. Robert W. Funk, Language, Hermeneutic, and Word of God. (New York: Harpers, 1966) p. 9

13. Thomas Wieser, "Evangelism and the ‘Death of God’ ", The Ecumenical Review, Vol. XX, No. 2 (1968) , p. 140.

14. G. Ebeling, Theology and Proclamation. trans. John Riches. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966) p. 15.

15. Ibid., p. iS.

16. Sittler, op. cit., p. 50.

17. Reuel Howe, Partners in Preaching. (New York: Seabury Press, 1967) p. 35.

18. James. B. Conant, Two Modes of thought. (New York: Trident Press, 1964) Dr. Conant’s point ha been applied to this church by Locke Bowman, Jr. Straight talk About Teaching in Today’s Church. (Philadelphia: Wstminsiter Press, 1967)

19. Op. cit., p. 47.

20. Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes (New York: Schocken books, 1961), p. 93.

21. Howe, op. cit., p. 52.

The invitation in 1965 to join the faculty of the Graduate Seminary of Phillips University read: Professor of New Testament and Preaching. And Preaching! All my graduate work had been in New Testament, and while I had considerable interest in preaching and had on my own worked at homiletical theory, much work lay between me and that advanced course in preaching to be taught each Fall. The urgency of that preparation was heightened by the general recognition that Homiletics was hanging by its nails on the edge of most seminary catalogs.

It was at that time, while reading in the fields of hermeneutics, linguistics, and communication that the basic ideas in these essays were formed. Students were subjected to them; colleagues on the faculty and in the parish ministry listened to them.

In 1968, a Fellowship from the American Association of Theological Schools made possible a sabbatical at the University of Tübingen, Germany where the resources of the Institute for Hermeneutic contributed greatly to the orientation and content of this book. In the Spring of 1969, while still in Tübingen, my wife typed the first draft of the manuscript. Upon our return, additional typing and other chores related to a manuscript have been handled by my student assistant, Diane McCracken.

For the help of these persons and institutions I am grateful. I wish to thank also my faculty colleagues who spent an evening in colloquy with this material, and Phillips University Press for its thoughtfulness and many considerations.

Fred B. Craddock

Enid, Oklahoma

January, 1971

ix

The Problem:

A Description

Faith and Order created a Commission on Worship in acknowledgment of a fact. The fact is that the way Christian people worship is declarative of what they believe. This declaration may well be made in worship at a depth and with a fullness seldom attained in credal propositions.

Early in Faith and Order inquiries it became apparent that formal comparative examination of the confessional and other utterances of the churches was not adequate for a responsible understanding either of what these churches affirmed in common or asserted in difference. There is a worship of the one God by his one people; that is why a Commission on Worship is possible and necessary. And there is a wild and bewildering variety in ways of worship by this one people: that is why the work of this commission is difficult.

It is not necessary to go into great detail concerning the present constitution of the commission as reorganized following the second assembly of the World Council of Churches at Evanston. It is enough for our present purpose to remember that three commissions in widely separated and quite different areas were established: one in Europe, one in East Asia, one in North America. While some preliminary correspondence has been carried on with the European commission, and while all of us in the area-commission are aware of and grateful for the vigorous and productive work of the East Asian group -- this is a discussion of matters which have arisen in the two meetings which have been held under my chairmanship in North America.

One cannot get very far in constructive thought about a problem until the nature of the problem has been clearly exposed. Our work of exposure is by no means complete, but certain aspects are clear enough that I can point them out in the confidence that any concerned listener will recognize what I am talking about.

The term "worship" presents a problem. At the second meeting of our commission Professor Leonard Trinterud with characteristic bluntness and clarity excised this particular problem in these words: "Our English word ‘worship’ misstates the whole content and significance of that which in the New Testament is called ‘the service of God,’ i.e., leiturgia, latria, diakonia, and their respective related terms.

"In the New Testament these terms refer normatively to ‘serving God,’ ‘doing the will of God,’ in a great variety of ways most of which are without cultic significance or form, and which refer principally to that which is done for and among men -- not to something done to or for God in a sanctuary. The New Testament knows nothing of a leiturgia, latria, diakonia which is localized in an edifice, or to fixed times of occurrence. These terms refer to the whole round of the Christians’ ordinary life as people."

Professor Trinterud made his second point as follows: "Acts such as prayer, thanksgiving, breaking of bread, are regarded in the New Testament as but an aspect of the ‘service of God,’ and that not the controlling or central aspect. That which in the New Testament is central and controlling in the ‘service of God,’ is the presence of Christ, the Head of the church, in the Holy Spirit given to the church. The living Christ, thus present, directs, guides, builds up the church, and thus it ‘serves God.’ Our ideas of worship are too often rooted in the situation of the people of God before the Resurrection and Pentecost. There, indeed, priests, strictly so-called, performed cultic acts, in properly consecrated sanctuaries, acts addressed to God on behalf of the people. But the new aeon comes when the promise of God has been fulfilled, when the redeeming work of God has been done in Christ, and when the Holy Spirit has been given to all believers. God’s people are now related to him in a new and living way previously only promised. So, also, God is now present among his people, by the Holy Spirit, a manner of presence which previously was but a promise.

"We cannot discuss ‘worship’ as though we were still in the old aeon, on the other side of Pentecost and the Resurrection."

One can disagree with a great deal of what Professor Trinterud says, but such disagreement has little to do with the size or importance of the problem thus explicated. Our commission has been sufficiently impressed to agree upon the following:

a. A thoroughgoing biblical inquiry into the relation between the "service of God" and what we have come to call the "service of worship" by the congregation of believers assembled in a specific place has got to be undertaken. The enormous exegetical ferment which has been engendered by recent decades of brilliant and notion-cracking biblical studies makes it quite impossible to derive schematically neat ideas about worship from the New Testament community. Some old certainties have been made untenable, and a confusing and exciting richness of life has been exposed.

b. The interdependence of the work of the Commission on Worship and the Commission on Christ and the Church is transparently clear. Just as the doctrine of the church was at Lund shifted to a position under the doctrine of Christ, so also, we think, the inquiry into worship must be illuminated from the same center.

A corollary of these convictions has shaped our commission’s understanding of its task -- and it may be expressed here as a kind of an aside. If any of us came to this study as liturgiologists, or were under the impression that by becoming such we could best advance our work, we have long since laid such notions aside. There is a place and a useful function to be served by such inquiries, but none of us is disposed to interpret our directive in such terms. Descriptive and analytical inquiries into ways of worship must follow a clear understanding of the nature and scope and meaning of worship. If liturgical considerations precede such studies, the deeper question is either dismissed or too quickly set in doctrinaire terms.

c. Inquiry into the nature of Christian worship of God has, particularly in North America, got to operate in a sphere of discourse already occupied. The name of the occupant, in very many of our congregations, is the psychology of worship. This strange roomer got into and established himself in the living room of church practice in roughly the following way: that people do worship God is an observable fact; and every fact is permeable to psychological inquiry. Psychology does not operate from hand to mouth; it has either open or unavowed presuppositions about the structure and dynamics of the psyche. If, then, in worship people are in some way or other in search of a relationship to the Ineffable there must be ways which lubricate and ways which hinder this search. The human animal is influenced by setting, accompaniment, symbols, silence, the gravity of statement and response, the solidarity-producing impact of solemn music, etc.

So it has happened that experts in worship have arisen among us. All assume that the purpose of public worship is to create a mood; and he is the next admirable as the leader of worship who has mastered finesse in the mood-setting devices made available by the application of psychological categories. Thence has flowed that considerable and melancholy river of counsel whereby one may learn how to organize an assault upon the cognitive and critical faculties of the mind, how to anesthetize into easy seduction the nonverbalized but dependable anxieties that roam about in the solitary and collective unconscious, and how to conduct a brain-washing under the presumed banner of the Holy Ghost.

That this is what worship means in thousands of congregations is certainly true; it is equally true that the scriptures know nothing about such ideas. When we are enjoined to be still and know that God is God, the presupposition is not that stillness is good and speech is bad -- but rather that God is prior to man and all God-man relationships are out of joint if that is not acknowledged.

d. The third problem of which we have become acutely aware is a big and general problem; and I cannot advance toward a description of it until I shove out of the way an unhappy term which is well on the way to ecumenical canonization. It is a nontheological factor! Which is saying an unintelligible thing. For there are no nontheological factors in human existence. To suppose that there are is to misunderstand both the scope and intention of Christian theology and the actualities of human thought and feeling.

This tough third problem then can best be delineated by starting with a proposition: that language is the primary creation and carrier of culture, and it follows the career of man’s culture with absolute seriousness. Language, that is to say, in the structure, scope, and content of it, is an obedient transcript of what a people understands itself and its world to be like. When that world-understanding is mono-dimensional, language loses its opulence. When that world-meaning becomes a plane without extension or depth, language becomes designative and thin.

I cannot here investigate why language in our time has become flat, nonallusive, and impoverished, but simply to observe that it has and ask what this means for our churches as they seek to recover ways of worship which shall be more adequate to the object of worship, and more fully reflective of the long history of the people of God in their life of worship.

It is strange that this problem, so widely acknowledged and so profoundly disturbing outside the churches, has, so far as I know, not been systematically discussed among us. This is the more strange because the more deeply a concern is loaded with history, the past, things accomplished long ago, the more a church understands herself as a "pilgrim people of God" -- that is, called, continuous, on the way, starting with a constitutive deed and living out her life in a hope which is both a given and an awaited consummation -- the more clearly the church understands that, the more embarrassing her problem with a flat and impoverished language. Just as our Christology becomes richer, our ecclesiology more organic, our anthropology deeper -- our common language, the cultural instrument that must do the work of acknowledgment, praise, and interpretation, is shrinking in obedience to a diminished realm of meaning.

The gravity of rhythmic speech is the mark of a culture that carries its past livingly in its present experience. Rhythmic speech is the outward and visible sign of rootedness. Every society has had its rhetoric of remembrance. "Come now, let us bring our reasoning to a close, saith the Lord. . . . Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider. . . . I am the Lord thy God that brought thee out of that great and terrible wilderness. . . . I have called thee by thy name, thou art mine."

In the scriptures each moment is heavy with all past moments, for the God of the moment is the creator of the continuity. The old prayers of the church understood this so well and felt it so deeply that every one of them jumps into the moments’ petitions after a running start in the eventful history of the people of God. "O God, who didst teach the hearts of Thy faithful people by sending to them the light of Thy Holy Spirit: Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things, and evermore to rejoice in His holy comfort. . . ." This is great rhetoric because it roots the life of the moment in the grace of the past; it evokes a response in depth because it is not only a report, but a reverberation. It is an expectant episode in a people’s life because it is a note in ancient and continuing music. It is as big as the heart because it is as old as the people of God.

How many times, in reading the liturgy for the Holy Communion, I have felt both exultation and despair at the moment of the Sanctus: "Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify Thy glorious Name; evermore praising Thee, and saying: Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Saboath . . ." Exalted because, in this language, this place and time and company of momentary lives are interpreted and blessed within the scope of an eternal action of God, released from the tyranny of death and what Dylan Thomas has so movingly alluded to when he laments that

But also in despair for to the flattened speech of our time angels and archangels are rather ridiculous symbols -- material, so to speak, nonfissionable by contemporary definition of fact.

Strange things nevertheless are happening in the present practice of language. Just when one is sodden with despair over the possibility of making alive the massive biblical symbol of fire, for instance --

just then man does such things with language as to reinvest this symbol with meanings and dreamed of meanings of terrible force. The immediate referent of fire in 1957 is not the celestial fire of God’s descending and recreating ardor -- but a monstrous shape like a death-dealing mushroom. And out of this unimaginable hell a man envisions again an unbelievable grace, and writes in language which wildly fuses destroying atom bombs and the descending Holy Ghost:

Such speech judges one’s tepid unbelief in the power of the Holy Spirit of God, reminds us that the aggressive and ingenious love that can make the stones cry out can penetrate positivistic language too, and betimes torment its flatness into a kind of "negative" praise.

It is therefore proper to our study of worship to inquire what this revolution in language means for the public worship in our churches; to ask whether perhaps it is not a task of contemporary obedience and praise to find fresh forms of statement whereby intelligibly to set forth ancient facts and encounters. It may well be that we are entering upon a period in the church’s life wherein men’s minds must be shocked open to entertain the suspicion that there are realms of meaning, promise, and judgment which ensconce God’s incarnate action for their vague disquietudes.

The Problem:

Constructive Analysis

There has never been a church which has not declared its faith and order to be continuous with the apostolic tradition. Some churches have affirmed this explicitly in their confessions or other basic writings; others have unfolded their life, eschewing confessional statements, but claiming to celebrate this tradition in teaching, order, and piety.

This fact opens up a double way to make an entrance into the constructive part of our task. One way is to mobilize all resources for an ever-fresh encounter with the actual content of the apostolic tradition and judge the public worship in our churches according to their congruity with its announcement, promise, and demand. This does not of course assume that there are, in the apostolic tradition, clear and commanding directives concerning the form and content of public worship; it affirms, rather, that ways of worship which ignore or distort the liberating message of God’s Christly action must be corrected from that central action.

The other way is to examine the phenomena of public worship as carried on by the various churches; peer behind the accents and selections which have actually modified all of them; get beyond the cultural deposits in the form of language, music, gesture, etc., which cling to all of them; and ask if there is morphology of the response of the people of God.

The hope is that there may emerge among us, as we inquire into these matters, a way of thinking about worship which will liberate us from our placid captivity within our separate traditions. We are asking if there is a unity in the entire worshipping career of the responding faithful people of God, whence this unity comes, and what is its essential content.

The earliest Christian communities to whose life we have literary access apparently believed there was such a unity. This consensus concerning the apostolic tradition is the more remarkable in view of the broad and detailed New Testament studies which have elaborated the rich and sometimes confusing variety out of which the voice of this consensus speaks. Before the Gospels, in the form we now know them, existed, the church was giving voice to the general shape and content of what it believed God had accomplished in Christ -- which action called it into being, sustained and enabled its life, and furnished it with both task and power. God, it was affirmed, had engaged himself in a personal, incarnate action with man’s estranged and captive predicament, had recapitulated in Jesus Christ the entire life of Adam (his created but now estranged human family) , had involved himself with every tragedy, limitation, desolation, and even the death of man.

This God-initiated, ingressive penetration of human life is the substance of those records which are the Four Gospels. Each, to be sure, has its own character; each has sources unknown to or unused by the others; and each is shaped in accent and use of materials by circumstances known to us to some degree.

But the morphology of the action of God in Christ is alike in all. Its shape is an inverted parabola. The starting point is the appearance of One who asserted that he came to announce and inaugurate the kingly rule of God in such a way as to actualize the hopes of the people of God, make effective the liberating promise and power of God, establish men -- by his life and teaching and deeds -- in a new relationship to God and to one another.

This lived-out action had a shape which was that of a descending curve which went down, into, through, and under every broken God-relationship, and was apparently destroyed at the nadir of its career on Good Friday.

The Gospels, however, are resurrection documents. They declare that God, who is alive, is not stopped in his purpose by the assault of death, but rather carried his action through. His Word, Jesus Christ, is victorious over death, lives, reigns, is the second Adam, the Head of a new body -- the church. The old creed of the church follows episodically the precise pattern of the parabola of the grace of God -- born, suffered, died, arose, ascended, reigns with the Father.

This declaration is the core of the apostolic tradition. We confront it repeatedly in the Acts of the Apostles and in that body of correspondence available to us in the letters of Paul. Especially clarifying and impressive is the way Paul, caught in a polemical situation, again and again appeals to this tradition. In such situations the apostle reaches, as it were, back of himself and back of his hearers, gets hold of the given core of what commands him and them,- and strides into the point at issue as from a secure beachhead. That these moments occur in the course of the rough and tumble of his pastoral career and not, as a rule, as calculated links in a chain of argument makes them the more startling. Paul did not, apparently, so schematize his words to the Philippians as to lead up to the great words in chapter 2, verses 5-11. He is simply appealing to this community -- which was in a fix -- to be "like-minded" in the "fellowship of the Spirit."

This fellowship involves a "lowliness of mind." And whence is that? Where shall one behold it, whence receive it? Led on then by the questions his own counsel has generated the apostle cannot stop short of sinking the present life of the Philippian community in the entire deed of God in Jesus Christ. So, almost accidentally, does the all-shaping apostolic core reveal its massive shape behind an occasional pastoral message. This passage is not Christology in order to Christology; it is Christology in order to ethics. And the more persuasive for that reason.

In the letter to the Romans Paul is called upon to confront a flippant and almost blasphemous non sequitur -- a situation not unknown to any preacher or teacher today. If grace abounds more abundantly where sin abounds in force, then one is in the amazing situation of eating and having his cake at the same time! Against such total incomprehension of his message Paul wheels up the heavy artillery of the apostolic tradition.

