Can Anyone Hear See?By Patrick W. T. Johnson

Doctoral Candidate at Princeton Theological SeminaryAdvisor: James F. Kay

Presented to the Rhetoric Working Group 2008 Meeting of the Academy of Homiletics

In the most recent meeting of the Academy of Homiletics, Robert Reid asked

homiletics scholars to think “tropologically,” and propose new metaphors by which to

understand preaching. Each scholar was to present a different metaphor that would invite

us to see and understand homiletics from a new perspective. While listening to these

proposals, I began to wonder if we can understand preaching according to a metaphor

that emphasizes the sense of sight: perhaps the “preacher as one who sees,” or “the

preacher as one who is seen.”1 That mind-wandering moment led me to this essay, in

which I originally intended to develop such a metaphor.

As I began thinking through the question, though, other questions arose, important

and preliminary questions. What is a “tropological orientation to thought,” and what

does it mean for how we understand a field such as homiletics? With respect to tropes of

preaching, is there already a perspective in the field that understands the preacher

according to the sense of sight? If not, is there a biblical basis for associating the

proclamation of the Word with what we can see? Now, this essay is an attempt to answer

these questions, and in so doing gesture toward a metaphor for the preacher that

emphasizes the sense of sight.

1 There is a lot in the little word, “as.” Rebecca Chopp identifies the logic of “as” as “abduction.” Chopp defines abduction as: “the procreation of meaning in the creative inference of new possibilities.” Abductive logic, “places the priority of our poetics and rhetorics on creativity, the creation of the new from the present and the past . . .Abduction is hypothetical, introducing new ideas, as compared to induction, which determines values, and deduction, which evolves the necessary consequences of a hypothesis.” Thus, abduction—and the little word “as”—is about the creation of new visions and new meaning by positing new possibilities. (Cf. Rebecca Chopp, The Power to Speak: Feminism, Language, and God (New York, NY: Crossroad Publishing, 1991), 37.)

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First, we will attempt to understand a “tropological orientation to thought” by

attending to the rhetorical epistemology of Kenneth Burke, on whose work Reid bases his

understanding of tropes. This will provide the philosophical basis upon which we will

use tropes to understand the field of homiletics. Thus, we will then turn to the theologies

of proclamation that we have studied in this semester by analyzing them according to the

“master metaphors” that Thomas Long proposes in The Witness of Preaching. By placing

these metaphors together, we should achieve a relatively comprehensive view of the

major theologies of proclamation in the field of homiletics today, and be able to assess

whether any of these perspectives attend to the sense of sight in proclamation.

Based on that assessment, we will then ask whether there is a Biblical basis upon

which to offer a metaphor of preaching that emphasize the sense of sight. We will

attempt to answer this question through a heuristic exploration of the theological

relationship of hearing and sight to divine revelation in the New Testament. We will not

offer a comprehensive study of this issue; such a study would need to accompany the full

development of a sight-oriented metaphor. Rather, we will attempt only a heuristic

exploration that could give a “green light” to the full development of a sight-oriented

metaphor, and gesture toward appropriate construals of that metaphor.

FOUR MASTER TROPES

In the papers of the most recent Academy of Homiletics meeting, Robert Reid

appeals to the ability of rhetorical tropes such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and

irony, to open our understanding and create meaning. Reid, who convened a group of

several homiletic scholars to develop “tropes of homiletic agency,” writes that,

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“a tropological orientation to thought invites people to imagine their way into an entire body of knowledge by what they can bring as understanding from some other domain… A tropological orientation invites individuals to clarify a perspective by sharing the formative orientation that shapes perspectival thought.”

He then refers the reader to an essay by Kenneth Burke, entitled, “The Four Master

Tropes,” in which Burke argues that the tropes of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and

irony, “constitute the basis upon which humans are able to discover and describe

everything that counts as truth.”2

Burke’s essay, to which Reid refers, was first published by the Kenyon Review in

1941, and then published as an appendix to Burke’s A Grammar of Motives in 1945. The

initial recipient of the essay was John Crowe Ransom, the editor of the Kenyon Review at

the time, who subsequently engaged in a three year letter-exchange with Burke,

vigorously debating the views set forth in the short article. The length of this exchange

was foretelling, since “Four Master Tropes” has been subsequently the subject of various

interpretations and great debate among Burkean scholars. In 2004, David Tell wrote an

article for the Rhetoric Society Quarterly, in which he attempts to clarify this debate by

interpreting Burke’s essay in light of the letter exchange between Ransom and Burke. It

is from this article that Reid takes his bearings in appropriating Burke’s understanding of

the four master tropes.

In his article, Tell reads Burke’s essay in the context of the letters between Burke

and Ransom, and concludes that “Four Master Tropes” is basically a succinct statement

of a Burkean rhetorical epistemology. This is not a surprising conclusion, since Burke

begins the essay by saying that in referring to the four master tropes—metaphor,

2 Robert Reid, “A Rhetoric Group Panel ‘Slow of Speech and Unclean Lips:’ Homiletic Agency Re-imagined for the 21st century.” From: “Papers of the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Homiletics: Minneapolis, Minnesota, November 29-December 1, 2007,” (accessed at www.homiletics.org, January 6, 2008), 147.

