Modern Preaching: a study in ensnarement between Enlightenment and Postmodernism

So I've (finally) finished grad school, moved into my church (yes, you read that right), am finding my place within the strata and tangle of this fascinating community, and am now sorting out how best to do the visa thing so that I can stay, which will probably involve going back to Oz for half a year. So that'll be nice. I have failed to update this blog in ... um. However many months. Even though there has probably been (and will be) plenty to tell you about. All of this is true. But can wait.

Oddly enough, the subject of this post follows on, thematically at least, from my previous one. Never let it be said I don't value continuity. I have now spent three years in seminary, which has included one semester of studying didactic preaching (which was the sum total of what was taught in the class called "Communication of Biblical Truth", and if that doesn't give you pause, the rest of this post is for you; likewise, if you find the "P" word up there in the title a dirty one), along with I don't know how many years of sitting in church listening to preaching. I am no expert. But I am a heavily experienced observer. And now, you are going to get My Opinion.

Brace yourself.

Modern preaching, more or less, sucks.




Now – it is encumbent on me to acknowledge that amongst the preachers I know and have heard, there are earnest, intelligent, accomplished souls who sincerely seek God's truth to proclaim it, and believe that our modern preaching form is the best method to do so. If you are among this group of people, and find yourself affronted by the above statement, I don't apologise for making it but you can take the (postmodern) comfort that it is, as stated, my opinion. Quite likely the majority of your audiences enjoy your preaching, or are at the very least comfortable with it. There have almost certainly been times, possibly even more times than not, when I've found something enjoyable in it too.

For the enlightenment-minded among you all, I shall break this topic down into its graspable component parts and deliver these parts in a discourse with an eye to rationality and persuasiveness. For the modern-minded, I shall break it down, include self-conscious commentary and utilise technological advantages available to me. And for the postmodern-minded, I shall share story and experience personal to myself and others. I will not, however, do these things in any real delineated way (since they're all interrelated anyhow). You're big boys and girls and, I hope, can juggle various epistemological swerves without too much hand-holding.

the story so far

(or, ESTABLISHING RELEVANT CONTEXT: A Study in the Great Movements in Recent Eras of Thought)

(if you're impatient for the point, skip to the next section)


Our story opens with the Enlightenment, or, "the Age of Reason":

A Glorious Age of Man, wherein the kindled Rebirth of Intellect and Enquiry from the ashes of the Dark Ages is fanned into its Brightest Blaze of Reason Triumphant. Mystical truth and its attendant vagaries is pruned, sensibly, from the province of Reason; only that which may be Weighed, Measured, Quantified, Proved – that which is Objectively Available to All Minds and Experiences in All Circumstances – may be effectively engaged as Truth and basis for progress. A solid, unchanging, immovable, rational Foundation upon which to build the Heady Spires of Human Endeavour.

(Anchored, it is generally understood, by the assumption that what undergirds this discoverably-consistent and coherent world is a consistent and coherent, discoverable Creator. Ie, God is the Measure of All Things.)

Huzzah! Come one, come all, and look upon the definitive, societies-wide accomplishment of Enlightenment Thought, and marvel: the Great Wonder of the Industrial Revolution! Through Rational Thought and Invention, we may raise Mankind to Heights undreamed of by any age before!



Excellent. Job well done, everyone. Now all we have to do is keep building, yes? Keep innovating on Truth that can be proven – the Scientific Method being our very best friend, here – and the future is gravy. The whole world brought forth into light and plenty, the dark days of credulity, superstition and misery left, thankfully, far behind us.

So we do; we build, and build, and discover and discover, and theorise and experiment and revise and experiment and generally achieve mastery of the rational universe (or, you know, close enough). Heartened by the reassuring mechanistic consistency of the observable, quantifiable world, we begin to suspect we can actually do without the whole undergirding God thing, or at least his non-mechanistic qualities, because frankly his whole mystical, mysterious, transcendent shtick had become rather unseemly (not to mention messy) in light of our bright-and-shiny new testable, knowable, dependable Truth. Enter Deism. And, with the proposal of a mechanism for diversity of life as we observe it without the need for divine creativity (that would be Darwinian Evolution; you may have heard of it), enter atheism.



Which is ever so much better, really. Neater, certainly! The physical world, with its attendant epistemological boundaries, is a better foundation of coherency for enquiry into Truth than the unmeasurable divine, as the progress and productivity of the Enlightenment conclusively demonstrated. Material blessings, once superstitiously – irrationally – considered the province of the Great Unpredictable Provider In the Sky, are now achieved by human invention alone. Bounty is made possible, not through appeasing deity but through properly grasping and implementing Scientific Principles; progress and Truth can thus be decoupled from anything spiritual at all, and in fact there's no reason to believe that anything outside of the natural world (that is, anything that can be measured ... er, by the natural world, but pay no nevermind to that, because –) even exists. Truth is ... well, TRUTH is ours, if it's anyone's, obviously, and our TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES are in and of themselves the progressive realisation of the ideal. HUMANISM! MANKIND IS THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS! Finally, we have something we can truly depend on – truly control, because it's us, after all – as our EVOLUTIONARY PINACLE OF KNOWLEDGE, MORALITY, PROGRESS, MASTERY OF ALL WE SURVEY, AND ALL THAT STUFF.

