by Jims | December 21st, 2009
The fundamental attack against biblical authority from within some self-professing Evangelical Churches continues to produce devastating results. Noting the historical context of biblical authority in the New Homiletic, David Allen states, “In the eighteenth century . . . the old road was marked with the old sign ‘Authority of Revelation’ . . . the new road sign read ‘Autonomy of Reason.’”[1] It is this autonomy of reason that characterizes much of the New Homiletic. The primary works of the authors of the New Homiletics emphasize an authority that is subjective to the preacher and hearer. Grant Lovejoy notes that this subjectivity causes the proponents of the New Homiletic to “lose whatever claim they make for divine authorization of their message.”[2] Allen traces this subjectivity back to Karl Barth, noting that Stanley Grenz mimics Barth’s view of scriptural authority indicating that the Bible is “revelation in a derivative sense” and that the “Bible is functional revelation.”[3] It is this sense of the functionality of revelation that results in a subjective authority of Scripture for the proponents of the New Homiletic. The New Homiletic is not merely a branch of Evangelicalism, but rather a birth from liberalism. Allen believes this Barthian emphasis in the New Homiletic is what distinquishes evangelical preaching from non-evangelical preaching.[4]
Most major movements within Christianity find footing in seminal works that not only define the movement, but serve as catalysts for the proposal of new theories. Six books serve as foundational resources for the discovery of the view of biblical authority within the New Homiletic. Although other works contribute to the New Homiletic in the areas of sermon methodology and delivery, the following works are foundational to the New Homiletic’s deteriorating view of authority.
The work that launched the denigration of authority in the New Homiletic is Fred Craddock’s As One Without Authority. Craddock begins his polemic of denying pulpit authority by elevating listener authority. Allen notes that the goal of Craddock is to create “an experience in the listener which effects the hearing of the gospel.”[5] Craddock notes that there exists a perception of the congregation’s view of the words chosen to articulate truth as out of date and out of touch, therefore void of authority to change lives.[6] The words, according to Craddock, need meaning but that meaning is found in the ear of the hearer not the mouth of the preacher. Ronald Allen states, “In 1971, Fred B. Craddock’s groundbreaking book, As One Without Authority, became one of the first Homiletical texts to advocate for the authority of the listener.”[7] The appeal to the frustrated preacher’s desire to find a way out of the monotony that often characterizes propositional preaching is commonplace in the works promoting the New Homiletic.
A second work that served as a foundational source for the New Homiletic is Grady Davis’ Design for Preaching. Davis concludes that the absence of a text from a sermon is not a problem, but that the text is one choice among many for the acquirement of a sermon idea. He notes in regards to the preacher’s authority, “He is almost too strongly inclined through piety to accept without question the dogmatic rule that every sermon must have a text from Scripture.”[8] Davis’ work set in motion the movement known as the New Homiletic. His subtle questioning of textual authority, the preacher’s authority, and the role of the congregation in the sermon serves as a foundation for the continual divergence away from authority in the New Homiletic. He states, “Our task is not to extract ‘permanent values’ from outdated material, but rather to discover what the Bible’s message meant to its contemporaries.”[9] This statement along with complimentary assertions throughout his work, removes the preacher, hearer, and sermon away from the text and towards a more experience centered hermeneutic.
The third major work that continues to diminish the value of authority in the New Homiletic is Homiletic by David Buttrick. Buttrick’s theological convictions emerge from liberal biases. David Schnasa Jacobsen notes, “Buttrick reflects theologically on a text, sometimes explaining and engaging it, and at other times challenging or correcting it (e.g., Matthew’s occasional penchant for transactional forgiveness, “if you forgive, God will forgive you”).”[10] David Allen highlights Buttrick’s theological persuasion by quoting Buttrick’s statement on salvation, “[W]e are starting to realize that the gospel is bigger than something called personal salvation … Clearly the Christian Scriptures see Christ as a cosmic savior; he doesn’t just merely save souls, a Gnostic heresy at best: he saves the entire human enterprise, indeed, the universe.”[11] Allen further notes that Buttrick says, “What the Bible offers is narrative with an elaborate mythic beginning-creation and fall, Cain and Abel, Noah’s ark, the tower of Babel.”[12] Buttrick’s theology is liberal, which leads to a methodology void of scriptural mandates or substance.
