The Spirit and Proclamation: A Pneumatological Theology of Preaching. Part I
Presented to the American Theological Society, Princeton Seminary,
28 March 2015
James Forbes, senior minister emeritus of Riverside Church in Upper Manhattan, wrote in his book on homiletics, “Preaching is an event in which the living word of God is proclaimed in the power of the Holy Spirit.1” While much has been said about preaching in relationship to the Holy Spirit,2 much less has been proffered about why and how kerygmatic proclamation is a pneumatic or pneumatological event. The intuition behind this essay is that the dynamic character of Christian preaching should be explicated not only theologically (or pneumatologically, as in this case) but also phenomenologically in terms of its orality and ontologically in terms of its audibility. I will submit throughout this inquiry, however, that both the oral and audible or sonic aspects of preaching are resonant for thinking about Christian proclamation when explored along the pneumatological register.
There will be three steps to the following thought experiment. First, we will explicate the obvious orality of preaching but do so in conversation with the oral culture of Pentecostalism.3 This is not only the Christian tradition I know best and have worked out of the most, but the pneumatological linkages between orality and preaching – the triad of themes in this discussion – will quickly come into view against the pentecostal backdrop.4 Second, we will shift from the oral to the audible horizon, thus analyzing the sonic dimension of preaching. Here we will draw at length on studies of oral culture but, again, pneumatological resonances will guide our quest. The final section will attempt to sketch what might be called a pneumatological theology of preaching. Here our goal is both descriptive and normative: on the one hand to overview preaching as pneumatological event, but on the other hand to suggest that attentiveness of the pneumatic and the oral-audible aspects of Christian communication provides a guide to homiletical praxis relevant for the present time.
Two caveats need to be foregrounded before proceeding. First, the following ought not to be read as a pentecostal theology of preaching.5 It is more accurately considered as an outline of a pneumatological theology of preaching, perhaps even a contribution to thinking about the nature of the so-called Spirit-filled or Spirit-empowered preaching prevalent in the literature,6 albeit one especially informed by oral cultural analyses (of pentecostal preaching) and phenomenological considerations (regarding the nature of sound). Second, I am only at the beginning stages of thinking about orality and its theological implications and have yet to thoroughly engage the literature. Yet I am led instinctively to the interconnections between pentecostal or other forms of orality with what might be called a sonic rationality and believe these might be productive for thinking theologically about preaching.7 If our line of inquiry proceeds successfully, it might add to the growing discussion on pneumatological theology, a conversation into which I have been decidedly invested as a systematic theologian.8
Pentecostalism and Oral Culture: A New Perspective on Spirit-Empowered Preaching?
Part I
Much has been assumed about pentecostal preaching and not all of this salutary. Pentecostal preaching – and pentecostal preachers – has been stereotyped as being too emotional, animated, even frenzied. For all the whooping, shouting, and crying produced, such preaching, for its critics, lacks content, especially intellectual and theological substance. Hence pentecostal preaching might be effective in moving hearts and animating bodies, but fails to feed and nourish the mind. At its worst, stirring up the emotions is misguided and can even be manipulative for preachers motivated for reasons other than the proclamation of the gospel.
Yet the foregoing set of characterizations, while pointing to potential liabilities in the pentecostal preaching tradition, rings otherwise when considered acoustically and resounded vis-à-vis human orality. What if emotionalism and animation were understood in terms of holistic embodiment instead? Might the affectivity of pentecostal preaching appear differently when rang out in oral cultural perspective? When happens when we perceive pentecostal spirituality as oral performance rather than from a literary or textual vantage point?9
If we consulted the recognized dean of pentecostal studies, Walter Hollenweger, we will note that of the many sources nurturing the modern pentecostal movement, what he calls the “oral root” may well be the most crucial and substantive.10 More specifically, Hollenweger understands pentecostal orality in terms of its origins at the Azusa Street revival under the leadership of the black holiness preacher William J. Seymour and argues that the distinctiveness of much of pentecostal faith is informed by the black American slave experience, including but not limited to its traditions of worship, singing, and preaching. When set in global context, such pentecostal sensibilities resonate with indigenous cultures similarly orally constituted such as Native American (not only North American) traditions, Korean shamanism, and African religious spirituality, and this might well be part of what accounts for Pentecostalism’s explosive and phenomenal growth worldwide in the last century.11
Our focus here, however, is on preaching. Yet thinking about the orality of Christian proclamation in light of pentecostal orality might also be instructive. More pointedly, as black pentecostal homiletician William C. Turner has reminded us, “the music of black preaching can be understood as a sort of ‘singing in the spirit,’ for there is a surplus (glossa) expressed in music which accompanies the rational content (logos) enunciated in words.”12 Turner’s pitch extends the Hollenwegerian claim about the black oral roots of pentecostal spirituality in a homiletical direction and beyond. Preaching, when viewed through a black pentecostal lens, not only requires thinking about Christian proclamation in terms of song and music (about which more momentarily) but also invites consideration of the event of preaching to be holistically constituted, as a fully embodied experience. Much more is engaged than the intellectual dimension, as cognition is constituted by affectivity as much as by rationality.