(Those playing along at home would be correct in surmising that this marks the emergence of the MODERN PERIOD – THE "SCIENTIFIC AGE".)

I don't know about you, but there's a comfortable sense that we're sitting pretty right about now. We have tamed – tamed! – the physical universe.... Let me just say that again, in the unlikely event that the enormity of such an accomplishment has become blasé through familiarity: we have tamed the physical universe. One or two short centuries of rigourous intellectual exertion is all it took, and collectively the human brain has encompassed all there is to material existence. (And since we have mostly decided there is nothing outside that, we are de facto World Series Champions.)



Then ... well, I don't want to spoil anyone who hasn't seen it, so [spoiler alert]: then, the Twentieth Century happened. Which included, among other notable things, the discovery of subatomic particles, the development of some really weird physics, the invention of the commercially-lucrative adolescent age group, two world wars, a decades-long global stalemate with enough firepower to destroy the world 100 times over, and more inventive and effective and horrific ways of killing each other with technology than any previous century ever dreamed of (which is not to say there weren't some ancient and medieval periods that didn't give that attempt their very damnedest). I'm not saying there weren't good things going on, too, but to some, that whole "PINNACLE" business began to look just a little feeble, if not outright ... well. Suspect, to be honest. People began to comment. Eventually, spurred on no doubt by all that rebellious sex'n'drugs'n'rock'n'roll, there were ... questions.

The most irritating, to the MODERN mindset, was that staple of teenage thought: oh yeah? Well, how do you know? This question of nascent postmodernism (the "information age") may have found a niche, of oddity if nothing else, within the Enlightenment question of: ah, interesting, how do you know?, but unfortunately that question had accumulated answers enough that MODERNITY had codified the statement: we know actually quite a lot, thankyouverymuch, and while you're under OUR ROOF you'll kindly recall that WE make the rules! We worked very hard to establish this domicile upon SCIENTIFICALLY-PROVEN UNIVERSAL CERTAINTY and we will not have you tracking in mud and kicking the walls with your "relativism" and "subjectivism" and elephants and blindfolds! And who let that Uncertainty Principle in here –? ... oh wait, that was us.

Thus a titanic struggle over TRUTH began. Only, not really. Because the Enlightenment/MODERN tradition had laid claim to the possession of TRUTH so strongly, framing it as "that which can be proven through replication of results" with such success, postmodernism couldn't reject (or move past) MODERNIST principles without rejecting TRUTH as well. Impetuous move, perhaps, but let no one say it isn't fun to make MODERNS splutter forth righteous effrontery with a well-aimed declaration that all truth is subjective.

Well, naturally there is spluttering. It's a nonsense claim. If there were going to be any attempt at INTERNAL, LOGICAL CONSISTENCY, the statement would read: all truth is subjective, even this one. Which would then promptly self-destruct, under the sneers of MODERNS and their Very Rational Enlightened foundation. Which, if postmodernism looked to MODERN epistemology to legitimize its truth-claims, would be a problem. Rather infuriatingly, however, it doesn't. It looks to its own. I mean, the very nerve of it, but that's what it does. (And under the postmodern epistemology, all truth is subjective is not problematic – because they have no problem with the idea that something can be both nonsensical and true at the same time. It is only Enlightenment and MODERN thought that insists on a one-to-one correlation of MAKING LOGICAL SENSE with TRUTH.)

Yes, that's right: postmodernism makes truth-claims. Of course it does. All philosophies do. The problem it's dealing with is that it's making truth-claims in an arena where the philosophy it is challenging long ago claimed a monopoly on TRUTH. And the arena itself. And, for good measure, declared that nothing else even existed. Strategically, then, the best option is to take the discussion outside the arena, provided there is indeed ground beyond its boundaries, which is precisely what postmodernism did.

In terms of the broader discussion of truth, it's a pity, since there is a lot of good stuff inside that arena, but MODERNISM's lock on it means it's currently unwinnable; better to just leave them in there until they're starved into cultural irrelevancy. In the meantime, it has turned out that the ground outside is wild with tantalising irrationality and fertile with possibilities. The vast unmappable jungles of the mystic and the mysterious, so long abandoned, are being rediscovered, via the epistemology of personal experience – the only thing (as adolescents have discovered beyond any question) one can truly depend on. The individual is the measure of all things! Or at least all the things that one individual can experience! Which, thanks to the internet, is actually quite a lot, even if it's 90% virtual and also complete rubbish.