Buttrick’s divergence from propositional preaching began in much the same manner as his emphasis on the starting point of preaching. Both originate from an experience based belief system. He notes, “I grew curious as to how human consciousness actually did conjoin ideas. The result was a journeying system of ‘moves’ assembled by various ‘logics.’ When preached, such sermons did seem to heighten attention and retention in surprising ways. More, a mobile system offered freedom to fulfill intention, to alter models in consciousness, in a word, to change minds.”[13] Buttrick vehemently denounces all models of deductive, propositional preaching stating, “Preachers are forced to fabricate some sort of sermon design from their own minds.”[14] Buttrick emphasizes a movement in the sermon. He states that the sermon should result in “pacing the movement of a speech with linking blocks of content like a freight train linked with cars to keep all the issues of the message in motion.”[15] Allen notes, “Buttrick’s main concern is to effect an experience in the listener.”[16] This experience becomes, for Buttrick and the New Homileticians, the foundation for authority in the sermon.
Buttrick’s argument is designed to establish a foundation in favor of an experience based model of communication, particularly in the pulpit, which is characteristic of the New Homiletic.[17] In a polemic to establish the value of the story of the Christian faith, Buttrick makes us of the “symbolic reflective” aspect of Christianity that is established by Jesus and “the nature of the ‘being saved’ community.”[18] This idea that Jesus is a living symbol in the Christian community again has a detrimental impact on the authority of the text. If Jesus is reduced to a religious symbol, then the interpretive experience of the viewer of this symbol becomes the authority and the only valid hermeneutical foundation.
A fourth work by Richard Eslinger, A New Hearing, again invests much content downplaying the value of propositional preaching. Eslinger’s theology presumes that authority is not communicated through propositional truth as much as he does through experience related to the truth.[19] He notes, “The story of God’s self disclosure is prepared in specific stories about concrete human experience.”[20] This premise is the basis of his theology, namely a belief that God’s word is supplemental in nature to man’s experience with God’s word. This belief is most evident in Eslinger’s approach to exegesis, which is more about the exegesis of culture than Scripture. In many of his works, he notes that words have lost their power for today’s generation; therefore in order to effectively communicate, the preacher must emphasize experience with God rather than rationally understanding the Word of God.[21]
His goal in examining five New Homileticians is to “allow, as much as possible, each homiletician to have a new hearing.”[22] It is later revealed that this new hearing is more about noting the “liabilities of the old homiletic”[23] than highlighting the benefits of the New Homiletic. There is a sense throughout the work that the denigration of the old homiletic’s view of authority is more important than promoting the New Homiletic.
A fifth work that is not normally associated with the New Homiletic is increasingly defining the detrimental approach to authority in preaching. Carl Raschke’s, The Next Reformation, details the end result of much of the work initiated by Davis, Buttrick, and Craddock. Raschke’s basic premise is that the anti-authoritarian polemics of the New Homiletic are not historically based in Davis or Craddock, but rather in the Reformation. He notes that we live in a “sensate culture” that will not be reformed by modernist attempts to communicate truth. Raschke perceives the failure of Protestantism is that it “only exchanged the Bible for the church as the source of authority. It did not alter the method of drawing implications from that authority.”[24] He notes that Luther, Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, and others added experience as the primary means by which they communicated truth.[25] Raschke believes their actions to eliminate Aristotelian rhetorical components from preaching were purely of a reformation nature and that based on this premise the next reformation will be about faith alone.[26]
The final source to be examined in order to obtain a clear understanding of the historical foundation of the New Homiletic’s view of authority is a compilation of works by Carl F. H. Henry. Henry wrote against the challenges facing Evangelicalism during the same time period that Craddock and Buttrick were launching the New Homiletic. Henry clearly articulated the view that much of what is purported in the New Homiletic is nothing more than liberalism in disguise. Russell Moore indicates that Henry’s authorship of God, Revelation, and Authority, was the academic force behind the renewal of Evangelicalism in America, and served as Henry’s lifelong pursuit “to detail an evangelical theology of propositional revelation and biblical authority.”[27] Henry spent a lifetime defending the authority of Scripture against liberalism and the constant attacks from secularism. These same principles serve well as a polemic against much of what is espoused as new and better models of preaching today. He notes, “Even some theologians find it more natural to assert their own creative individuality than to accept religious authority.”[28]