The shape of the deed of God, he declares, engenders a total human life in organic congruity with itself; and to be a Christian is to have one’s life in its shape determined by the shape of what God has done. Therefore, says Paul, what happened to Christ is the God-given, redemptive pattern of our lives. "Know ye not that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life."

As then, the morphology of grace in the life, death, resurrection, and exaltation of Jesus Christ imparts to and creates in the believer its own shape -- so worship is the name proper to the celebration of this new being in Christ by his body, the church. Such a celebration has a scope broad enough to include all the New Testament means by leitorgia, latria, diakonia (the service of God) , and has enough specific concreteness to be verbalized in the liturgical life of the church where it is assembled in public worship. Any definition of worship less rich than this comes under the judgment of such an admonition as Paul’s in the twelfth chapter of Romans. "I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship."

As then we perceive the bare elements of the apostolic message, and observe how this shape, re-enacted within the behavior by the power of the Holy Spirit, constituted Christian life in the fellowship of the community, do we not also, perhaps, find a pattern for Christian worship? Is there not here a given substance and morphology of response which presses upon all of us, calls all of us to attend, acknowledge, and celebrate? If that is so, then we are given a starting place where, from within our various churches, we ask after what is constitutive of and proper to the content of truly catholic worship.

Every tradition in Christian worship acknowledges that it does indeed stand under this given substance of the gospel. This is overtly so among the churches which cherish liturgical patterns centuries old; it is covertly so among churches whose public worship is improvised, ad hoc, and so free as to make the term "tradition" strange. The directive of the churches represented in Faith and Order -- that a study of worship be pursued over a number of years -- indicates a recognition that there is a giveness to Christian worship, and that the common degradation of worship into gimmicks for religious mood-engendering is a kind of impoverishment, a failure, a positive disobedience hiding behind the face of individualism, spontaneity, freedom.

Remembering then the apostolic tradition, and having in mind the huge spectrum of forms of public worship within the churches -- from nonliturgical churches on one side to Eastern Orthodoxy on the other -- there is none that does not acknowledge in public worship the following five elements: recollection, thanksgiving, participation, proclamation, expectation.

Recollection. A congregation of believers assembled for the public worship of God knows that it did not come into existence at that moment, knows that it is not alone, knows that what is happening is happening because something has happened from God’s side. What is announced is continuous with what has been announced since the Resurrection.

And therefore all sequences of public worship include, whether in formal liturgical or informal ways, powerful elements of recollection. Mighty deeds have been done, a huge liberation has taken place, an event called Jesus Christ was, is, and is here -- and everything that takes place presupposes that. "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. . . In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a love. . . . In all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. . ."

Celebration begins with recollection.

Recollection engenders thanksgiving. The content of what is recalled in worship is not a cluster of episodes spiritually elevated above, but essentially continuous with, the structures of human history. These remembered deeds of creation, care, deliverance, and renewal are rather the recital of faith in which is perceived within the structure of history the ultimate redemption of man. Exodus is an occurrence, and a power-bearing symbol; Incarnation is an occurrence, and the radical mercy of God whereby he did and does what needs doing in the sin and death determined house of man’s existence. As then ". . . although they know God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him"; nevertheless, ". . . when the time had fully come God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons."

Therefore, "Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift." "And all the angels stood ‘round the throne, .. . and they fell on their faces and worshipped God, saying, Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God for ever and ever! Amen."

The church’s thankful recollection of God’s deed of redemption is at the same time a participation. Hearing, repentance, acceptance of mercy, forgiveness of sins -- these are all the work of God whereby man receives no less than a "new-being in Christ." Rich and various are the New Testament images in which this new-being is promised and, given in faith, celebrated. Men are before Christ, who beholds them; under Christ, who judges them; for or against Christ, who addresses them. But the thrust and destiny of this holy encounter is that they may be in Christ! The language of participation dominates the New Testament speech about the fullness of the Christ relationship. "I am the vine; you are the branches." "If any man be in Christ he is a new creation, old things have passed away." "I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me . . . the life which I now live I live by this Son of God who loved me. . ." "For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God."

Christian worship is proclamation. The substance of what is proclaimed is the same as what is recollected, the same as is now acknowledged by the congregation in thanksgiving as God’s salvatory and present power, the same as is offered and received in participation of the members in the Head of the church. Worship not only includes proclamation of the gospel of salvation, it is proclamation.

Every service of public worship is a banner of life flying among the banners of mortality. Every assembly of believers in the name of Christ is a proclamation of the Regnum Dei by subjects and sons who have been liberated and now live in the Regnum Christi. The celebration of the Supper of the Lord is indeed recollection, Eucharist, the seal of forgiveness of sins, and the gift and nurturing of life in the Lord of the feast. But it is something more: something immediate and poignant in the embattled "little flocks" of the first century, known again in our day by millions in shattered and cut-off lives in cells, rubble, behind wire, and behind curtains.

It is the proclamation of engrafted membership in a kingdom not born of history, and therefore not at the mercy of history’s demonic tyrannies. The somber chalice has in our day again become a defiant sign uplifted, the believer’s "toast of terrible joy." "As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes."

But all of this recollection, thanksgiving, participation, and proclamation is the worship, or true service of God, in the body within the theater of this world; a response and a song of praise by the pilgrim people of God. And for that reason Christian worship is always expectation. This expectation is not an element in a richer context, it is rather the pervading mood of the whole of Christian worship. If I had not been given an immeasurable gift I could not expect at all; if this gift were consummated within the conditions of human existence I could not expect, either.

The last word of the New Testament is a dramatic condensation of this "not yet -- yet even now." The Apocalypse of St. John concludes, "Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!" The Amen leans backward toward the mighty salvatory deeds of God, affirms that the church, the Body of Christ, is held in God’s hand against the powers of hell. The "Come, Lord Jesus" leans forward toward the consummation of "the fullness of him who fills all in all."

The Christian life is a life drawn taut between the Amen and the Come. This tautness has its suffering, its waiting, and its peculiar service to the world. And inasmuch as Christian worship has been the strange music of these taut and joyous lives in history, a deep study of worship points a steady finger to the nature of the unity we seek.

This lecture is not continuous with the preceding ones. It is related to them, however, because I have been aware in the preparation -- with a clarity amounting to a sense of guilt -- that urgings toward the kind of study and reflection presupposed for preaching to our situation have a bright and bitter sound to many who have done me the courtesy to listen. Bright because what I have called attention to is acknowledged as necessary for obedient preaching; bitter because the church, which might be expected to encourage and protect the minister in his cultivation of these conditions, does nothing of the sort.

What I have to say in this lecture might well come under an epigram applied to the Korean War: the wrong war against the wrong enemy at the wrong place! The situation I propose to describe is already and painfully well known to the clergy, and if a lecture to them has only an intermural value they are perhaps comforted in their pain by the knowledge that others know of it. It is nevertheless said here on the purely tactical ground that someone ought to speak up against what I call the maceration of the minister. He ought to do so with plain, reportorial force, and he ought to do it not as a psychologist, internist, or time-study expert -- but as a churchman within the context of a convocation traditionally concerned with the practical wellbeing of the churches.

I have sought for a less violent term to designate what I behold, and maceration was the only one sufficiently accurate. Among the meanings of the term listed in the dictionary is this grim one: to chop up into small pieces. That this is happening to thousands of ministers does not have to be argued or established; it needs only to be violently stated. His time, his focused sense of vocation, his vision of his central task, his mental life, and his contemplative acreage -- they are all under the chopper. Observation leads me to conclude, too, that this fact is general. The man who looks back thirty years to his ordination is in no better circumstance than the man who looks back three years. The man who is minister in an established parish and surrounded with a staff has substantially the same complaint as the mission minister with his self-propelled mimeograph. Nor does the church body in which the man is a minister, or the distinction or obscurity of the school which awarded him his Bachelor’s degree in Divinity make any perceivable difference.

The Niebuhr-Williams-Gustafson study (H. Richard Niebuhr, The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry[New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956]) of several years ago makes it unnecessary to dilate upon this first point. Because these men are members of theological faculties their observations were related with particular force to the responsibilities of theological educators. They therefore made quietly and with becoming academic restraint a point that I want to make noisily.

What the schools elevate the actual practice of the ministry flattens. The schools urge to competence in the various fields of theological study. The canons of competence that determine the churches’ practice are not only strange to what the schools supply and encourage, they are radically destructive of their precedence and nurture. There is something positively sardonic in a quick jump from a remembered student in a remembered classroom to the same man in his parish. I have done many such jumps and the effect is disheartening. In the classroom he was told that the basilia tou Theu, for instance, is a phrase of enormous scope and depth, and that his declaration of it should be informed by such studies as we could expose him to in class. It was further urged that such study ought persist throughout life. His teachers were concerned that he not become so insensible as to make such easy identifications with the kingdom of God as characterize the promotional theological literature of our burgeoning churches.

Visit the man some years later in what the man still calls inexactly his study and one is more than likely to find him accompanied by the same volumes he took with him from his student room. And filed on top of even these are mementos of what he is presently concerned with: a roll of blueprints, a file of negotiations between the parish, the bank, and the Board of Missions, samples of asphalt tile, and a plumber’s estimate.

When one wonders what holds the man together, enables him to bring equal enthusiasm to his practical decisions and his pastoral and proclamatory function, one learns that he is held together (if he is) by his public role of responsibility for the external advancement of the congregation. The terms in which this advancement are commonly assessed seep backward and downward to transform his interior relation to his studies. Those studies become less and less an occupation engaged in or intrinsic to his role as witness to the gospel and pastor to people, and become more and more frantic efforts to find biblical, or theological, generalities which will religiously dignify his promotional purposes. The will of God has got to be simplified into a push for the parish house. The Holy Spirit is reduced to a holy resource which can be used as a punch line for the enforcement of parish purposes. The theme of Christian obedience must be stripped of its judging ambiguities and forthwith used as a lever to secure commitment which is somehow necessarily correlated with observable services to the current and clamant program. The message, in short, is managed in terms of its instrumental usefulness for immediate goals. "Arise, and let us go hence" becomes a text so epigramatically apt that it were a shame to lose it by the complication of context or exegesis.

Where are the originating places of this process, and what forms does it take? There are, I think, three that are so obvious and constant that they can be named and described. But even these are to be recognized as functions of a force that is pervasive, and underlies them all. This basic force is a loss of the sense of the particularity of the church, the consequent transformation of the role of the minister into that of a "religious leader," and the still consequent shift whereby the ministry is regarded as a "profession" and theological education has come to understand its task as "professional education". Had this shift in meanings not occurred the three specific forces I am about to name could hardly have been effective. But the shift has occurred -- and the minister is macerated by pressures emanating from the parish, the general church bodies, and the "self-image of the minister."

The Parish: The very vocabulary that has become common is eloquent. The parish has a "plant," its nature or purpose is specified in terms of a "program" for which a "staff" is responsible to a "board." The "program" is evaluated in terms of palpable production which can be totaled with the same hard-boiled facticity as characterizes a merchandising operation -- and commonly is. The minister, like it or not, is the executive officer. I know of a synod of a church body which, wishing to put the matter of financial support of the "program" of the church on a less obviously allocated basis than characterizes the property tax office of the municipality, came up with a "fresh" idea: each should give as the Lord had prospered him -- the synod called it the "Grace system"!

This systematization of the holy betrays, if nothing worse, a peculiar atrophy of a Protestant sense of humor. Our theology of stewardship is pragmatically translated into terms and operational devices which deny the theology we affirm. The path to such practices is easily discernible. After a generation or two in which paid quartets, in the better-heeled parishes, praised God weekly as surrogates for the congregation, and professional organizations raised the money for "plant expansion" (all, of course, with a well-oiled unction that would have glazed the eyeballs of St. Paul) it is not surprising that the counsel to stewardship should be preceded, according to some church programs, by an inquisatorial scrutiny of the share of each of the sheep in the gross national product. The reply, of course, is that it works. There can be no doubt that it does. The same reply, however, if made normative for the truth of the entire nature and scope of the meaning of the church would indicate that the theology of prayer ought to take account of the reported correlation between petition and the growth-rate of potted plants.

The Christian community always walks close to the edge of superstition, magic, and the strange human desire to translate grace into nature by a direct and forthright program. There is a relation between an immeasurable gift of grace and the responding gifts of man to advance the institutional celebration of the gospel of Grace. But it is the task of theology, as it ought to be a concern of planned parish preaching and instruction, to witness to this grace in such a way as to raise Christian eyebrows over every perverting proposal to mechanize it.

There is no evidence that policy preserves against perversion. A church in a surplice is as easily seduced as a church in a black robe, or one with neither of these. That the "business of America is business" has bequeathed to us all a vocabulary, a point of view, canons of evaluation that are so deeply rooted in our parishes that perhaps nothing short of a Kierkegaardian attack upon Christendom will suffice for renovation.

The General Church Bodies: What characteristizes the mind of the parish is but amplified, solidified, and given enhanced authority in the larger world of the general bodies. Some years ago it became apparent to some large corporations that they had succeeded so well in fashioning the company man into symmetrical functionaries of an order that a danger was recognized. A few eccentrics were deliberately sought out, cherished, protected, and asked to give themselves to reflection uninhibited by charts.

Such sardonic maturity has not yet arisen within the churches. The fantastic rigidity, the almost awesome addiction to "channels," the specialization of concern and operation that characterize our structure have made us, in large part, prisoners of accredited mediocrity. "The wind bloweth where it listeth," but when it does a shudder of embarrassment racks the structure from top to bottom. If another J. S. Bach should occur in my church and succeed, as the first one did, in giving a new deep piety a new and adequate voice, he would have to plead his case before elected or appointed arbiters whose authority ex- ceeds that of the consistory of Cöthen or Leipzig -- and whose general cultivation is less.

The informing and edifying of the church through charismatic endowments by the Holy Spirit is not incompatable with the doctrine of One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic church. But it is incompatable with the church order that takes its model from the more banal children of this world. We affirm the charismatic in piety and imprison it in established structures in practice. It has actually come to pass that our churches maintain a disciplined cadre of inspirational operators. These persons are on call for whatever program the church from time to time decides to accent. They can blow any horn one hands them. If the program involves support for educational institutions they stand ready to declare across the broad reaches of the land in districts, conferences, and parishes that "the future of the church hangs upon the success of this venture in education." And when at the next general convention the scene shifts to rural missions, the same enthusiasm, now supplied with a changed terminology and directed toward a changed goal, is sent out on the road from general headquarters. One has heard this interchangeable vivacity vocalize so many and such various projects that he is reminded that the salesman is a category that can be defined quite independent of the product he sells. Whether his sample case contains hammer handles or lingerie is nothing to the point.

Self-image of the Minister: The transformation of the minister’s self-image is the third force contributing to the maceration of the minister. The effects of this at the deepest levels of the man’s personal life can hardly be spoken of in terms that are too grave. For this image is, strictly, not a professional or merely personal or even church-official image. It is rather an image given with the office of the ministry in and by a church in obedience to the command of the Lord of the gospel. The "Ministry of the Word and Sacraments" belongs to no man; all believers belong to it. And among these some are acknowledged as having been given a charism undergone preparation, and announced their intention to serve the gospel in this particular ministry. In the full gravity of this gift, task, and intention a man is ordained to this ministry, charged in specific terms drawn from the dominical imperative faithfully to fulfill it. The self-image of the minister is then more than a self-image; it is an image of the vocation and task of the self gathered up into a gift and a task that was before the self came to be, having a reality that transcends while it involves the whole self, and which will be bestowed upon the church by her Lord when this particular self is no longer of the church in history.

Fragmentation has become a common term in psychology and sociology. But what has happened to the ministry is all that term suggests and reports, but more painful and accusatory because of the gravity of that public bestowing and receiving of the Lord’s Ministry of Word and Sacrament. A vase can be fragmented; maceration is what a human being feels when fragmented.

It is hard for the minister to maintain a clear vision of who he is when he is so seldom doing what he ought. His self-image of a servant of the gospel has been slowly clarified, carefully matured, informed, and sensitized during years of preparation. At the time of ordination the church publicly and thankfully acknowledged a gift, a discipline, and a man’s intention to assume a task.

All of this is under constant attrition in the present form of the churches. And thus it comes about that honesty in the fulfillment of the minister’s central task is gradually laid aside in favor of sincerity. Sincerity is a term a man uses to enable himself to live with himself when he has uneasy questions about his honesty. There remain, however, deep down but insistent, voices and remembrances that tell the man what is going on, tell him that the exchange is not a good one. And the enthusiastic readiness of parish and church to accept, even to applaud, the shift makes the suffering of the minister the more acute.

