This is the second and final article in a two-part series. The first part appeared in the July issue of Ministry.
A new generation from diverse backgrounds and complex situations challenges the church's traditional preaching. Both liberal and fundamentalist preaching are problematic. The former does not maintain the gospel as final authority, and the latter tends to disregard the gospel and the context of the people's contexts.
Both have fallen prey to analyzing isolated texts and solitary people without their con text. Both have deteriorated into Descartes' subject-object split, in which subjectivism prescribes objects in a rationalistic way. Such preaching has reduced life to narrow rationalistic and mechanistic understandings.
The central question now is, How can today's preacher "relate God's unchanging Word to our ever-changing world" while refusing "to sacrifice truth to 'relevance'"?1 Here are some pointers.
A networking approach
First, sermon construction needs to adopt a networking approach2 and reject the atomism of modernism that takes into account only partial aspects and not the whole. The Bible, the Holy Spirit, the preacher, and the whole congregation are brought together in the creative "construction" of sermons.
Networking looks at the congregation not as a "sounding board" to ensure the success of sermons but as God's people who want to experience His message. The congregation is not uninformed listeners in need of admonition and repentance, but it is part of what the Reformers called God's universal priesthood, equipped and quite capable of declaring God's praises (1 Peter 2:9).
Though the congregation may have just a "common-sense understanding" of the Bible, they do have an experiential feeling of the biblical message that can enliven the meanings of the text. They know both God's Word and God's world, and this knowing is not accomplished so much in a so-called learned, scientific way, but in a biblical way—a relational experience of knowing.
Preachers can never tell and interpret the stories of all the members of the congregation. Their stories cannot be cemented into one grand determining narrative that unifies and represents all knowledge.3 Preaching beyond modernism needs to see people in terms of a node, a meeting point in a network, a "fabric of relations," requiring preaching to be open to a multiplicity of discourses.
By this we are not saying that sermons should be replaced with a kind of "chaotic preaching" in which everybody speaks when ever they wish. What we are saying is that preachers need to play a more challenging but also a more humble role.
They should strive toward becoming methodological guides that provide directive "pointers." They are to inspire and enable people to discover for themselves the full richness of God's Word. They are to guide their congregations in different ways, show ing the different possibilities and implications and thus "encourage people to find these riches for themselves."4
Preachers are like geologists. With their scientific tools, they can point to where gold ore may be found. They guide the miners, leaving the extracting task to them. Likewise, preachers can guide the members to dig for the "gold" themselves; without that experience, little lasting understanding occurs, and they cannot fully rejoice in the experience and say, "we found it!"
Preachers communicate to serve the people of the congregation, not to manipulate them. Their authority is not their own, but that of Jesus, internalized. They are not rulers or dictators. They are only privileged servants.
They do not throw the "absolute truths" they have discovered onto the people. Their sermon prepares the stage where the Holy Spirit can create an encounter between Himself, the Word of God, and the congregation; this is where the Spirit speaks His own words to the congregation within their context.
Such preaching is centered neither in the preacher as the expert nor in the likes or dislikes of a "sweet-toothed" congregation, but within the dynamic movement of a network.
In the network model, the preaching event is not characterized by a sound, well-prepared and motivated sermon that was constructed in the exclusive privacy of the preacher's study. It is rather characterized as a creative moment in which the people and the preacher listen to God's Word together and in which they share their findings and celebrate their awe and wonder in the dynamic movement of the sermon.
To create this internal collaboration, preachers need to be "inviters"— inviting people to become joint constructors of the sermon. The preacher's language, style, manner of preparing the sermon, and the study of the Bible should lure people into the Bible, inviting them to "come and see" for themselves (John 1:46).
Preachers are to invite people into the very "delivering movement" of the sermon itself. We are not preaching to people, but together with them. Jesus did not treat people as spectators but invited them into His sermons, enabling them to see, hear, and experience what was happening. They became a part of the great stories of God: they were the sowers, the lost coins, the prodigal sons and daughters.
People learn through personal participation. Webber says the new approach to knowing is no more only an "analysis" and a "linear sequence," but it is "the primacy of [authentic] experience"; "knowledge through immersed participation."5
How can this networking be achieved?
To begin with, the sermon should be constructed not merely within the preacher's study, but "within" the workspace, home, and "play place" of the people.
Some preachers emphasize the importance of a sermon resource group,6 also acting as a feedback group, not only supplying good intellectual information from the Bible and their perspectives and needs but also conveying the congregation's feelings about the suggested sermon topics. This could be more enriching for sermon preparation, because preachers will know whether their preaching was understood or not, and what emotional and intellectual con tents were invoked by it.