In a 1981 interview, Henry indicated that he believed the greatest challenge among evangelicals in that decade was the problem of biblical authority.[29] Although the opponents Henry challenged did not go the way of legalism they nonetheless, according to Henry, “dissolved the authority of the written revelation into a vague mysticism.”[30] A major catalyst for the intended demise of scriptural authority emerged from Harry Emerson Fosdick and Birney Smith’s removal of the validity of authority and elevation of one’s own subjective experience, which Henry called a compromise to the authority of Scripture and biblical teaching.[31]
Henry underscored the need to return to his authoritative view of the text by stating that the primary concern of the day was a recovery of truth, which he believed was best performed in its proclamation.[32] He called for a return of the preacher to the intelligibility of revelation against the detraction of truth from the pulpit that was occurring in the New Homiletic.[33] Henry defined the role of the preacher as one that clearly stands against the liberal efforts to undermine the authority of divine revelation, and to accomplish this task through a clear, reasoned statement.[34] He stated, “Christians have a mandated responsibility for verbal proclamation and rational persuasion.”[35] By this proclamation, Henry clearly defined the sermon as, “Nothing less than a re-presentation of the Word of God. Sound preaching echoes and reechoes the gospel.”[36] Henry clearly stood in opposition to what the New Homileticians of his day were promoting, namely the weakening of the view of scriptural authority.
[1] Allen, 496.
[2] Grant Irven Lovejoy, “A Critical Evaluation of the Nature and Role of Authority in The Homiletical Thought of Fred B. Craddock, Edmund A. Steimle, and David G. Buttrick” (Ph.D. diss., Southwestern Baptist Seminary, December 1990), 228.
[3] Allen, 496.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., 509.
[6] Fred Craddock, As One Without Authority (Missouri: Chalice, 2001), 6.
[7] Ronald J. Allen, Barbara Shires Blaisdell, and Scott Black Johnston, Theology for Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon, 1997), 51.
[8] H. Grady Davis, Design for Preaching (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1958), 46.
[9] Ibid., 204.
[10] David Schnasa Jacobsen, http://www.interpretation.org/reviews/oct-04/minor.htm. Viewed on September 13, 2005.
[11] Allen, Two Roads, 489.
[12] Ibid.
[13] David Buttrick, “On Preaching a Parable: The Problem of the Homiletic Method,” Reformed Liturgy and
Music 17 (Winter 1983):18-19.
[14] David Buttrick, Homiletic: Moves and Structures (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 336.
[15] Ibid., 24.
[16] Allen, 510.
[17] David Buttrick, Homiletic, 5.
[18] Ibid., 13.
[19] Eslinger notes in an email, “My personal theology is strongly shaped by recent post-liberal thought especially as articulated within a narrative theological context.” Received Friday, September 23, 2005.
[20] Richard Eslinger, A New Hearing (Nashville: Abingdon, 1987), 19
[21] See Richard Eslinger, Pitfalls in Preaching. Michigan: Eerdmans, 1996; Narrative and Imagination: Preaching the Worlds that Shape Us. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995; The Web of Preaching. Nashville: Abington, 2002. Each of these works presents the similar theme of a devaluation of words in today’s society resulting in a diminishing view of authority in the pulpit.
[22] Eslinger, A New Hearing, 14.
[23] Ibid., 14.
[24] Carl Raschke, The Next Reformation (Michigan: Baker, 2004), 93.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid., 133. Raschke redefines “faith alone” to mean experience alone.
[27] Russell D. Moore, “God, Revelation, and Community: Ecclesiology and Baptist Identity in the Thought of Carl F. H. Henry,” Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Journal 4 (Winter 2004): 27.
[28] Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 4, (Waco: Word, 1976), 10.
[29] Carl F. H. Henry, “The Concerns and Considerations of Carl Henry,” Christianity Today 25 (March 13, 1981): 19.
[30] Carl F. H. Henry, Fifty Years of Protestant Theology, (Boston: W. A. Wilde, 1950), 101.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Carl F. H. Henry, A Plea for Evangelical Demonstration, (Michigan: Baker, 1971), 75.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Henry, Conversations with Carl Henry: Christianity for Today, (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen,
1986),161.
[35] Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1,(Waco: Word, 1976), 27.
[36] Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 4, 479.