There have been a number of studies, some widely publicized, in which attention has been called to the large number of crackups of various degrees of severity among the clergy. The supporting testimony is impressive. The reasons most often suggested are too much work, too long a day, too various a complex of problems and duties, too unremitting a drain on emotional and mental stores, insufficient opportunity to lift the clerical nose from the parish grindstone.

While these facts are present and powerful, the sum of them does not, I think, get to the heart of the matter. They are too obvious, too shallow; they do not designate what comes out -- stumbling, embarrassed, and often gestured rather than stated -- when one observes and listens with attention. From many hours spent with many former students I have learned that there is a constant fact in the variety of their confessions, overt or oblique.

These men are deeply disturbed because they have a sense of vocational guilt. This guilt is so strong, so clear, and so deeply sunk in their central self-consciousness that one knows with an immediate impatience that no diminution of hours or other rearrangements of outer life can have decisive effect.

This sense of guilt has an observable content. A minister has been ordained to an Office; he too often ends up running an office. He was solemnly ordained to the ministry in Christ’s church. Most of the men I know really want to be what they intended and prepared for. Instead they have ended up in a kind of dizzy occupational oscillation. They are aware of the truth of what Karl Barth said in one of his earliest addresses, "Our people expect us to take them more seriously than they take themselves, and they will not thank us if we do not do so." Most ministers are aware that it is a tough and delicate labor to insert the lively power of the Word of God into the rushing occupations and silent monologues of men. They recall with a sense of joy the occasions when honest work and unhurried reflection gave a strange victory to their efforts. But these occasions are infrequent, set amid great stretches of guilt-begetting busyness.

What, then, is to be done? From each of the designated constituents of the problem a different response is required. These are the professors in schools of theology, the parishes, the officials in the general bodies, the ministers themselves. Upon professors in the schools of theology there rests an immediate and pressing responsibility. Our clear perception of the demolition wrought upon our labors with students, combined with the respect accorded us by our churches, urges us out of silence and toward articulate protest. We ought to be more courageous, critical, and noisy advocates for our students, more concerned protectors of their reflective future. Our intermural grousing has now the obligation to leap over the wall and seek to make itself heard among parishes and in the offices of church officialdom. For it is there that the machinery of maceration and the pounding of program is set in motion.

It is, I think, simply not true that the parish demands of its minister that he become simply an executive officer of multiple activities. It is likely to accept, support, and be deepeningly molded by the understanding of Office and calling which is projected by its minister’s actual behavior. It will come to assess as central what he, in his actual performance of his ministry and use of his time, makes central. And when this tightening and clarification of the minister’s conception of his Office discloses, in the reflective depth and penetration and ordering skill of the sermon, where his heart and mind are centered, the parish will honor this pastoral obedience to "take them more seriously than they take themselves."

The officialdom of the church, and how it may be penetrated by a knowledge of the plight of the minister, presents a more difficult -- because more subtle -- problem. When one beholds the staff-generated devices dreamed up by boards and commissions to focus the attention of the church-in-convention assembled upon their particular programs, one wonders if the motivation is exclusively either educational or evangelical. Have these members of promotional staffs not fallen under the sovereignty of Parkinson’s Law, whereby whatever is tends to persist, whatever does is driven by dynamics strange to its purpose to do more and wider and bigger? Must not each "program" outshout the other in order to dramatize an urgency psychologically necessary for its own sense of importance, if not priority?

One does not have to operate at the top level of the ecumenical movement to suspect that the "nontheological factors" there exposed as powerful in church and theological history are operative along the whole front. It is no ingratitude toward my own family in Christendom that I take delight in the fact that there are about one hundred million of us! And the dynamics of this delight will not bear too much scrutiny in terms of the truth of the gospel, the obedience to Christ, and other such properly elevated rubrics.

We may and perhaps ought to be impatient about the world’s quip that when a man becomes a bishop he will never thereafter eat a bad meal, read a good book, or hear the truth. But from within the family we dare a smile. For in the very generality that determines executive office there is a power that disengages from the common table of parish existence, from the direct and pathetic book of the common life, and from the moments of sudden truth that stun and depress and exalt the minister on his ordinary round.

Finally there is the minister himself; and in what follows I appeal to him from the same center as has informed these lectures on preaching. He, in his private and imperiled existence, must fight for wholeness and depth and against erosion. By a sheer effort of violent will he must seek to become his calling, submit himself to be shaped in his life from the center outward. He need not be slapped into uncorrelated fragments of function; he need not become a weary and unstructured functionary of a vague, busy moralism; he need not see the visions and energies and focused loyalty of his calling run, shallowly like spilled water, down a multitude of slopes.

Certain practical, immediate, and quite possible steps can be taken. The temptation to improvised, catch-as-catch-can preaching, for instance, can be beaten back by calculated ordering of one’s study. The most profitable period in my own parish preaching came about because I did that. What I learned in seminary about Paul of Tarsus, Paul’s Christology and ethics, was not sufficient either for the great subject or for the discharge of my preaching responsibility. In one memorable year I determined to bring together concentrated study and actual preaching. Surrounding myself with the best available to me from modern Pauline scholarship I literally lived with this man for six months, directed and taught by Adolph Deissman, James Stewart, Charles Harold Dodd, Robert Henry Lightfoot, J. H. Michael, and others.

Because the Philippian letter is the most direct, personal, and uncomplicated of Paul’s letters I resolved to preach straight through it, informing and correcting exegesis from the Greek text by the findings and insights of historians, exegetes and theologians.

The result of this study and preaching -- extending from Epiphany through Trinity Sunday -- was the establishing of a love affair with this towering and impassioned "man in Christ." I came to know him with the quick and perceptive delight one has in a friend. Paul had been fused into an adoring, obedient, proclaiming and explicating totality by the fire of his new relation to God in "this Son of God who loved me . . ." And the informing of all the parts of his writing by that rooted and vivacious new being in Christ, when beheld in concentrated study, opens huge new perspectives in every single verse or section. It is not necessary to add that such an exciting discipline makes quite unnecessary the weekly scrounging for a "text."

It was a sort of added dividend that when Holy Week and Easter came around, progress through the letter had landed me precisely at Philippians 2:1-11: "And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him. . ." That section, explicated on Maundy Thursday, Good Fridays and Easter, had gained a momentum from the twelve preceding sermons on chapters 1 and 2 that was both powerful and full for the preacher and for the people.

The foregoing is an illustration, it is not a prescription. Each man must order his life from the inside, and each must order it according to the requirements of interest, nature, and parish situation. But order it he must.

Part Two

In our effort thus far to describe and illustrate the role of the imagination in preaching, we have considered two aspects of its power: the investiture of the Christian moral vision with such sensibility as sometimes enables it to enclose within the meaning of the Word of God the subtler perditions that stalk men’s lives; and the power to behold, and in part reenact, the architectonic structure of grace that is the subliterary matrix out of which the witness emerges.

In this lecture I propose to set out on the trail of two other, and trans-intellectual, powers of the imagination; and I confess that I am by no means certain of my ability to catch them in language. But the role they play in the preparation of the mind for preaching is so large and pervasive that it were better to fail to do adequate justice to them than to ignore their existence. It ought not be necessary to say that the process I am about to describe does not commonly take place in the absence of fundamental disciplines in theological work. In such disciplines freight is delivered at the unpublic back door of the mind, and is undramatically stored in the basement; it nonetheless determines what gets on the shelf and over the counter. Exegesis, and biblical-introductory studies do not guarantee a rich life to the imagination. But they do supply the mind with solid and responsible stuff, tighten thought to the particularity of the biblical speech, discourage that too-quick translation of quite specific terms into feckless generalities which makes much preaching both dull and inaccurate -- and dull because inaccurate.

Let us, therefore, boldly plunge into the first of these with an experimental proposition. If the outcome does not secure the fox it may at the least indicate the direction of his flight when last seen. The imagination has the power to extend intelligibility beyond the launching site -- where one can see and hear clearly, experimentally confirm confidently -- into nonverifiable orbits which are nevertheless continuous with the instantly intelligible.

Concrete analysis alone can be useful here. I ask you therefore to consider the first twenty-seven verses of chapter 1 of St. Paul’s Philippian letter. It was as a parish pastor preaching my way straight through this Epistle in a series of sixteen sermons that I first became aware of this orbit-tracking power of the imagination.

These verses are a rhetorical unit. The apostle, about to send back with Epaphroditus a letter to his particularly beloved Philippians, begins with a wonderfully warm and candid confession of how he feels and prays and hopes about them. He goes on to report that a jail which was intended to stop his witness has provided it rather with strange new occasions. The local situation is filled out in some detail; and in the course of this report, the more moving because unintended, the apostle discloses the mature stance of a man "in Christ" as he lives out his obedience in the midst of envy, rivalry, misunderstanding, and considerable interparty slugging.

Thus far the described situation can count upon confirmatory experience in the life of every man. Not many men, to be sure, win through to the surging victory of Paul of Tarsus as we hear him speak of his life within and simultaneously above a double imprisonment. He was literally imprisoned; and he dismisses the fact with the light phrase, "what has happened to me." And he was imprisoned with no opportunity to talk back to those who, taking advantage of the stilling of a vigorous voice, "proclaim Christ out of partisanship." Knowing what we do about Paul -- his impatience, his quick and searing temper, his earthy inclination to slap down the opposition -- we are the more edifyingly astonished by the utter levity of the phrase in which he sums up the whole miserable business and tosses it away. "Ti gar," he says; and the only idiomatic translation that does justice to that magnificent gesture is "So what!"

Now with all of that every man has experiences which, however limited, make Paul’s victory intelligible. Every man has that which responds to, because it is continuous with,

(From Hamlet’s soliloquy, Hamlet [1603] , Act III, scene ii, lines 66 ff.)

We probably, however, have not been able to manage the apostolic freedom of the "Ti gar," much less the positive, tight-lipped breakthrough to the superlative fact that curls up all lesser facts -- " . . . whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed: and in that I rejoice." Not able, perhaps, to follow; but able to understand.

But follow now the curve of the thought as Paul without a trace of cant or self-consciousness takes off from the confirming field of our common experience and beats out the music of his ultimate joy. The authentic continuity and power of this utterance is enhanced because it is flung in the face of certain persecution, probable death. "Yes, and I shall rejoice. For I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance, as it is my eager expectation and hope that I shall not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If it is to be life in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account." (Phil. 1:19-24.)

It would be untrue to call that passage intelligible to us in the sense that the preceding verses are intelligible. By participation in Paul’s Christ I too know something about liberation from the tyranny of environment, and some measure of liberation from the terrible interior tyranny of my own egocentricity. With both of these I have a measure of continuity in experience. When Paul says that because of Jesus Christ he will rejoice, I too, however faintly, can second the motion -- and out of comparable experience. The trajectory of the man’s thought sends his song of rejoicing into the black heavens of death, and sends back from his reflections upon it a gallant but only partly intelligible music.

This apostolic affirmation often has been wrongly compared with Socrates’ words in the Apology, or these of John Keats:

("Ode to a Nightingale" [written in 1819] , vs. 6.)

It won’t do; and no analogy that does not center upon the concretion of love in Jesus Christ will do. Socrates died with poised nobility because that way of dying was alone congruent with his way of thinking; his surmise about life after death was a rational one, and he died supported by its power. In awful sobriety and total involvement with the ultimate issue he had made his choice. Keats’ gesture is gallant, too; but on different grounds. "O for a life of sensations rather than thoughts," he once wrote to a friend. And now, with the days running out and a fated love hopeless, he longs but to dismiss all possibilities together, to "cease upon the midnight with no pain."

Tautly drawn between life and death, both men decide; on different grounds, to be sure, but on grounds comprehensible from within the generality of human experience. But what meets us in Paul’s monologue about life and death is precisely the absence of any concern with these alternatives as ultimate at all! It is as if the twin tyranny of life and death had been already overcome, as if the monologue were being carried at a high remove. With an air that one can only call evangelical insouciance the man talks about living or dying as a mere tactical consideration of no central importance. The very language has the character of the muttering of a man at a hat counter hurrying to decide for the brown one or the gray one so that he might be off to some matter of genuine importance.

The point of this is that the entire orbit of the utterance is the creation of the gospel; what can be experientially confirmed does not reach the dimension of the ecology of the faith. The speaker is continuous with himself. The Paul whose participation in Christ enables him to talk about death in a way that is unintelligible to the preacher is the same Paul who talks about the praetorian guard in a way that is intelligible. And any understanding of preaching which would ignore the extension of the intelligible line and restrict Catholic witness to the dimensions of accidental experience is a thin and reductive misunderstanding.

For the gospel, when we attend to its rich and various working out in the testimony of the church has a morphology which is vaster than any man’s life and a momentum which unfolds beyond any man’s experience. What we know points the direction for, and in its fragments authenticates, what as yet we do not know. The gospel is not a holy box of divine propositions ranging from simple to complex; it is nothing less than the organic life of God confronting us now here, now there. But wherever we confront it we find it to be like an outcropping of a continuous vein of silver, and years and discipline and prayer and grace disclose its subterranean continuities. Or, to change the figure, it is like a tight unfolding chrysalis whose most huge promise is continuous with its most plain gift. "This, then," said Luther, "is the nature of faith: that it dares on the basis of God’s grace, and creates tranquillity and trust toward Him; and thinks without doubt that God will regard and not forsake it. For true faith doubts not God’s good and gracious will. Such a confronted trust, or repose in God -- that is Christian faith and good conscience in the scriptures. Faith does not demand anything but freely surrendered and joyously daring trust upon his unfelt, untried, and unknown goodness."(W A 10:2, p. 239.)

We conclude then our consideration of the first proposition: that the imagination has the power and, I would now add, the witnessing duty to extend intelligibility beyond the launching site where one can see and hear clearly, or experimentally confirm into non-verifiable orbits which are nevertheless continuous with the instantly intelligible. And add to our basic figure of the ecology of the faith a second drawn from mathematics. Extrapolation is defined as "the calculation, from the values of a function known within a certain interval of values of its argument, of its value for some argument value lying without that interval."

This extrapolation of a fragment of the knowledge of God into its full orbit is precisely the process by which the primitive Christians affirmed that God was in Christ. Distilled out of the centuries of Israel’s experience of the relentless and steadfast mercy of her God is the powerful and pathetic figure in second Isaiah. The shape of that fragment is extended to a full orbit when the community, made a community by the words, the work, the living presence of Jesus, bore witness to the size of the event itself. "God hath visited his people," say the Synoptics. "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us," says John. "For in him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell," says Paul. It is required of the preacher that he so master as positively to reenact this creative process whereby the witness was originally uttered that in his witness to it the epic be not lost in the episodes, the fullness forgotten in the fragments.

All that has been said thus far has been controlled by the figure with which we began -- the ecology of faith. So to understand the faith of the church leads one to understand the preaching task as a function of that context. Added to that in my own life is a strong historical consciousness, the dominant role of biblical theology, the catholic character of a liturgically nurtured piety always providing promptings that are secret because they are of the church’s wholeness. Inevitable, too, that one so placed and formed within the life of the church should practice preaching as an effort to rebuild the topsoil of memory on the eroded fields of faith in the hope that unfurnished poverty might be supplied.

But there are facts before us, and neither the richness of a tradition nor the vigor of a hopeful effort can evade them. Just as theological reflection is today dominated by the fact that the entire mental, emotional and image context of the past is eroded, so a way of preaching proper to that fact must be wrought out. Our preaching, as a matter of fact, is deepeningly directed; not as the New Testament writer has it, "from faith to faith," but from faith to unfaith. Most of my preaching in the last fifteen years has been in academic chapels. And while I know that the student group represents in a more aware way the erosion to which we have alluded, the process is general.

"The world," as Dietrich Bonhoeffer has said, "has come of age." Traditional cultural and intellectual companions of the Christian gospel have been either violently destroyed or gone silently out of mind. The venerable discipline of philosophical inquiry no longer makes affirmations beyond the methodological, has curved inward upon itself. The sheer vitalities of culture, once hailed as redemptive, have for a hundred years been unpacking the logos of contradiction that infects all historical life. The very ethos of religious sentiment has on the one hand become so disenchanted as to assess its former friendliness to Christianity as false, febrile, or indecent, or, on the other, undergone a transformation whereby its terms have been instrumentally debased into techniques for integrating the personality, or into glue to hold the republic together.

("For the Time Being," Collected Poems [New York: Random House, 1945] , p. 410.)

Nothing constructive is accomplished by lamenting the dissolution of structures and sentiments that once were suasions within which the Christian story was relevant. There is, indeed, much that is diagnostic and clarifying in the exposure of their merely suasive and mutable character. The history of Christianity is the story of the waxing and the waning of these tactical and interim alliances. As these have arisen, flourished, affirmed adequacy, they have underlined congruities between the shape of the Kerygma and the shape of the mind and spirit of the age. But these alliances come and go; and knowledge of that fact does not depress the theologian in his work but rather clarifies what that work is, urges it to its doing, and defines its limit.

