METODOLOGÍA DE LA INVESTIGACIÓN 3.1 Tipo de investigación
GRAFICO Nº10: NIVEL DE CONOCIMIENTO CON EL GRADO DE INSTRUCCIÓN DE LAS GESTANTES QUE ACUDEN A LA
THE PREACHER AS TEACHER is a reliable and time-tested identity for any preacher to adopt as a metaphor to shape his or her homiletic art. In the tradition of Augustine, THE PREACHER AS TEACHER follows the advice of classic rhetoricians to be holistic in the speech act: to enlighten the mind, touch the heart, and move the will. However, this holistic emphasis of THE PREACHER AS TEACHER was altered to fit the cultural emphasis of modernity. As suggested earlier, the ancient and modern casting of a metaphor can change in accordance with differing cultural and intellectual milieux. Metaphors adapt to cultural contexts. Shifting cultural understandings can alter
metaphoric assumptions of meaning as new ideas and experiences come to be associated with the relationship between this and that. Because conceptual meanings are shaped by these tacit relationships, new emphases in culture can result in a shift in the practices associated with a particular metaphor. Augustine’s pre-critical world was shaped by a vastly different culture than the world shaped by the cultural assumptions of modernity. To understand how THE PREACHER AS TEACHER is understood and practiced in today’s shifting culture, we first need to appreciate the metaphor’s place at the end of modernity.70
In this next section, we will argue that the metaphor of THE PREACHER AS
TEACHER has lost Augustine’s holy tension by placing emphasis on a truth rooted in natural reason over Scripture, and using rhetoric to communicate this limited
epistemology. We will use the work of John A. Broadus as an example of how the THE PREACHER AS TEACHER’S sermon practice reflects a “rational rhetoric” for the pulpit.
70 This argument has been informed by a diverse reading of theologians, philosophers, and cultural critics. See for example, Nicholas Lash, Holiness, Speech, and Silence: Reflections on the Question of God (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism (New York: T&T Clark, 2002); Rodney Clapp, A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1996), 16-17; Stanley Hauerwas, Wilderness Wanderings: Probing Twentieth-Century Theology and Philosophy (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997).
a. THE TEACHER Exalts Rationality
During the modern period, the cultural context of THE PREACHER AS TEACHER experienced something of a paradigm shift that impacted how a preacher shaped by this identity understood and practiced communication. This shift helps us to understand how rational assumptions of truth became so ingrained in the cultural thinking of the Church in the time of modernity.71 As a consequence of an understanding of truth as
propositional ideas, THE PREACHER AS TEACHER adapted its sermons to exalt reason and reflect a “rational rhetoric” bent towards the appeal towards individual choice.
The modern period grew out of the religious wars of Western Europe that significantly eroded the moral authority of the Church. This was a historical period marked by great intellectual investigation, critique, and rigor that inspired revolutions in science, politics and religion. This period of “The Enlightenment” championed the innate and universal endowments of human reason that were adjudged to be capable of providing humanity with the knowledge of nature, morality and religion necessary for individual and societal welfare.
A main source of this modern outlook was the new paradigm inspired by Isaac Newton (1642-1727) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), among others. Newton encouraged the view that the natural universe is a grand cosmic machine of interacting causes and effects, precisely measurable and predictable according to mathematical laws. This mechanistic view of the universe was an effect of the modern period’s emphasis on rationality. Reason was to be the primary means to accomplish both individual and social transformation. Kant formulated the oft-quoted definition of the philosophy that gave the modern period its name. His 1784 essay “What is Enlightenment?” starts out with the declaration:
Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to
71 Craig M. Gay makes this argument in The Way of the (Modern) World: Or, Why It’s Tempting to Live as if God Doesn’t Exist (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 1-28.
use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own reason! --that is the motto of enlightenment.72
The overall ideal of the Enlightenment was rational self-determinism. With this
understanding of rational autonomy in a mechanistic world, knowledge could be known quite apart from dependence on special revelation from God, Scripture, or Church. Claims of ultimate meaning that relied on such foundations as supernatural revelation or miraculous interventions as described in Scripture and fortified by Church doctrine were considered highly questionable. Within this perspective, commonsense was bound to ask whether religious authority had any empirical “truth,” worth directing one’s faith. Mark Noll notes that this emphasis on the individual’s reason threatened the traditional authority of the preacher because it led to the celebration of universal commonsense as the guide to moral life.73 Reason, not Scripture, was considered the new authority over
moral life.
