Modernity Shaped Preaching Summary

How Modernity Shaped Preaching

In her book Sharing the Word: Preaching in the Roundtable Church, Lucy Rose offers three overviews of preaching methods or forms throughout the history of homiletics. Using these three overviews as a representative framework, the paper will briefly demonstrate how modern thinking shapes each method. The traditional method or understanding of preaching has been around from the beginning of the church but is constantly changing and adjusting to meet the apologetic context. However, the main purpose of this traditional type of preaching remains timeless, persuasion to the truth or transmission of the truth to listeners. In the modern era, this type of preaching conforms to foundationalism, reductionism and representative

If this is successful and reasonable, the biblical text retains its authority, offers foundational truths, and the pastor can proclaim and apply these truths to the congregation. God is sovereign and intervenes among other ways, in the form of scripture. Scripture is inherent and infallible given by God. The pastor’s job is to discover universal truths from the text and offer these as truths that will influence the listeners. Authority in this form of preaching is hierarchical. The pastor receives or perceives via study the revealed word of God and mandates this to the hearer. Moreover, the pastor is communicating objective truths. These truths are unchallengeable and the language used must be representative and therefore justifiable as factual as Rose writes, “Words that are precise can grasp and deliver objective truth”. The connection of the stories of scripture to context, cultural issues, timeliness, and practical meaning take a backseat to general truths applied objectively in a timeless fashion. In fact, the most effective sermon in this form is one

The purpose of this model of preaching is an encounter with God speaking through the preaching event. A basic premise is that the text of scripture shapes the sermon rather than an idea or topic. Again, the authority of proclaiming truth falls with the pastor yet the truth exclaimed is also God speaking. As McClure writes regarding this understanding of preaching, “(Karl) Barth asserted emphatically that God speaks in human words in the act of preaching”. Barth, writing himself, actually places emphasis on God, stating that preaching is the work of God, not a “human task”. One can distinguish reductionism here in the intervention of God via the sermon as well as in the saving act of Jesus, specifically the idea that Jesus’s whole existence is reduces to his death for humanity. Salvation reduces to the realm of thought and factual language and disconnected from lived