Alive to the Word. Stephen I. Wright

17] See for instance the quantity of references to them in Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.

[18] On this event see Timothy Clark, 1999, ‘Literature and the Crisis in the Concept of the University’, in David Fuller and Patricia Waugh (eds), The Arts and Sciences of Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 217–37, here pp. 222–5.

[19] This division is especially associated with the name of J. P. Gabler. See Craig G. Bartholomew, 2005, ‘Biblical Theology’, in Kevin J. Vanhoozer (ed.), Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible, Grand Rapids/London: Baker/SPCK, pp. 84–90, here pp. 85–6.

[20] See Bartholomew, ‘Biblical Theology’.

[21] See Andrew Rogers, 2007, ‘Reading Scripture in Congregations: Towards an Ordinary Hermeneutics’, in Andrew Walker and Luke Bretherton (eds), 2007, Remembering our Future: Explorations in Deep Church, Milton Keynes: Paternoster, pp. 81–107; Andrew Village, 2007, The Bible and Lay People: An Empirical Approach to Ordinary Hermeneutics, Aldershot: Ashgate.

[22] Cf. Rogers, ‘Reading Scripture in Congregations’.

[23] On the theological function of preaching see also Trevor Pitt, 2010, ‘The Conversation of Preaching and Theology’, in Stevenson, Future of Preaching, pp. 65–83.

[24] On the connection between preaching and pastoral care see Michael J. Quicke, 2005, ‘The Scriptures in Preaching’, in Paul Ballard and Stephen R. Holmes (eds), The Bible in Pastoral Practice, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, pp. 241–57.

[25] See Michael J. Quicke, 2006, 360-degree Leadership: Preaching to Transform Congregations, Grand Rapids: Baker.

[26] ‘Because the word conveys the new humanity, by its very nature it is always directed towards the congregation. It seeks community, it needs community, because it is already laden with humanity’, Bonhoeffer, ‘The Proclaimed Word’, p. 35.

      part 2

      Introduction

The second stage of practical theology is called by Osmer ‘The Interpretive Task: Sagely Wisdom’.[1] This is the stage at which we bring various theories from the sciences or humanities to bear upon the phenomenon on we which we are reflecting, in order to be able to understand better from a human perspective what is going on. Thus in Chapters 3 and 4 I seek to interpret preaching with the aid of several theories related to human communication. We will consider aspects of language, media, rhetoric, sociology and psychology. If as theologians we are tempted to doubt the necessity or worth of this stage – preferring to move straight on to the next stage, in order to develop a theological perspective – the wisdom tradition of Scripture should be sufficient to convince us otherwise. Osmer gives an excellent account of the pertinence of the wisdom tradition to the practical theological task.[2]

      Some might still feel, however, that preaching is such an irreducibly theological event that to postpone a properly theological consideration of it till Part 3 is to give in to reductionism. Are we not allowing our basic understanding to be dictated by ‘secular’ categories? I offer three responses to such a fear.

First, the phenomena of preaching which I seek to analyse here are, to my mind, thoroughly conditioned by God himself. In no sense do I regard preaching as merely a ‘secular’ occurrence. There is no wish to claim that the various ‘human’ categories applied to the study can fully encompass or explain the divine realities inherent in the event. In Osmer’s helpful analogy, human theories provide a map of the territory that may be found more or less suitable for the expedition, but they are not the territory itself, and of necessity leave much out.[3] This is true even when the ‘territory’ is purely mundane. Yet such theories and categories, with all their limitations, stem from the creativity implanted in us by God himself. They are not ‘secular’ at all. They mediate his creative wisdom to us and are meant to be used, alongside what we call the ‘special’ revelation he has given in Christ and through Scripture.

      Second, I make no claim that these categories from the human sciences, or my application of them, offers us a ‘neutral’ analysis. There can be no such thing. Therefore, although I do not make theology an explicit part of the framework in this part, I am very happy to acknowledge that a theological perspective undergirds the way I seek to understand everything – preaching included. In practice that means I have chosen frameworks of analysis that seem to me to accord with such a theological perspective and usefully fill it out. Most importantly, I adopt a fundamentally positive view of the potential of human communication, grounded in the belief in a God who communes with his children and enables their mutual communion to be real and not sham.

      Third, the truth of God’s incarnation in Christ suggests that to ignore the human dimensions of our knowledge, our practices and our discipleship would be profoundly un-theological. If, as we continue to claim, God still speaks, somehow, through human beings, our aim should be to seek to understand with all our (God-given!) human powers what that claim entails and what are its practical consequences for us. History is littered with the wreckage caused by those who have been so confident in the possession of divine inspiration that they have (unwittingly) wrought abuse of some kind on their many hearers. Such speakers (if Christian) have often, I suspect, not grasped this implication of the incarnation: that far from neglecting the human, we are called to embrace it and enable it to be God-filled. For preaching, this means that it would be sub-Christian to neglect the human capacities, conditioning and categories of thought which enable us to make the most of who we are and what we might be. When all that has been attended to, the question of whom, how, when and where he will inspire is for God’s free choice alone. The danger for us is precisely that we will be so sure of God’s inspiration that we seek to act as God instead of being ourselves. This, to me, is amply sufficient to justify bringing all the relevant tools of human knowledge, skill, creativity and hard work to the task of preaching itself, and of understanding what it is we are about.

      Central to reflection on the nature of preaching must be an awareness of the dynamics of human communication, and the various theories considered in Chapters 3 and 4 all bear in some way upon this phenomenon. Preaching’s place in Christian tradition and contemporary Church life gives it a unique character among communicative events – a uniqueness greatly enhanced by the divine dimensions claimed for it in Christian theology. But to overlook what it shares in common with other acts of communication would be a grave mistake.

The simple model of communication in which a ‘sender’ (usually a speaker or writer) encodes a ‘message’ (usually in words) and delivers it to a ‘receiver’ (usually a hearer or reader) is now widely and rightly regarded as inadequate. Even if we expand the model to allow for a possible act or acts of translation somewhere along the way (in other words, bringing a third person into the frame as an interpreter, or envisaging the necessity of a specific process of decoding by the receiver), it should be clear that