Thus began a cultural move away from locating moral authority in external sources like the Scriptures and Church doctrines. In their place, the individual’s reason became the sovereign moral authority of society.74 Proponents of the use of reason believed it to be
a neutral tool that could be used to discern the natural laws that would govern a people newly emancipated from the chains of the Church’s superstitions, Scriptures and doctrines. Modernity also nurtured the assumption that God had endowed humanity with natural reason that made self-evident certain inalienable rights of the individual. Stephen Toulmin suggests that in modernity, meaning was limited by empirical ideals of rational intelligibility, which “emphasized regularity and intellectual order and above all stability.”75
Samuel Wells argues that the modern turn toward the “self” as a new source of ethical reflection was a paradigm that fundamentally changed the Church’s witness and, as a consequence, its proclamation:
72 Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What Is Enlightenment? Translated, with an Introduction, by Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merill Co, 1959), 85.
73 See Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 43-49.
74 This authoritative transition did not become widespread all at once. Its effects were subtle, but began to be significantly felt by preachers by the beginning of the nineteenth century. See James Davison Hunter, American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 28.
The seeds of salvation were now regarded as lying within the self, in the moral law written on every heart; those seeds were no longer assumed to lie outside the self, in the possession of one institution, the Church. The drama of the universe ceased to be God’s unfathomable force of life, death, and judgment, and the Church’s negotiation of them through the preaching of the Biblical narrative and the ministration of the
sacraments. Now the center of attention was the human individual, the new self, and the drama was humanity’s struggle to know and command its environment.76
Wells suggests that this emphasis on the “self” as a source of authority had an
overarching influence on the construction of a coherent account of an individual’s sense of truth. Putting faith in autonomous reason as a neutral source of revelation signaled a shift in how truth was to be taught. No longer was “truth” the primary property of the Church. No longer could “rational” people blindly appeal to the sacred Scriptures or Church doctrine as the sole genesis of truth. The modern turn to “self” meant that truth could be determined through autonomous reason. Both the credibility and necessity of supernaturally (God-to-human) inspired Scriptures, narratives, doctrines, and institutions were challenged by modernity’s rational, often anti-dogmatic modes of critique. Hans Frei suggests that this led to the belief that “truth” was no longer located in the Biblical narrative, but in the ideas inspired and verified by human reason. He argues that this functional rationality caused the Biblical narrative to be “eclipsed” by the story of human reason, the autonomy of the individual, and blind belief in human progress inspired by scientific knowledge.77 When it comes to preaching, “truth” was no longer to be located
in and learned from the voice of the preacher teaching Scripture and doctrine, unless the preacher could adapt himself to the modern age.
It is not that preachers had to cease teaching Scripture altogether, it is that they had to make Scripture mirror or collaborate with the new truths being discovered through modern practices like science. As Christian Smith observes:
Intellectually, nineteenth-century orthodox Protestantism enjoyed and promoted an epistemological worldview that secured the critical importance of the Bible and theology in the scientific enterprise. Believing that all of God’s truth was unified and readily
76 Samuel Wells, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2004), 26-27. 77 See Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 111-112, 118.
knowable, evangelicals employed the dominant Baconian paradigm of scientific knowledge and the epistemology of Scottish Common Sense Realism to demonstrate that faith and science could and must go hand-in-hand. The Bible would reveal God’s moral law and certain natural truths; science, for its part, would confirm the teachings of the Bible and expand human understanding beyond what the Bible revealed. Together, the Bible and science were expected to render a rational validation of the veracity of Christianity and lay the foundation for a healthy national moral and social order.78
Thus, the person and practice of the preacher had to be reborn with a modern sensibility that could combine teaching the commonsense realism of Scripture with the empirical realism of science. Modernity imposed such constraints on the culture – and
consequently on the worldviews of individuals in modern society – that it made it almost impossible to resist. Indeed, James Davison Hunter writes:
The Protestant experience does not present fundamental opposition to such constraints. The cognitive styles of the Protestant worldview and the modern worldview have certain similarities that are historically grounded and dialectically related. One may note the Weberian commonplace that the inner worldy asceticism of early Protestantism was particularly suited for the augmentation of rationality in Western society. Even as Western rationality began to develop independently of religion, the worldview of Protestantism continued to legitimate modern rationality and even to reflect some of its changes.79
Paul Scott Wilson identifies five significant influences this fusion had on the practice of the traditional identity of the preacher.80 First, the human elements of the text gradually
become the focus of meaning in the text, while theological meaning became secondary. Human experience became the primary focus rather than the acts of God. Second, natural explanations of events, including miracles, tend to be sought over supernatural ones. Third, the interpretive focus shifts from the Biblical text itself to the vast
uncharted historical events and territory behind the Biblical texts. Fourth, the authority of the Bible is questioned in new ways as history offers competing claims for the literal sense of the text. As a result, the ability of Scripture to govern faith and morals for the Church is undermined while different ways are sought to shore up scriptural authority.
78 Christian Smith, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) 3.
79 See Hunter, American Evangelicalism, 73.
And finally, the grammatical and historical senses of Biblical texts become distinguished from each other as historical method gains a cultural hold on the preacher. In light of a culture that understood truth to be verifiable, the goal of preaching could no longer be to
teach the literal and figurative references of meaning that occurred in historical events of Scripture that could not be verified.