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metonymy, synecdoche, and irony—he is concerned with, “their role in the discovery and

description of ‘the truth.’”3 In the exchange of letters, Burke argued that rhetoric as a

“core epistemological practice” is capable of uniting the epistemologies of scientific

knowledge and poetic knowledge, the division of which Ransom supported vehemently.4

These letters lead Tell to conclude that a Burkean epistemology is a, “rhetorical

epistemology—in other words, the “discovery of ‘the truth’”. . . is possible only by way

of rhetorical inducement. In short, rhetoric is an essential condition for knowledge.”5

Burke believed that language creates understanding, and his analysis of the four

master tropes demonstrates how it does so. The metaphor is Burke’s foundational trope,

and it teaches us that knowledge is perspectival. He writes, “Metaphor is a device for

seeing something in terms of something else. It brings out the thisness of a that, or the

thatness of a this.”6 In other words, metaphors create new perspectives from which to

view an object. These perspectives do not dissolve objective reality by introducing

multiple relative viewpoints, but enable us to describe reality by viewing it from various

angles. Only by seeing an object from many perspectives can we approach a description

of the “truth,” which for Burke is, “the sublimity of an object in the world.”7

According to Tell, this description of metaphor gets at the fundamental

disagreement between Ransom and Burke. For Ransom, scientific epistemology was

reductionistic, and could never approach the “vast magnitude” of an object; only poetic

epistemology could do that. He thus rejected any epistemology that would unite

3 Kenneth Burke, “Four Master Tropes,” Kenyon Review (Autumn, 1941), 421. Burke places truth in quotation marks here because, in his view, any knowledge of the truth (what Reid describes as, “everything that counts as truth”) is rhetorically constructed.4 David Tell, “Burke's Encounter with Ransom: Rhetoric and Epistemology in ‘Four Master Tropes,’” Rhetoric Society Quarterly (Fall, 2004), 34-35.5 Tell, “Burke’s,” 34.6 Burke, “Four,” 421.7 Tell, “Burke’s,” 39.

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scientific and poetic knowing. Burke agreed that scientific epistemology was basically

reductionistic. However, he argued that in making reductions, scientists relied on

metaphors—just as poets—to describe reality. Metaphor, thus, is the foundational trope

of Burke’s rhetorical epistemology, which unites scientific and poetic knowing.

Since it is foundational, as we now move to metonymy, we will take with us the

metaphor; each of the remaining tropes operates by the invention of metaphor, and all

four overlap each other. If the metaphor teaches us that knowledge is perspectival, “the

tutelage of metonymy is that language demands such perspectivism.”8 In order to know

truth, which is utterly sublime, we must appeal to symbolic language to describe the

truth; any description, though, is partial and incomplete. According to Burke, this partial,

symbolic, and reductive construction is a metonym is this reduction; a metonym attempts

to, “convey some incorporeal or intangible state in terms of the corporeal or tangible.”9

For example, the concept of “shame” can be reduced to a physical reddening of

the cheeks, and we can say that one who is ashamed is “red-faced.” On the basis of this

example, Burke points out that both scientists and poet use metonymy this way. Scientists

study the behavior, or the reductions, associated with shame; and poets refer to the

reductions to allude to the intangible state. The important distinction between them is

that the poet, “is using metonymy as a terminological reduction whereas the scientific

behaviorist offers his reduction as a ‘real’ reduction.”10 Nevertheless, both scientists and

poets appeal to the reduction of metonymy, and thus share a common epistemology.

A metonym is therefore a reductive representation of a thing, and in this sense it

overlaps upon synecdoche, which Burke equates with representation. To define

8 Tell, “Burke’s,” 37.9 Burke, “Four,” 424.10 Burke, “Four,” 426.

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synecdoche, he uses conventional phrases such as, “part for the whole, whole for the part,

container for the contained, sign for the thing signified…cause for effect, effect for

cause,” and so forth.11 In each of these expressions, he notes a “relationship of

convertibility,” which implies, “a connectedness between two sides of an equation, a

connectedness that, like a road, extends in either direction.”12 In this way, metonymy is a

special application of synecdoche, which only extends in one direction: reduction.

Synecdoche, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with moving in the other

direction, abstracting from the metonym, and correcting its reductionistic excess. Tell

writes, “If metonymy is the reduction from the immaterial experience of shame to the

material experience of colored cheeks, synecdoche is the “conversion upwards” by which

the poet understands that colored cheeks represent shame.”13 Whereas metonym reduces

intangible truth to the tangible, synecdoche allows us to move from the tangible toward

the truth. In this sense, it is the vehicle for human knowledge, and as Burke writes to

Ransom, it is “Trope No. 1.”

This point is very important for understanding a Burkean epistemology with

rhetoric at its core. As Tell writes,

The implication here is that knowledge of ‘truth,’ for Burke, is fundamentally rhetorical. Recall Burke’s famous definition of rhetoric—‘the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions. . .in other human agents.’—and it becomes clear that rhetoric is synecdochal; it induces an audience. . . .For Burke, then, insofar as rhetoric synecdochally induces audiences it is precisely rhetoric that provides the possibility for knowing truth.14

11 Burke, “Four,” 426.12 Burke, “Four,” 428.13 Tell, “Burke’s,” 43.14 Tell, “Burke’s,”44.

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At this point, Burke is willing to acknowledge, with Ransom, a distinction between

scientists and poets: scientists only work metonymically, through reduction; poets work

synecdochally, moving from the tangible to the intangible, inducing us to understanding.

In summary, through synecdoche, one is able to move upwards from a reduction

—which Burke calls a “representative anecdote”—towards an understanding of the

truth.15 At this point, though, question naturally arises, how a reduction to the simple may

lead to knowledge of the complex? As David Tell puts it, “Knowledge depends on

rhetorical inducement from representative anecdotes, but every anecdote is insufficient,

‘every simplification is an oversimplification.’”16 Or, as Burke puts it, all one need say

is, “But you have explained the complex in terms of the simple—and the simple is

precisely what the complex it not.”17 Thus, in terms of epistemology, we have come to