To be sure, black pentecostal preaching is just as much black as it is pentecostal, this being, at least in part, the gist of Hollenweger’s argument. Thus our consideration of pentecostal orality in conversation with Hollenweger and Turner urges focused dialogue with the black preaching tradition in general. In this vein, preaching involves not only speaking but multiple forms of vocalization: intoning, moaning, whooping, shouting, and harmonizing are all part of the African American call-and-response tradition that informs not only the preacher’s performance but also the assembly’s role. The latter, in turn, is not merely responsive since there are “counterpoint” moments when the congregational participation and feedback provokes the preacher’s rejoinder in turn. Considered then in terms of the event that includes preacher and hearers, the robustly embodied character of Christian proclamation comes into full view: “the listeners respond percussively with hand-clapping, foot-stomping, body-tapping, and holy dancing, the resulting texture of which is contrapuntal matrix of African-like cross-rhythms… [and the rhythmic repetition climaxing in a shout] typically occurs in Pentecostal and Holiness churches where holy dancing is the customary expression of jubilation.”13
Beyond this affective and kinesthetic dimension, preaching heard through a black and pentecostal amplifier is perceptually interpersonal and intersubjective. More than just saying “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” – as central as these are – call-and-response, especially at those counterpoints, involves “reciprocal instruction, through which preacher and congregation commune in the spontaneous creation of spirituals,” so that “the art of black preaching involves such components as skillful solicitation of dialogue, dramatic timing or ‘emotional pace,’ and the ability to bring about climactic congregational celebration of the ‘good news’.”14 This points to the heart of preaching in the black church and pentecostal traditions wherein spontaneity and improvisation are the rule, rather than the exception. As Jon Spencer puts it, “as the gospel singer’s song is characterized by a freely melismatic melodizing and the jazz singer’s song by a creatively syncopated sentencing, so are the preacher’s spirituals distinguished by an unrestrained and extemporaneous outpouring of religious verse executed with the finesse of a poet.”15 This does not mean that pentecostal (or black) preachers do not come prepared; it just means that the delivery of the message is dynamically performed so that the final outcome depends as much on interaction with the audience as it relies upon having internalized the details of the sermon.
The interactivity of preaching within at least these Christian traditions might be threatening to those for whom kerygmatic proclamation ought to proceed “decently and in order,” here no less an authority than the Apostle Paul is often cited (1 Cor. 14:40; KJV). Yet such concerns about anarchic subjectivism do not take into account oral cultural dynamics wherein both speakers and audiences synergistically perform and interrelate within agreed upon parameters. So, “While call and response are moderated by the talented preacher through calculated phraseology which intentionally leaves space for response, polyphonic and heterophonic (contrapuntal) dialogue is controlled by the congregation as they allow themselves to respond to spiritual repletion”; if this is the case, then even if theoretically, “dissonance is the consequence of harmonies resulting polyphonically and heterophonically…, to those who appreciate the tradition the overall effect is consonant.”16 From a pentecostal perspective, this ought not to be too surprising as on the Day of Pentecost itself, felt multilingual and polyvocal dissonance – amazement, perplexity, incredulity, and unbelief on the one hand (cf. Acts 2:12-13) – yet somehow translated into an incomprehensible harmony: “in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power” (Acts 2:11).