Protestant theology at this moment is employed in reconstructing its method in open disengagement from all previous alliances. This radical undertaking has been forced upon it by such a multiplicity of facts and forces as would go beyond the scope of these lectures and my competence to describe. But something of their character and force can be suggested by two generalizations: 1) the full range of biblical studies has so profoundly unfolded the matrix out of which the biblical witness was fashioned that the problem of hermeneutics is of absolute urgency; and 2) the very body of reactions and the vocabulary with which our time is aware of itself is so radically strange to the world view of the Bible and to the vocabulary of all previous theological discourse as to force us, both as preachers and as teachers, to fresh foundational work.

For engagement, then, with the powers of irrelevance, incomprehension, denial, and of sheer emptiness, a new work of the imagination is required both of the theologian and the preacher. When an age matures to a point where it displays a radical transference of interest, and when its very language reveals that what former times felt as fact are no longer so felt, then the central task is clearly exposed. Demythologization as a biblical program inevitably begets symbolization as a theological program. When, that is to say, it becomes the effort of biblical theology to penetrate to the divine realities, forms, and intentions that have been temporally invested in reportorial forms available to the moment, it becomes the principal effort of systematic theology to interpret the biblical story in amplest symbolic dimensions. When myth is the term for the story, symbol is its vocabulary.

The possibilities of this way must be responsibly exploited; to do so is the given theological task of our time. And protests against the effort can be constructive only if they participate in the effort, gather up into their own vision the deepening disclosure of the symbolic and transhistorical vitalities of historical fact. Only by a thoroughgoing exploitation of the relation of reported fact and reflectively engendered meaning can the church learn how to bear witness to the mystery of her life. And she need not fear, either, that radical phases of this program which seem to dissolve the very matrix of things given in time and place will prevail for the destruction of her message. For historical fact, while quiet and infinitely patient of flexion, is tough. Historical actuality is deceptively acquiescent, but it will not, like a family dog, roll over and play dead. For there is a built-in dialectic that controls the process of historical interpretation: Fact must be expanded to symbol in order fully to announce fact; and symbol must be rooted in fact in order to retain force as a symbol.

These considerations lead us to the second proposition of this lecture. Ultimate negations generate a strange addressability by ultimate affirmations. It is not proposed here to explain that proposition; its primal spring is nowhere this side of Credo in Deum Patrem Omnipotentem, Factorem coeli et Terrae! It is only proposed to state it, report upon evidences that it is so, and suggest how it specifies for the contemporary preacher his stance and his tactic.

Let us consider these terms in order. Stance is posture assumed in readiness for indeterminate but resolute action. It designates how a man stands in the midst of his time, both a product of his time and, because he has a burden and a duty, alert to address his time. Stance is both poised and utterly incalculable; poised because of a knowledge of what must be done, incalculable because the how of the doing is an emergent of a fluctuant situation. Michelangelo’s Moses has posture and presence, his David has stance.

The posture of the preacher is given in the substance of the faith; where he stands and what he has to say standing there are products of the attested gifts and the million-voiced responses of the centuries of the faith. But the stance of the preacher is determined by the depth with which he is penetrated by and participates in the vitalities of his time. Men of our time will not entertain as a possibility the redemption we proclaim if our stance does not reveal our involvement in the damnations they suffer. Nor will evangelical replies be accredited as possibilities if our presentation of them be not informed by involvement in the questions to which they are addressed. "God Himself Is Present" is no longer a sensible song for a congregation that is regularly addressed as if its members had never felt that God himself is absent! One need not, indeed cannot, go to school to all the lashing literature of our time in which the absence of God is celebrated. But by this means or another one must learn the lessons the schools talk about. One need not necessarily join Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in the Roxy gallery, watch the Rockettes make their peculiar obeisance to the Incarnation in a tinselled Christmas routine, and hear the lad remark, lonely and honest amidst the gurgling delight of the audience, "Good ol’ Jesus would a’ puked!" -- one need not know that particular incident. But one must by some means come to the place where he penetrates with his mind and learns his preaching stance by pondering the meaning of that bitter statement. For that trenchant remark discloses both the appalling insensibility of our time and a strangely persistent longing for righteousness.

Our proposition -- that ultimate negations generate a strange addressability by ultimate affirmations -- requires then a stance learned in existence always open and alive. But a stance is not a sermon. The actual sermon will be the effort we make -- the tactics we employ to set over against the negations, whether they be conscious and articulate or unconscious and weary -- the powers, claims, promises, and gifts of the Christian gospel. If the world has indeed come of age, and in that maturity left behind effective beliefs, remembrances, hopes that were once the humane context in which life heard the message of God’s redemption, how can one preach at all? What possible tactic is there for relating possibilities to negations?

A clue is given in an observation. If one reflects upon the literature of the last three decades or so in which Christian terms have been employed to suggest the redemptive truth of the Christian faith, he makes an important discovery. Neither the presumed religion of Jesus, nor isolated episodes of his career, nor specific items in his teaching are the substance being pondered by the writer. What is being pondered, and that with a power and a fascination altogether singular, is the congruity between the entire story as objectively related and celebrated in the Christian church, and the whole story of man’s passional subjectivity. The mighty descending, crucified, and ascending curve of love’s restorative action as it invades, reenacts, and lifts back up to itself the entire human situation -- this is the central theme of an impressive body of contemporary reflection. I name here a few instances, the list could be very long: He Came Down From Heaven and Descent Into Hell, by Charles Williams. Christmas Oratoria, with its poetic refashioning of the Kierkegaardian dialectic, and For the Time Being, by W. H. Auden. T. S. Eliot concludes his Four Quartets with lines which are both a summary of his analysis and an announcement of a salvation:

(The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 [New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1952] p. 144)

These lines are a tight counterpoint in which a big theme is condensed: life’s affirmative fire is only to be redeemed from self-incineration when it is met by, controlled, and purified by the God who is a consuming fire, in his concreteness of love in Christ ("I come to bring fire upon the earth") and mediated by the Spirit,

And so, writes a contemporary poet,

There is a preacher in the Christian church, dead now for a hundred years, who better than any other can be our tutor as we seek to learn how to preach to our time. He saw with absolute clarity that preaching is neither the bestowal of faith nor the heavenly confirmation of human truth. He understood it as a kind of "indirect communication" whereby the sluggish self is made passionately aware that its highest perfection is its need for God. Sören Kierkegaard understood that preaching cannot deliver what the need discloses; it is the function of preaching rather so to tell the story that God’s deed becomes a possibility for man’s need. He understood that preaching is a kind of contrapuntal exercise directed not primarily to a cognitive relation to the declaration, but directed rather to such evocation of the passion of the self that it shall "will" to become the truth which Christ was and is.

There is a contemporary poem which illustrates our proposition: that ultimate negations generate a strange addressability by ultimate affirmations. Its title is "Elegy: Separation of Man from God." In the poem the fact of separation is not only acknowledged, but the terms in which it is objectified are named with stunning precision. The absence of God generates a negative capability to recognize the formal adequacy of God. In the first stanza the bitter identification of opposites suggests the shape and the depth of a need to which nothing less than eucharist will be redemptive:

These errors loved no less than the saint loves arrows

Repeat, Love has left the world. He is not here.

O God, like Love revealing yourself in absence

So that, though farther than stars, like Love that sorrows

In separation, the desire in the heart of hearts

To come home to you makes you most manifest.

The booming zero spins as his halo where

Ashes of pride on all the tongues of sense

Crown us with negatives. O deal us in our deserts

The crumb of falling vanity. It is eucharist.

George Barker

(Oscar Williams [ed.], The Golden Treasury [New York: Mentor Books, 1943], No. 90. Reprinted by permission of Criterion Books, Inc., New York).

In the last stanza the poet invents a series of epithets in which are flung out, in more brutal terms than the ordinary man would permit himself, what nevertheless the ordinary man knows to be his argument with God. The startling reversal in the last line, in which the word God, spelled backward, is dog, utters the promise that time and grace can disgorge the massive need of men’s souls out of their knotted negations, and find again a fierce salvation in the ancient story. Hear the epithets spat out in passion, and hear these current negations declare their kinship with all who, walking in darkness, have seen a great light. Darkness does not make a light out of sheer darkness, but darkness has a way of making light a term of passion.

Sometimes a spontaneous and uncalculated word may be more revelatory than one born of conscious reflection. Not long ago, in a class in systematic theology, I was speaking of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The effort was to disabuse the mind of some students that the doctrine had been imposed as a kind of perverse sophistication upon the assumed "simplicity" of the religion of Jesus. After an indication of the multiple strands in the New Testament witness that made this assumption questionable, and some treatment of the primitive Christian experience of Jesus Christ which invited the mind to other than monodimensional terms for a just understanding of this encounter, we moved on to a consideration of the role of the doctrine in Christianity’s penetration of classical culture. I referred the students to Charles N. Cochrane’s lucid description of this process (In his Christianity and Classical Culture[New York: Oxford University Press, 1944]) and for about half an hour did an enthusiastic recapitulation of Cochrane’s argument: that the doctrine of the Trinity was alone a principle big enough to fill the intellectual, moral, and emotional space left by the waning ideal of Romanitas; and that it had, in fact, accomplished this for many men and for hundreds of years.

There sat before me a student who, in his own experience of an eroded Christian ethos and understanding and in his equally certain longing to find a faith with a magnitude equal to his problems, was a living symbol of millions in our generation to whom the gospel must be preached. When the lecture was finished -- and without meaning, I think, to be overheard -- he uttered a sentence monumental in its meaning for the preacher: "If it were true, ‘twould do!"

There you have it -- both the nature of the contemporary preaching situation and the implied tactic. We can cause no man to permit his life to be determined by the revelation of Jesus Christ as the coming of God to him. We cannot, that is to say, guarantee the victory of the truth by the telling of the story. To accomplish that is the work of the Holy Spirit. But we can so tell the story within the house of negation and emptiness that the great passion lay its hand upon the wan, quiescent, or aggressive passions that the hearer might exclaim, "If it were true, ‘twould do!"

Part One

As we now, in this chapter and the next, inquire into the role of the imagination in preaching, we may seem to have shifted from any further concern with the ideas thus far submitted and to have entered a fresh area of reflection. To do that has not been the intention; it is rather proposed in these two sections to ask and make an effort to describe and illustrate how the notion of faith as maturing in the ecology of the history of the people of God requires of preaching a vigorous and controlled use of the imagination. We have indicated under the figure of ecology in the world of nature the complex and intimate relationships operative in that process whereby Christian affirmations are made in terms integral with their status in the witnessing and remembering community, and also heard in terms which prevent their distortion into rationalistic, moralistic, naturalistic, or psychological categories. In the course of the argument the noetic force of time in the process of apprehension and the significance of the revival of liturgical worship as the church’s pedagogy have been pointed out. The claim has been made that worship which thus fuses the present with the remembered past is the rich and allusive theatre within which Christian affirmations are made with an amplitude proper to their nature, and responses are invited at a level proper to their gravity.

Before we get into the argument at all it is necessary to make clear in what sense the term imagination is here used. This clarification is necessary because the term has been so debased, particularly in discourse about preaching, that it were better not to use the word at all if another were available. But no other word is available. What one must do, then, is strip from the word those connotations which make its popular use perilous for our present purpose and re-present the term in its naked intention.

Imagination in its proper meaning is never an addition, it is an evocation. It is perception, not piquancy. Its work is not cosmetical or decorative; it is a function of percipiency. It is exercised not only in the perception of new qualities in things, but also in the discovery of hitherto unseen relationships between things. Richard Kroner, the Gifford lecturer in 1942, concluded a long chapter on the function of the imagination in the life of faith with this paragraph:

Imagination owes its power to its peculiar nature. It is not, like sensation or intellect, confined to either the realm of sense reality or of intellectual notions and general concepts, but it belongs rather to both realms, and it is, therefore, suited to span the gulf between them. The imagination is at home in the sphere of change as well as in the sphere of changeless ideas; it is rooted as much in the visible as in the invisible world; indeed, its peculiar excellency consists exactly in its capacity of making visible what is invisible and of detecting the invisible element in the visible situation. Imagination binds together what the thinking separates; or, more precisely, it maintains the original unity of the elements separated by abstract thought. Imagination is as realistic as it is idealistic; it is as sensuous as it is intellectual; it moves in a medium in which the extremes are still united and undissolved. (The Primacy of Faith [New York: The Macmillan Company, 1943], p. 138.)

We move even closer to the definition of the role of imagination in preaching when we proceed from that judicious statement about general religious discourse to affirm that specifically Christian discourse is intrinsically needful of the same thing. For the central revelation of God in an Incarnation of grace in a world of nature inwardly requires that all discourse inclusive of these two magnitudes is of necessity dialectical. And imagination is the name for that category-transcending and fusing vision and speech which is proper to the given character of God’s self-disclosure. The problem of proper Christian statement may be put in another way.

The "power and the truth" of the Christian gospel is in the level and the dimensions of its assault upon the hurt God-man relationship. When once it is acknowledged that man is a creature of nature who nevertheless cannot settle for the natural and that he is an object of grace who nevertheless must celebrate grace in the natural -- it is at the same time settled that any adequate theological explication must forever be two sided; that is, dialectical. Its statements will always have to walk the knife edge at the frontier or fuse together the magnitudes of nature and grace.

This double character of Christian communication, if lost or blurred by oversimplification, banalization, or moralization, can perhaps achieve a hearing -- but usually at the cost of the truth. Every simple term of the faith must be set forth in such a way that the multiple dimensions of its own content are exposed.

Faith, for an instance, is related to man’s nature and his need. But if presented as simply engendered by nature and need and not as a faith in the faithfulness of God -- that is, as trust in its object -- it is distorted into a psychological reassurance, or degraded into some sort of bonding agent which can then be exploited as a necessary adhesive for the wholeness of the personality.

Love is related to man’s nature and need. But if presented simply as a free-flowing human resource, itself in no need of the fires of redemption, it becomes a name for the most adored illusion ever to seduce mankind. Christian love is born not simply of love itself as expanded, sensitized, or even cauterized by suffering, but out of the love wherewith we are beloved, wherewith we are made "acceptable in the Beloved." In the understanding of the New Testament the passive form of the verb is always the womb of the active.

Hope, in the Christian understanding, is not simply resolute hopefulness. It is a "living hope" to which men have to be "born again." Its source is not in a religiously informed and optimistic reading of history or in the solitary human career as this may be temperamentally disposed toward the bright side of things. Its source is again its object, the "God of hope" who, we pray, may "grant us joy and peace in believing."

Only this double character of the Christian faith and life can make sense of the strange speech of the New Testament. The world is there called our proper place of obedience, the place where we are to "go and do likewise," the theatre in which Christ is to be obeyed by service to "the least of these, my brethren." And this same world as nature and as history is called "no abiding city," a place of pilgrimage. It is given us as our house precisely on the ground that it does not become our home. Every confession of Christendom stresses this double character of the Christian hope. "Not yet . . . yet even now."

These considerations add up to the judgment that while it is possible to make undialectical single statements about general idealism, for instance, it is quite another and a more imaginative task to expose the inner core of faith which looks like and works like idealism but is compounded of utterly different stuff. It is possible to expound simple moralism; it is another matter to communicate that kind of moral gravity which has no faith in morals but, being justified by faith, has a dynamics for moral responsibility that is forever confusing to the moralist! It is possible to make a moving sermon out of "bear ye one another’s burdens." It is also possible to make a second equally moving sermon out of "every man must bear his own burdens." The task is considerably complicated however by faith’s knowledge that both statements are fused and made concrete in a burden bearer of God’s own choosing. "Then Jesus, knowing that He came from God and went to God, took a towel and girded Himself and began to wash the disciples’ feet."

Because preaching presses for a God-determined and Christ-realized ethicality, and because the gift of grace whereby this possibility is bestowed is ensconced in a holy story, the character of Christian preaching is a unique kind of discourse. Current philosophical preoccupation with language analysis cannot, indeed, say what this discourse should be. It can, however, by its critical scrutiny designate the differences between propositions aimed at logical cognition and propositions aimed at the exposure of specifically the Christian and Christianly-ethical alternative.

Paul Holmer, in his article on "Kierkegaard and Ethical Theory," (Ethics, an International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy, Vol. LXIII, No. 3 [April, 1953] , p. 63.) analyzes the difference in type of discourse between ". . . those who claim cognitive significance for ethical claims and those who claim ethical and religious and metaphysical significance for logical discourse." In his exposition of Kierkegaard’s writings on ethics, Mr. Holmer speaks as follows:

By an elaboration of two propositions I hope to illustrate the role of the imagination as it has been defined and asserted to have a proper role in preaching. The first proposition is this: that imagination invests the specifically Christian moral intelligence with perceptive sensibility.