what appears to be an impasse. Irony, though, provides the way forward.18

Burke writes, “Irony arises when one tries, by the interaction of terms upon one

another, to produce a development which uses all the terms.”19 In irony, each

15 Burke stresses that the reduction must be representative, in other words it must be of the same kind as the actual material, if it is to yield true knowledge. Burke notes that scientific reductions are selected for reductive purposes, and not representative purposes. For example, suppose a scientist conducts a laboratory experiment involving rats; this cannot then lead him to an interpretation of human beings. The reduction is not of the same kind. Rather, “the genius of his restricted terminology must ‘drag the interpretation down to their level.’” (Burke, “Four,” 430.) 16 Tell, “Burke’s,” 47. This contained quote is from: Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of the Literary Form (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973), 262.17 Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of the Literary Form (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973), 262. Quoted from: Tell, “Burke’s,” 46.18 Burke does not mention the concept of recalcitrance in “Four Master Tropes,” but Jeffrey Murray has argued convincingly that it must be recognized as logically prior to and a necessary condition for irony in a Burkean epistemology. According to Burke, in Permanence and Change, recalcitrance is the resistance offered by reality against our symbolic constructions of reality. In other words, it is the basic inability of any one perspective to be an absolute perspective. Murray argues that recalcitrance is Burke’s way of achieving a balance, “between phenomenology’s insistence that the universe can be discovered as it is ‘in-itself’ and the opposite inclination that any meaning can be laid upon the universe.” Recalcitrance is the disruption of perspective, the very first crashing-in of the “other” that resists any totalizing claims to knowledge or understanding. It is thus the condition for irony, the dialogical trope that will bring multiple perspectives into a dialectical tension. Cf. Jeffrey W. Murray, “A Dialogue of Motives” (Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 35. No. 1. 2002), 28.19 Burke, “Four,” 432.

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synecdochal term is a relative perspective that is brought into a dialectical relationship

with other relative perspectives. From the standpoint of an observer who considers the

participation of all the terms, irony offers a “perspective of perspectives.” This then is

able to produce a “resultant certainty,” which is necessarily an ironic certainty because it

requires that, “all the sub-certainties be considered as neither true nor false, but

contributory.”20 Each relative perspective is qualified by competing perspectives, such

that no one perspective can claim superiority. In fact, the recognition that each

perspective is partial and needs other perspectives to describe the truth leads to a

fundamental epistemological humility.

We can now see more clearly what constitutes a “representative anecdote;” it is

one that recognizes its own contributory, partial, and incomplete character. It is a

reduction which recognizes that it participates in a perspectival tension that offers a

tentative “certainty,” which is always to more viewpoints and new visions. Indeed, the

representative anecdote prompts the audience, “not only to induce knowledge from a

reduction, but also to seek further reductions from which they might induce

knowledge.”21

This last point leads us directly back to Robert Reid and his call for tropes of

human agency by which to understand preaching. As we have seen from Burke, tropes

are a type of rhetorical epistemology, a way of knowing. Metaphor allows us to invent

perspectives on reality; metonymy enables us to reduce the intangible to something

tangible; synecdoche, working in reverse, prompts us to induce knowledge of the

intangible from the representative anecdote, the metonym; and irony provides the vehicle

20 Burke, “Four,” 433.21 Tell, “Burke’s,” 47

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for bringing these many representative anecdotes into a dialogue that can produce a type

of tentative certainty. In calling for tropes, therefore, Reid is asking homileticians to

propose perspectives that will be representative anecdotes, and that in their interaction

with one another will provide a better understanding of this thing we call “preaching.”

Indeed, the more anecdotes we have the better, for each one is but a perspective of the

whole, and each needs the other to describe the “truth.”

So, with the invitation extended by Reid, six scholars developed tropes of

homiletic agency, which were grounded in a biblical image, story, or other aspect of the

Christian tradition, and could, “ground their own theological identity as a preacher and/or

pedagogically frame her/his approach to teaching homiletics.”22 Each of the proposals

they submitted offered a different—sometimes quite unfamiliar—vantage point from

which to see the ministry of preaching. The titles of the submissions were: preacher as

“one who is out of her mind,” preacher as “fisher,” preacher as “lover,” preacher as

“messenger of hope,” preacher as “stranger/guest and host,” and preacher as “steward of

God’s mysteries.”23 As each of the four master tropes overlap each other, so these tropes

overlap in their functions as metaphor, metonym, and synecdoche. Together, ironically,

they offer us a better understanding of the ministry of preaching.

THEOLOGIES OF PROCLAMATION

Nearly twenty years before these papers were presented at the Academy of

Homiletics, Thomas Long used tropes very similarly in his homiletic textbook, The

Witness of Preaching. In this book, Long employs three classic “master metaphors” to

22 Reid, “A Rhetoric,” 146.23 Reid, “A Rhetoric,” 144.

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distill the various understandings of preaching, and then adds a fourth metaphor to

describe his own approach. The first three metaphors are herald, pastor, and

storyteller/poet; and as his title suggests, he then proposes the metaphor of witness. Long

uses each of these tropes to categorize the major approaches to preaching in the field of

homiletics, and help the reader to quickly understand the broad contours of the field. In

my judgment, his tropes are indeed “master metaphors,” which together offer us a

comprehensive perspective on the theologies of proclamation that we have studied in this

course.

According to Long, the metaphor of preacher as herald, “was the most prevalent

metaphor advanced by homileticians of the last generation,” to describe the ministry of

preaching.24 The term herald refers to the Greek word khruc, and the associated verb

khrussein, which in the New Testament is translated into the English, “proclamation.”

Often, and more specifically, it is rendered by the word “preaching,” although the original

Greek means the “declaration of an event,” and is much more expansive than our usual

definitions of preaching.25

In the twentieth century, the herald image was given most prominence by Karl

Barth, and those who follow his understanding of preaching. Long notes that Barth uses

this term specifically in the Church Dogmatics when he writes, “Proclamation is human

language in and through which God himself speaks, like a king through the mouth of his

herald, which moreover is meant to be heard and apprehended.”26 Barth thus holds what

may be called a very high theological view of preaching; for Barth, the primary agent of

24 Thomas Long, The Witness of Preaching, 2nd edition (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 19.25 Gerhard Friedrich, “kerus,” Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 3, ed. Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1967), 683-714. 26 Long, Witness, 19.

