Communicating the eternal truth of the Gospel in the continually changing context and language of contemporary culture can be a challenging task. In
HEAR the WORD, author Dr. James A. Prette explores authentic Christian preaching in the postmodern culture.
In this examination, Prette discusses the three essential elements of persuasive communication-pathos, ethos, and logos-and their parallels in Christian spiritual transformation-content, context, and conveyor. He offers a theological reflection exploring and defining a biblical paradigm for spiritual formation through the exposition of the biblical logos that crosses cultural and generational boundaries. He also delves into the cultural shift that has taken place in the ethos of western culture, from a modernist worldview to a postmodern one, and its impact on Christian life and ministry.
HEAR the WORD offers nine important themes that can guide spiritual leaders in listening to and proclaiming the authentic word of God in this new postmodern paradigm.
HEAR the WORD
Listening to the Eternal Word in the Contemporary WorldBy JAMES A. PRETTEiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 Dr. James A. Prette
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4620-1374-6 Contents
Introduction...............................................................................................ixChapter 1: Communicating Spiritual Formation...............................................................1Chapter 2: The Content of Spiritual Formation..............................................................1 9Chapter 3: The Context of Spiritual Formation..............................................................58Chapter 4: The Conveyor of Spiritual Formation.............................................................94Chapter 5: Putting it All Together: The Logos, Ethos and Pathos of Spiritual Formation.....................169Appendix A The Survey......................................................................................195Appendix B The Follow-Up Interview Questions...............................................................201Appendix C The Statistical Analysis........................................................................203Bibliography...............................................................................................207
Chapter One
Communicating Spiritual Formation
The Communication and Contextualization Frameworks
Lesslie Newbigin returned home to England after serving as an Anglican missionary bishop in India. In his book Foolishness to the Greeks, he laments the fact that the Church has fallen into one of two traps as it has sought to engage its surrounding culture. The Church has either fallen into "indigenization," wherein the language, history, and culture of the surrounding ethos is compromised for the sake of preserving the peculiar culture of the Church, or into "adaptation," wherein the peculiar message of the Church is compromised for the sake of relating to the contemporary ethos of the particular culture.
The weakness of the former was that it tended to relate the Christian message to the traditional cultural forms—forms that belonged to the past and from which young people were turning away under the pervasive influence of "modernization." The effect was to identify the gospel with the conservative elements in society. The weakness of the latter term, adaptation, was that it implied that what the missionary brought with him was the pure gospel, which had to be adapted to the receptor culture. It tended to obscure the fact that the gospel as embodied in the missionary's preaching and practice was already an adapted gospel, shaped by his or her own culture.
Newbigin advocates the use of the term "contextualization" to help us understand the "culture of the moment," differentiating between the message of the Gospel, the context of the culture of the Christian missionary, and the context of his contemporary cultural environment. Bruce J. Nicholls describes contextualization as "the translation of the unchanging content of the gospel of the kingdom into verbal form meaningful to the peoples in their separate cultures and within their particular existential situations."
In this chapter we will examine the issues of effective communication in relation to Spiritual formation through biblical exposition. This will involve an application of communication theory to the discipline of preaching and an exploration of contextualization as a means to best translate the meaning of God's Word to each cultural context. An adaptation of Aristotle's three parts of persuasive speech (logos, ethos, and pathos) can be used to examine the effectiveness of the preaching act. The authentic logos (the content of God's Word) must be given in the authentic ethos (the perceived ability of the conveyor of the logos to connect with the receptor language, history, and culture of the contemporary context) with authentic pathos (the perceived authenticity, authority, and integrity of the conveyor of the message).
Authentic Christian Spiritual formation has always connected the logos of God to the ethos of the contemporary audience through authentic pathos. With Newbigin's warnings, one can evaluate whether a specific Christian proclaimer has committed "indigenization," wherein the ethos is compromised for the sake of logos, or "adaptation," wherein the logos is compromised for the sake of ethos. Rather, one must "contextualize" the unchanging logos to the contemporary ethos and speak with authentic pathos.