There are places in the scripture where this "logos obtaining within subjectivity" must operate to make the mind permeable to central meaning. When Isaiah protests that "the heart of this people is fat," he is lamenting something that cannot be equated with mere intellectual lethargy, recalcitrance, or even moral perversity. He is reporting a particular instance of what is general enough to have caused the ancient Litany of the church to cry:

There are dynamics of damnation resident in prosperity, and they are of so sinuous and powerful a nature as to deserve acknowledgment in a series that includes tribulation, death, and judgment. There is a fat as well as a gaunt way to go to hell. There are stupors that obtain because of the decay, or the sheer blubber-encasement of some natural percipiency. For this situation Isaiah could only say that hearts are fat!

The investigation of the relationship between fat and perception is not a matter, I suppose, that formal epistemology concerns itself with; but in its words about the knowledge of God the biblical account is steeped in it. And if the imagination of the preacher does not pierce through the chinks of formal concepts and inwardly recreate what hides there, the moral heart of the matter will remain inert. Take, for an instance, Moffatt’s vigorous rendering of Eph. 4:17-19. The writer is on the trail of something that shows itself at the level of torpid intelligence, loss of purpose, and the decay of common animal decency. But he knows that these manifestations are symptomatic of some fracture that is below and anterior to them all. He writes, therefore, to ". . . insist and protest in the Lord that you must give up living like pagans, for their purposes are futile, their intelligence is darkened, they are estranged from the life of God by the ignorance which their dullness of heart has produced in them."

There is a difference between a fat heart and a dull heart. The fat hearted are likely to be dull, but all the dull are not fat. There can be a virtuous kind of dullness of heart; a tight-lipped, efficient, decent, and unimaginative refusal to let facts be facts or, rather, a so contented existence within one’s chosen and familiar world of fact that equally obvious but unexpected facts are dismissed with the same brisk impatience as a good mechanic reveals when a bumbling apprentice hands him a wrench when he needs the pliers. It is one among the many values I have for a long time gained from the work of Joseph Conrad that he perceives and pictures this grey kind of damnation with peculiar clarity. Here he is in Typhoon, introducing the Captain: (Joseph Conrad, "Typhoon," Portable Conrad [New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1959] , pp. 1, 207. Reprinted by permission of J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., London.)

The captain’s ship was on her way to a port with some cargo and 200 Chinese coolies returning to their village after a few years of work in tropical colonies. When the typhoon struck, these men, trapped in a lower deck amid a catapulting inferno of loose sea chests and other gear, were pounded to a wounded mass of misery. And all the time, as during the crucial hours before, the captain simply stared at the falling barometer in sheer refusal to open his stolid mind to the knowledge of what, even before the storm came, he ought to have done. Conrad has, in the body of the tale, the following paragraph. It speaks of the China Sea and of a captain; it also speaks of the deep and undramatic damnations wrought in the world by the dull and heavy-lidded men of good will who will not look!

There is a second way in which this proposition -- that imagination invests the specifically Christian moral intelligence with perceptive sensibility -- authenticates itself. We cannot come at it more bluntly and accurately than Buffon did: "The style is the man himself!" Suppose that the substance of the sermon is a section from one of the Epistles of St. Paul. The substance and the style are here so wedded that the full-blooded personal substance of what the man is saying cannot be apprehended if the imagination has not been quickened and informed by the style of the utterance. There are ways of saying this, but we shall be better instructed if we test Kroner’s statement that "Imagination maintains the original unity of elements separated by abstract thought" by testing it against a concrete instance of the Pauline style.

In the whole of scripture there is perhaps no passage in which is so tightly compressed and interwoven a more various company of massive ideas as in the eighth chapter of Romans. To make a unity out of that complexity, a symphony out of that baffling polyphony of powerful voices is a task before which the dissecting intelligence feels its incompetence. And yet one has to know little of Paul to know that he, who wrote this, was in no confusion. His mind, though intricate in its matter and process, was no chaotic jumble of high epigrams. The task then is to seek from the inside of that passage its vital motif, its invisible cohesive element. And it is in this task that the imagination, if it has been informed by acquaintanceship with the ways of men as immemorially they have uttered in speech their turgid and passionate hearts, may silently and in strange ways come to an apprehension of what otherwise eludes the mind.

With the character of that passage in Romans in your memory, consider this: that there is here exhibited a quality of the mind in its working which is not permeable to the merely analytical intelligence. Here is a quality that inheres as much in the how of a man’s speech as in the what of it. The prose is forward leaning, eager, exuberant -- a manifestation of that end-over-end precipitedness that Deissmann remarked in Paul’s writing, and caught in the phrase "his words come as water jets in uneven spurts from a bottle held upside down!" By imaginative association of this peculiarity of Paul’s prose with other evidences of this quality in experience we can come close to knowing what it was that made him write so. And when we know that, we shall perceive in this particular instance the value claimed for the imagination in our first proposition -- perceptive clarity. For is not this exuberance precisely what nature regularly exhibits at every moment of arriving at something? A horse runs with a new rhythmic vitality when he turns the last curve and straightens out on the home stretch. This vitality is due not only to the drive to win but arises out of something elemental -- the combination of joy and release, the sudden realization of a long and burdening task almost done. An intricate piece of music draws its diffuse parts together in its last pages and in a muscular and positive coda resolves its far-wandering voices. Mighty Burke, when he "arrives" at the end of his persuasive paragraphs, gathers together his powers of thought and language for coalescence into final words of authoritative eloquence.

To have "gotten through" to have come to the end, to sense the laborious process of "working toward" about to break through into an "end achieved," is a feeling we all know. I once worked in a shop where it was my job to operate an electric drill, boring holes at marked intervals in four-by-four timbers. For the first three and half inches, it goes its way with a steady, dull growl. And then the sound becomes more open, the machine gains speed, small splinters fly as the bit bites through the last solid stuff and spins and whines with singing ease. All "arriving," all completion has this quality, whether it be a four-inch timber, a symphony, a running horse, or a work of the mind. Can you, I wonder, have failed to observe that our minds have this quality in their working? -- or can we fail to catch the tempo of "arriving" in these paragraphs of the apostle? For thirty-four verses Paul’s powerful mind twists and turns and torments with as mighty a complex of ideas, actions, heavenly wonders as ever lived together in a sane man’s mind. His language, like thought, is muscular, contorted, and tense -- but always leaning forward . . . boring . . . boring into the hard deeps of his great subject. And then, at the thirty-fifth verse, "at last he beats his music out" in that amazing march of affirmations: "What shall we say to these things? . . . . If God be for us, who shall be against us. . ." and passes into that song of intolerable joy that ends the chapter.

Here is imagination operating exegetically to do for a passage what studious mastery of its individual parts could never accomplish. For the imagination understands that this chapter is not only argument but adoration, not a series but a sequence, not an order but an organism. Meanings "by the way" are only to be understood from the peak of spiritual song which is the brave conclusion. The ideas here are not unrelated equals pitched into a rhetorical concatenation by enthusiasm; here is, rather, the sovereignty of grace battering its way to victory through all the torments and doubts and opacities of this man’s embattled soul.

In a second proposition it is possible to state how the imagination, immersed in the Pauline substance and peculiar style, works to prepare the preacher for more lively and fuller utterance of the writer’s intention. The proposition is this: Imagination is the process by which there is reenacted in the reader the salvatory immediacy of the Word of God as this Word is witnessed to by the speaker.

The peculiarity of the style mirrors the fierce dialectic set up in the psyche by the invasive Word. The strange jump, the quick, unself -conscious corrections, the contradictions -- these, which bring pain to the teacher of composition, bring theological light to the preacher. The natural-religious man can make a clean explication of his case; and the beatified child of grace could, presumably, write untroubled prose descriptive of his life in God. But the Epistles of Paul stand at the intersection of nature and grace. They are the utterances of a man drawn taut between the huge repose of "a man in Christ" and the huge realism of a man of flesh and earth. It’s the same man at the same time bearing witness to an inseparable movement of faith who can say: "Wretched man that I am. . . . There is therefore now no condemnation." "I don’t care what you think of me. . . . I am troubled about what you think of me". Work out your own salvation in fear and trembling because no man can work out his own salvation and does not have to, for God is at work in you!

Preaching dare not put into unbroken propositions what the tormented peace of simultaneous existence in nature and grace can utter only in broken sentences. What God has riven asunder let no preacher too suavely join together. When we find, as we regularly do, that Paul stops the forward rush of active-voice statements to crack the integral structure of the affirmation with a joyous and devout regrounding of everything he is saying in the ultimacy of the passive voice, then we are obliged to stop with him. The salvatory power of the Word of God is eloquent precisely at the embarrassed halt. Where grammar cracks, grace erupts.

"I know," says Paul. And then he reflects upon what he knows, how he came to know it, and what kind of a religious confidence it was within which such knowledge occurred. The reflection stops the assertion cold, and he writes, "I mean, rather, that I have been known."

"I love," says Paul. And then he reflects upon how he came to the point where he can say that, by virtue of what startling and reconstitutive convulsion it has been made possible, and he stops the active voice in the remembrance of ". . . this Son of God who loved me, and gave himself. . .

"I accept," says Paul. And then the reflection! And in the course of it the remembrance of the forgiving madness of the Holy which is the creator of all sanity, the huge and obliterating acceptance by God which empowers all acceptances among men. The passive both destroys and recreates the active in its own image; and the Christian life is spun on the axis of this holy freedom whose one end is sunk in the accepting mercy of God, its other end in the need of man for an ultimate acceptance.

This transformation of the realm of the active by the power of the passive is a key not only to isolated fragments of Paul’s witness, but also to an understanding of the man’s total bearing within the world of nature and history. A peculiarly illuminating instance of this transformation is the memorable passage near the end of the Philippian letter. "Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things."

This paragraph, occurring as the summary of the argument of the entire Epistle, is strange. It’s almost as if Paul had forgotten what he had written, or taken back what he had so passionately affirmed, or suddenly replaced his intense and consecrated gaze by a genial and relaxed smile. For three chapters he has hacked away at the adequacy of all the confidences and solidities of religion, morality, culture. I count everything as loss . . . even as refuse, he says -- and drills through to the "surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. . . . that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead."

And then the shift. From the packed and intense inwardness of that statement, which locates the dynamics of the faith-full life of the Christian within the enacted morphology of the Incarnation and resurrection he passes, after sundry personal and admonitory asides, to the blithe and humane: "Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely. . .

This change in tone is not a shift in center. It is, in fact, not a shift at all. It is simply the language of a man who raises his eyes from the center to the circumference. It is the maturation of centered faith into a kind of evangelical humanism. It is rhetorical celebration of a basic Christian paradox: The way to breadth is by the road of narrow concentration; the road to beauty, graciousness, justice is a road that begins with the beauty of holiness, the graciousness of Grace, the justice of judgment. The really humane is a function of the fully human; the fully human is beheld and bestowed in the new man who is the second Adam who, obedient in Gethsemane, restores to God and to himself the first Adam, faithless in Eden.

These too brief samplings of the Pauline style, while sufficient perhaps to make our formal point, suggest further and more subtle things to be learned from the Apostle to the Gentiles. To these we shall give some attention in the next. But these do suffice to bring under question the venerable practice of preaching from isolated texts, or even brief pericopes. This practice, perilous enough when exercised upon the Gospels, is intrinsically disastrous when applied to the Epistles of Paul. For to a degree unmatched in the world’s literature, anything the man wrote has to be made luminous in the glow of everything he wrote. The apparent unsystematic of his language must be inwardly controlled and ordered by the central systematic of his passion. And he is the first to protest that this passion is a passive; that it is God’s before it is his, and that it is his only because God’s passion became a historical fact in a locatable garden.

It is obviously possible for many ministers to keep separate their theological reading and reflection, and their preaching. Given the leaky structure of the human mind whereby contents of one area are regularly sloshing over unto others, this consistently maintained separation is an unusual feat. In trying to account for it I propose to say some things in the last lecture about practical facts in modern American church life which operate to encourage, if not to demand this deadening and guilt-begetting circumstance.

In this lecture I am proceeding on the assumption that the minister really knows that theology and preaching belong together, wants help in keeping the marriage alive and, while aware of the strain on the brain involved, is willing to endure it. The help proposed is to affirm that there is significance for preaching in the contemporary search for theological method, designate and describe an aspect of that search by reference to an impressive discussion of it, and finally delineate what its findings suggest for the public declaration of the Word.

The task of theology, as I understand it, is to make statements which clearly, intelligibly, and in just relationship set forth the content of the Christian faith as that faith is known and celebrated in the church. This definition requires that we understand theology both as a content and a task. It is a content because there is a sameness in the issues, divine and human, which it talks about, and a continuity in the substance of what it affirms about them. But it is the purpose of such statements to be intelligible; i.e., to say what is said in such a way as to communicate clearly to another mind precisely what the claim is. And because this activity goes on within a world where canons of clarity, requirements of intelligibility, and the nature of immediate human needs are in constant flux, the task of theology is a never-ending one.

In his Seventeenth Century Background Basil Willey asks why it was that "explanations of things which were satisfactory to one century were not satisfactory to another." To explain means to "make clear," to "render intelligible." But clarity and intelligibility is not a static quality of a statement; it is rather a quality of acceptability in a statement which quality is determined by the entire culture. "An explanation commands our assent with immediate authority when it presupposes the ‘reality,’ the ‘truth’ of what seems most real, most true. One cannot, therefore, define ‘explanation’ absolutely; one can only say that it is a statement which satisfies the demands of a particular time and place." (Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background [New York: Columbia University Press, 1942], p.13)

The current search for a proper theological method is surely due to the fact that our generation finds older "explanations" simply not clear, intelligible, or in just proportion. There is a "disharmony between traditional explanations and current needs." Statements of one period are "felt as fact" in virtue of their congruity with the spirit, practice, and basic assumptions of a time; they are not "felt as fact" by another period because, in the unstoppable running of water over the dam, the spirit, practice, and basic assumption of a time became altered. The degree to which the common life is aware of this alteration has nothing to do with the case. That is why, to stay within our immediate field of preaching, justly celebrated sermons of thirty years ago, while admirable in terms of craftsmanship and witnessing vivacity, cannot be heard now as they were then. They make statements that are no longer "felt as fact"!

A proper theological method will be one that meets these conditions:

1. It must operate open-eyed in the midst of the problem of hermeneutics, or principles of interpretation, as these are propounded by the biblical record. I am assuming, of course, that the earliest record of what men affirmed the Christian faith to be is admitted as having central status.

2. It must operate with a kind of epistemology which is appropriate to the kind of events and claims which have been clearly generative, formative, and sustaining of the Christian faith and community. I choose a specific example of the contemporary search for a proper theological method not only because of its intrinsic responsibility and impressive force but because, having come to life in this school, its right to be heard will not be lightly questioned.

In 1957 Richard R. Niebuhr published his Resurrection and Historical Reason. (Richard R. Niebuhr, Resurrection and Historical Reason [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957], p. 49) The argument of this book constitutes, I believe, the opening of a fresh and exciting period in American theological discussion. It does this because it is profoundly and accurately aware that the kind of thinking which declared Jesus Lord and Christ by his Resurrection from the dead is a kind of thinking which is a function of the historical consciousness of the community within which that claim was made. It affirms, further, what fifty years of critical biblical and historical and theological studies have made completely clear: ". . . that Christ and resurrection are inseparable, and the old dichotomy of Jesus of History -- Christ of Faith does not solve this problem; it only dissolves Christ and the Church."

The theological method for which Niebuhr makes a solid and persuasive plea is so clearly set forth in certain of his own summary sentences that by putting several of them in sequence the scope and rationale of his proposal is plain. Says Niebuhr:

In several chapters following this stated program the writer describes and analyzes nineteenth century and current ways of relating ourselves to the historical Jesus, and gives particular attention to the options elaborated in the work of Karl Barth, Rudolph Bultmann, and John Knox. He finds none of them to be adequate, and all inadequate for varieties of the same reason: they do not take seriously the kind of knowledge of Jesus the Lord which the Resurrection record assumes. Barth, because he makes an attempt ". . . to answer the methodological and historical problems raised by the nineteenth century by foreclosing all discussion of epistemological questions and insisting that the subjectivity of Jesus Christ, the God-man, is the only important reality confronting the mind of man." Bultmann’s program of demythologization is assessed as inadequate because "Faith is oriented not on the picture of Jesus, but on the instantly proclaimed Word; it arises not in memory of the past, but in the eschatological moment without past or future." And further, ". . .the real purpose of historical investigation is the discovery of new dimensions, not in the past, but in the historian himself." New Testament theology is thus disqualified from playing a constructive role in the forming of a theological method which shall take seriously the problem of faith and history, and particularly this faith, rooted as no other religious faith is, in the very concreteness of history, and becomes nothing more than ". . . the first permanent expression of the distinctively Christian consciousness, and begs the question of the external history of that consciousness" (Ibid., 57, 58) "thus leaving . . . theology with nothing to discussion except the human need for self-understanding in general."