Resorting to the Day of Pentecost narrative at this juncture thrusts us into the theological nexus where scriptural interpretation meets performative application. If in some theological circles (especially those of conservative evangelical Protestantism) there are more strict lines separating scriptural exegesis (focused on deriving the original meaning of texts in their contexts) from practical application (directed to identifying contemporary significance), pentecostal hermeneutics presumes a restorationist this-is-that approach that ignores the historical chasm between biblical times and the present.17 Thus the apostolic experience (that) either certifies or inspires contemporary Christian life (this); at the very least, the scriptural narrative provides a map for trekking, both descriptively and normatively, present faithfulness. Yet this is not merely a reader-response hermeneutic, as much as they chime with the current discussion, since the pentecostal belief proceeds more narratively and, equally important, pneumatically. If the latter insists that not all that is in the Bible is relevant for any or our time except that which the Spirit retrieves, the former emerges from out of the orality of pentecostal sensibilities as it imaginatively connects Christian hope with the scriptural drama.18
Against this background, the homiletical reflections of Luke Powery, a Princeton Seminary professor who also hails from a pentecostal background, are relevant.19 Powery’s thoughts echo pertinently for us along these lines, although they can only be ever so briefly traced. First, the this-is-that methodology connects if not fuses the biblical soundscape and the historic experience especially of the black church through the ongoing work of the Spirit of God. Thus Powery highlights how scriptural themes of lament and celebration vibrate within the African American slave historical context and how the prophetic vision of resurrection life amidst a valley of dry bones (Ezekiel 37) speaks to matters of life and death amidst this milieu.20 More accurately, here black preaching not only emerges from out of the fires of real life,21 but also is unavoidably and inextricably intertwined with black spirituality, singing, and worship. “God the Spirit gave blacks these musical sermons called the spirituals; thus they may be called spiritual preaching, that is, Spirit-filled proclamation.”22 In other words, pneumatology provides the proclamatory content even as the spirituals shape the form of the message and the Spirit is believed to enable the preacher.
Second, Powery’s pneumatological homiletic emerges, arguably, from out of the pentecostal spirituality that shapes his thinking. Hence the hope of which he speaks is not merely rhetorical but is theologically grounded in the pentecostal work of the Spirit. On the one hand, the “‘spirituals’ [are] songs of the Spirit that voice ideas of death and hope as expressions of the Spirit”; on the other hand, “To preach in the Spirit includes preaching the hope of heaven for the present and future.”23 Together, both reflect recognition that oral culture needs not propositions but inspiration to undertake the task for the next week and that such teleological encouragement will need to be theologically tethered and informed to have lasting value and impact.24
But third and most importantly for our consideration, Powery proposes from out of his reflections on pneumatic preaching what he calls a “sounding the Spirit”: “The spirituals, like preaching, imply pneumatology. It is more appropriate to think about the spirituals as the expressive voice of the Spirit preaching through humanity with particular words and sounds…. The Spirit permeates the entirety of the spiritual, even without being explicitly named; thus the content of spiritual preaching requires lyrical and acoustical sensitivity.”25 Such a pneumatological sounding involves not just the vocalization of the sermon but also a charismatic orchestration of “the mood” of and for the message. For Powery, then, spiritual preaching commences variously: “repetition, rhythm, antiphony, melody, body, metaphoric coded language – conjoin the other basics of preaching to help voice the mood. It will be sonic and somatic because it is pneumatic…. It may take groans and moans to preach the gospel and shouts of joy when there appears to be nothing to shout about.”26 Such gestures toward what we might consider as a pneumatological acoustemology. Not only: “Sound says something about the presence of the Spirit and invites the Spirit”;27 but also: hearing is inherently about not audibility but pneumatology, about the “soundings” of the Spirit from and into the deep recesses of human soul that are immeasurable in terms of decibel levels but no less effective in their affectivity.28
In part for this reason African American pentecostal scholars like David Daniels have talked about a “Pentecostal sensorium” that includes not only oral but also audial, tactile, and other kinesthetic registers which combine to comprise a more expansive pentecostal and, I would add, pneumatological acoustemology.29 The full range of pentecostal spirituality – its sounds of prayer, singing, preaching, testifying, music-making, cries, glossolalia, praise, worship, shout, tarrying, clapping, stomping, silence, etc. – are heard as challenging the orality-literary binary chiefly because these multiple modalities of pentecostal faith deprivilege vision or sight, or at least equal the playing field between what is seen and what is heard and felt. While Daniels is interested at least in part in how such a pentecostal “way of knowing” might be drawn upon to eliminate hierarchies of race (not to mention class and gender),30 our present purposes press questions regarding how to further comprehend such pneumatological and acoustemological dynamics for a theology of preaching.31
Notes
1. James Forbes, The Holy Spirit and Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 56. Forbes taught homiletics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City from 1976-1989, including the last five of those years as the inaugural Joe R. Engle Professor of Preaching, and then served as senior minister at Riverside for the next eighteen years until his retirement. He was not only the first African American preacher to serve in both roles but also, noteworthy for our purposes, the first to come from a pentecostal background.
