The New Homiletic Movement

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A New Homiletic Movement: It is a type of movement. It was originated in the late 70s. The aim of this movement is to turn away from rational, cognitive models of homiletics and followed homiletic models grounded in dialogue, narrative, induction and imagination. . The term “New Homiletics” is ascribed to David James Randolph, who in 1969 associated a new group of homileticians with the New Hermeneutic of Gerhard Ebeling and Ernst Fuchs. Homileticians that are included in the new homiletic movement are Fred Craddock, Charles Rice, Henry Mitchell, Eugene Lowry and Paul Scott Wilson. Paul Scott Wilson defined that “it is a revolution in homiletics. It indicates a departure from the old homiletic that is characterized by point form, structure, …show more content…

At first, The New Homiletic required a turn to the hearer. The traditional homiletical works generally focused on how the preacher builds an argument. The New Homiletic focused its place on how people in the pew listen, how they understand the spoken language. As an alternative of constructing language simply to serve the content, it plays with language to invite hearers to experience somewhat specific. In classical rhetorical terms there is shift in emphasis from logos to pathos. Secondly, to enable hearers to do their sermonic work appropriately, there must be a shift in how sermons are offered. It is not overly dramatic to call this paradigm shift a homiletical revolution. After four to five hundred years of deductive sermons, the New Homiletic said, “No more.” In their place were offered inductive, narrative-type sermons. Sermons in the vein of the New Homiletic are expressed in the indicative instead of the …show more content…

Propositional sermons work on the statement that language is a clear, exact tool to convey the truth. Therefore the main elements of the sermon are the images, narratives, myths, parables and metaphors, abstracts, theological moral point yielding knowledge of the experience of God . Imagery is used to “illustrate” these main points, to make them more concrete, more palatable. The imagery is the message in New Homiletic. Sermonic content is not propositional truth but a true being, and transformative experience of the good news. The sermon, like Scripture itself, is a word