The Sacramentality of Preaching : A Sacramental Theological Approach to Preaching as the Word of God

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the significance of peaching as the Word of God in terms of sacramentality, the concept that indicates the divine encounter in and through the physical matter or action. Drawing on the expanded concept of sacramentality, I attempt to claim that preaching as the Word of God can be restated as the sacramentality of preaching. In particular, I investigate how Martin Luther, Karl Barth, and David Buttrick understood the sacramentality of preaching and what common ground they share with their contemporary sacramental theology. While Luther claimed of the real presence of Christ in preaching, as he claimed of Christ's real presence in the sacraments, Karl Barth developed the Reformed confession of preaching as the Word of God to the preaching as the Word-event, emphasizing the eventfulness of the revelation. Meanwhile, David Buttrick articulated preaching as the symbolic event or the hermeneutical event, in which the Christ-event is reconstructed in human consciousness. These homiletical discussions are related to the sacramental theological conversations in each period. While Luther's conviction of the real presence of Christ in preaching was a reaction to the Thomist objectivism, Barth's dialectical theology of the revelation was the reaction to liberal theology and impacted Roman Catholic sacramental theology, as Karl Rahner and Edward Schilleebeckx show. Also, Buttrick's hermeneutical and symbolic model for preaching runs on the same track with the sacramental theologians who attempted to explain the sacramentality by employing Heideggerian hermeneutical phenomenology. These scholarly models show that homiletics and sacramental theology have a point of contact for the discussion of preaching as the Word of God in terms of sacramentality, as preaching functions as a mode of revelation as the sacrament does.