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preaching is God himself who speaks, claiming for the purpose the exposition of a

biblical text in free human words. If God is the primary agent, what is the role of the

preacher? Barth’s definition is dialectical: while God is the primary agent, the preacher

also has a responsibility, “to expound a text in free human words,” even if his own

agency is ultimately marginalized.27

In addition to Barth, one could argue that Rudolf Bultmann and Jürgen Moltmann,

both of whom are important figures in twentieth century theology and homiletics, also

share an affinity with the metaphor of preacher as herald. Bultmann differs sharply from

Barth as he pursues his program of ‘demythologization,’ which attempts to translate the

mythical terms of the gospel into modern existential terms. However, like Barth (and

unlike other liberal theologians who sought to translate Biblical language into modern

categories), Bultmann believes that the saving significance of Jesus Christ is

eschatological, coming to us from outside of history, presenting us with a crucial moment

of decision. Thus, James Kay writes, “Granting all the differences between Bultmann

and Barth regarding the interpretation of the gospel, both are united in the conviction that

in its proclamation God is speaking, and is therefore the true Preacher of his own

Word.”28

Similarly, Moltmann argued that the essence of the Christian proclamation is the

cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the eschatological future kingdom that is both

promised and inaugurated in that event.29 By extension, the preacher is the herald (or

‘proclaimer’) of the promises of Christ, of his cross and resurrection, and the

eschatological future of all things. Appropriating and clarifying Moltmann, Christopher

27 Karl Barth, Homiletics, trans. G.W. Bromiley and D.E. Daniels (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991), 44.28 James F. Kay, Preaching and Theology (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2007), 47-48.29 Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (London: SCM Press, 1967), 139.

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Morse argues that the human words of preaching can indeed be the medium of God’s own

act of promising, by which God reveals God-self and announces God’s future actions.30

Construing Moltmann’s view of preaching in this way, we can see that for him, like Barth

and Bultmann, God is the speaker and primary agent of preaching.

In addition to the metaphor of preacher as herald, Long’s second master metaphor

is preacher as pastor. Long writes that preaching as pastor, “should intentionally seek

beneficial change in the hearers, should help people make sense of their lives, and should

strive to be a catalyst for more responsible and ethical living on the part of those who

hear.” In this understanding of preaching, the needs of the hearer come to forefront;

whereas the herald is concerned with faithfulness to the message, the pastor is concerned

with, “a communicational strategy designed to provoke change in the hearers.”31 “In

sum, the pastoral preacher must know more than a set of messages; the pastoral preacher

must also know people and how they listen to messages.”32

The classic example of this approach in twentieth century homiletics is one of the

earliest of the century’s homileticians, Harry Emerson Fosdick. In his famous Beecher

lectures entitled, The Modern Use of the Bible, Fosdick argues that the Bible speaks in

mythical categories that are unbelievable to the modern mind. The preacher’s task is to

translate the Bible into terms that make it believable and meaningful to modern hearers.

30 Morse has strengthened Moltmann’s approach by employing the speech-act theory of John Searle to clarify theoretical problems in Moltmann. In summary, Morse asserts that 1) promises have a necessary linguistic logic; 2) the one making the promise can be known from the promise; and 3) the promise relates to the future by predicating a future act of the subject. Cf. Christopher Morse, The Logic of Promise in Moltmann’s Theology (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1979), pp. 75-81. 31 We should note at this point that Bultmann’s approach to preaching appears to stand on the border between herald and pastor. Bultmann was concerned with the message of the gospel, but he was also concerned to translate the message into terms that could be understood by modern hearers, so that they might come to the point of existential decision that is at the heart of the kerygma. However, because Bultmann locates the agency of proclamation ultimately in God, and not in the communicational strategy of the preacher, I would argue that he has more affinity with the metaphor of herald than with the metaphor of pastor. 32 Long, Witness, 29.

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He writes, “Having frankly recognized, therefore, the outgrown nature of the category we

need not be troubled by it when we read the Bible. What we should seek to understand is

the abiding experience…An important part of the modern preacher’s responsibility is thus

to decode the abiding meanings of Scripture from outgrown phraseology.”33 The abiding

experiences that are understandable and believable to the modern mind becomes the

criteria for interpreting the message. The driving concern in this approach is that the

preacher is faithful to the congregation, and how they understand. This foundational

focus on the hearers allows us to associate Fosdick with the pastoral metaphor of

preaching.

Coming nearly two generations after Fosdick, liberation theology’s approach to

proclamation also can be situated within a pastoral understanding of preaching. Justo

González and Catherine G. Gunsalus, in their book, Liberation Preaching: The Pulpit

and the Oppressed, argue that the mission of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ are

toward the liberation of the oppressed. Therefore, the criteria for interpreting Scripture—

and hence the message of the Gospel—come from the community of the oppressed, and

more importantly proclamation is ultimately evaluated by the liberation of the community

from oppression.34 Similarly, in, The Heart of Black Preaching, Cleophus LaRue argues

that historical slavery and cultural oppression has shaped the African-American

understanding of Scripture and the Gospel, and has produced black preaching’s

distinctive focus on an all-powerful God who acts mightily on behalf of the

marginalized.35 Here, too, the proclamation of the gospel is shaped by the experience of

33 Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Modern Use of the Bible (New York: Macmillan Co., 1947), 121-123.34 Cf. Justo L. Gonzalez and Catherine Gunsalus Gonzalez, Liberation Preaching: The Pulpit and the Oppressed (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1980), pp. 15-28, 108-113.35 Cleophus J. LaRue, The Heart of Black Preaching (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), pp. 9-29, 115-127.

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the hearers, is designed to change the experience of the hearers, and is evaluated by how

well it accomplishes this task. Although these approaches are certainly different from the

approach of Fosdick, because liberation theology and black theology both locate the

criteria for interpreting Scripture and evaluating proclamation with the hearers, I would

identify these theologies with the metaphor of preacher as pastor.

The third classic metaphor that Long uses is preacher as storyteller/poet. Long

writes that, “this image differs from the previous two in that it tells us who the preacher is

by describing the literary and artistic character of the preacher’s sermon: preaching

marked by storytelling and poetically expressive language.”36 In its beginnings in the

1970’s, this understanding of preaching was linked with theories of narrative and

narrative theology. Proponents of the preacher as storyteller argue that the narrative is

theologically superior to other forms because the gospel itself is a narrative, and it is

communicationally superior because human beings naturally understand their lives in

narratives. In recent years, for some scholars, the emphasis on the power of stories has

broadened to the power of language generally, and specifically poetic language.