Newbigin also warns against the absorption of the logos into the ethos of the conveyor of the message. One must observe the "culture of the moment," differentiating between the cultural context of Spiritual formation and the context of the audience's cultural environment. One must evaluate all three dimensions of authentic communication in the act of Christian Spiritual formation in the experience of a sermon. Figure 1 shows a scale of how one might evaluate the logos of the message being preached. One can appraise whether a sermon reaches a low, medium, or high standard in the exposing of the actual meaning of the text being exposed.
Evaluating the Logos
The logos of the message can be evaluated on whether the messenger has correctly exegeted the text. This involves interpreting the message of the passage in its original contexts. These include its historical, cultural, and literary contexts. The text of the logos was written to a particular ethos at a particular time for a particular purpose. These contexts must be understood before one can apply the meaning of the text for the contemporary ethos. The message cannot mean what it never meant. One danger is to take the text of Scripture and apply it directly to one's contemporary ethos, as in figure 2.
This accounts for many awkward applications of texts, written for culturally sensitive occasions, being applied inappropriately in contemporary settings, such as requiring women to cover their heads in churches. Brian Hebblethwaite warns,
It is not even possible for us to mean what the writers of the Bible and the creeds meant just by saying what they said. We have to embark on the process of interpretation, in the light of our recognition both of their presuppositions and of our own, and struggle to express the truth of God and of God's acts for our own time.
An equally dangerous approach is when a preacher begins with his own contemporary ethos and approaches the biblical text, looking for material he can take out of context to have the Bible say what he thinks his ethos needs to hear, as in figure 3. The Big Idea of Biblical Preaching is a helpful book for applying Haddon Robinson's excellent concept of finding the one big idea in the biblical text passage and exposing it to the listeners through preaching. But the preacher must be most careful that his "one big idea" is not in fact his own "one small idea" eisogeted into the text, nor his own rendering of God's dynamic presence reduced to a mere moral principle or a feel-good, pop-psychology nuance.
Rather, what one must do is to listen to the biblical text (the logos) and interpret what its message was to the original audience (biblical ethos) in light of its original context. Then one must take that message and contextualize it for one's own audience (contemporary ethos), as in figure 4.
Os Guinness observes, "The only thing that is always relevant is the gospel." Meanwhile, Chad Myers is right to warn against "reducing [the Scriptures] to morality tales for private spirituality." He also writes, "Fortunately, post-modernism has exposed the fallacy of claims to either doctrinal or historic-critical objectivity." He hopefully does not mean what others have taken to mean that there is no such thing as "objective truth." He hopefully means that the claim that one can reach a perfect, objective understanding of any text is a fallacy. God is objectively true. He reveals himself through his logos, the Word. This revelation comes to us as truth. It is objectively true, but received subjectively. The preacher's task is to listen, dig, mark, learn, meditate, argue, study, memorize, obey, and then proclaim, as best he can, what it meant and what it means.
Christian preachers must be especially careful when exegeting narrative. These parts of Scripture are given to us as "stories," but they are also the historic records of God's revealed salvation history events, his real historic work in the real world, not just the experience of how these stories make us feel. These are not private oracles through which individuals are meant to have their own personal religious experience. These are the corporate "stories" of the Spiritual formation of the authentic historic faith community that worships the God who has revealed himself in and through his personally breathed-out Word. As Peter Adam writes, "Christian gospel ministry involves explaining, preaching, applying and interpreting this sufficient Word so that people may be converted and congregations may be built up in faith, godliness and usefulness."
Another contemporary compromise with postmodern culture is the rejection of expository preaching for greater spiritualist experientialism. Some have tried to link exegetically-based "expository preaching" with modernist intellectualism, in contrast with more "Spirit-led," spontaneous, postmodern, topical messages. John Woodhouse makes a convincing argument for the absurdity of this, stressing that the reasonable and clearly exegeted text and the Spirit are inseparable. He rejects the attempt to bring a "balance" between these two extremes as heretical. He demonstrates that the illumination of the text of God's Word is the primary work and message of the Holy Spirit. He then calls for an embracing of the authentically Christian approach to interpreting and proclaiming the Word, which involves the dynamic synergy between the Spirit of God speaking and working through the Word of God read, exegeted, and taught.
