theo|digital

(Etching of Jesus is 1647 by Rembrandt)

O.C. Edwards writes an encyclopedia article on the History of Preaching:

There are several genres of Christian preaching, including at least the missionary or evangelistic, catechetical [teaching/training], and the liturgical [context of worship]. … Such a sermon may be defined as a speech delivered by an authorized person applying some point of doctrine, usually drawn from the biblical passage, to the lives of the congregation with the purpose of moving them to accept that application and to act on the basis of it

Clearly there is little in the New Testament that can be identified according to these criteria as Christian preaching. … The preaching of Jesus could be thought to provide an exception, but it fails to on at least two counts. First, since it’s content was the breaking in of the reign of God, and it refers only by implication to its proclaimer’s role in that inauguration, it is not, strictly speaking, Christian preaching.
Edwards Jr., O.C. “History of Preaching” in Willimon, W., & Lischer, R.. Concise Encyclopedia of Preaching. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995.

Edwards goes on to invalidate most of Paul as a model for preaching as well. I’m not sure I could disagree more. If Jesus proclamation doesn’t fit out definition of Christian preaching, isn’t it time to examine our definition?

My model for “preaching” for a number of years has been modeled on Jesus, phrased perhaps as:

“Like Jesus, we use stories, (i.e. narrative, setting, character, plot (tension), etc) set in our down-to-earth lives to illustrate (<– too weak…embody?) the kingdom of the heavens—the subjective revealing the objective, the temporal as eternal. We tell stories contrasting what life is like inside the kingdom and outside the kingdom for the ears of four “rings” of people within earshot: the absolutely committed, the followers, the apathetic or curious, and the skeptics.”

This is my model of preaching, using what I find from Jesus. I know it’s not typical of whole streams of the church’s exegetical preaching. But I think this is one that many got wrong. I wonder what O.C. Edwards would think.

More from Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982). (long I realize, but try it anyway)

Most persons are surprised, and many distressed, to learn that essentially the same objection commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus and in the Seventh Letter against writing.

Writing, Plato has Socrates say, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only int the mind.  It is a thing, a manufactured product.  The same of course is said of computers.  Secondly, [Socrates] urges, writing destroys memory.  Thos who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack…  Today, parents and others fear that pocket calculators provide an external resource of memorized multiplication tables.  Calculators weaken the mind, relieve it of work that keeps it strong.

One weakness in Plato’s position was that, to make his objections effective, he put them into writing.

Writing and print and the computer are all ways of technologizing the word. Once the word is technologized, there is no effective way to criticize what technology has done with it without the aid of the highest technology available. Moreover, the new technology is not merely used to convey the critique: in fact, it brought the critique into existence. Plato’s analytic thought…was possible only because of the effects that writing was beginning to have on mental processes.

Communication theorist Walter Ong speaks about communication ages: orality (pre-literate), literate, and secondary orality (age of radio, TV, etc). It seems appropriate, with the debate (likely?) coming tonight, to note some of his thoughts on presidential debates:

“The contrast between orality in the past and in today’s world well highlights the contrast between primary and secondary orality. Radio and television have brought major political figures as public speakers to a larger public than was ever possible before modern electronic developments.
…
The old style oratory…is gone forever. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, the combatants–for that is what they clearly and truly were–face one another often in the scorching Illinois summer sun outdoors before wildly responsive audiences of as many as 12,000 or 15,000 persons…The debaters were horse and physically exhausted at the end of each bout.

Presidential debates on television today are completely out of this older world. The audience is absent, invisible, and inaudible. The candidates are ensconced in tight little booths, make short preparations, and engage in crisp little converstations with each other in which any agonistic edge is deliberately kept dull.
…
Candidates accommodate themselves to the psychology of the media. Genteel, literate domesticity is rampant. Only quite elderly persons today can remember what oratory was like when it was still in living contact with its primary oral roots.”

Walter Ong is most famous for his book Orality and Literacy.

Seeking to study the intersection of theology with communications and culture has been a deeper sea than I imagined. I’m starting to realize that only two years of formal study can barely scratch the surface, and the overwhelming nature (plus my insatiable curiosity), means that I sometimes find myself out of intellectual oxygen and gasping for shore. It’s been helpful to understand that part of the dilemma is the number of academic approaches that can be taken. It’s this interdisciplinary synthesis that I’m sure is so attractive to me, but also makes me feel like I need to be an expert in all of these areas: which of course is impossible?

I know that I’ve pushed myself toward Communication Studies—and possibly more specifically media studies—as an approach, but this is interdisciplinary as well. Phew.

So approaching my thesis… argh! I’m so wrapped up in grasping an approach, that a specific topic still feels miles away.

From a missiological article:

Comprehensive contextualization is interdisciplinary in its approach to culture. While contextualization is anchored in the Bible, it brings to bear a number of disciplines, each of which has a distinct contribution to make. For example, history enables us to see how faithful Christian communities (and perhaps unfaithful ones as well) have dealt with similar or parallel issues that we face today. Theology helps us to think in biblical ways about a variety of issues being faced. Anthropology offers insights into societies and cultural values, symbols and artifacts that need to be brought into focus through the lens of Scripture. Sociology enables insight into social networks and associations and helps us understand church structures and polity. Linguistics gives insight into the word forms and language issues that are so crucial to communication of the faith. Communication studies offer tools for analysis of persuasion and methods of communication. Psychology helps us understand human dynamics — especially such things as motivations and decision-making — as they are played out in faith settings. Economics helps us understand exchange processes that are essential to the survival of institutionalized faith structures, and politics helps us understand political and legal processes both in and out of the church.
~ Scott Moreau

Sigh. Oh good, I’m not crazy when my brain flips between these things as quickly as changing lanes.

