"SEEING IS BELIEVING" is being revised to read, "Sensing is believing." Psychologists have determined that real events experienced in vivid sensory impressions act to create attitudes and influence conduct through the laws of learning—for example, a child's experience with & hot stove or ice-cream cone. Likewise, the experts tell us, by verbally reconstructing experience a speaker may affect the beliefs and behavior of his audience—almost as if the narrated experience were real.
Dramatization of ideas is an important key to persuasive preaching. The basic principle of dramatization, according to one writer, "is to place truth in such imaginative form that people respond through several of their senses ... [so that] the sermon becomes a shared experience in which all are vital participants in the drama unfolding before their eyes." 1
Two rhetorical processes essential to such vicarious re-creation of experience are description and narration. Successful utilization of these processes involves the gift of creative imagination. Broadus has defined imagination as "the imaging function of the mind. It is thinking by seeing, as contrasted with reasoning." 2
Exponent and exemplar of what he called "dramatic power in preaching" 3 was Dr. Clarence E. Macartney (1879- 1957), pastor of the First Presbyterian church in downtown Pittsburgh for more than twenty-five years. Almost forty volumes of Macartney's published sermons provide a rich and readily available homiletic resource for those who wish to study this gifted craftsman's technique. (See the September, 1976, issue for discussion of his famous sermon "Come Be fore Winter.")
Macartney is eminently worth studying. Relying on nothing but "straight Bible preaching," he was successful in holding and building his congregation over the long period of his Pittsburgh ministry and at the same time attracting throngs of people in spite of the consider able odds of the prevailing climate of opinion and of the location of his church.
According to Macartney's observations, those preachers who have gripped and stirred congregations "had some thing in their treatment which can best be described as dramatic power." He does not mean by this that the minister becomes a stage actor, but "it is well for the preacher to remember that the actor holds his audience by acting out the emotions and the transactions and the characters which are presented." 4 The inference is that the Christian preacher by means of public speech, promotes the creation or re-creation of experience in the "here and now" of the listener.
The average preacher, Macartney charged, does not make enough use of his imagination—an absolute essential for dramatic and emotional power in preaching. He held that it is a legitimate function of the imagination to embellish and make vivid a scriptural narrative. From his notes (unpublished) prepared for a lecture series scheduled for Princeton Theological Seminary, we learn how he might have gone about it. As an ex ample of an imaginative filling in of details, he suggests the following treatment of the narrative of Elisha's servant, Gehazi, who for his sin of procuring a reward from Naaman under false pretenses was afflicted with leprosy.
When he returns with the spoils from Naaman, picture him (a) in the tower where he stores his goods, putting on one of the garments, the golden coins drifting through his fingers; (b) standing before Elisha and hearing the sentence "A leper white as snow"; what Gehazi said to himself when he went out: "I am a leper, and yet I have what many of the lords and nobles would like to have, the bag of gold and goodly garments. They won't avoid me when they know I have the money." (c) Gehazi returns to the tower, locks the door, puts on the purple garment, empties the sack of gold on the floor, lets the gold coins fall through his hands, the sound of gold falling on gold, the shaft of light into the tower; and suddenly Gehazi sees the white scar of the leprosy, takes the robe off, tears it to pieces and stamps upon it, falls down on the heap of gold, crying aloud, "A leper! A leper forever! A leper white as snow!" 5
Obviously, narration and description blend in Macartney's sermons. Representative examples of description employed for purposes of the visual re-creation of (1) the physical setting, and (2) the emotional mood and climate of the setting appear below:
The physical setting. The setting on the night of the slaying of the first-born in Egypt is re-created with vivid imagery word-concepts: "Over all Egypt it is night. The April moon sheds its golden light over all the land. Against the clear sky rises the mighty Pyramid of Cheops, and in front of that pyramid the Sphinx stares out over the white moonlit desert with stony, mysterious, inscrutable gaze. By the banks of the winding Nile and the numerous canals, tall palm trees wave their branches in the soft evening air. Along the river a thousand villages are asleep. In his marble palace, flanked by porphyry columns wound with sculptured serpents and crowned with fierce eagles whose eyes flash with precious stones, Egypt's Pharaoh slumbers. In the temples of Isis and Osiris the fire has sunk on the altars and the priests and their attendants are asleep. In the huts and cottages of the peasants the sons of toil are deep in sleep, sore Labor's bath. In the dungeon the captive has forgotten the galling of his chains as sleep, balm of hurt minds, knits up his raveled sleeve of care. All Egypt is asleep." 6
The setting in an oriental king's palace introduces sensory material of a visual, auditory, and olfactory nature: "Mid day, in the palace of the king of Persia at Shushan, where the yellow Ulai winds about the walls of the palace. Within the palace Artaxerxes, the long-handed despot of the world, with his queen at his side, is seated at the banqueting table, attended by obsequious slaves and hundreds of his nobles and satraps. The hall is worthy of the empire. White, blue, and green curtains drape the walls, caught with purple cords to silver rings fixed in pillars of marble. The pavement is of red, blue, white and black marble, and the couches of gold. Clouds of incense go up, and the strains of music float through the halls." 7
In the following attention-arresting action description, he employs imagery word-concepts appealing to the visual, auditory, motor, and tactile "doors to the mind": "The words of doom were heard in awe and silence by Belshazzar and his lords. Then, suddenly, there was the loud blast of a trumpet, the sharp words of military command, and the rush of the feet of armed men as the soldiers of Darius, the general of Cyrus, charged up the grand stairway and burst into the banqueting hall. Swords flashed under the candelabras; groans, shouts, curses, pleas for mercy rang through the hall; and soon a thousand nobles and their women lay dead in the slush of mingled wine and blood, and among them lay Belshazzar." 8
Descriptive re-creation of the emotional setting. The material here, as with the foregoing, is so abundant that it is difficult to be selective.