With the metaphor of storyteller/poet, we can place two large schools of thought

in theologies of proclamation. The first group are those who belong to the New

Homiletic, which follows the New Hermeneutic; the second group are those who follow

narratological poetics, and this group divides into two significant sub-groups. What

unites these schools of thought is that both emphasize the power of language in the

ministry of preaching; in terms of agency, both focus on human agency exercised in the

use of language.

36 Long, Witness, 36-37.

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The primary spokesperson for the New Homiletic is Fred Craddock, who

dramatically altered the conversation in homiletics with his book, As One Without

Authority, in 1971. As James Kay has noted, Fred Craddock’s approach to homiletics is

frustratingly incoherent and difficult to summarize. At some points he emphasizes the

theological relationship between the Word and the preacher’s word, at other points he

focuses on the poetic power of the preacher’s words, and at still other points he stresses

the rhetorical strength of an inductive sermon that leads to a central idea.37 However,

from each perspective, and particularly in the poetic and rhetorical perspective, Craddock

locates the agency of preaching in the preacher’s spoken words in oral address38 Thus,

because human agency exercised through language takes center stage, whether to convey

the poetics of the text or the preacher’s experience of the text, we are dealing with the

preacher as storyteller/poet.

Similarly, in Eugene Lowry’s work, the creative linguistic artistry of the preacher

is also the primary agent of proclamation. Lowry, perhaps unwittingly, anchors his

approach to homiletics in Aristotelian poetics. He argues that we should think of every

sermon as a narrative, and that every good narrative has a basic pattern (which

corresponds roughly to Aristotle’s tragic plot): upsetting the equilibrium; analyzing the

discrepancy; disclosing the clue to resolution; experiencing the gospel; and anticipating

the consequences.39 This constitutes the basic plot of the sermon, and plot is, “the key

37 Kay, Preaching, 91. 38 Fred Craddock, As One Without Authority (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1979), 24-25.39 In the Poetics, Aristotle describes four basic moments in the plot of a complex tragedy, with the second and third occurring simultaneously: 1) complication; 2a) reversal of the situation; 2b) recognition; and 3) denouement. (Cf. Aristotle, Poetics trans. Stephen Halliwell (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).) Interestingly, in the expanded edition of The Homiletical Plot, Lowry clarifies the stages of his homiletical plot to bring it even closer to Aristotle’s Poetics (Cf. Eugene Lowry, The Homiletical Plot: The Sermon as Narrative Art Form, expanded edition (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 119.)

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term for a reshaped image of the sermon.” Lowry writes, “Preaching is storytelling. A

sermon is a narrative art form.”40 Clearly, then, for Lowry the preacher is a storyteller.

Finally, in addition to Craddock and Lowry, we can identify the postliberal school

of homiletics with the metaphor of preacher as storyteller/poet. Postliberal homiletics

comes to us mainly from Charles Campbell, who draws primarily on the work Hans Frei.

From Frei, we receive a Barthian theology read through the lens of Eric Auerbach’s

theory of “realistic narrative.”41 In short, Frei proposes that the narrative presented by the

gospels renders the unsubstitutable and saving identity and presence of Jesus Christ. In

turn, Campbell argues that the basic function of the preacher therefore is to re-tell this

story, to “preach Jesus,” and so render his saving identity and presence by an embodiment

of the narrative.42 In the words of one like-minded homiletician, the preacher should,

“tell the story, tell it often, and tell it well.” With postliberals, as with Lowry, the

preacher is a storyteller. However, for Lowry the plot of the story, which he derived from

Aristotelian poetics, is decisive. For postliberals, what is decisive is the central character

and identity of Jesus Christ, which is rendered by the story.

The last metaphor that Long presents is the subject of his own work: the preacher

as witness. He takes his bearings from two related sources: the Greek New Testament

word family, martus, which in translation means “witness,” and from Paul Ricoeur’s

work on the idea of witness. Drawing on these sources, Long defines several major

characteristics of preaching as witness, which may be summarized by the following

statement: the preacher, sent by the community, goes to the Biblical text in order to return

40 Eugene Lowry, The Homiletical Plot: The Sermon as Narrative Art Form, expanded edition (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 12.41 Kay, Preaching, 105.42 Cf. Charles L. Campbell, Preaching Jesus: New Directions for Homiletics in Hans Frei’s Postliberal Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1997), especially pp. 189-220.

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to the community and witness (or testify) to what he has seen and heard in the encounter

with the text.

With this final metaphor, we may group several recent approaches to homiletics,

and their theologies of proclamation. In my judgment, the feminist theologies of Rebecca

Chopp and Anna Carter Florence are closely related to this image of preaching. In

addition, the postmodern homiletic of David Lose understands the preacher as a witness,

although his approach is very different from the feminist proposals. Despite their

differences, though, for all of these theologians the preacher is one who testifies, bearing

witness to what she has seen and heard.

For Chopp, the Word of God is a perfectly open sign, an inexhaustible resource,

which is always disrupting the status quo, opening new possibilities, and setting the

captive free. In this framework, the Christ event becomes a W/word event, which

disrupts reality and constitutes an emancipated community. As the word of the preacher

approximates the perfectly open Word, it becomes a liberating word for the preacher and

hearer alike. In this way, Chopp appears similar to the storyteller/poets, who locate

homiletic agency in language. Also, because emancipation is the criterion by which to

evaluate proclamation, and all true proclamation comes from those who have been or

need to be emancipated, she appears similar to the liberation and black theologies we

mentioned.43 However, despite her similarities to the understandings of the

storyteller/poet and the pastor, I associate Chopp’s approach with the image of witness

because she strongly emphasizes the testimonial character of proclamation. She puts it

succinctly when she writes, “proclamation moves through testimony, relying on the

43 In fairness, an important point of distinction between Chopp and the liberation and black theologies mentioned is this: for Chopp the only criterion for the content of proclamation is emancipation. Chopp appears unconcerned with Jesus Christ, except as he is an example of one whose speech was closely associated with the Word as perfectly open sign.