And the most helpful:

Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. ~ Raymond Williams

Well, I’ve used this blog for years on a variety of ministry and personal topics, including this past year the experience of heading to fulltime work in theological studies for a couple years.

This year marks an entire year of classwork finished, and I’m beginning to need to focus.  The main goal for the next 5-6 months:  choose a specific thesis proposal.

The general topic for my course of study is the “intersection of theology, communications, and culture.”  This means I’ve been focusing on communication studies approaches for looking at theology, but even this is difficult to navigate.

A communications approach could focus on how we communicate theology (e.g. evangelism or “preaching”) and therefore be classified in “ministry” or “missiology.”  Missiology has possibly done some of the best integrative work in communications and culture globally, some of the insights which are finally coming back to hit our local North American context.

OR it could instead look at the process of doing theology (theological reflection) itself.  Noting the cultural context and invisible context which creates fish-in-water assumptions during the process.  I’m particularly curious about the difference the generational distinction of current writing pastors and theologians compared to those that will have grown up in an information age (which I’m sorta on the bleeding age of… 30 years old).  How will the process and assumptions change?  This possibly gets into theological prolegomena (epistomology, etc), which I’ve not had tons of training in.  On the other hand, I can speak with a little bit of cultural knowledge from an online society.

OR I could look at a particular doctrine and the communications dimension within that doctrine, which probably less examines the process.  Ex:  what are the communicative elements of incarnation or sacraments or ecclesiology?

OR… I could look at a theology of communication, a la Vanhoozer’s text as a communicative act that demands a moral responsibility.

Anyway, I hope to upgrade this space to help me process my thoughts in the area, and invite my current friends, partners, but also new friends from the blog world to interact with me as I move through this year of research.

“The most integral and involving time sense imaginable is that expressed in the Chinese and Japanese cultures. Until the coming of the missionaries in the seventeenth century, and the introduction of mechanical clocks, the Chinese and Japanese had for thousands of years measured time by graduations of incense. Not only the hours and the days, but the seasons and zodiacal signs were simultaneously indicated by a succession of carefully ordered scents.”

“In the Renaissance the clock combined with the uniform respectability of the new typography to extend the power of social organization almost to a national scale. By the 19th century it had provided a technology of cohesion that was inseparable from industry and transport, enabling an entire metropolis to act almost as an automation. Now in the electric age of decentralized power and information we begin to chafe under the uniformity of clock-time. In this age of space-time we seek multiplicity, rather than repeatability, of rhythms. This is the difference between marching soldiers and ballet.”

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man : Critical Edition

G.K. Chesterton, the English novelist and theologian, was rather influential in Professor Marshall McLuhan‘s conversion to Roman Catholicism in the early 1930s. Originally drawn to Chesteron while still a university student in Manitoba, McLuhan later wrote a defense of some of Chesterton’s way of thought which he liked so much. The article was published in the Dalhousie Review in 1936, entitled “G.K. Chesteron: A Practical Mystic.”

The background isn’t completely necessary, though to appreciate these two Chesterton quotes, as selected by McLuhan:

Real mystics don’t hide mysteries, they reveal them.

The highest use of the imagination is to learn from what never happened.

Dr. Lamin Sanneh, a native of Gambia, is a missiologist at Yale. A quote from his book Whose Religion Is Christianity?: The Gospel beyond the West, which he writes as a series of short questions and answers:

Q: What is the significance of the growth of the world Christianity for the West?

A: The West can encounter in the world Christian movement the gospel as it is being embraced by societies that had not been shaped by the Enlightenment, and so gain an insight into the culture that shaped the origins of the NT church. That might bring about a greater appreciation for the NT background of Christianity. It might also shed light on the issues of the early church faced as it moved between the Jewish and Gentile worlds.

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Now playing: Andrew Osenga – The Letter
via FoxyTunes

On 24 Feb ’08, Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church (Seattle) spoke on the topic of the emerging church. Mark is often quoted — especially by general-audience news media (doing feature articles in the religion section) — as an “emerging church leader,” though I don’t think I’d agree (despite the wide breadth the term covers). Really he’s simply a younger conservative evangelical pastor who wears Urban Outfitter t-shirts.

But he does have a past association with Emergent Village types, which he can be pretty negative towards. Because I wanted to look more closely at what he had to say, I went ahead and transcribed his entire talk. The audio and video of his talk were already publicly available, but sometimes it’s easier to read it. I did it for myself but then figured others might want it as well. So here it is, the full transcript of his talk. It was part of a sermon series entitled Religion Saves & Nine Other Misconceptions.

Full Transcript (pdf – 379kb) Mark Driscoll Ask Anything Question 2: Emerging Church

The above is my unmarked transcript of his talk. If you’d like to see the copy I was using to mark up, including my personal (biased) comments, you can download that instead. Maybe I’ll be able to get back around and put up some quotes later.

“Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing… What Orwell feared was those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one…

In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

~ Neil Postman, writing in his forward to Amusing Ourselves to Death, an old favorite that I finally just bought to put in the permanent shelves (go Amazon impulse buy). This guy wrote in 1985, and still has a lot of power. Love it. So good. Love it. Yep.

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Now playing: Sigur Rós – Ágætis Byrjun
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