The toolmaker versus the conduit metaphor
Preachers with a modernistic approach have pursued the Shannon-Weaver communication model and have largely fallen prey to the conduit metaphor by "sending" their messages, as it were, through a conduit or a confined channel. In terms of this metaphor, people are regarded simply as "reasonable beings," and consequently, they are seen to come to a full understanding almost exclusively through intellectual processes.
Under this outlook, any non-rational influences are distorting "noises" or "equivocations," representing interferences in the intended message. For example, when a baby cries during the sermon, it is regarded as noise having no part in God's mes sage for that morning.
Thus the sermon tends to become a "still" picture, colorless, in black and white. The movement of the wind, the smell of the roses, and the laughter or cry of children are left out of this "frozen" photo, and there are no subtle spiritual emphases of different "colors" that inspire creative awe and wonder.
Of course, preaching cannot by any means afford to belittle rational, intellectual knowledge or the intuitive process. But preachers need to recognize that knowledge, words, and concepts are not the same as "reality." Knowledge is an intellectual "representation" and therefore a mental abstraction of reality. The map itself is never the territory.
Research has indicated that religious malfunctioning is more closely bound up with deficient emotional contents than with inadequate intellectual contents. This is often seen where a congregation is in protest against a preacher's repetition of intellectual content, while emotional content is always experienced as "new," as each moment of joy or sadness has something unique and significantly different about it.
Consequently, the verbal contents are quickly forgotten after a sermon, but the feelings that it aroused are vividly remembered.
Van Niekerk prefers the "toolmaker's" metaphor rather than the conduit approach. The toolmaker's metaphor presents preachers with a multitude of communicative tools and signs serving as units of communicative transferences.7 These tools may be concepts and words but also cultural signs, directive "pointers," feelings, awe, and hope; they all function as commentaries on texts and assist the congregation to grasp and come closer to "understand" God's messages.
Humans obtain knowledge not only through intellectual stimulation but also through feelings, strivings, and impressions. We "know" by way of intellectual, willful, and emotional interaction. It is no wonder that literary critics warn us against the excessive emphasis on the intellectual dimension. Intellectual words may wound listeners through emotional dryness and emptiness.
Our view of the Scriptures
Another effective tool that enables us to go beyond the perils of the modernistic pulpit is to be sure of our view of the Scriptures. The fundamentalist orientation often takes a mechanistic and literal lexicographical view of the Scripture. It can lead preachers away from the biblical message and the context of people.
On the opposite side, the liberal view of Scriptures, particularly the historical critical method, has fallen prey to Descartes' subject-object split, where the subject determines the object logically beforehand. This method, with its analytical approach, taking parts without the whole, and its eclectic approach, picking only the privileged parts, is in fact more criti cal than historical. It has silenced the living voice of the gospel.
Webber insightfully says that while the liberals tear the Bible to shreds with criticism, the conservatives try to put the pieces back together with rational arguments.8 Both these extreme approaches can lead to the end of authentic preaching.
The Bible is a book with more than words; it spells out God's actions and even far more, God's redeeming actions. The Bible, however, is more than mere activism; the Bible portrays God's redeeming love. Preachers should attach real "authority" to the Scriptures. The Bible as "God's Word" has far more depth regarding meaning and contents than any exegetical and hermeneutical tool can ever fathom. The Scripture's meaning and messages will always transcend our methods and our best interpretations.
Preaching beyond modernism means the end of final atomistic explanations. The Bible cannot be reduced to a book of objective knowledge apart from subjective experience. Academics, preachers, teachers, and the laity, from their own perspectives, by way of different hermeneutical tools, have unique and diverse interpretations of the Scriptures that may not always be totally "correct."
These varied interpreters, however, may indicate different journeys toward meaning; as directive "pointers" they do not imitate and copy each other but complement the movement toward the messages of God. This may stimulate our intellect, emotion, and will, and supply us with a variety of spiritual emphases and perspectives for the preaching event.
The creative use of language
Another pointer in our consideration of preaching beyond modernism is concerned with the creative use of language.
One of the greatest challenges facing preaching is to formulate sermons in a dynamic "open" language. Influenced by the natural sciences, some preachers tend to think that they can describe reality in an absolute and objective way.9 Language is then seen as a "system of signs with a 'large overarching, communal vocabulary' that is governed by rules and words that have fixed meanings."10 Such language seeks to evade the ceaseless "play" of language.
By using correctly defined literal words from the dictionary, those who follow this view seem to believe that things can be stated in an absolute way. Words are then regarded not as signs or traces but, erroneously, as conveying final meanings. Such a use of language tends to make it static and predictable, to the point of meaninglessness.
