Ethos Pathos And Logos By Reid And Hogan

Reid and Hogan make very clear the pitfalls that preachers can find themselves in. There is a temptation to compromise the purpose of preaching. “There is significant pressure on preachers to energize, engage, and entertain listeners while also sharing profound insight.” (19) There is one thing missing in the previous statement, a need keep the Scriptures in mind, because preaching without the Scripture is not preaching anymore, it is just public speaking.

The authors discuss three rhetorical categories of ethos, pathos and logos; that have an impact how effective preaching can be. These categories provide a virtue of ethics or benchmark that can be used to determine whether preaching is done responsibly.

Ethos deals with the character

They preach a form of Christianity that appears as Bonhoeffer would call “cheap grace”; therefore the congregation is not challenged to grow in their faith, which in the end weakens their faith. It becomes “a path of least resistance to become a pander bear with our theological substances as well as our use of stories.” (55)

In my own preaching, I need remember it is not about me meeting people’s needs; it about my cooperation with the Holy Spirit to allow God’s Word to meet their people’s needs. This means that some Sundays people will go home challenged and possibly angry, but if the sermon transforms people’s heart into a better direction then I have done my job. “The gospel is not simply about meeting people’s needs. The gospel is also a critique of our needs, an attempt to give us needs worth having.” (60)

Churchill and Roosevelt in their speeches were not pandering to the people, who wanted peace at all costs and not wanting to fight another war. They spoke out on what needed to be said about the evils of Nazism and that something had to stop its spread or else the world would be facing a far bigger

This reasoning is “presented as language shaped to woo listeners to be responsive to a specific way of understanding the ideas in view.” (13-14)

Words have power. God used words in Genesis to bring the world as we know it, into existence from out of nothing. It is important how we use our words and craft them to allow it to be about God’s purposes rather than our purposes for our congregations, or we become a demagogue.

The demagogue will exploit people using the power of the words to manipulate existing stereotypes and insecurities held by listeners by creating scapegoats for people to hang their fears and frustrations on. The problem is not necessarily your fault, but it is “those” people who are causing your problems or your situation.

Demagogues succeed by polarizing people through a strategy of divide and conquer. “So the word demagogue was used to describe those whose oratorical skills made them particularly effective in leading and inciting people.” (69) These people are incited by scapegoating and marginalizing people into an attitude that is “us against them”, which in the end can lead to something quite evil, as history would say about Hitler and