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power realized in speaking one’s life.”44 Or, as Anna Carter Florence puts it in

summarizing Chopp, “Proclamation, then, is a testimony of freedom.”45

In many ways, Florence shares Chopp’s perspective on the Word as a perfectly

open sign, and preaching as the embodiment of that Word. Moreover, she argues that

Christianity must always choose a hermeneutics of testimony. For Florence, however,

preaching is not simply a testimony of freedom, but is testimony about an experience of

an encounter with God. Indeed, everything rests on the experience of this encounter. If

one has not had this encounter, if one has gone to the text and experienced nothing, then

one has nothing to preach. Fundamentally, for Florence, the preacher testifies to her own

experience with God in the text.46 This stands in marked distinction from the herald who

proclaims God’s message, or the pastor who speaks to the needs of the congregation, or

the storyteller who tells the story of Jesus.

Finally, in his book, Confessing Jesus Christ, David Lose develops a concept very

similar to witness as a homiletic model for the postmodern situation: confession.47 Lose

proposes that, “preaching that seeks to be both faithful to the Christian tradition and

responsive to our pluralistic, postmodern context is best understood as the public practice

of confessing faith in Jesus Christ.”48 In a postmodern context where neither

foundationalism nor relativism is a viable option for the preacher, Lose argues that

confession is the best way to understand preaching. Preaching that is confession,

according to Lose,

44 Rebecca Chopp, The Power to Speak: Feminism, Language, and God (New York, NY: Crossroad Publishing, 1991), 62.45 Anna Carter Florence, Preaching as Testimony (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 97.46 Cf. Florence, Preaching, pp. 91-105.47 Although confession derives from a different Greek word than witness, Lose notes that is bears strong resemblance both in meaning and in usage. (Cf. Lose, Confessing, 79.)48 David Lose, Confessing Jesus Christ: Preaching in a Postmodern World (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2003), 3.

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is the assertion of faith’s deepest convictions, prompts the conversation of the faithful, and functions as both 1) a summary of the “essential” Christian tradition and 2) the articulation and actualization of that tradition in response to the proclaimed Word and the immediate circumstances of our hearers and world.49

For Lose, then, the sermon is a testimonial response to the Word that the preacher hears

in the testimony of the text, which the preacher confesses to his immediate hearers and

the world.

Concluding with the trope of witness, we have just seen how the master

metaphors that Thomas Long proposes in The Witness of Preaching can offer a relatively

comprehensive perspective on the field of homiletics. Of course, each of these tropes is a

reduction, and none have completely captured the nuances of each theology. It has not

been my goal, however, to describe in detail each theological option for proclamation.

Rather, I propose that these tropes, taken together, can offer a relatively comprehensive

perspective—a view from 30,000 feet—of the field of homiletics.50 If it appears that

these tropes, placed together, do offer a fair understanding of the field, then I have done

what I wished to do.

DIVINE REVELATION IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

Now, having hopefully offered a fair understanding of the field of homiletics by

using these master metaphors, I want to argue the central contention of this thesis. If

indeed the four tropes of herald, pastor, storyteller/poet, and witness can describe the

major theologies of proclamation available today, then I suggest that there is a blind-spot

in our understanding of preaching. Recall from the beginning of this essay that tropes are

49 Lose, Confessing, 233-234.50 The reader may have noticed that I have failed to describe an apocalyptic of preaching. We will come to this later in the essay.

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not merely ornaments of discourse, or innocent decoration. Rather, tropes are

epistemological; they are ways of knowing, of discovering and describing the “truth.” As

Robert Reid writes, “a tropological orientation to thought invites people to imagine their

way into an entire body of knowledge. . . to clarify a perspective by sharing the formative

orientation that shapes perspectival thought.”51

Recall, also, from Kenneth Burke’s analysis, that any representative anecdote is

only a relative perspective, and must—through irony—participate with other perspectives

in describing the truth. Any one perspective can see only from its vantage point; to see

the whole—to avoid blind-spots—we need other perspectives. Herald, pastor,

storyteller/poet, and witness are obviously excellent representative anecdotes; yet, still,

they are each partial and incomplete understandings of the ministry of preaching. Indeed,

if these four can be reasonably employed to understand to the field of homiletics, then we

probably do have blind-spots in our understanding of preaching. This insight affirms the

call of the Academy of Homiletics for new tropes, which can provide fresh visions.

With this problem in mind, I want to argue for what I think is a major tropological

blind-spot in our understanding of the ministry of preaching: sight. Each of the “master

metaphors” we have examined, to one extent or another, is rooted in oral/aural discourse,

in the acts of speaking and hearing. For the herald, God himself is speaking in the

proclamation of the church, which hears God’s voice. In the trope of pastor, the

congregation is the primary focus of the preacher, and they are described only as

“hearers;” presumably, therefore, the preacher is only a “speaker.” In the trope of

storyteller/poet, with emphasis on language, the preacher is obviously one who tells, or

51 Reid, “A Rhetoric,” 147.

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speaks, and the congregation hears. Finally, with the trope of witness, we are focused on

the spoken testimony or confession of the preacher, which is heard by the congregation.52

This basic orientation toward oral/aural discourse in these tropes is

understandable in light of the New Testament’s description of the relationship of hearing

to divine revelation. However, the New Testament also places sight in relationship to

hearing, and to divine revelation. There are few resources for outlining in detail this

relationship, especially as the traditional focus has been on divine revelation by hearing.

However, one fruitful resource for this work is the classic, Theological Dictionary of the

New Testament. For a heuristic exploration of the relationship of hearing and seeing to

divine revelation, we can look to a theological understanding of the Greek words akouo,

which means “to hear,” and orao, which means “to see.”

In the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, one discovers that the

auditory sense is the fundamental means of perceiving divine revelation in the Old

Testament and the New Testament. Indeed, Gerhard Kittel writes, “The hearing of man

represents correspondence to the revelation of the Word, and in biblical religion it is thus

the essential form in which this divine revelation is appropriated.”53 In fact, Judaism is

set in sharp relief to Hellenism and other ancient eastern religions on exactly this point.

