The Implications for Preaching
So what does this mean for us as preachers? We must recognize that these intellectual conditions now prevalent in Europe and in the American universities are quickly filtering down from the elites to the general culture. The mechanisms in this process are fairly easy to trace. In fact a number of polls reveal that the greatest predictor for whether you will find yourself in an increasingly secular space comes down to whether you live near a coast, a city, or a university. Given that the future of America is increasingly defined by most of its population being coastal, urban and university educated, you can see that the future of America is also increasingly secular.
Given these cultural changes, we need to recognize we are not preaching to people who hear us in the same way as previous generations in Western societies. Furthermore, we are not preaching with the same authority, culturally speaking, as we once did because we no longer represent the dominant, established worldview of the culture. Instead we now represent a worldview that is not only considered marginal but subversive of the new intellectual and moral regime. Even the people in our churches believe in a way that is more provisional and less theologically grounded than in previous generations.
The question remains what does preaching look like in the secular city? How do we preach a binding authority when people do not even realize they are under authority? How do we preach the objective truths of a non-provisional gospel? How do we preach the authority of a single book, its singular Savior, and a faith once for all delivered to the saints when most people hold, even unconsciously, to a firm commitment to pluralization?
Preaching: The Church’s Means of Survival
With our cultural analysis behind us, I would like to move on to consider the role of preaching in a secular age, particularly preaching as a survival strategy for the church. Many today are reconsidering the role and nature of preaching, especially given the massive changes that now characterize our culture. All sorts of new plans and strategies have been created in order to reinvent preaching in light of demographics, sociology and even management theories. But I want to posit that the only answer to our current crisis in preaching is to recall how many of our forebears approached the task of standing behind the “sacred desk.”
In a secular age, preaching will be met with one of three responses. First, we will find ourselves preaching in a context of hostility. This will not necessarily take the form of overt action. But, at least in the immediate future, much of this hostility will look like cultural marginalization. Those who listen to us will now do so by paying social capital, not gaining social capital—a cultural situation notably different from our grandparents or even our parents.
Second, our preaching will also often be met with befuddlement. For many among the intellectual elites, Christian preachers are not an object of hostility or derision as much as they are creatures of oddity. The plausibility structures of society are so different from our own that many people simply cannot understand us.
Finally, we will find that we will not only be met with hostility and befuddlement, but also indifference. Many in our society will not even care enough about our message to spend their energies either in hostility or befuddlement.
One of the problems we encounter moving forward is that in many circumstances our approach to preaching in relation to other theological disciplines is wrongly skewed. For years in the theological academy, homiletics has been seen as something of a finishing school for clergy. We have imagined that the true theological heavy lifting occurs in the disciplines of theology, exegesis, or church history, while homiletics was merely the practical work for those who were moving on to the professional and less theologically involved environment of the pastorate.
I would suggest to you, however, that this alienation between the classical theological disciplines and homiletics is misguided and detrimental to the life of the church. Historically, the tripartite division in institutions of theological education between theological studies, biblical studies and practical ministry studies originated in Germany, but was concretized as the accreditation expectation for theological seminaries by the Association of Theological of Schools by the middle of the last century. While there are benefits to specialization in academic disciplines, we should also recognize that segmenting theological study along the lines of specialization has come at a cost (perhaps even unintended) in the lives of many modern preachers.
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