Beyond the New Homiletic

Preachers are beginning to raise questions about the new homiletic, now roughly 30 years old. For one thing, the experiential focus of these newer methods—that sermons seek to create an event for listeners—is theologically suspect. Must sermons always engender experiences of God for the hearers? If so, does this mean that preaching is really more focused upon the inward experience of the listener than the nature of Christ, say, or the call to discipleship? Has the new homiletic, with its roots in theological liberalism, unintentionally exchanged theology for anthropology?

If the preacher intends to create an experience for the listener, then isn’t the preacher really attempting to "control" the experience of the hearers rather than share with them the responsibility for the message? In this case, how different then is the new homiletic from the old insofar as both already know the outcome of the sermon? The questions pile up.

A second concern is that the new emphasis in preaching has been more intent upon the methods of preaching than theologies of preaching. As David Lose claims, we have eagerly agreed with Marshal McLuhan that the medium is the message, but we have been less willing to say the inverse that the message is the medium.¹² We have cried buckets over how to preach but barely broken a sweat over what to preach. Maybe it is time for preachers to be honest about the theology that informs our preaching. These are only a few of the questions that beckon us into the next generation of preaching.

12. David J. Lose, "Medium and Message Reconsidered: Thoughts on Preaching the Gospel and Teaching Such Preaching," in Annual Papers, The Academy of Homiletics (2001), 402-406.