In the “Greek mysteries and oriental Gnosticism,” sight is the primary means by which

one apprehends God. For these religions, “where the true mystery is achieved, the

reference is to vision, access and worship, with no reference to the fact that the devotee

52 I must note here that Long, when he speaks of the preacher’s encounter with the text, refers to what is “seen and heard” in that encounter. The implications of this “seeing,” however, are not made clear in his theory, and I am left to conclude that the addition of the sense of sight is not material to his argument.53 Gerhard Kittel, “akouo”, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 1, ed. Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1967), 216.

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has heard a verbal revelation.”54 For the Greek mysteries and oriental Gnosticism, the

essential content of revelation comes by the sensory perception of sight and not of

hearing.

On the other hand, for the religion of the Old Testament and Judaism, the true

vision of God on earth is a dangerous and frightful thing (Gen 19:26; Ex. 3:6; Ju. 6:23).

Even in the prophets’ visions, the prophets do not see God; rather, God is to be heard,

giving his word in the vision (Nu. 12:6).55 In the Old Testament and Judaism, instead of

receiving divine revelation by vision, divine revelation is about the Word, “which is

either heard or to be heard.”56 The fundamental religious declaration in the Old

Testament is, “Hear the Word of the Lord” (Is. 1:10, Jer. 2:4, Am. 7:16), and the

fundamental religious accusation is a failure or unwillingness to hear and obey the word

(Jer. 7:13; Hos. 9:17).

What it means to “hear” the Word of divine revelation follows two basic

trajectories in Judaism. One is the rabbinic line of thought, where the Word is related to

the Word of God given in the sacred book. The sacred text is read and meditated on

aloud, and exegesis and interpretation is framed in terms of what is heard in the reading.57

The seeing of God, on the other hand, “is reserved for the hour of death and the life

beyond.”58 Even then, though, there is no sure promise in the Old Testament that one will

see God after death.59

54 Kittel, “akouo,” 217.55 Wilhelm Michaelis, “orao”, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 5, ed. Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1967), 330.56 Kittel, “akouo,” 217.57 Kittel, “akouo,” 218.58 Kittel, “akouo,” 219.59 Michaelis, “orao,” 334.

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The second line of thought for understanding what it means to “hear” divine

revelation is the apocalyptic trajectory. Naturally, with apocalyptic literature, the

eschatological contemplation of symbols and divine visions comes to the forefront.

However, notice still that, as in the prophetic and rabbinic traditions, any sense of sight as

a medium of divine revelation is deferred to the eschatological event, which is present in

the apocalyptic vision. Moreover, in the apocalyptic vision, the symbols are, “often

bound up with words which are to be heard and which help to bring out the meaning”

(Da. 7:17ff; 8:16ff).60 Thus, in the apocalyptic line of thought, what is seen provides the

context for what is heard; or as Wilhelm Michaelis puts it, in the development of

Judaism, “revelation by picture is more and more a framework for revelation by word.”61

We note the relationship of hearing and seeing to divine revelation in the Old

Testament and Judaism because this is the background against which we must understand

the relationship of hearing and seeing to divine revelation in the New Testament. As in

the Old Testament, in the New Testament revelation is primarily a Word to be heard, “and

the mission of Jesus and the disciples was first regarded and treated as something to be

received by way of hearing.”62 On the other hand, in the New Testament, there is not a

sharp division between hearing and seeing. Rather, “often seeing and hearing together

constitute the totality of sensual and spiritual perception, which underlies eye-witness,

personal experience and individual certainty.”63 Still, while the New Testament does not

divide seeing and hearing, it is a specific about what is to be seen.

60 Kittel, “akouo,” 218.61 Michaelis, “orao,” 330.62 Kittel, “akouo,” 219.63 Michaelis, “orao,” 341.

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In the gospels, there is a striking absence of any description of Jesus, of others, or

of the world they inhabited. As Michaelis notes, this is not because the details had

dropped away. Rather, “the real point is that for eye-witness accounts what was to be

seen, and what had to be described as visible, was the actions of Jesus, His deeds,

encounters with Him.” So, when the New Testament references the perception of divine

revelation by sight, it is specifically referring to the deeds of Jesus, which are interpreted

by his words.64 As in the Old Testament, in the New Testament what is seen acquires its

true significance in what is heard.

Also, in the New Testament as in the Old Testament, eschatology is the defining

feature of the relationship between divine revelation and sight. For example, the gospel

accounts of the Risen Lord, and the accounts in 1 Corinthians 9:1 and 15:5, refer to

“seeing” him. Therefore, Kittel argues that as the Easter event is perceived by means of

sight it is eschatologically evaluated.65 In this sense, though, the eschatological sense of

Jesus presence is not limited to the resurrection accounts, but is throughout the gospels,

as seeing and hearing are intermingled in the ministry of Jesus. Jesus tells John’s

disciples, “Go and tell John what you hear and see” (Mt. 11:4). In Matthew 13:16, Jesus

blesses the eyes that see and the ears that hear; and in Mark 4:12, Jesus condemns both

the eyes that do not perceive and the ears that do not understand.

Of course, we still must understand this against the Judaic background that we

have just traced; hearing is the fundamental medium of divine revelation. But, if hearing

is the basic and historic means of perceiving divine revelation, so the reasoning in

64 To support this point, Kittel sights numerous examples: the message of the nativity, the voice at the baptism, the voice at the transfiguration, the visions of Paul, and the visions of the Apocalypse. (Kittel, “akouo,” 219.)65 Kittel, “akouo,” 220.

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Matthew 13 goes, how much more blessing and responsibility is laid upon those who not

only hear but also see? Michaelis frames the issue, saying, “Hence we may conclude that

eye-witness as such is not extolled, but emphasis is laid on the increased obligation to

make a right decision in the light of it.”66 Moreover, for those who see and perceive, their

eyewitness account is only genuine when it is accompanied by the imperative of faith,

which results in the proclamation of the Word.