2. The books are legion, a sampling of which include: J. Ithel Jones, The Holy Spirit and Christian Preaching (London: Epworth Press, 1967); Calvin Miller, Spirit, Word, and Story: A Philosophy of Preaching (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1989); Jay Edward Adams, Preaching according to the Holy Spirit (Woodruff, SC: Timeless Texts, 2000); Jim Cymbala, with Dean Merrill, Fresh Power: Experiencing the Vast Resources of the Spirit of God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001); Tae-Hyeun Park, The Sacred Rhetoric of the Holy Spirit: A Study of Puritan Preaching in a Pneumatological Perspective (Apeldoorn, The Netherlands: Theologische Universiteit Apeldoorn, 2005); Greg Heisler, Spirit-Led Preaching: The Holy Spirit’s Role in Sermon Preparation and Delivery (Nashville: B & H Academic, 2007); Jeffrey Crotts, Illuminated Preaching: The Holy Spirit’s Vital Role in Unveiling His Word, the Bible (Leominster, UK: Day One, 2010); and Albert N. Martin, Preaching in the Holy Spirit (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2011).
3. In this essay, I capitalize Pentecostals (believers) or Pentecostalism when used as nouns but not when used as adjectives.
4. Most relevant for my programme in pneumatological and pentecostal theology are Yong, Spirit-Word-Community: Theological Hermeneutics in Trinitarian Perspective,New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies Series (Burlington, Vt., and Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2002), and The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh: Pentecostalism and the Possibility of Global Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005).
5. There are plenty of such books, including but not limited to: Guy P. Duffield, Pentecostal Preaching (New York: Vantage Press, 1957); Ray H. Hughes, Pentecostal Preaching (Cleveland, Tenn.: Church of God Department of General Education, 1981); Ken Chant, The Pentecostal Pulpit: Studies in the Art of Preaching (Ramona, Calif.: Vision Publishing, 1995); Charles T. Crabtree, Pentecostal Preaching (Springfield, Mo.: Gospel Publishing House, 2003); and Aldwin Ragoonath, Preach the Word: A Pentecostal Approach (Winnipeg, Canada: Agape Teaching Ministry of Canada. 2004).
6. From the non-pentecostal-charismatic side, see Arturo G. Azurdia, III, Spirit Empowered Preaching: The Vitality of the Holy Spirit in Preaching (Fearn Ross-shire, UK: Mentor, 1998); cf. pentecostal scholars also on this theme: Mark L. Williams and Lee Roy Martin, eds., Spirit-Filled Preaching in the 21st-Century (Cleveland, Tenn.: Pathway Press, 2014).
7. My cues for the so-called “sonic rationality” spring off from Werner Kelber’s reference to a “typographic…rationality” – see Werner H. Kelber, “The Oral-Scribal-Memorial Arts of Communication in Early Christianity,” in Tom Thatcher, ed., Jesus, the Voice, and the Text: Beyond The Oral and the Written Gospel(Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2008), 235-62, at 260 – a modality and frame of thinking dominated by sight, reading, and print. My question here is how thinking proceeds orally, even prior to literateness and its benefits.
8. So far, I have written books (in some cases more than one) on pneumatological theology of religions and interfaith encounter, pneumatological hermeneutics, pneumatological theology of disability, pneumatology and science, pneumatological-political theology, pneumatology of love, pneumatological missiology, and pneumatological systematics, among other less ambitious explorations in pneumatological theology. Why not trek toward a pneumatological theology of preaching? Consider this a first step in this direction.
9. Elaine J. Lawless, Handmaidens of the Lord: Pentecostal Women Preachers and Traditional Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), deploys rhetorical rather than oral cultural analysis (as a professor of English rather than of communication), but the beginnings of such a shift of perspective is evident in her work which highlights all that critics would find problematic about pentecostal preaching (pentecostal women’s preaching no less!) – its emotionality and affectivity, existentiality, narrativity, autobiographical quality, existential, etc. – even as her deftly articulated gendered and racial-ethnic (these are Southern or Bible-belt tongues speakers!) scrutiny precipitates additional sound-ways into the orality of pentecostal culture and spirituality.
10. The “black oral root” takes up over 85 percent of the first 145 pages of Walter J. Hollenweger, Pentecostalism: Origins and Developments Worldwide (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1997). While three of the other four “roots” – he calls them Catholic, evangelical, critical, and ecumenical – occupies the same amount of space combined, the “critical root” and its 135 pages actually relies (explicitly and otherwise) on and makes sense only from out of the oral matrix of pentecostal spirituality.
11. Harvey G. Cox, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the 21st Century (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995), discusses this global pentecostal phenomenon in light of what he calls its primal spirituality.
12. William C. Turner, Jr., “Foreword,” to Jon Michael Spencer, Sacred Symphony: The Chanted Sermon of the Black Preacher (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), ix-xii, quote from xi.
13. Jon Michael Spencer, Sacred Symphony: The Chanted Sermon of the Black Preacher (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 4.
