Preaching the New Testament as Rhetoric

The Promise of Rhetorical Criticism for Expository Preaching

MacBride

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781630877644
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Since the rise of the "New Homiletic" a generation ago, it has been recognized that sermons not only say something to listeners, they also do something. A truly expository sermon will seek not merely to say what the biblical text said, but also to do what the biblical text did in the lives of its original audience. In Preaching the New Testament as Rhetoric, MacBride looks how at the discipline of rhetorical criticism can help preachers discern the function of a New Testament text in its original setting as a means of crafting a sermon that can function similarly in contemporary contexts. Focusing on the letters of Paul, he shows how understanding them in light of Greco-Roman speech conventions can suggest ways by which preachers can communicate not just the content of the letters, but also their function. In this way, the power of the text itself can be harnessed, leading to sermons that inform and, most importantly, transform.

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The Promise of Rhetorical Criticism

Designing a sermon that does

For some decades there has been a growing awareness in homiletic circles of the relationship between the function of a text and the function of a sermon. In 1975, David Kelsey drew our attention to the fact that Scripture does something in the shaping of individuals and the Christian community.1 David Buttrick, reacting against what he saw as a prevailing “atomistic” approach to expository preaching,2 argued that “true ‘biblical preaching’ will want to be faithful not only to a message, but to an intention. The question, ‘What is the passage trying to do?’ may well mark the beginning of homiletical obedience.”3 Fred Craddock, one of the fathers of the New Homiletic, then urged us to ask the question, “does the sermon say and do what the text says and does?” in terms of both content and rhetorical strategies.4 Consciously building on Craddock, Thomas Long labeled what a text aims to say as its “focus,” and what it aims to do as its “function”; he observed that a sermon on a given text also had a focus and function, and said that this “should grow directly from the exegesis of the biblical text.”5 Without wanting to abandon historical questions and concerns, he wants to augment them with questions about rhetoric: the things that take place “between text and reader.”6 In more recent times this has been acknowledged by homileticians such as Michael Quicke, whose “360-degree-preaching” model takes as a basic assumption that “Scripture not only says things but also does things.”7 In light of this, he reworks Haddon Robinson’s notion of the “big idea” as the “main impact,”8 and defines the task of homiletics as “designing a sermon that says and does the same things the biblical text says and does.”9

Despite this growing awareness, there has been less of an established consensus when it comes to how this might be achieved. Craddock had already broken new ground in 1971 when he urged preachers to take their hearers on the same journey of discovery they experienced when encountering the text in the study, rather than presenting the congregation with the finished product from the outset;10 in other words, one way of making a sermon do something was to preach inductively, not deductively. Although this approach was enormously influential,11 it remains essentially subjective, as the sermon does not seek to recreate the original impact of the text on its first hearers, merely the impact on the preacher. Indeed, it is this original impact which Long encouraged us to recapture and bring across the preaching “bridge”:

Once upon a time, everything about the biblical text made a claim upon its first readers, and now everything about that text makes a new claim upon us. What we bring across the bridge from text to sermon is not just an idea, or even an idea wrapped in our own inductive process of discovery, but rather this claim upon the hearers” (italics mine; note the reference to Craddock’s approach).12

Long then went on to give some practical guidance as to how this might be achieved, but it is still largely an intuitive process by which the preacher attempts to discern the nature of this “claim” on the first hearers. More recently, Quicke has sought to apply this by breaking it down into a two-step process which mirrors the traditional approach to hermeneutics. Instead of merely asking what a text said to its original hearers, and then what it might be saying to us today, we are also to ask what a text did to its original audience, and what it might do now.13 Again, however, we are left without much in the way of tools in order to answer these questions.

Interestingly, Buttrick also argued for an investigation of the text’s original function, and then gave some clues as to how this might be achieved. He pointed to the usefulness of redaction criticism in locating “secondary intentions,” and appeared to foreshadow a discipline that located the primary intention.14 Such a discipline would “explore the different ‘logics’ of language in consciousness” so that “homiletics may well discover that different biblical rhetorics will demand different homiletic strategies including variable logic of movement.”15 That is, he seemed to envision a discipline which investigated the rhetorical rules of a given text, and sought to assimilate this into a homiletic strategy.

Rhetorical criticism and expository preaching

It is our intention in this thesis to advance one such discipline in relation to the preaching of the epistles, namely, rhetorical criticism.16 Over the past few decades this discipline has received an increasing amount of attention, with a plethora of commentaries labeled “socio-rhetorical” becoming available. The aim of this discipline is to recover, as much as possible, the original rhetorical intent (or function) of the text using a defined set of critical tools. In this thesis we will explore how this discipline might be used as a fundamental building block in the task of biblical exposition.

To date, there has been little in the way of systematic application of rhetorical criticism to preaching. James Thompson has drawn the link between the goal of the New Homiletic and the goal of rhetorical criticism,17 but has not provided any concrete methodology for matching the rhetoric of the biblical text to the rhetoric of the sermon. He seems simply to note where Paul uses rhetorical techniques, and to suggest that we might therefore apply similar techniques in our sermons. Similar, too, is the approach by Hogan and Reid, who use a (particularly well-presented) mixture of classical and modern rhetorical theory to show how rhetorically effective sermons might be constructed;18 however, the existence of rhetoric in Scripture is for them merely a justification for using rhetorical techniques in sermons, nothing more. In contrast, our thesis here is that our sermon will say and do what the biblical text says and does if we understand and appropriate the rhetorical function and techniques of the particular text itself, not just rhetorical theory in general.

There have been several studies along this trajectory, most notably those of Long, Greidanus, and Graves.19 Long outlines a process of determining the genre of a biblical text and interpreting it in light of the rhetorical function of that genre, including an analysis of the literary devices used to achieve that function. In light of that, he asks how the sermon, in a new setting, might achieve the same function.20 He stresses that this is not simply a call to use the same literary form for the sermon (so that a narrative text must yield a narrative sermon, etc.). The preacher “is not to replicate the text bu...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: The Promise of Rhetorical Criticism
• Chapter 2: The Tapestry of Rhetorical Criticism
• Chapter 3: Rhetorical Species
• Chapter 4: Rhetorical Arrangement
• Chapter 5: An Introduction to the Means of Persuasion
• Chapter 6: Ethos: Argument from Character
• Chapter 7: Pathos: Appealing to the Emotions
• Chapter 8: Logos: Rational Argument
• Chapter 9: A Worked Example: 1 Corinthians 1–4
• Chapter 10: General Conclusions
• Abbreviations of Classical Sources Cited
• Bibliography