Rhetoric in Preaching

As we breathe a collective sigh of relief at the stop of the political party conference flavour, information technology is worth reflecting on the importance of rhetoric in public oral communication. Perhaps nosotros agree with ane half of the definition of rhetoric:

Language designed to have a persuasive or impressive issue, merely which is often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content

Merely anyone involved in public ministry building needs to remember the other half:

The fine art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the exploitation of figures of speech and other compositional techniques.

This has been very evident this calendar week. Whatever the merits of their respective content, there was a marked contrast in thedelivery by David Cameron and Ed Miliband. In his interview on Radio 4, Miliband used endless parataxis ('and…and…and then…and…') whereas Cameron used much more hypotaxis ('Because… after…whilst…') and information technology was much more than effective. Surely we want our linguistic communication to be effective and persuasive—and we might even want to have up Nick Baines' challenge to redeem what is often (in public discourse) the corruption of language.

Apart from annihilation else, nosotros alive in an age where rhetoric is making a serious comeback:

• The increment in radio listening, this year believed to be up by nine%.
• The effect of the previousLabour Authorities'southward initiatives in numeracy and literacy. I was amused by a conversation with the Caput Instructor of my children'southward schoolhouse last year when I asked about my children'south awareness of dissimilar genres of writing. 'Information technology is all about meta-knowledge!' he replied; in their literacy strategy (adult in conjunction with Nottingham Trent Academy), they are developing skills in genre recognition by focussing on reading and writing a unlike genre of literature each half term. Thus at age nine the pupils are overtaking well-nigh graduates in their agreement of what Douglas Stuart and Gordon Fee identify every bit a primal chemical element of biblical literacy.[i]
• Actual apply of the internet as an interactive medium, which, despite the importance of film and video material, is very often text based. Children asked to 'research' a subject on the cyberspace are very often engaged in activities that in practise look very similar to reading an article in an encyclopaedia, and adult usage often makes high demands of literacy. The growth of blogs, in detail, has led to a veritable explosion of circumlocution; from an bookish and a ministry perspective, I just observe I cannot keep upward with all that is beingness written.
• The extraordinary rise of stand up-up one-act in the last few years, a form of amusement entirely dependent on the crafting and employ of words. To those objecting to the form of the monologue sermon as unsustainable in the contemporary context, I point out that people will pay very good money to heed to 90 minutes of monologue at the Apollo Theatre in London! There might exist problems with many monologue sermons, but stand-upwardly comedy says that the problem does non merely lie in the monologue form itself!
• The return of rhetoric inside political speech, the prime example here existence that of Barak Obama. Writing on the day Obama was due to give his Inaugural Presidential Speech, Razia Iqbal quotes Tony Blair'due south erstwhile spoken communication-writer Philip Collins: Obama at his absolute all-time "combines a poetic form of expression with a poetic compression of significant, while rarely straying from ordinary language. His speeches do accept wing, just the flight comes from the rhythm of the sentences as much as the summit of the language".[ii] Obama's speech on that twenty-four hour period is replete with classical techniques and strategies of rhetoric.[iii] You could observe similar moves in Cameron's 'unscripted' speech outside Number x when he became Prime number Minister.

If we desire to engage persuasively with our congregations in our preaching, and if this is the world they are living in, we demand to reflect on the language we apply..

A rediscovery of rhetoric

Paul Scott Wilson, in his masterly introduction to The Practice of Preaching, argues that preaching must be engaging and persuasive—but not in the first example for practical reasons. Rather, he argues that theology itself is rhetorical because it is relational, in that it seeks to be a place of run into between God and his people.[4] Anthony Thiselton says something similar in the opening of his contempo The Hermeneutics of Doctrine. The early on creeds were never mere statements of propositions to which the church gave intellectual assent; they were e'er expressions of 'dispositions', fundamental orientations which afflicted the whole of life.[5]

If theology is rhetorical, in the sense that its goal is 'faithful persuasion', Wilson argues that homiletics must also exist rhetorical, since it is the 'completion' of theology:

I believe that the sermon is not the dilution of theology; information technology is rather the completion of theology, made complete through Christ speaking it and constituting the church through it. We might even say that the church building is about truly the church building when it is preaching in worship, for it is through the Word and sacrament that salvation comes to the world, and it is through our lives being transformed in the cruciform image that our acts of justice, mercy, peace, and love are begun one time more than in power.[6]

Against an 'old homiletic', propositional approach to preaching, Wilson believes that preaching is 'never simply the exchange of data from preacher to congregation' (p 77), but must involve persuasive engagement. In doing this, preaching must rediscover Aristotle's ancient rhetorical categories of logos, the appeal to rational statement and facts, ethos, the integrity and character, fifty-fifty plausibility, of the speaker, and pathos, or emotional entreatment.

Our preaching must be experienced as integrating caput, center and soul (or loosely: logos, ethos and pathos). Homiletical theology is not an intellectual exercise that results in the cool dispensing of knowledge over a prescription counter; information technology involves our entire lives in devotional purpose.[seven]

Interestingly, some of the examples of the recovery of the importance of language in culture announced to have discovered this very matter. In 'observational' comedy, 1 of the most prominent forms of gimmicky stand-upwards, the rational facts of a situation (logos) are extrapolated into a reductum ad absurdum; as a result, the comic is left in an absurd situation, with which we sympathise (pathos); and all the while the comic uses various devices to establish rapport with the audience (ethos)—the comic is very much 'one of u.s.' and fifty-fifty (in a sense) goes through these experiences on our behalf.

Proponents of the 'new homiletic' have argued for a more than radical rethinking of the sermon as a performative date. Only the demand to rediscover rhetoric is more than fundamental and all-encompassing; contemporary preachers need to develop basic skills of communication, 'request alliteration'south artful aid' (as I was once taught)[viii], structuring in threes,[nine] creating narrative tension by delayed resolution—and then on. I constitute the experience of giving two-minute 'Pause for Thought' talks on Radio ii transformative of my preaching, since it demanded a scripting and crafting of linguistic communication that a xxx-minute sermon never asked for. So I require all those studying homiletics at St John'due south to preach a 2-minute sermon to their peers. Discovering how much you tin can say in such a brusque fourth dimension when y'all take care, they so sometimes wonder why they always needed 20 minutes or more!

Given the sense of growing hostility to Christian organized religion, the importance of expert, persuasive, engaging preaching is not only about satisfying religious consumers in the supermarket of faith. Increasingly, Christians in the West demand to have good reasons for what they believe, and encouraging religion involves continually making a persuasive instance for trusting in God.

(For farther material on this, see my chapter 'The Future of Language in Preaching' inThe Future of Preaching)

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[i] In How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth London: Scripture Union, 1983 and later editions, the unabridged framework of which is genre recognition. I am aware that this growth in literacy is very uneven, given the continuing poor levels of attainment especially in areas of social impecuniousness. Rather than uniformly increasing literacy, Government education policy could be seen to have both increased but also polarised literacy, with certain social groups becoming more literate just a continuing underclass remaining functionally illiterate.

[ii] Quoted in Razia Iqbals's BBC blog from Tuesday xx^th Jan 2009, http://world wide web.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/raziaiqbal/2009/01/the_power_of_language.html accessed in March 2010.

[three] Both transcripts of the speech itself and analyses of its features are plentiful on the internet.

[4] Paul Scott Wilson, The Practice of Preaching, Nashville: Abingdon, 1994, affiliate three 'Theology and Rhetoric.' Revised edition, 2007.

[five] Anthony Thiselton, The Hermeneutics of Doctrine. Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans, 2007 affiliate 1.

[vi] The Practise of Preaching, p seventy.

[vii] Ibid, pp 79–80.

[viii] Run into the department 'How to requite a talk' in David Watson, Discipleship, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985.

[ix] From Barak Obama'due south Countdown Presidential Address: 'Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered… all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance… the chance-takers, the doers, the makers of things…For us, they packed upwardly…/For us, they toiled…/For u.s., they fought and died… we accept duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world… This is the price…/ This is the source…/This is the meaning…' and and then on!

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