When we move beyond modernism, we realize that language is "a system of signs which is in constant play, and meaning is a product of this play of differentiations."11 This view, however, does not mean that the understanding of a text is a haphazard affair, or that any interpretation is correct. The approach to language beyond modernism is about not the meaning of language but what language does; it signifies and conveys "meaning" to people in a dynamic way.
Ignoring the metaphoric richness of the Bible has led preachers to minimize the symbolic forms of communication and has caused loss of understanding.
Metaphors are "pictures" assisting us to see the unknown in terms of the known in a challenging way. This "open" system allows preachers to create a whole textual world that can become a reality within the specific context of every individual in the congregation. Metaphors are not only ways of communication but also ways to "know" the hidden.
Metaphors identify and describe things in a unique way; they are genuinely creative and present something in a way that cannot adequately be said in another way; they do not rep resent things in a merely ornamental manner, for the show only, but are an embodiment of new insights, revealing and unchaining "truths."
Metaphorical language makes it possible for us to speak about God and the greatness of His kingdom.12 It is important for preachers to realize that metaphors not only illustrate and explain difficult "truths" but also create room for emotional modes and the dire needs of those who are there to hear.
Metaphors "interpret" the emotional and intellectual modes present in the texts in such a way as to carry the congregation into the meaning. In the process, they carry not only rational meaning but also awe and wonder that is so much needed in preaching today.
Preaching styles
The final pointer about preaching beyond modernism concerns style. Sermon styles are not sanctioned by heaven. They are instruments of communication, and they all have limitations as well as possibilities for preaching. It is, however, imperative for the preacher's sermon style to have the capacity to open up unlimited potential for dialogue and encounters between people and preachers, and most importantly, with God and His Word.
Because of the strong story-telling character of the Bible, the narrative approach can be helpful. We constantly live by stories, those we hear and the ones we tell. Narrative preaching is not a modern superficial kind of storytelling but introduces a movement where, for example, God, people, and evil play dramatic metaphoric roles.
Narrative preaching beyond modernism is important, because people evaluate their lives not in terms of dogmas or confessions, but in terms of biblical and other stories. Because their own stories have become lifeless, people need an "enactment of the narratives of the biblical text" that can provide "an alternative reality ... the terrible, life-giving reality of God." Preaching God's Word gives them "models of alternative imagination." Narrative sermons let us encounter new "truths" that the so-called factual sermons cannot.13 Biblical dramas that are not overdramatized can challenge people to become par takers of the sermon and the meaning, and not mere spectators.
Narrative preaching, however, also has its own problems; for example, we can easily superimpose our own stories on God's story as we churn out our own assumed psychological version of the experiences of the people making up the stories of the Bible.
Conclusion: caring for a corpse?
Preaching needs to move beyond modernism not just for functional reasons.
Modernistic sermons have often portrayed a "gospel" and a "God" that is true neither to the Bible nor to the contexts of people's lives.
Conservatively oriented preachers cannot be criticized when they emphasize the preserving of their tradition; if we lose our historical "pointers" and directives, we drift toward an uncertain future and a merciless postmodernism.
Preaching, however, that does not move to new territories beyond modernism fails to keep our traditions alive. The result is that tradition becomes a museum piece and we the curators of a lifeless system.
1 John R. W. Stott, Between Two Worlds: The Art of Preaching in the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 192.
2 Bernard Lategan, "The Reception of the Reception Theory in South Africa," in The Reader and Beyond (Human Science Research Council, 1992), 5.
3 Gerhard van Wyk, Practical Theological Discourse: Modernism and Beyond (Practical Theology in South Africa, 1999), 14.86.
4 Charles Bradford, "The Imperatives of Preaching," Ministry, January 1997, 6.
5 Robert E Webber, Ancient-Future Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Books), 24.
6 See H. J. C. Pieterse, Verwoording en Prediking (Pretoria. N.G. Kerkboekhandel, 1985) 131-136, and John R. W. Stott, Between Two Worlds.
7 E.. van Niekerk, Postmodern Theology (Pretoria. University of South Africa, Package 2 for STH41I-T), 13.
8 Webber, 45.
9 Willie de Koker, Evangelisasieteorie en -praktyk in die lig van die paradigmaverskiiiwing van modernisme na postmodernism? (Practical Theology in South Africa, 1998), 5.
10 Johan Degenaar, Deconstruction of Language: The Reader and Beyond (Pretoria: Human Science Research Council, 1992), 188.
11 Ibid., 189.
12 Wentzel van Huyssteen, Teologie as kntiese geloofsverantwoordmg. Teorievorming in die Sistematiese Teologie (Pretoria: Raad vir Geesteswetenskaplike Navorsing, 1986), 158-168.
13 W. Brueggemann, Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism: Living in a Three-Stoned Universe (Nashville 1 Abingdon Press), 9, 11.