... Is anyone still with me? Hello?

what this has to do with anything

(or, CUT TO THE CHASE: Enough with the Ridiculous Typography Already! Wherein Capitals and Italics resume their Traditional, Objective Purpose of Authorial Emphasis (and I stop trying to be so damn clever).)

It may surprise some of us to learn that the bible was written a while ago. Now, I hear chuckling in the audience, and I appreciate that, because I was in fact making a little joke there. Which I will now make again: the bible was written a while ago. In fact, it was written before any of those eras listed in vaguely storied form above. And the reason it's important to point this out is because it was written by different people, in different cultures, all of which had different ways of evaluating truth.


If you look at those eras up there, each one has accepted forms in which truth is communicated. The job of a good preacher is to study what the bible says and do their best to understand that in the light of the culture it said it in, attempt to grasp the essential message, and communicate it in such a way that preserves the integrity of the essential message to their audience.

So far, so good, although even a quick pause for thought will spot that Moderns and Postmoderns require very different preaching approaches, and I want to say something about this quickly before moving on. I was going to say a great deal more, as you can probably tell from the amount of context I established up there, but then I realized it's easy to rant about styles of preaching and how they fall short of some standard; I don't like didactic preaching but that's because it bores me to tears, not because it lacks any merit whatsoever for communicating truth. I'm not going to assert that it sucks on that basis alone (because I've got a better one; see below).

Essentially, the point I was going to make about preaching to the different philosophies up there can be boiled down to this:

Moderns receive truth presented in a propositional format. The essay format, that we had drilled into us since forever: a central argument, given as introduction; three points (with sub-points); conclusion. (Even writing that makes my toes clench, but never mind my raging personal hate-on for it right now. Just wanted to remind you it's there.) They love powerpoints and bulletpoints; the message is clearly laid out in a logical step-by-step progression, intellectually graspable.

Postmoderns receive truth presented in a personal format. The closest the pulpit can get to that is the testimonial format, although really the way to communicate truth to a Postmodern is to put them in a situation where it is experientially graspable (which is nigh-impossible from the pulpit). Hence the appeal of a dynamic "worship" session; the music is an experience they can participate in.

The utterly objective and the utterly subjective, wanting nothing to do with one another. Which is a pity, because it is in the context they give one another when they're integrated that actual meaning is found. Didactic preaching, which takes the propositional format above, acknowledges this by ritually including a sub-point of illustration for each point (usually extremely poorly), between the sub-point of exposition and the sub-point of application. This is done because the exposition doesn't mean much – has little force for application – until it is contextualized to personal experience. An illustration – a story, basically – is used as the bridge between the two.

(Story is the bridge between the intellectual and the experiential forms of receiving truth. Actually, I'd go very much further and say that it's the vehicle that integrates truth on every level: propositional, experiential, applicational, personal, relational and communal. Just putting that out there.)


In any case, the conflict between how the Moderns and the Postmoderns in the pews are receiving the three-point sermon is not the heart of the problem. The heart of the problem of the didactic sermon also contains the problem with the pulpit itself: what it says about the nature of truth. The argument about objective vs subjective truth presupposes that truth is a set of statements about the nature of reality. The pulpit, which evolved from the Enlightenment tradition of lecture halls, of one person (or a series of people) standing at the front presenting on a subject, in and of itself limits truth to being a series of ideas, regardless of the criteria (reason vs experience) by which those ideas are evaluated for veracity. The entire Enlightenment-Modern-Postmodern pageant presupposes that truth takes place in the realm of ideas.

Therefore, the message from the pulpit and modern preaching (which is making a claim of communicating biblical truth) is: truth is an idea.

The message from the bible (the actual biblical truth) is: truth is a Person. Specifically, truth is Jesus Christ.

Jesus didn't say "The truth is about me"; he said "I am the truth." The truth IS Jesus Christ. The gospel isn't the good news about Jesus Christ; the gospel IS Jesus Christ. But generations of truth being presented as ideas to accept or reject has led us to believe that the "salvation message" is a series of theological propositions and not Jesus himself. The way is not following Jesus, the way IS Jesus. The life doesn't come from Jesus, the life IS Jesus. (Basically, the moment you stray from Jesus himself, you're in trouble. It's a decent rule-of-thumb. It's also remarkably helpful in that, as a person, Jesus Christ is eternally, universally relevant, regardless of the prevailing philosophy and culture.)

This proposition (that the Truth is the person Jesus Christ) can be said in a didactic sermon (although I can't say I recall ever hearing it). But that's the extent of it. That is as far as a didactic sermon alone can go to get that message across (while being undermined by the assumptions inherent in its own format). It doesn't matter if it's communicating truth in a way Moderns or Postmoderns will accept; its claim to being the venue in which biblical Truth is communicated is saying that truth is something it's biblically not. And that is why it sucks.