The effect of these changes was that THE PREACHER AS TEACHER began to reflect the spirit of the age, making “truth” a propositional idea that could be dislocated from Scripture. If truth was to be located in rationality, then preaching had to make appeals to universal reason. Therefore the preacher began to develop a reflex for apologetic
sermons, arguing in deductive points, themes, and main ideas that were abstractly designed to persuade the hearer through “logically sound propositional” language.81
Homiletic scholar Richard Eslinger describes the sermon practices of the preacher “as a spatial kind of activity in which the preacher constructed sermons from static themes and propositions.” 82 Eugene L. Lowry writes that preaching under this modern assumption
of “stable and ordered” rationality trained the preacher to “immediately set about to order ideas” dressed in propositional prose when sitting down to begin sermon
preparation.83 The work of interpreting Scripture was dedicated to identifying the ideas
that could appeal to reason through ordered propositions. As Frei comments:
In the course of the eighteenth century it [interpretation] came to signify not so much a literary depiction that was literal, metaphorical, allegorical, or symbolic, but rather the single meaning of a grammatically and logically sound propositional statement. 84
David Buttrick argues that the modern preacher, in search of this logical propositional statement, approaches Scripture the way one might mine for gold in a mountain.85 The
mountain is viewed as an obstacle to be blown apart, cleared away and reduced in order to discover, remove, and grasp the golden nugget buried deep in its core. For the preacher, the golden nugget is the propositional idea buried in the text that can be extracted only by applying natural reason. Buttrick calls this a “hermeneutic of
81 See David Buttrick, “Interpretation and Preaching,” Interpretation 35 (January 1981), 46-58. 82 Richard Eslinger, The Web of Preaching (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2002), 15.
83 Eugene L. Lowry, Doing Time in the Pulpit: The Relationship Between Narrative and Preaching (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1985), 12.
84 Frei, Eclipse, 9.
distillation,”86 meaning that the preacher reads Scripture to glean its natural propositional
or eternal themes that can be distilled into rationally organized outlines.
Hence, in modernity, THE PREACHER AS TEACHER came to the Scriptures with an interest in extracting particular verifiable ideas from the text that could be distilled into propositional statements in a sermon. To satisfy this requirement of ordering rational ideas, the preacherbegan to assume that “sermon building” involved fitting together an assortment of Scriptural ideas or themes into a logical order in order to justify the Scripture’s truth to a rational audience.87 The sermon became a place to hear an
argument controlled by propositional ideas. In a culture that valued rationalism, it made perfect sense for the preacher to adhere to strict rules of logical argumentation that were controlled by propositional statements and outlines. Similar to the way Augustine married Greek rhetoric to preaching, modern preachers began to merge modern
assumptions of rationality to preaching. The preacherbegan to mirror the exaltation of reason as an authoritative arbiter of truth.
There was no better tool for this modern “sermon building” than the classical wisdom of rhetoric. Craig Loscalzo argues that the burgeoning psychological and philosophical ideas of modernity greatly influenced the recovery of rhetoric during modernity. He writes:
The eighteenth century was characterized by intense intellectual fervor, marked by an avid interest in the classics. Empirical sciences flourished, and the study of human nature made its way onto the intellectual stage. Thinkers began asking questions about the origins and functions of language and how humans, from an anthropologic basis, were communicating beings. The stage was set for the revaluation of rhetoric as a tool for such studies.88
Rhetoric was understood to be an effective tool for preparing Christian preachers in both the defense and presentation of the Christian faith. Like preaching, rhetoric emphasized the purposeful use of oral discourse with stress on intent and effect. The appeal to
86 Buttrick, Homiletic, 276.
87 See Eugene L. Lowry, The Homiletical Plot: The Sermon as Narrative Art Form (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 13.
88 See Craig Loscalozo “Rhetoric” in Concise Encyclopedia of Preaching, eds. William H. Willimon and Richard Lischer (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), 411.
master rhetoric was natural for the preacher because it had always been one of its entailments. In modernity, as the Church was faced with the loss of its presumed authoritative status, the preacher saw once again the importance of using classical rhetoric as a means to persuade the hearer through ordered and rational arguments for the truths of Scripture.
However, rhetoric was more than just an aid to the preacher. Classical rhetoric was seen as sharing in the celebration of the “self” that marked the modern period, as its rules and laws were discerned not through Scripture but by applying natural reason to experience. Modernity respected the communication of propositional ideas spoken with clarity and force. Rhetoric was thus valued as a natural handmaiden for the preacher to
communicate the rational truths located in these ideas. Teaching rational ideas became the purpose of preaching. Truth is best grasped and communicated in propositional forms that appealed to natural reason.