Macartney imagines the emotions that may have stirred Jacob in the years fol lowing his son Joseph's disappearance: "Neither had Jacob forgotten Joseph. Often we are sure, he thought much about him. I wonder if he ever asked him self 'Did my sons deceive me? Can it be possible that Joseph still lives?' On a day when his sons and their families are afar off with the flocks, Jacob opens an old black chest, and taking from it a faded garment, lays it across his knees. It is the coat of many colors, with the rents and the stain of the blood still there. Tears are in the eyes of the old man, and if any had been at hand, they might have heard him exclaim, 'Joseph! Rachel!' "9
Illustrating the Conflict of Thoughts and Emotions
Macartney imagines a possible conflict of thoughts and emotions within the woman who was subsequently healed by touching the hem of Christ's garment: "Now watch this woman against the wall, as she lifts her head and looks eagerly in the direction of Jesus. She is talking to herself, and this is what she is saying: 'If I do but touch His garment, I shall be made whole. And yet, do I dare to try it? How can I get through this great crowd, when I am so weak and frail, and hardly able to stand? If the rulers see me, will they let me approach him? After all, I am only an outcast; but so were the lepers; they were unclean too, and yet I hear that he healed them. He is on his way also to the house of a rich man. Perhaps he will not care to heal a poor woman like me, for I have spent all I had on the physicians, and having nothing with which to pay him. And yet I have heard that he takes pity on the poor. Thus alternate waves of hope and despair rolled over the soul of this woman." 10
Thus Macartney made concrete the abstract ideas and theories of religion through the use of word imagery, which presumably would find vicarious response in the auditor's experience.
Macartney said on one occasion, "When I get through preaching the Bible I would like to paint it." 11 He saw the Bible as an unequaled source of scenes lending themselves to such descriptive treatment. Biblical characters and scenes, he contended, "afford the preacher a rich field for dramatic preaching." Indeed, "Limitless are the possibilities of the Bible, its scenes and its characters. There is no need for going elsewhere." 12
Macartney, who in his long career had preached sermons on virtually all the Biblical characters concerning which sufficient information is given to provide the basis for a sermon, believed that the secret of the popularity of such sermons is this potential for dramatic power— the elements of conflict, emotion, and concreteness inherent in the narratives. "When-you talk on these characters and scenes," he asserted, "everyone knows what you are talking about. You enter into emotions which are timeless." 13
Because of its emotional impact, such description serves a further purpose—it prepares the mind to receive the truths of the gospel: "Thus by describing and entering into the scenes of the Bible, even a most familiar scene, like that of David and Goliath, the preacher gets hold of the thought and imagination and the emotions of his hearer. One might liken it to the plow, or the harrow, preparing the soil for the sowing of the seed. The seed will not take root and germinate in dry, hard, barren soil. Neither will the seed of the gospel take root in a dry, hard mind." 14
The popular response to, and apparent effectiveness of, Macartney's imaginative dramatization of the Christian gospel by means of the narrative form (particularly Biblical narrative) would suggest that preachers might well recognize and use the narrative element in the gospel—the persons and events— more than they do. He demonstrated the importance of conceiving and feeling a background in the communication of ideas. He saw correctly that a fact in itself is dead; it must be assimilated, it must be seen, and become food for the imagination before it becomes a vital truth.
Notes:
1 Ronald E. Sleeth, Persuasive Preaching (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1956), pp. 66 f.
2 John Broadus, On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, rev ed (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), p. 276.
3 Unpublished lecture notes from the files of Dr. Macartney, Macartney Memorial Library, Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. The writer spent a week studying Macartney's papers and manuscripts in connection with a research project.
4 "Dramatic Power in Preaching," unpublished lecture notes, p. 1, Macartney files.
5 Ibid., pp. 6 f.
6 Clarence E. Macartney, "The Night of Doom." Great Nights of the Bible (New York" Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1953), PP. 9 f.
7 Clarence E. Macartney, "Nehemiah, the Bravest Man in the Old Testament," Sermons on Old Testament Heroes (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1933), p. 221.
8 The Night of Dissipation," Great Nights of the Bible (1943), p. 31.
9 "The Most Christlike Man in the Oid Testament," Sermons on Old Testament Heroes (1935), p. 71.
10 Clarence E. Macartney, "The Woman Who Touched Him," Great Women of the Bible (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1942), pp. 190 ff.
11 Great Nights of the Bible (1943), p. 45.
12 "Feathers for the Arrow," unpublished lecture notes from the files of Dr. Clarence Macartney. Macartney cites Whitefield as a master of description: "He could describe the sufferings of Christ in a way that answered the end of real scenery." Clarence E. Macartney, Six Kings of the American Pulpit (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1943), p. 33.
13 "Dramatic Power in Preaching," p. 2.
14 "Feathers for the Arrow," p. 4.
