theo|digital

I believe that this concept of a distant, primarily unknowable God is at the heart of postmodernism. The major proponents of postmodern approaches to human communication rarely contend that there is no higher power. They simply assume that such a power cannot be known intimately by human beings, since sacred texts are presumably just as prone to deconstruction as any other texts.
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The more I study Hebrew and Christian traditions, however, the more struck I am by the ways that these monotheistic faiths incorporated deconstruction within their understanding of ultimate reality. I make no joke when I say that the account of the fall from grace in the beginning of the book of Genesis can be “read” as both an explanation and description of the cosmic disconnect between symbol and referent. From what I can tell, Adam and Eve represent the first postmodernists as a result of their alienation from God. Ashamed of their disobedience, they feared both self-revelatory and God-revelatory discourse.

Quentin Schultze, “The God-Problem in Communication Studies” Journal for Communication Research 28 (March 2005), 13-14

Looking at the history of preaching, I find that I identify with streams of thought that are more minority than some of the more common Greek-rhetoric influenced theories of how preaching should work. But occasionally I find quotes that really match my heart on this stuff, this one from 1877 England:

I think one great need in our pulpit ministrations is naturalness. … Many are miserable in their inmost hearts, who are light-hearted and gay before the world. They feel that no heart understands theirs, or can help them. Now, suppose a preacher goes down into the depths of his own being, and has the courage and fidelity to carry all he finds there, first to God in confession and prayer, and then to his flock as some part of the general experience of Humanity, do you not feel that he must be touching close upon some brother-man’s sorrows and wants?… Does not the man feel that here is a revelation of God’s truth as real and fresh as if he had stood in the streets of Jerusalem, and heard the Savior’s very voice?

(F. W. Robertson, Sermons Preached at Brighton. 1877. Preface, ix)

(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.

Linford Detweiler, one half of the folk-jazz-pop- bluegrass-acoustic duo Over the Rhine, spoke last week at North Park University.  OtR usually comes up on my “top 3″ favorite bands list for a long list of reasons, but the not the least that they project a view of the world that sees doubt as part of faith, winter as warm, and back-roads as essential to human experience.

I’d never seen Linford speak more than a few words (he doesn’t talk a lot at concerts, usually letting his partner Karin Bergquist hold down center stage).  His topic was on faith and art, which he approached mostly by storytelling through parts of his childhood.

Some quotes (not quite verbatim, cause I was sketching them with my thumbs on my Treo keyboard—which can also be thanked for the blurry picture—but pretty accurate).

All good art involves getting caught up in a story that’s bigger than you.

My father grew up in Amish community.  No tv, no radio, no electricity.  He was restless.  The first thing he did that was unusual was sketch faces along the whitewashed barn.  People from the community came by and recognized themselves.

At one point [my father] discovered the reel to reel tape recorder.  He’d take it out to the woods and point that microphone at the swamp, the insect symphony, that extravagant useless beauty that’s all around us.

At breakfast he take these recordings and play them for us as we leaned over our hot cereal.

Linford explained that in the religious tradition he grew up in, instruments were not allowed (with the exception of a harmonica, which he didn’t understand. Was portability a criterion?). The piano, Linford’s home instrument, was considered a sin, and he didn’t know immediately what one was.

The first time I heard a piano:  My mother took me to visit an adopted boy. He was sitting at a small wooden house with pedals like a car…

The first time I heard the trumpet: ” It pierced me.  It was like I was thinking my first thoughts.  And one of them was: I’m out here. That sound is coming from up there. I need to be where the sound is coming from

On advice to young song writers:

“Are there powerful early memories that you have that you need to take care of?”

“Write the song that someone would listen to on the next to last day of their life. Maybe that’s the song you’re called to write.”

Professor Emeritus C. John Weborg, 72 years old, is lecturing on his experiences on the combination of ritual and pastor identity.

When someone calls you to a death bed, do you know what to do? 
A pastor is someone who does rituals
People need someone who knows the words.

The Apostle Paul writes of apprehending what had apprehended him. [referencing Phil 3.9].  Ritual, using transrational thinking, using reflection, can sometimes help us apprehend what has apprehended us.

Quoting Aidan Kavanagh:
Ritual is a system of symbols rather than mere signs. Symbols being roomy, allow many different people to put them on, so to speak, in different ways. Signs do not. Signs are unambiguous because they exist to give precise information. Symbols coax into a swamp of meaning and require one to frolic in it.

Because he’s retired, we get only a few guest-lecture chances to hear from John Weborg.  Every time is worth it.

Dr. Lindy Scott formerly the Director for the Center for Applied Christian Ethics at Wheaton College writes an article toward “A Biblical Perspective on the Current Immigration Situation.” His first theological point is that God is the owner.

God places humanity (both male and female) on earth to take care of the creation. In no way is humanity the absolute owner of the earth. All people have the calling to represent God on earth as stewards or administrators, and as such all will give an account of their stewardship to God.

Therefore, Biblical teaching does not totally agree with an extreme form of capitalism where the individual is the absolute owner of “private property” nor with an extreme form of socialism where the state is the absolute owner. Within both “isms” humanity, both individually and collectively, is called to use the earth according to divine principles. The Spanish phrase “Mi casa es tu casa” (My home is your home) captures quite nicely the spirit of Biblical teaching.

I’m still reading what implications he draws for immigration policy in the United States. Read the full article.

“One purpose of this chapter is to situate today’s Christian theologian by calling attention to the church’s global context and to remind us that no language or culture has a monopoloy on God, the gospel, or theology.  This is an important and timely prophetic blast against the monstrous regiment of systematic theologians, in whose company I count myself.

It is undeniable that the church has entered a new era.  … The reign of the sovereign knowing subject, and of universal method, is coming to an end. …  But does it necessarily follow that systematicians must go the way of the Elves, whose time had ended, setting sail (appropriately enough!) toward the West?”

Dr. Kevin Vanhoozer, writing in typical Smile: It’s Theology! form. His chapter is in Globalizing Theology, co-editied by one of my current professors, Dr. Craig Ott.

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.
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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.
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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.

Pope Gregory the Great (540-604 CE) writing a letter to Abbot Mellitus, speaking of the missionary work of Augustine of Canterbury:

After mature deliberation on the condition of the English, [I have] decided upon, namely, that the temples of the idols in that nation should not be destroyed but the idols which are in them should be destroyed. Let holy water be prepared and sprinkled in said temples; then let altars be erected and relics set in place. For if those temples are well built, it is right that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God, that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed may abandon the error in their hearts and know and adore the true God, while still resorting familiarly to the places to which they are accustomed.

And since they have been used to slaughtering many oxen in sacrifices to devils; some solemnity should be substituted for that On the day of dedication, for example, or on the nativities of the holy martyrs whose relics are there deposited,[6] they may build them selves huts of branches of trees around the churches which have been converted to Christian use out of temples, and celebrate the solemnity with religious feasting, offering no more beasts to the devil but killing cattle for eating to the praise of God and returning thanks for their food to the Giver of all things, to the end that while some outward pleasures are permitted them they may more readily accept the inward consolations of the grace of God.

 Comments:

• Interesting example in the history of theology (more missiology) and culture.
• Assumes English native religion is of Satan
• But is remarkably accomodating to allowing the architecture and sacrifice practices to remain, but “re-purposed” toward a Christian worldview.
• Issue:  can existing systems of meaning be changed?