Evaluating the Ethos
The evaluation of the logos of Spiritual formation through the preached message is only the first of the three parts of the communication of the eternal Word to one's contemporary audience. One can rank the logos of a message in one of three places: low, medium, or high. When one adds a second dimension of persuasive speech, one now has nine options in evaluating the preached message, as in figure 5. The ethos of the message is the perceived authenticity of the speaker, based on his ability to communicate in the language, culture, and history of his audience. One cannot only evaluate how well the preacher exposes the authentic logos, but also how well the preacher reaches the authentic ethos of the receptor language of his audience. One may have the very Word of God to convey, but if one is not perceived as authentic, the message is not heard.
In this case, "ethos" is not used strictly in the sense of Aristotle's Rhetoric. By "ethos," Aristotle means something more akin to the English word "ethic." The credibility of the speaker is judged on his perceived character. There it is used to mean the credibility of the conveyor of the message, but here "ethos" will be used more in the sense of his ability to connect with the "ethnicity" of the audience—their language, history, and culture.
George Barna's Generation Next is an insightful expose of the twenty-something generation in America, and it describes how Christian ministries can reach out to this unique group. The most helpful section for applying understanding of the contemporary Western ethos is found in the ninth chapter, entitled "New Rules, New Challenges." These fifteen "rules" are 1) Personal Relationships count, institutions don't; 2) The process is more important than the product; 3) We must aggressively pursue diversity among people; 4) Enjoying people and life is more important than productivity, profitability, or achievement; 5) Change is good; 6) The development of character is more crucial than achievement; 7) You can't always count on your family to be there for you, but it is your best hope for emotional support; 8) Each individual must assume responsibility for his or her own world; 9) Whenever necessary, gain control—and use it wisely; 10) Don't waste time searching for absolutes. There are none; 11) One person can make a difference in the world—but not much; 12) Life is hard and then you die, but because it's the only life we've got, we may as well endure it, enhance it, and enjoy it as best we can; 13) Spiritual truth may take many forms; 14) Express your rage; and 15) Technology is our natural ally. We may not agree with these statements, but we must understand them to best communicate in the history and culture of the receptor language.
Emergent leader Dan Kimball offers ways of connecting the Christian life with contemporary postmoderns in his book The Emerging Church. He provides helpful charts, photos, thoughts, and suggestions on ways to engage the postmodern ethos. In preaching, he argues for an exegetically-based topical approach, saying,
I use a mix of both expository and topical preaching, a type of preaching I call "theotopical." We should be expository in terms of doing the right exegetical work for biblically rooted messages. But at the same time preaching is an opportunity to shape a theological worldview for people by telling the story. Every time I preach I clearly know what theological concept I am trying to teach and how it fits into the story of the Bible.
In his book The Unknown God, Alister McGrath examines how the Christian Church can communicate the Gospel to this postmodern culture. His argument is that one must discover the common ground from which to start the proclamation of the Gospel and then couch it in the terms and interests of the hearers. This is precisely what the Apostle Paul does in Athens on Mars Hill in Acts 17, where McGrath takes his title.
McGrath demonstrates how one can see that there is a common Spiritual hunger in every person, and he uses this archetypal longing to begin his exploration of the claims of the Christian faith. He uses Plato's classical Greek metaphor of "The Cave" and postmodern sentiment to build a case for a hearing of the Christian worldview and the particulars of the historic biblical message. The book includes many pictures and has a colorful, sparse layout that is inviting and readable for this, our Western ethos. This book is helpful as training material for Christians to be fitted for sensitivity to the basic searching needs of the postmodern ethos. Walter Brueggemann argues for contemporary preachers to become poets who "speak against a prose filled world." He sees this as the way postmodern Christian proclaimers can subversively undermine the misunderstandings of their generation with evocative words that generate new vitality in this flat reductionist culture.
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Excerpted from HEAR the WORDby JAMES A. PRETTE Copyright © 2011 by Dr. James A. Prette. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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