The work of John Knox is given detailed attention. Its basic thesis is that ". . . the data with which biblical theologians have to deal . . . will become luminous only if they are approached not as simple facts but as events." Event is, to Knox’s mind, the basic category for an analysis of history and the way in which it is known. A historical occurrence is simply an occurrence that was perceived and remembered. In other words, it evoked the response of a historical subject. . . . There can be no a-historical knowledge of a historically revealed Lord, no relationship to Jesus Christ apart from the power of memory or from the community in which that memory is lodged. ⁽Ibid., pp. 62-63.) This method of interpreting the relation of faith and history, operating with the triad -- Jesus Christ • Church § New Testament -- drives the argument, by the power of its internal relations, to declare: "The Resurrection is a part of the concrete empirical meaning of Jesus, not the result of mere reflection upon that meaning. . . . It was something given. It was a reality grasped in faith." (John Knox, Christ the Lord [New York: Harper and Brothers], p. 60.) When, however, one investigates where and when and what this "resurrection-event" really is, what he ends up with is the community’s experience of the Christ-Spirit within it. And so adequate a transcript of the event itself is this "remembering" community that the Resurrection of Jesus is not a datum of faith but a postulate of the community’s experience, and the apostolic narratives of resurrection are superfluous, from the point of men of faith. ⁽Ibid., p. 69)

Niebuhr introduces his own constructive discussion with several statements which are not only a correct report of the biblical-theological situation in our time, but also provide material for our effort to say something useful about the theme of this lecture: what are the requirements for preaching which are suggested by this search for a proper theological method? He writes, "The impasse into which Protestant theology has come through its efforts to give significance to the resurrection tradition shows that the dogma of pure reason does not have sufficient resources to give Protestantism that kind of knowledge of Christian origins that its life and doctrine require." What is necessary, Niebuhr declares, is ". . .a critique of historical reason, a reason that will not seek the possibility of biblical history in the conditions of natural science or idealistic metaphysics, but rather in the answer to the distinctive question, how do we know historical events." (Niebuhr, op. cit., p. 89)

How do we know historical events? That question, standing between the biblical narrative of the mighty acts of God and the existing individuals who look up at us at the moment when, having read, we close the book and begin to preach, is the question. And if the preacher does not ponder it and wrestle with it, exciting and informing his pondering and wrestling with the best resources of biblical and theological labors, then nothing really useful can be done for him. For what does it mean that the declared redemptive power of human life comes to us in a narrative? This: that time is the category of the historical; that because the redemptive power of God has become time, faith-engendering witness cannot be borne to that power save in a kind of preaching which is a rhetorical address to men in their time-determined and time-imprisoned existence.

There is a noetic potency in temporality. Preaching must be such an activity as invites the hearer to suspect a congruity between what is declared to have been done by God in time, and his own self-consciousness as a creature of time. By the term "creature of time" I do not refer only to the fact of duration, clock time, the observable but scarcely exciting fact that there is a before-and-after pattern in human experience. I refer, rather, to a fact that has been observed by every critic of Immanual Kant, that time and space are not comparable categories. Space is a conception. Time is a feeling. It is a word to indicate something inconceivable -- a "sound-symbol" -- and to use it as a notion, scientifically, is utterly to misconceive its nature. In the entire company of older philosophy I know but one profound and reverent presentation of time: it is in the fourteenth chapter of the eleventh Book of St. Augustine’s Confessions. "Quid est ergo Tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio!" (Translation -- What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, I know not [Loeb Classical Library Edition]) It is possible to illustrate this statement about time in many particulars. The most quick and living way is simply to muster, for the evocative and response-begetting power they have, a miscellany from man’s general confessional.

From John Milton’s "Nymphs and shepherds dance no more" to our present century is a long time. And this time has seen a magnificent multiplication of devices, institutions, analgesics, and therapeutics designed to make man, the "time-creature," more content, prosperous, and secure in his "brief and mutable traject," or designed to obscure the fact of death by narcotizing the living as we cosmetize the dead. But the intervening centuries have done nothing to diminish the passion with which men regard mutability and passingness. The passion has become rather less restrained -- for life can become so air-conditioned as to make its contingency seem a huge and somewhat rotten joke.

That distortion of the New Testament witness to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (which carries its distinctiveness clearly stamped upon it) whereby its character has been translated out of particularity to the generality of immortality, makes it increasingly difficult even to declare the hope of the resurrection. For resurrection deals bluntly with man in his temporality -- and claims to overcome it. Immortality deals with man in his ideal non-temporality and essays to persuade him that his actuality is not his reality.

(A. E. Housman, "Could Man Be Drunk?" Complete Poems of A. E. Housman [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1959] Copyright 1940, 1959, by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., publishers. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.)

So it is that the facts break through, and in so doing draw out from men reflections immediate and forceful. As, for instance, the lovely "Epitaph" by Walter de la Mare:

(Walter de la Mare, "An Epitaph," Collected Poems, 1901-1915[New York: Henry Holt & Co., Inc., 1920] , I, 160)

The interpretation of resurrection as merely the persistence of human or divine memories in "minds made better by their presence" can hardly persist beyond the crumbling of the rememberers.

The noetic power resident within the self’s understanding of passingness must, in preaching, be conjoined to the revelationary power resident within a story of redemptive deeds accomplished in sequential, dramatic form, within time and passingness. The congruity of the two magnitudes -- man’s pathos and God’s passion -- both unfolding their power in time and history, is the most general theme of biblical preaching: it is the homiletical counterpart to the "interpretation according to historical reason" for which Niebuhr appeals. If, as he affirms, ". . . one of the indisputable offices of theology is to open the mind of the present community to the way in which the primitive church apprehended the event that became the focus of its self-understanding," so it is an indisputable office of preaching to do the same thing. (It is not necessary for the sake of the present argument to share this chapter’s high evaluation of Niebuhr’s book, nor to consent to Niebuhr’s analysis and judgment upon the ideas of others who are presently busy with biblical hermeneutics. The preoccupation of the entire theological world with this issue is a significant point.)

But not in the same way, for theology and preaching are distinct offices of the church. It is the task of theology to keep categories clean, to explicate the faith of the church in categories which are inwardly fashioned by the particularity of the events and affirmations which are constitutive of the community of the people of God. It is the task of preaching to enflesh these categories with the living, episodic, and anecdotal concreteness of historical and present eventfulness. This concreteness does not deliver its force in a simple melody; it requires, rather, a kind of counterpoint -- voices in such contrapuntal relevancy as shall fuse together the passion from above incarnately become present in order to redeem the pathos from below.

What is required in order to move toward the accomplishment of this? As I now attempt to elaborate several requirements which that task imposes upon the preacher, it will be evident that we are still absorbed in the large figure of speech with which we began: the ecology that determines the fertility of the fields of faith. The single stone of a declaration of a specific grace, or of a promise of power, or of an all-obliterating forgiveness, or of a judgment -- such single stones are set in a ring of remembered mercies. They are what they are; but what they are in their separate brightness gathers a glow and achieves a larger circle of meaning, a certain steadiness of godly fact, when set in the ring of the great story.

Two propositions indicate specifically what, in my judgment, is necessary. First, a reformation of worship whereby the noetic power of time may support the content of biblical preaching. For worship is that activity of the household of God in which the content of the moment is ensconced in the events and the remembered career of the great story. (I have tried to make this clear in another essay during the North American Conference on Faith and Order in Oberlin in 1957. The essay is printed as an appendix to this book. The proceedings were published as The Nature of the Unity We Seek[St. Louis, Missouri: The Bethany Press, 1958]) Worship is personal; but it is never individual. Just as it breaks personal life open to the sweep of the arc of grace in such a way as to gather the person in all the immaculate selfhood of his particularity into the fold of the relentless Shepherd, so, with no loss of existential immediacy, it breaks open the trap of the moment to the power of the possible.

If this prospect means fresh attention to the content and role of liturgy, let us not blanch in free church horror or smilingly relax in liturgical satisfaction. We dare not blanch, for our choice is not, as one of my colleagues is wont to say, between liturgy and no liturgy; the actual choice is between liturgy which may accomplish ecological deepening and liturgy which does not, i.e., between good liturgy and bad liturgy. If the church really is, among other things, the community that remembers Jesus, then liturgy is but the obedience of the practice of the church to the reality of its mind! And we who have grown up within the liturgical tradition dare not relax as if we, by our deeds of preservation, were automatically obedient. For a liturgical tradition, shaped for recollective vitality, may be so disengaged from the glowing stone of the instant Word as not only to fail to enshrine it but actually constitute a devout irrelevancy. Repetition of the mellifluous can become torpor concealed by piety. And often does.

Recall now the evidence, illustrated previously by Niebuhr’s discussion of the current theological concern with the resurrection narrative in the New Testament: that teaching and preaching have not done with this matter. Efforts to contain the meaning of the church’s testimony to the resurrection within various categories of interpretation have, rather, thrust its character as intransigently belonging to the realm of historical reason sharply into the center of the church’s present mind. And suppose now a preacher to this moment who has followed the biblical, philosophical, and historical battles of the past 150 years. Suppose him, further, to be a man who is compelled so to preach the gospel of the Resurrection to the common life as not to betray in his pulpit what he learns in his study. Is it actually possible to declare the dimension of the meaning of the resurrection if that declaration is unsurrounded by, unsupported by, and, in the trans-momentary reality of worship, uninvested with the non-propositional noetic force of historical time? It is possible, yes. It is also possible to speak tenderly to a man who suddenly finds that he has but a few months to live, as if

"He were the first to ever burst Into that silent sea -- -- " but we commonly do not do so.

All things are more bearable if we make a story of them. And ultimate desolutions are made both bearable and significant when the story is the Ultimate Story. That is why man’s time, in the Order for the Burial of the Dead, is inserted not only into its own pattern of passingness, but into God’s time. That is why, whether we honor liturgical continuities or not, we enfold the broken rhythms of existence within a mightier rhythm in the words of Psalm 90:

How the powers of the Christian past are to be related to the living moment so as to help such a central affirmation as the Resurrection of Jesus Christ to bloom in the mind to its indeterminate dimension, I do not clearly know. But I do know that shallowly devised, mood-engendering stimulants to unstructured piety are not helpful. A structure appropriate to this substance, because recollective both of what this substantial affirmation gathers up into itself and of what affirmation and counsels flow out of it, serves to make available to the action of the Spirit the noetic powers resident in historical reason. Hundreds of years of Christian preaching have taken place in such a context; and while it is properly asserted that the erosion from the mind even of the church of the rich referents traditionally clustered about the Easter narratives makes dependence upon them questionable, it must nevertheless be pointed out that a process can be reversed.

There is heartening evidence that a biblical soil-conservation program is presently at work. The following facts support this belief: the participation of the churches in the theological conversations of the ecumenical movement, which perforce have had to find their common starting point and common vocabulary in biblical literature and theology; the growing body of specifically biblical theology, produced by the very vitality of fragmentary and monographic studies. These studies, extracting the differentiation of the parts, and astounded nevertheless by the historical fact that there has been discernible unity transcending them in the mind and life of the church, have thrust into the foreground a fresh interest in the unity of the biblical tradition, and in the doctrine of the church. To these forces from within the churches must be added another from without. An increasing body of contemporary literature has laid hold of old biblical themes, episodes, central terms and symbols because it finds there, presumably, stuff elemental and big enough to contain and furnish forth its message. We remark the curious fact that just as, thirty years ago, the churches had about succeeded in excising Bach and Palestina from the ken of the new generation at the moment college and high school choirs were finding them -- and church schools, afraid of the recondite reaches of the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, beheld their children at school singing "0 Magnum Mysterium" and "Ave, Corpus Verum" -- so, too, the preaching fashion, having become in large part the holy branch office of the local psychiatric clinic, is now confronted with "J.B.," "The Fall," "Christmas Oratoria," and the considerable theological imagery in "Four Quartets."

Easter is not an episode; it is both a culmination and a new beginning. Resurrection is an assertion about God before it is a puzzling reported fact about Jesus. And the persistent heart of the puzzle is due to the fact that the first shines through the second, and has never been understood in the historical mind of the church in any other way. And worship in the church must set that stone in that setting. As, for instance, in the old propers of the missal for Quasi Modo Geniti, the first Sunday after Easter. By an ordered round of readings -- Old Testament, Gospel, and Epistle -- plus the fragments in Introit and Gradual, the church once secured the people against the poverty of the preacher; extended the orbit of this season’s declaration beyond the fugitive inspiration of the moment. The Introit for that day, as indeed for the entire post-Easter season up to Ascension Day, makes clear that the One "with whom we have to do" in the resurrection is God. Here are selections from these Introits:

The Collect for the Day, by the very amplitude of the gift prayed for, makes clear that the deed of God’s power in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is in a continuum of grace whose endless field of operation is nothing less than the restoration of human life to its Godly intention. Profoundest theological assertions in these simple prayers are made a part of the worshipers’ consciousness.

In the Introit the source of resurrection action is stated; in the Collect the scope of resurrection action is acknowledged; and in the Epistle and Gospel lessons which follow, what is required of the hearers is set forth. This requirement in the Gospel lesson (John 20:19-31) is stated not propositionally but in a narrative: the story of the appearance of Jesus, the disbelief of Thomas, and the response of the Lord.

Simply to have these elements in this sequence in the single hour of worship does not, to be sure, guarantee anything at all. What is suggested, however, is that these words of the remembering-church-in-time provide a pattern within which the nature and size of the resurrection faith and promise is secured against reduction and trivialization. Reformation of worship cannot convey faith; it can go a considerable distance toward making clear what the Christian object and substance of faith is.

The second proposition in which I suggest what the quest for theological method requires of preaching is this: the pace of historical reason, whereby ultimate meanings are disclosed, is not the pace at which problems of faith arise; and preaching must be a leading activity of that nurture of the church whereby this is acknowledged and dealt with. That is to say that what the gospel has by way of reply to a man’s problem cannot be proclaimed, disclosed in its salvatory depth, or enfold his problem in its strange reconstitutive power with the same instant clarity and immediacy as marks the problem. What I need is clear, immediate, and pressing: what has been accomplished and is available for my need cannot be packaged and instantaneously delivered as from a holy pharmacy. Problems arise in the lives of individuals, and the terms in which the problems of faith become articulate are a function of the total life of the generation. But the replying instruction into the faith which is the church’s true treasure is not commonly available to human need in the clinking and separate coins of declaration, diagnosis, judgment, and grace. The need and the reply must, in the complex ecology of faith, find their congruity. This seeking and finding have been many times described, and G. K. Chesterton’s account is a particularly moving one:

This process, which is the inner history of every man whose life in the whole weight of its problematic character and its ambiguous self-consciousness has been lived within the sound of the voice of the Christian tradition, has a pace that is slower than the urgent haste of individual perplexities. And in every generation it is the peculiar task of preaching to lay the shape of the healing to the peculiar contours of the hurt. This ministerial task requires a double sophistication and a double pace: the preacher must constantly repossess with the deliberate steadiness of history’s pace the accumulated resources of the fields of faith, and he must at the same time race along with his time in instant knowledge of its lusts and loves, its longing and its lostness. Only thus can he sink the moment’s problems into the accumulated humus of the long history of the people of God.

It is now more than sixteen years since I was called away from a parish and a pulpit to assume the ministry of teaching. That fact is remembered here at the outset because it has determined the substance of these lectures. Lectures on preaching would normally and reasonably be assumed to have been prepared by a regular practitioner of the craft who, having actualized certain convictions about substance and method, has now undertaken to order and articulate his ideas.

That assumption in the present instance is not correct, and on several grounds. The elaboration of these may be a useful introduction to the following hours. During the years I have been a teacher of systematic theology I have continued to preach, most often in college and university chapels. Both foci of my work, that is to say, have been spheres of swirling change. As a teacher of theology one is exposed to and participates in the huge demolition and the tentative theological reconstruction of this twentieth century. As a university preacher one is obliged to declare the thus mauled but persistent message at the very place where the forces which make it difficult to communicate, to hear, and to apprehend, enjoy the most open field, inform the most esteemed disciplines, and have access to the most mobile minds.

