The time of cultural transition we have been describing points our attention to a growing anxiety or problem felt in Western preaching for two reasons, according to Babin. 91 First, he observes that a literary culture necessarily makes certain assumptions about knowing and relating to the world that must be agreed upon for its influence and power to be secured. However, in today’s shifting culture, those assumptions are not as secure. One of the key issues is how a literate clergy deals with the growing post-literate ethos of emerging world Christianity. This is a large part of the existential identity crisis facing the modern preacher. As Ong notes, print helped to create a linear approach to the task of proclamation. When this approach was applied to preaching, the goal of preaching became to teach the abstract idea of a text. The faith engendered in the hearer is “faith” that the ideas are true – which, when translated, means that the proposed propositions are logically or empirically verifiable.92 This assumption, that ideas can be logically proven, is no longer taken for granted within our culture and churches. Second, Babin notes that today’s preaching culture is evolving into a new species of communication inspired by technological media. Print technology is rapidly being replaced with new forms of electronic media; churches are making an adjustment to this world of electronic communication that emphasizes sound. They are integrating multi-media technologies to supplement and enhance their worship services. For example, many churches are fitting their auditoriums (not sanctuaries) with new technologies such as multi-media screens, microphones, and soundboards. Preachers are faced with the reality that in the marketplace of competitive religious consumerism, they have to pay attention not only to the right ideas, but also to the right sound. One can lament this situation, but the issue that needs to be faced in today’s culture is that how something is heard may be just as important as what is heard. 93
Not everyone celebrates the current transition in communication. There are many who resist a thesis that blindly accepts the emergence of the new technologies as neutral means of communication. Considerable concern exists that our new communication culture is “dumbing us down” and causing us to lose the ability to rationally think and
91 Babin, The New Era in Religious Communication, 25. 92 See Jensen, Thinking in Story, 27.
93 Frank Burch Brown suggests that these are issues which are discerned as much by aesthetics as by theology. See Frank Burch Brown, Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste (Oxford: Oxford Press, 2000), 12.
discern.94 Some scholars of communication, such as Quinten Schultze, are calling for serious reflection on the changing (and often negative) impact modern technology is having on our emerging postmodern society. 95 Schultze argues that electronic media is not neutral and that Christian communities must critically evaluate their use of it so as not to be seduced by the “flash and glitter” of the emerging information technologies. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman unapologetically laments the erosion of the print-literary influence on the American mind and its public discourse.96 One of Postman’s main critiques is that the patterns of communication encouraged and sustained by media such as television (with its moving images, competing sounds, and virtual experience of place) are displacing those encouraged by print (characterized by the word, discursive reasoning, and the possibilities of logic). Postman's argument is not that words are good and images are bad, but that the images preferred by television—as it actually exists as a social institution—are images designed to titillate and entertain. Postman's ultimate concern is for the quality of public life and the possibility of promoting serious discourse. In his estimation, without serious discourse and without the tools that allow serious discourse to happen (e.g., logical reasoning), the institution of democracy will crumble.
For anyone who is called to engage in public discourse like preaching, Postman’s warning is wisely heeded. Much of what shapes our culture’s idea of “serious” communication is nothing but entertainment designed to brand merchandise. While preachers need to recognize that a shift in communication is happening, they also need to acknowledge that technology, and the ways different technologies communicate information, are not neutral. When preachers get their cues from those in the popular entertainment industry, much of their proclamation can be rendered inane, shallow, or just plain ridiculous.
94 See Marva J. Dawn, “Inside the Technological, Boomer, Postmodern Culture,” in Reaching Out without
Dumbing Down: A Theology of Worship for the Turn-of-the-Century Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 17- 40.
95 See Quinten Schultze, Habits of the High Tech Heart (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004). Schultze does not advocate the eradication of technological services. Rather, he argues that we must focus as much on the quality of our character as we do on technological innovation. He contends that our society is governed by infomationism (his term), a quasi-religious faith in the power of information to improve our lives. Our informationist society, however, values short-term technological goals over long-term humanistic ones, uses people instrumentally and devalues religious teachings on morality, community and humility that, in Schultze's eyes, foster virtuous living. He argues that we need to restore a society where meaning is more than measurement, intimacy is valued over observation, and deep moral wisdom is esteemed above superficial knowledge.
While preachers need to recognize that electronic technologies of media are
epistemologically loaded, there are reasons for preachers to be more optimistic than Postman acknowledges.
Postman believes that “literate” Christianity is doomed by electronic forms of
communication. He suggests that preachers will no longer be able to communicate their faith in the literate manner to which most of Protestantism has been accustomed. Postman’s critique, however, is problematic. First, he conflates the content of
Christianity with the printed word and the form of thought created by print. However, the content of Christianity is not dependent on the written word, but the Word who became flesh – Jesus Christ. Christianity is a result of God’s revelation, which is always the event of God’s self-giving, and thus can never be limited or located simply on a page. In other words, preaching and its message are a work of the Holy Spirit given to us in Jesus Christ.
Second, preachers can take comfort by remembering that the world of Scripture was handed down from generation to generation centuries prior to the development of the printing press. The Church does not rise or fall by the eye, but by the ear – with the speaking of the Word. The Christian faith does not require a literate culture in order to communicate its good-news message. Interestingly, Jesus Christ, the eternal Word, chose not to write any words down himself. Jesus passed on his wisdom by word of mouth and action to his apostles, the apostles passed it to their disciples, the disciples to their families and friends, and so on. Christianity spread from person to person by way of mouth, by the telling of the story orally. Postman needs to remember that faith still comes “through what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ” (Rom. 10:17). Thus, preachers need not be anxious as they preach in an emerging context of a post-literate world, even as they are attentive to and discerning about our current communication technologies. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, working in Jesus Christ, God is still able to communicate to humanity.
If we are to take Ong seriously at this point, the shift of communication we are experiencing is not simply a matter of people favoring entertainment over serious discourse, but rather of our technologies having physically changed the human sensorium – the patterns of association that help us to think and make meaning. The
point for us is not to evaluate or judge whether this is to be celebrated or lamented, but to observe that it is a real situation with which the preacher today must contend. The primary issue for the preacher is to recognize that people fundamentally hear and process information differently. It is not that sermons dressed in a logical suit are necessarily bad, but that many of our most important ideas may best be heard and understood when communicated through narrative and story rather than in logical outlines sub-divided into many points.97 This is indeed similar to how Jesus himself preached. Jesus, working out of a largely oral culture and tradition, spoke in ways that appealed to the imagination of the hearer. Could it be that what is the matter with preaching today is that we have lost the way that Jesus, God’s spoken Word in the flesh, embodies a broader artistic and aesthetic understanding for gospel proclamation?
In a time of transition and twilight, when a print era is fading into an electronic era, it may be that the thinking and speaking modes of oral cultures invite us to consider some possibilities for homiletic practice. The question before us is this: given that today’s preacher is caught at twilight between a modern and postmodern world, given that the hermeneutics of suspicion has helped to reclaim the significance of the imagination, and given that the communication culture is recovering the importance of sound and forms of preaching that emphasize orality, what would be a helpful and faithful “homiletic identity”? More specifically, would a metaphor that encouraged preachers to operate with the broader identity of an artist help them to follow the artist Jesus as they find themselves situated in an era that is marked by a renewed interest in the imagination and a new way of experiencing oral communication? To begin this consideration, we first need to examine the role and power metaphors have in shaping the ways we think, live and act in the world.