Preaching as Reimagination

Abstract

In what follows, sixteen theses are set forth and developed, suggesting that evangelical preaching finds itself now in a quite new cultural, epistemological context. (1) Ours is a changed preaching situation, because the old modes of church absolutes are no longer trusted. It is not that the church's theological absolutes are no longer trusted, but that the old modes in which those absolutes have been articulated are increasingly suspect and dysfunctional. That is because our old modes are increasingly regarded as patriarchal, hierarchic, authoritarian, and monologic. The mistrust that flies under all these adjectives, however, is due to a growing suspicion about the linkage between and power. The mistrust of conventional authority, now broad and deep in our society, is rooted in the failure of positivism, positivism that is scientific, political, or theological. Many are increasingly aware that knowledge most characteristically means agreement of all those permitted in the room. Such absolutism in truth, moreover, characteristically has pretensions to as well, surely an adequate reason for suspicion. Those at the margins of dominating will no longer permit the practitioners of dominating power to be supervisors of absolute knowledge. (2) Along with the failure of old modes of articulation, we now face the inadequacy of historical-critical understanding of the biblical text as it has been conventionally practiced.