I cannot, further, address you out of a confidence matured in almost thirty years of preaching. For I am steadily less confident of the adequacy of the ways I have gone for the time in which we now are, and am quite certain that they will not do in the years ahead. What has been done is not repudiated; it is simply assessed in terms of efficiency and communicative vitality, and found wanting in fresh circumstances. Forms of communication must change as one’s mind and spirit grope toward larger meanings and as one sees the faces that look up at him to be eloquent with fresh problems, apprehensions, loves, hopes. In my city, as in yours, new forms of architecture are springing up to enclose new functions or to enclose old ones in a new way. It means something for every craftsman that these forms celebrate new materials and textures, that there seems to be a fresh delight in sheer cleanliness of line in this cluttered world, that forthright candor of statement is both proffered and received. A building by Mies van der Rohe is similar to the structure of a sentence by Ernest Hemingway. One cannot sermonically address men who produce and live in the steel and glass world of form in ways fashioned out of and for another time. Here, too, form follows function.

Now, therefore, I want to share with you some of the questions I ponder as I try to learn how to preach to my time, and certain ideas which I am weighing in the process of that endless work of obedience.

The first lecture, "The Ecology of Faith," is an effort to illuminate the present situation of preacher and parish by exploring the relational determinants suggested by the science of ecology. The second, "The Search For Theological Method, and Its Requirement of Preaching," is an inquiry into the central meaning of this search, and an effort to suggest how our practice in preaching may be changed by its occurrence. The third, "The Role of the Imagination in Preaching," is a kind of public payment of a debt! If I have learned anything about how to transform a theological assertion into an invitatory religious address, my constant teacher has been the Apostle to the Gentiles. The tight sequences of Paul’s thought are not more characteristic than his amazing leaps; and in my own experiences as a preacher, the open space between the taking-off place and the landing place has been profoundly instructive. The fourth is a continuation of the third, an effort to reflect upon and reenact the delicate process whereby the mind and the imagination move from the place of hearing to the public celebration of the thing heard. The final lecture is but the articulation of a protest directed to those who alone can do anything about what I have called the "Maceration of the Minister." The substance of that lecture is less for the ears of the ministers than for those of the people in our parishes and for the executive officials in our general bodies. I say it in the context of these lectures on the legitimate ground that the macerated minister is operationally restrained from doing what the Lyman-Beecher lectures were intended to help him to do; and on the possibly illegitimate ground that this shout might be amplified from as prestigious a pulpit as is available for me.

Ecology is defined as the science that deals with the mutual relationship between organisms and their environment. As I have reflected upon the many elements that constitute the situation to which Christian preaching is directed I have sought for an analogy big enough and rich enough to do justice to all the trees, and at the same time lure the mind to the forest. The facts of the biological and botanical world seem to supply such an analogy.

On the bank of a river that flows between high hills is a village. It has been there for centuries. The village has made an arrangement with the vernal and autumnal moods of the river: the houses and shops know how much the river rises with the spring runoff of the snow water and with the fullness of the autumn rains. Well up the bank they keep their distance. High in the forest-covered hills, too, a right relationship exists between trees and earth and forest animals and insects. By virtue of a marvelous ecological balance the life of each is regulated by the function of the others. Under the bark of the trees, for instance, there are millions of beetles which, undisturbed, would destroy the trees. But they do not destroy the trees because beetles are food for woodpeckers and the birds devour the beetles in such numbers as to keep the margin safe. On any summer’s day in my part of the country one can hear the birds about their happy ecological business! But one day a great beetle-infested tree so falls upon the soft-mounded earth that its underside is inaccessible to the birds. Thus protected, the beetles proliferate in the rotting timber. They spread from tree to tree now in such numbers that the bird-beetle balance is destroyed.

Tree after tree is attacked, invaded, killed. The first ravaged acre increases to a dozen denuded hillsides. The billions of miles of earth-gripping hair roots die. When the rains come and the melting snow water gathers to a flood, the earth sponge, loosened now, nonfibrous and helpless, pours the water down the slope and with it the accumulated rich earth of unnumbered forest seasons. The old rhythm of the river is broken by a process that began with a strangely falling tree. The shops and houses at the river bank are flooded in the spring because the beetles on the far hills had an uninterrupted cycle of life.

Every situation in which the Word of God is declared in preaching is a place and a moment on the riverbank; and the permeability of that time and place to the declared Word is bound up with the forests, the birds, the beetles, and the waters of history. From Incarnation to culture is a straight line, for the determination of God to embody his ultimate Word places man’s relation to that Word inextricably in the web of historical circumstances. The Word is not naked, it is historically embodied. The hearing situation is not naked either, and culture is the name for that ecological matrix in which the embodied will and deed from above addresses the embodied hearer at every point along history’s river.

The depth, opulence, and vitality of a culture is determined by the fullness with which each episode in thought, feeling, and action is heavy with this ecological matrix. Men may think, feel, and act in ways that are novel, unprecedented, tradition-breaking and still preserve unbroken that power and content of the past whereby the life of culture is enriched. Hawthorne is deeply honored for his role in the articulation of the American character because he was creatively appreciative of what he repudiated and knew to be dead. And Joseph Conrad, a virtuoso among twentieth-century recorders of the demonic potential in the liberated life of the modern man, could write, ". . . for life to be full and large it must contain the care of the past and of the future in every passing moment of the present."

What is to be observed in that statement is the choice of the term care to designate the feeling-tone that pervades a man as he stands at the evanescent borderline between the "not yet" and the "no longer." Care is neither sentiment nor acquiescence; it suggests neither uncritical accumulation nor idealizing evaluation. To care is to cherish because a thing is given, because one has been there, because every field of dishonor or of praise is alive in the rich leaf mold of the unfolding years. This ecology of the spirit is what informs and sings out of memorable utterances which are hauntingly compounded of gallantry and pathos, memorable in virtue of evocative powers that escape analysis.

(Excerpt from "A Sea Dirge," in The Tempest)

Or this, from a Cambridge lecture by Arthur Quiller-Couch: "Is it possible, gentlemen, that you can have read one, two, thee, or more of the acknowledged masterpieces of English literature without having it borne in on you that they are great because they are alive, and traffic not with cold celestial certainties, but with men’s hopes, aspirations, doubts, loves, hates, breakings of the heart; the glory and the vanity of human endeavor, the transcience of beauty, the capricious uncertain lease on which you and I hold life, the dark coast to which we inevitably steer; all that amuses, or vexes, all that gladdens, saddens, maddens us men and women on this brief and mutable traject which yet must be home for a while, the anchorage of our hearts?"

Or this, in the quiet imagery of Walter de la Mare:

(Walter de la Mare, "All That’s Past," Collected Poems, 1901-1918 (New York: Henry Holt & Co., Inc., 1941) , I, 128.)

Or, finally, this in the thought and austere lyricism of T. S. Eliot:

(T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 [New York: Harcourt Brace and World, Inc., 1952] , p. 144.)

The new preaching situation, were one exhaustively to catalog the elements that constitute it, would require a long essay. Attention would have to be given to issues of a biblical, historical, and theological kind which in their number and complexity torment the mind of the responsible preacher of the gospel. From Q to Qumran is one axis; and along it are strung the conclusions and constructions that every student knows by the names of Strauss, Ritschl, Herrmann, Harnack, Schweitzer, Dodd, and Bultmann. From Comte to Carnap is a second axis; and along it, troubling the mind with possibilities of basic error and exultant with hermeneutical possibilities for fresh articulation of kerygmatic eventful truth, are strung the philosophical, social, and linguistic analyses that every student knows by the names of Kierkegaard, Weber, Troeltsch, Dilthey, Marx, Freud, and the current practitioners of the meaning of meaning.

But we have been, let us assume, through all of that. These and other mentors have warned and instructed, demolished and rebuilt our understanding of the production and transmission of the biblical text, and have made us aware of the multitudinous forces that have thudded it into its received form. We are aware also of the career of this record in the history of the church, and of the oceans of ecclesiological, dogmatic, ethical, devotional, mystical discourse that have been engendered by analysis and contemplation of it. The sum of all of this is the substantial ecology of the faith of the Christian church at this moment -- the moment when, with this record of the gospel of Jesus Christ before us, we stand up to preach.

In order to make concrete that preaching situation let us assume further that I am a preacher in a church which owns and honors the liturgical tradition, and as a major obedience to that tradition does not deliver over to me -- for exploitation according to my ambulatory penchants or enthusiasms -- a merely religious occasion, but has from of old designated this Sunday as the second Sunday in Advent. In most American Protestant parishes the old lectionaries are, to be sure, not followed; but to point that out has really nothing to do with the difficulty I want presently to expound. For these lectionaries include within their various sections -- Gospel, Epistle, Introit, and Gradual -- a large body of the most memorable and central addresses of the scriptures to the worshipping generations in the church. If one is not stuck with Luke 21:25-36 on the second Sunday of Advent he is not thereby released from the thundering New Testament words about the signs of the times, the invasive and convulsive power of the kingdom, the perils of drunkenness and stupidity in the midst of crises which are rich in threats of damnation and promises of redemption. And if one is not stuck with Rom. 15:4-13 on this December Sunday, he can hardly avoid being stuck with it sometime -- particularly since the sheer black hopelessness of men and the world cries aloud for some sober word; and even the churches at Evanston in 1954 affirmed that the Lord of the church is the hope of the world! The degree to which the waning authority of the lectionary has enabled the Protestant clergy to exercise so bland a selectivity within the corpus of New Testament utterances is a matter I observe but do not dilate upon.

It is, then, the second Sunday in Advent. As we attend now to what is being announced, affirmed, and pleaded for in the propers appointed for this day, have in mind the sheer magnitude of ecological richness and balance, the sheer allusive opulence which is presupposed as the matrix in which communication is ensconced. The Introit for the day is as follows: "Daughter of Zion: behold thy Salvation cometh. The Lord shall cause His glorious voice to be heard: and ye shall have gladness of heart. Give ear, O shepherd of Israel: Thou that leadest Joseph like a flock."

The tonality of the entire issue, and all the parts of it, is there resoundingly struck. The Gospel lesson is going to speak presently of the terrible "things that are coming on the earth" and of the new thing -- ". . . that the kingdom of heaven is nigh at hand." But men are called to in this fateful and choice-laden situation by no inert holiness ossified in his own perfections. Singing out in advance of the judgment, designating as love and pursuit the God with whom we have to do, soaring like a steady motif over all that is said of our situation in the Gospel, and grounding like a continuo the complex argument in the Epistle, come the infinitely tender words of the Introit. The Word of God is not thrown like a stone; rather is it, as Isaiah says, ". . laid to the heart of Jerusalem." "Daughter of Zion: behold thy salvation cometh" as a father to a longed for child-daughter! And as an active lover to his own city, wrought out over the covenant centuries for his glorious habitation. The fundamental nature of this seeking and salvation-bringing God and his historically authenticated resolution is lyrical acknowledged in the final line of the Introit, "Give Ear, O Shepherd of Israel: Thou that leadest Joseph like a flock."

It may be possible to announce that action of God in that kind of a relation to that kind of recalcitrance in nonallusive, propositional tonal speech. And I am convinced, further, that the effort must be made. For the erosion that has gouged and gullied the fields of the vocabulary of faith is deep and impoverishing. And no man is ready to make an attack upon that problem who has not in sadness and clarity taken the measure of it. Let us not underestimate what is involved when we so easily assert that new ways must be found to make old affirmations! What precisely is involved is suggested in a section of a lecture, "On Reading the Bible," by Arthur Quiller-Couch: (On the Art of Reading [New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920], pp.145f.)

It must be known to you, Gentlemen, that these words can affect men to tears who never connect them in thought with the actual geographical Jerusalem; who connect it in thought merely with a quite different native home from which they are exiles. Here and there some one man may feel a similar emotion over Landor’s

Tanagra, think not I forget. . . ,

But the word Jerusalem will strike twenty men twenty-fold more poignantly: for to each it names the city familiar in spirit to his parents when they knelt, and to their fathers before them: not only the city which was his nursery and yet lay just beyond the landscape seen from its window; its connotation includes not only what the word "Rome" has meant, and ever must mean, to thousands on thousands setting eyes for the first time on The City: but it holds, too, some hint of the new Jerusalem, the city of twelve gates before the vision of which St. John fell prone:

The process there so movingly described has gone on now for a long time, and its effects are general. But I want now to indicate three facts which I have encountered in my experience as a teacher, who, because he came to that function by way of the parish ministry, has never been able to have an immediate and lively sense of vocation save in relation to the church and its teaching and preaching obedience. Because, therefore, I see these three facts so deeply determinative among theological students in particular, but generally evident in this generation as a whole, I devote the remainder of this lecture to a description of them:

1) The Tyranny of the Self

A long time ago St. Augustine affirmed that it was because of sin that man was deflected in his desire from his true end, the love of God, and . . . . . curved inward upon himself . . ." perversely given to the self as an adequate end. Insofar as that is a true description of the general pattern of egocentricity that characterizes all men there is no great illumination in remarking that this generation is so disposed. What is new is that an in-curvature which has traditionally been viewed in Christian pedagogy as a disposition to be overcome is among many in our day jubilantly cultivated as a way of redemption! There is a difference between regarding the self as a theatre of redemption and regarding the recovery of the self as the substance of redemption.

The term under which this absorption with the self is most commonly cultivated is existentialism. The historians of philosophical, theological, and literary existentialism will properly protest that the filching of the term by the self-absorbed is not only unwarranted but actually begets confusion. Soren Kierkegaard would certainly be astonished to know that his lifelong wrestling with God’s angel was presently being interpreted in the categories of the personality sciences. St. Paul would certainly be astonished to hear the passionate inwardness of the vocabulary used to describe the relentlessness of God’s Christly pursuit of man reduced to merely psychological categories.

The tyranny of which I am speaking is not lessened by niceties of designation. The reality of it is this: that we incline to define ourselves, take the measure of our actuality, admit as educative and civilizing, acknowledge as relevant and powerful -- only that in experience or reflection which is authenticated by its occurrence within the biographical brackets of the self’s existence. What is actually accomplished by this determination to admit as personal only what is authenticated as individual and inwardly certified is a radical reduction of the potencies for self-knowledge. For the self exists within an ecological matrix; and the address to, the description of, and the evangelical promises to the Christian self are embedded in that ecological web which is the faith of the Christian church. It is not necessary for the deepening and amplification of my understanding of what it means to become and be a Christian that I inwardly respond with incandescent recognition to every member of that "mighty cloud of witness" who, in the imagery of the letter to the Hebrews, surround and support my Christian race. It may in fact be a mighty gift to the self that it hear other selves in the stadium of the church catholic who make sounds of praise and joy which are as yet, and may remain, unattested within the cubicle of its own experience. One can acknowledge that he is unacquainted with what Paul meant when he said "I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me", and at the same time have his individual existence broken open to fact by the assumption that the man knew what he was talking about, meant what he said, and lived out and died out the affirmation.

The extent to which men of this generation are absorbed with themselves and permit that absorption to filter the accumulated masses of human experience and utterance is a formidable fact in teaching and in preaching. In a course which I share with a colleague, a lecture was in progress dealing with pre-Chalcedonian alternatives to the statement there declared by the church. In the course of an exposition of the Nestorian position, justly illuminated with reference to strands in the New Testament witness to Christ which have made adoptionism an inevitable temptation, the lecturer was interrupted by the impatient protest of a student, "But Doc, I can’t interiorize this stuff!"

This visceral authentication of the relevance of the history of doctrine would be merely humorous were it not symptomatic of something that is not humorous; and one could be patient with phases of development marked by fascinated picking away at the gossamer peculiarities of one’s own insides if the damage wrought were not so extensive. The extent of that damage is apparent in much preaching of the gospel. Preaching becomes primarily personal, the history of the church becomes an anecdotal arsenal useful for its supply of supportive items. The "mighty deeds of God" are transformed into such interior "patterns of sensibility" as are readily marketable, and the mighty TE DEUM of the people of God becomes trivialized into a "worship experience."

2) The Tyranny of Boundlessness

When the theme of the second assembly of the World Council of Churches was announced, and more acutely when the preliminary study document was made available to the churches in North America, there was a curious reaction. The reaction was compounded of bafflement, annoyance, and impatience. Some were baffled by the declaration that nothing less than Jesus Christ was the hope of the world, for were there not broader, more generally "religious" and less radical sources for hope? Others were annoyed because they regarded this blunt statement as a frantic oversimplification of Christian theology, a retreat into pre-enlightenment piety. Others were impatient because they believed themselves allied with redemptive powers and possibilities whose adequacy was threatened by this identification of hope with so scandalous a historical particularity.

One does not take the measure of this reaction if he ascribes it merely to the fact that theological discourse in the United States has not had the role in intellectual life that characterizes European Christendom, or to the fact that we are a practical and activist people. There is that in our entire American experience on this continent which has deeply informed our self-consciousness. One might call it the mood of the illimitable. Frederick Jackson Turner, early in this century, inaugurated an epoch in American historiography with his essay, The Frontier in American History. This historian affirmed that the particular quality of American historical thought and action was to be explained from the perspective of the frontier. His argument was impressive, and the implications of it have left untouched no inquiries into the American character.