14. Spencer, Sacred Symphony, 6-7; for more on pentecostal call-and-response, see Christine Callender and Deborah Cameron, “Responsive Listening as a Part of Religious Rhetoric: The Case of Black Pentecostal Preaching,” in Graham McGregor and R. S. White, eds., Reception and Response: Hearer Creativity and the Analysis of Spoken and Written Texts (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 160-78.
15. Spencer, Sacred Symphony, 16. On pentecostal spirituality heard through the improvisational dynamics of jazz, see Harvey G. Cox, “Jazz and Pentecostalism,” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 38: 84 (1993): 181-88, and Stephen J. Casmier and Donald H. Matthews, “Why Scatting is Like Speaking in Tongues: Post-Modern Reflections on Jazz, Pentecostalism and ‘Africosmysticism’,” Literature and Theology 13:2 (1999): 166-76. See also Jared E. Alcántara, Crossover Preaching: Intercultural-Improvisational Homiletics in Conversation with Gardner C. Taylor (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2015).
16. Spencer, Sacred Symphony, 11.
17. I explicate some of this in my article, “Reading Scripture and Nature: Pentecostal Hermeneutics and Their Implications for the Contemporary Evangelical Theology and Science Conversation,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 63:1 (2011): 1-13, esp. 4-6; cf. also my discussion of this-is-that in The Dialogical Spirit: Christian Reason and Theological Method for the Third Millennium (Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2014), 108-10.
18. In a post-oral and post-chirographic and post-typographic age – our present age of the electronic, more specifically – Alan C. Purves, The Web of Text and the Web of God: An Essay on the Third Information Transformation (London: Guilford Press, 1998), 188, puts it this way:
Following from the idea that the individual receives the Holy Spirit or the divine inspiration directly and is thus empowered, the charismatic view coincides with the view of the reader as author or coauthor. The text is not outside but rather what I read and therefore in me. When the charismatic reads the gospel, she is highly aware that she is the reader, she is an empowered spiritual person engaging with the Word of God, not following what she reads as if it were a map but responding to it as it strikes sympathetic chords in her mind and soul…. The charismatic is also not averse to images, because the idea of the vision, the image of God in and through the Word, come together. Word and icon, image and text, are all stimuli to the religious and divine spark of knowing that is my consciousness.
19. Luke A. Powery, “The Holy Spirit and African-American Preaching” (PhD thesis, Emmanuel College of Victoria University, 2006), is the doctoral dissertation that charts many of the trajectories unfolded since in Powery’s homiletical works.
20. See Luke A. Powery, Spirit Speech: Lament and Celebration in Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2009), and Dem Dry Bones: Preaching, Death, and Hope (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012).
21. “Preaching in the Spirit, spiritual preaching, faces death directly as part of proclaiming hope” (Powery, Dem Dry Bones, 77).
22. Powery, Dem Dry Bones, 54; emphasis orig.
23. Powery, Dem Dry Bones, 17, 75.
24. In this regard, Powery also writes about what might be called the kerygmatic imagination: “Imagination is not only tethered with the Spirit but vital to a hermeneutics of hope” (Dem Dry Bones, 127). Thus is such a kerygmatic imagination also pneumatological: it understands that the Spirit both propels the preacher and enables –illumines/inspires/empowers – the hearing and receiving congregation
25. Powery, Dem Dry Bones, 55; italics Powery’s.
26. Powery, Dem Dry Bones, 71.
27. Powery, Dem Dry Bones, 72.
28. Indeed, even people with hearing impairment can “listen” through their bodies. As Don Ihde notes, “Phenomenologically I do not merely hear with my ears, I hear with my whole body. My ears are at best the focal organs of hearing…. Sound permeates and penetrates my bodily being”; see Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, 2nd ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 44-45.
29. David D. Daniels III, “‘Gotta Moan Sometime’: A Sonic Exploration of Earwitnesses to Early Pentecostal Sound in North America,” Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 30:1 (2008): 5-32, at 29.
30. Daniels, “Gotta Moan Sometime,” 26-29.
31. Although I will say little more about the interface of music and preaching, the preceding hints at why I think more study of pentecostal music is needed to appreciate its affective potency and popularity among oral cultural contexts around the world. For a global overview, see Monique Ingalls and Amos Yong, eds., The Spirit of Praise: Music and Worship in Global Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity (University Park, Penn.: Penn State University Press, 2015). A more local albeit also transnational assessment is provided by Robert Beckford, whose Jesus Dub: Theology, Music and Social Change (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), explores Caribbean and black British pentecostal musicking and its implications for pentecostal (and Christian) faith and praxis.
