I left off yesterday observing the broadly-defined preaching need not be problematic. We’re constantly trying to engender goodwill for premises and causes that we support, and that’s certainly fine.
We’re also tangled up in what we might call commercial preaching, or “marketing,” wherein we try to gin up support for a premise or cause not because we’re already committed to it, but because its proponents pay us so to do. Likewise, some of our energies intersect with the practice of bolstering support for participants or causes in political campaigns. We might observe that this differs from all the other sorts of preaching I’m talking about by noting that the motivation for this preaching discourse depends not on the inclination to promulgate or further our own ideas, but from the motivation to do well at persuading (regardless of the cause). I’m not going to get into a discussion of whether that’s problematic — hey, although I’d never have foreseen it, I now have to say that some of my best friends are marketers — but I think it’s plainly different, and certainly some people will challenge the integrity of anyone who make their capacity for persuasion available for pay. That’s one of the things that got the Sophists in trouble.
So I’ll take stock, for a second, before I take Josiah for his check-up, and then return and set about staking out the narrower version of preaching.
We can speak intelligibly about preaching in a broad, loose context that includes most forms of public persuasion. This includes (in one area) people who address religious congregations about spiritual topics, and (in another) people curry favor with mass-media interests by trying to hobble the productivity of the internet. This constitutes a big, loose category that I distinguish here mostly from “acting” (where the social contract of acting involves a consensual recognition that the persuasion involved is short-term and fictive), “coercion,” and “nattering” (in which one ascribes no real weight to one’s words).
Now, on to the narrower definition. In this narrower sense (which I’m resisting calling “real preaching”), preaching involves a particular kind of proclamation, exhortation, encouragement, invitation. The particularity resides in this preaching’s deliberate self-location within discourses that invoke the premises, the authorization, and the judgment of the God made known to Abraham (here I’ making room for the possibility, but not the flat claim, that Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same God; it’s obvious, in some respects, and not so obvious in others).
In other words, someone in funny clothing who stands up in front of a congregation but specifically disclaims being accountable to God for what s/he says, or someone who makes no claim to be preaching, or who dissents from the premises that the congregation upholds, such a person can justifiably be excluded from the narrower sense of preaching. I’m setting up my point this way because often enough, a “guest preacher” really doesn’t intend to be preaching-in-the-narrower-sense, and shouldn’t be held accountable as though that were the intent. On the other hand, one might well preach to a gathering of observers who don’t assent to the preacher’s faith; that pretty much has to be possible. But such preaching then draws on the premises, authorization, and accountability that the community ascribes to the preacher.
Having woven my intricate and abstract set of rationalizations and distinctions, I’ll say that preaching in this narrow sense involves some necessary connection to the Holy Spirit, as Christians ordinarily regard preaching and the Spirit. In other words, I’m not saying every such sermon gets the full Holy-Ghost spiritual dosage, or that a rabbi or imam necessarily operates on that basis (what do I know about that?). At the same time, I would think it odd to suppose that a (Christian) theology of preaching acknowledged the preacher’s disciplined adherence to the community’s faith, the preacher’s vocation to speak, and the preacher’s willingness to stand under judgment for the words of the sermon — but then suggested that the Spirit might not have anything to do with the preaching. Without intending to limit the Spirit (per impossibile), if you can’t reckon on the Spirit’s activity under those circumstances, I wonder whether one can say much about the Spirit at all.
What-all difference do I think this makes? I’ll try to spell out some of that tomorrow. Tonight I want to read a little and go to sleep.
Posted by AKMA at June 19, 2003 07:25 AM | TrackBack