In the following paragraphs an effort will be made to investigate whether and to what extent the mood of the boundless, so characteristic of the American spirit, constitutes a kind of soft and yielding tyranny into which the eschatological and bounded finalities of the gospel are absorbed without great effect. I have called this tyranny soft and yielding not by any means to suggest that it has not power and peril, but rather to pull into focus the kind of peril it is. A hard, tough, resistant surface is always more satisfying to fling the gospel at! There is impact and decisiveness in the thud of a ball against a brick wall. But to throw a ball into, let us say, a heap of cotton batting is an experience of quite another kind. The thing is unresistingly received, swallowed up, blandly absorbed as a part of the heap. And there is no thud. Is it possible to account for this mood, observe characteristic expressions of it, and assess what it means for our preaching?

Turner’s essay called into question all the previous perspectives from which the events and the patterns of American life had been presented. These perspectives were generally oriented to the European continent, and hence saw the peculiar developments of American life and institutions in terms of unusual, to be sure, but continuous extensions of European life. American history was Colonial history. American politics was a marginal activity in European politics. American economic institutions were modifications of European institutions. (For discussion of this and other ideas in American historiology, see J. H. Randall and G. Haines, Controlling Assumptions in the Practice of American Historians (Social Science Research Council Bulletin 54 [1946] , p. 25.)

This perspective does rough justice to wide areas of American life, and for a period of two hundred years or so after the first settlements it serves to make intelligible many activities on the new continent. But what was neither seen clearly nor enunciated precisely before Turner’s essay was the deepening impropriety of this perspective as the nineteenth century unfolded. Such a perspective made sense of the Revolution of these colonies against Great Britain; it did not make sense of the Whisky Rebellion. This perspective was useful in doing justice to many aspects of the personal character and historical role of George Washington; it made less and less sense when confronted with the figures of Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

It is proposed here to speak of the development of the American self-consciousness in such terms as to take seriously Turner’s thesis: that the blunt fact of the existence for many decades of a frontier in American history is a dominant factor in the content of America’s self-consciousness. And inasmuch as any basic Christian affirmation is molded to the vital energies which work upon it in any nation or country, it ought to be possible to gain insight into the fact that classical Christian eschatology is interpreted in present American life in a peculiar way. This insight will be sought in the following inquiry.

The frontier was for many generations of Americans the symbol of the illimitable. For centuries before the white man established settlements in New England, at the mouth of the Hudson, in the Virginia Tidewater, and in the Carolinas, the living space of European peoples had been divided among the nations. These borders to be sure were in rather frequent flux and large movements of people were in process. But the space was a "given"! The North Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean, were unrelenting borders. And to the east, the non-European peoples -- Mongols, Huns, Turks, later the Russians -- constituted an effective barrier. This barrier, indeed, was often penetrated, and European literature from Marco Polo to Hakluyt shimmers with the mystery and possibility of these peoples and lands. But as regards its bearing upon the European spirit the East could not exercise effective force.

The situation in North America was completely and profoundly different. The early communities which hugged the Eastern shore lived their lives, did their work, and were subtly shaped in their thinking by the fact that what was settled was not what was available. Arching pervasively over the established situation was the knowledge that the West stretched out beyond like an illimitable sea. One has only to read the sermons of the early New England divines to remark how often and how eloquently this huge land, unknown in detail but known to be there, supplied illustrations for those passages in the sermon which required pictorial language to nail down a sermonic point.

The seemingly illimitability of the American land was not an isolated factor in the early American consciousness; it was a pervasive form of that consciousness. Our literature, the clearest confessional of our national self-consciousness, is permeated through and through with the mood of the vastness of the setting of the American enterprise. The journals of the Mathers, the Cottons, the Endicotts in New England, the travel diaries of Crevecoeur, the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville, the essays and public addresses of Ralph Waldo Emerson -- all of these breathe an air which blows in from the open frontier. The very form of American humor in the nineteenth century is revealed by analysis to owe its vitality to this same situation. It is broad rather than witty, obvious and ribald rather than delicate and sly. It depends for its delight not upon the situations and ambiguities of the drawing room, the cultivated folk of the city, but upon the exaggerations, the trickeries, the buffooneries, and the fantastic human types so richly produced by the conventionless frontier. Mark Twain is America’s artist of the ridiculous.

At a more sober and contemplative level one finds that Amen-can efforts to articulate the promise and hope of the young nation’s role and place in history are informed by the language-shaping vastness of this illimitable land. Several instances will serve to illustrate how the breadth and the sweep of the midland prairies, the terrifying distances, the huge lakes and mighty rivers have imparted to the American dream a boldness of conception and an almost gargantuan excess of rhetoric.

About the middle of the nineteenth century Herman Melville, a New Yorker of Dutch descent, published his greatest novel. In the following passage it is not difficult to feel how the open illimitable frontier character of the American experience is taken as a clue to moral interpretation of man generally. It is a tribute to the power of this feeling that Melville -- who almost alone among mid-nineteenth century men of letters in America pierced through the general moral optimism of the expansive spirit of the time, revealing in powerful fictional characters the ambiguities, the tensions, and the dark depths of evil and delusion -- that Melville should have written these sentences. In them is the authentic note, later to come to full expression, that in the nascent American democracy was the solvent for man’s immemorial problems, the answer to his whole dream of freedom and worth:

Several decades later another Easterner, Walt Whitman, shattered the reigning forms of poetical expression and in a flood of tumultuous verse wrought out a voice for America’s vague but deep and powerful feeling for her national character and promise. In his poetry, place names and common terms for common products of land and mine and forest are strung into melodious sequences that exercise the force of an incantation. The result is to produce -- out of the sheer overwhelming rhythm of names that suggest space and scope, richness and distance -- the intoxication of the illimitable. That this illimitable forward-leaning vitality foresees concrete achievements and conquests that are of doubtful moral significance is nothing to the point.

Land of coal and iron! land of gold! land of cotton, sugar, rice!

Land of wheat, beef, pork! land of wool and hemp! land of

the apple and the grape!

Land of the pastoral plains, the grass-fields of the world!

Land of those sweet-air’d interminable plateaus!

Expanding and swift, henceforth,

Elements, breeds, adjustments, turbulent, quick and audacious,

A world primal again, vistas of glory incessant and branching,

A new race dominating previous ones and grander far, with new contests,

New politics, new literatures and religions, new inventions and

arts.

("Starting from Paumonok," Leaves of Grass [New York: Aventine Press, 1931] , pp. 23 ff.)

A second poem from Walt Whitman is instructive in this: that here the generality of the foregoing piece is given concreteness from the actual anecdotal record of the century of the winning of the West, and because there is revealed how the irremediable facts of limit, end, death are burned away in the sheer incandescence of the song of conquest and assertion.

Come my tan-faced children,

Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,

Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?

Pioneers! O Pioneers!

Have the elder races halted!

Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there

beyond the seas?

We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,

Pioneers! O Pioneers!

All the pulses of the world,

Falling in they beat for us, with the Western movement beat

Holding single or together, steady moving to the front, all for us.

Pioneers! O Pioneers!

They are of us, they are with us,

All for primal needed work, while the followers there in embryo wait behind,

We are today’s procession heading, we the route for travel clearing,

Pioneers, O Pioneers!

Walt Whitman

("Pioneers, O Pioneers!" ibid., pp. 236 ff.)

In an introduction to a collection of lyrical passages from the novels of Thomas Wolfe, John Hall Wheelock compares him to Whitman, ". . . whose vision of America and the American continent he shared. The American spirit and the American earth of our day as distinguished from the spirit and earth of any other land or time, these are the major themes of Wolfe’s writing, and it is as a poet that he articulates them. In so doing he has given many Americans a fresh sense of their country." (Wheelock [ed.], The Face of a Nation, Poetical passages from the writing of Thomas Wolfe (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939) , p.v.

This third writer who expresses the illimitable as a pervasive and formative presence in the American mind is selected not only for what he wrote but because of when he wrote it. Thomas Wolfe was no frontiersman. He was born in North Carolina and lived most of his life in the East; for the longest period of his mature life in New York City. The following selection from Wolfe is given here to advance the argument that the illimitable as a mood of the mind persists within men who have never seen a geographical frontier, and far beyond generations for whose history it was a palpable fact. The fact of the frontier is not gravely enough calculated if, as many historians have assumed, the effect of it upon concrete political developments, forms of community life, institutions, has been observed, measured, and recorded. For the American man the frontier is a way of viewing the human enterprise and a way of interpreting the life of the traveler. It is a way of seeing long after it has something to see. Writing of men in an old section of the South that he knew so well Wolfe writes: "He is not a colonist, a settler, a transplanted European; during his three centuries there in the wilderness he has become native to the immense and lonely land that he inhabits; during those three centuries he has taken on the sinew and the color of that earth, he has acquired a character, a tradition, a history of his own . . he is there in the ranks of the American Revolution, and eighty years later he is there, gloriously but silently in the ranks of the Civil War. But his real history is much longer and much more extraordinary than could be indicated by these flares of war; it is a history that runs back three centuries into primitive America, a strange and unfathomable history that is touched by something dark and supernatural, and that goes back through poverty and hardship, through solitude and loneliness and death and unspeakable courage, into the wilderness."

Another facet of this mood of the boundless is revealed when one ponders the role of technology in modern American life. Among us technology as a way of life is joyfully cultivated by a people who retain a frontier mentality long after the physical frontier has vanished. There is something strange in the joy and eagerness with which the "technization" of existence is exercised in America. This strangeness is understood when one comes to see that the spirit that conquered a huge land is a spirit continuous with that which today plays with technics as a previous generation made a game out of felling trees, shucking corn, and plowing fields.

For the common man in America the basic physical inquiries which gave birth to technology, and the philosophical ideas which attended its development, are of little concern. Technology for him is rather a stronger and a longer and a more supple arm to conquer a wilderness with! His judgment of its "goodness" is pragmatic; his delight in it is akin to sheer uncritical boyishness. For in technology and its possibility to enhance and expand the forms of life this man sees a new wilderness to conquer, new lands to settle, new problems to solve, new frontiers to push back and be exultant over.

That simple and uncritical acclaim should surround the advance of technology in America is evidence of the spirit that has never had to come to terms with boundaries, limits, ends. When one county was settled and the best land taken up, American history records that the new waves of people pushing up from the East went through to the next county. There, when once the trees were felled, the land cleared, was an abundance of rich earth for man’s taking. That land is now cut up into organized states and most of it is settled. The farther ocean has been reached. But the promise of technology itself is seen in the American mind as a new "illimitable" that evokes from this people a response whose inward character is identical with the response of their fathers. A "new frontier" has come into view. and the excitement and the challenge of it is similarly greeted.

The entire experience of the peoples of America has created and nurtured a world view which stands over against the world view of the Bible in sharpest possible opposition. For "Eschatology is the doctrine concerned with the limits and boundaries of our living, in time and existence, toward which at every moment our whole lives tend." (R. Calhoun, "Christ: The Hope of the World," published in the official proceedings of the World Council of Churches, second assembly Evanston, Illinois: August 15, 1954) In this statement is recollected a central affirmation of the scriptures that man’s life, in solitude and in history, is found and held within the hand of God; that operating within history, and dramatically at the consummation of history, is the judging and restoring activity of history’s God. There is a limit which stands not only at the end of human life as death, but which is built into the structure of human life by virtue of its creaturely character. All birth and development, all unfolding and enterprise, all moral vision and achievement are not only enfolded within this limit but receive their urgent character from it. Here is a "given" time, a "given" space, a "given" possibility. Within the boundaries of this "given" there are, to be sure, vast and absolutely crucial possibilities for affirmation or denial, hearing or deafness, decision or stasis -- but no elaboration of these possibilities can avoid the limit of sin and of death.

The character of a people’s life experience determines to some degree the permeability of their spirit to this Word. When the historical experience of the whole people is interpreted in such a way as to affirm the illimitable by virtue of an open frontier existing for a long period of their history, then it surely follows that that declaration of the eschatological character of all existence will not easily address them with quick and intelligible meaning. Precisely this is the situation among millions of Americans. For many of them a frontier situation has been transmuted from a fact of national history into a point of view in the mind. Only in recognition of the power of this inheritance can one understand the reception, bordering upon the charge of total irrelevance, with which many even within the churches regard the entire range of biblical eschatological teaching.

The eschatological reality becomes congruent with and partially confirmed in a man’s life experience when absolute limits, boundaries, inescapable facts confront him in the realization of his personal, social, and national experience. These lessons can be evaded or their meaning dimmed when the "given" in practical experience is not absolute. When, for instance, as has been true for American generations, an intolerable, unsatisfactory, or restricting life situation began to press too hard, the frontier offered an escaping option. There has always been an "out there," an open, raw, malleable theater wherein patterns of desire dreamed of realization in forms nearer to the heart. To uproot the thousand continuities of one’s life and settle in a wilderness required courage, decisiveness, resolution, ingenuity, and a huge output of activity. Hence the development of these qualities in the American national character. But in virtue of this same uprooting and transplanting career the occasion for the cultivation of another set of qualities has been successfully evaded. The realities of "limit" and "boundary," the spirit-educating forces that operate when one cannot move on, or start anew, but must come to terms with life where it is and where it is bound to remain -- these forces have not deeply entered into the American national consciousness.

There are evidences, however, that the facts of America’s new and responsible involvement in the revolutions, the agonies, the undeferrable decisions of the world is making her mind deepeningly permeable to the eschatological. Our debt to contemporary European scholarship in which biblical theological categories are freshly used as interpreters of the meaning of history is a large and growing debt. While, to be sure, the effect of such work is presently restricted to faculties and students in universities and schools of theology, the profound change in process will inevitably be projected in the preached and taught messages of the churches.

The question whether, short of concrete national tragedies, the frontier delusion of contemporary American can be translated into a realistic comprehension of man’s bounded life, a strong and faithful obedience to God as he confronts us with hard tasks in the actual world where tyranny, brutality, aggressive nihilism is consolidating its bloody conquest, must await the evidence of the coming years.

3) The Tyranny of Opaque Language

By developing the various themes in this first lecture (indeed our entire discussion) under the large figure of Ecology a general intention is clearly stated: to argue that faith comes to exist in the vast and complex totality of a man’s life, that faith as engendered by the Word of God works upon, makes use of, reillumines and reinterprets the total geography of existence. The proclamation of the Faith, and its transmission, must therefore operate within no narrower dimensions than the wild unsystematic of actual life. The theatre of redemption is the theatre of creation; anything has overt or covert influences upon everything; the beetles under the bark are the apprehension that furrows the brow that watches the untrapped waters destroy the town. Therefore I will discuss for a moment a third tyranny that characterizes the preaching situation.

Language, in its scope and style, takes on the color of the preoccupation of an age. If an age is marked by what one observer has called "the thingification of man" the speech of the age will both record what is happening and make articulate the cries of hurt wrung out of the monstrous process. For speech is the primary carrier of culture and its form follows man’s career with an absolute seriousness. When grammar is sprung and words writhe, when images make leaps that baffle and astound, there is something other and something more wrong than can be ascribed merely to the disposition of the queer to be experimental.

People are round and have depth. And when their common language, used to do business in a technically preoccupied age, is shaped to the paucity of dimensions necessary to such business, the roundness and the depth become silent for want of verbal counterparts for the felt but inchoate self. Technical speech is a very efficient instrument. It is designative, precise, singular, flat, non-allusive; naming a certain device a cathode ray occilograph tells the company of operators exactly what it is and does. But such language is not only deficient for "Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn," it is useless to express how a man feels when he has been sullen with his wife! or to catch the little sad hint of mutability and pathos that crosses his mind when he goes back to a class reunion!

We are urged on every side to bring our speech into conformity with the common language of our world, to avoid expressions that do not ‘‘communicate,’’ to be careful lest we suggest to the mind other than a rearrangement of its present content. Even if this were advisable (which it isn’t) , it is not possible. For preaching of the gospel is a declaration before it is our exhortation. It proclaims a madly holy arrangement for human lostness before it promises a power whereby the rearrangement of man’s disordered house is possible. It deals with the significance of events in such a sequence as flat, episodic reportage cannot serve. Its promises are not wrung out of problems -- although their lure is made sharp there -- but out of Godly performances celebrated in the devotion of the church. The designative language of nature cannot contain the substance of Grace. But it can point, remember, celebrate, and hope. This is why, in the next lecture, I want to deal with certain imperatives for preaching that seem to me to arise out of the current concern of the churches for the kind of theological reflection which seeks to do justice to the kind of community the church knows herself to be.