Thus, in the presence of Jesus Christ, whether before of after the resurrection, the

eschatological event has occurred in which divine revelation engages both eyes and ears,

and results in the telling of what is seen. Kittel frames it this way:

Already in His earthly presence with its Word and work there has come the dawn of eschatology in which seeing has a place alongside hearing. Thus in the use of the verbs denoting the sense-process described there is reflected the early Christian understanding of the revelation given in Jesus . . . the eschatological understanding of the fact of Christ.67

As what is seen provides the framework for what is heard in the apocalyptic tradition, so

in the presence of Jesus Christ, his deeds are the framework for interpreting his words.

The event of Jesus Christ is an eschatological presence, which entails both a message to

be heard, and also a reality to be seen.

Now, these are the basic insights of a heuristic exploration of the relationship of

hearing and seeing to divine revelation in the New Testament, through a review of the

meanings of the words akouo and orao as it is found in the Theological Dictionary of

the New Testament. We can summarize these insights as the following: 1) Hearing is the

primary means of divine revelation in both the Old Testament and New Testament; 2) In

the Old Testament, the sense of sight is deferred to an eschatological event; in apocalyptic

66 Michaelis, “orao,” 347.67 Kittel, “akouo,” 220.

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contemplation on the symbols of that event, the true meaning of the symbols is clarified

by the message that is heard; 3) in the New Testament, it appears that the early Christian

understanding is that the eschatological event had happened in Jesus Christ. The long

deferred sight had now come. The message of Jesus and the acts of Jesus are

intermingled, involving both sight and hearing in the act of spiritual perception.

Of course, we must note that after the ascension (with the exception of Jesus’

appearance to Paul), things changed; no others in Scripture were given the privilege of

both seeing the Lord and hearing his voice. Indeed, according to Michaelis, and

Raymond Brown in his commentary on the Gospel according John, this is the basic thrust

of John 20:29. Here, Jesus is speaking to Thomas: “Jesus said to him, ‘Have you

believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have

come to believe.” Michaelis notes that this beatitude is addressed to contemporaries of

the Evangelist who do not have the privilege of seeing for themselves. They can be

assured that, “Faith without seeing is fully equal to faith on the basis of seeing.”68

Brown, too, notes that John 20:29 was likely written in response to the passing away of

the generation of eyewitnesses, to assure believers of the validity of their faith. He

writes,

Up to this point in the Gospel narrative only one type of true belief has been possible, a belief that has arisen in the visible presence of Jesus; but with the inauguration of the invisible presence of Jesus, a new type of faith emerges. What is important . . . is that one must believe, whether that faith comes from seeing or not.69

68 Michaelis, “orao,” 349.69 Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John, Anchor Bible 29B (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970), 1048. In this interpretation, Brown specifically argues that faith that arises from sight and faith that arises from hearing should be regarded equally. He argues against Bultmann on this point: “We find no evidence of Bultmann’s contention (p. 539) that the faith spoken of in 29a, despite the fact that it gave expression to the confession, ‘My Lord and My God,’ is not praiseworthy because seeing is sensible perception and thus radically opposed to faith.” (Brown, Gospel, 1050.)

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Indeed, the accounts of the eyewitnesses, accounts such as the gospel according to John,

are written and preserved to establish a vital link between those who were privileged to

see Jesus and those who would come after, to assure them that the testimony they would

hear is true (Jn. 21:24). This important implication of this is that, in whatever way one

may construe a sense of sight in the ministry of preaching, it cannot be that in preaching

we see the risen Lord; for us, as for those in the Old Testament, we may heard the Word,

but the sight of the Word is yet deferred.

Nevertheless, this heuristic exploration of the relationship of hearing and sight to

diving revelation in the New Testament is quite suggestive for other understandings of

sight in the ministry of preaching. As we noted before, the tropes of herald, pastor,

storyteller/poet, and witness are all grounded in the idea of preaching as oral/aural

discourse. This is certainly understandable in light of the Biblical understanding of the

reception of divine revelation. Yet, as we have seen by attending to the meanings of

akouo and orao as they relate to divine revelation in the New Testament, sight and sound

are not antitheses, but represent the fullness of spiritual perception. Therefore, with

Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical epistemology in mind, it appears to me that we are in need of

tropes for the ministry of preaching that relate specifically to the sense of sight. While

there is not the space remaining to pursue a full investigation of such tropes, I wish to

offer two suggestions for further work.

The first is preacher as, “one who is seen.” According to Paul, there is a sense in

which the visible Lord has not entirely disappeared, but his life is still visible in his

disciples. In the second letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes, “For while we live, we are

always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made

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visible in our mortal flesh” (2 Cor 4:11). In, Preacher and Cross: Person and Message

in Theology and Rhetoric, Andre Resner has explored in detail the relationship between

Paul’s visible person, understood rhetorically as his ethos, and his proclamation of the

crucified Christ to the church in Corinth. According to Resner, Paul does not only

understand himself as a “herald,” but also recognizes the rhetorical, ethos dimension of

his ministry. In his first letter to the Corinthians, he makes an extended ethos defense of

the legitimacy of his proclamation, overturning the classical canons of rhetoric, and

arguing for a “reverse-ethos” in conformity with the cross of Christ. According to

Resner, then, Paul understood his visible life as an integral part of his proclamation of the

crucified and risen Christ. It is obvious, then, that with Resner’s work we are well on the

way to understanding the preacher as, “one who is seen.”

The second trope I suggest is preacher as, “one who sees.” Again, we can draw

on Paul’s letters, and particularly the exegesis of J. Louis Martyn, to outline the contours

of this trope. In his essay, “Epistemology at the Turn of the Ages,” Martyn argues that in

Christ, we stand now at the “turn of the ages,” where we know neither kata sarka, nor

kata pneuma. Rather, Martyn argues that according to Paul, we now know kata stauron,

as all of our ways of knowing are crucifed with Christ. Taking up Martyn’s thesis, James

Kay turns this argument to homiletic use in his article, “The Word of the Cross at the

Turn of the Ages.” Kay asks,

What does life look like at the juncture of the ages? What assumptions of the old world are called into question by the new? What customary ways of knowing God are now rendered anachronistic? Where—contrary to all expectations—is God’s new creation becoming visible where there is no evidence for it? When preachers take their orientation from this turning point, it becomes a vantage point for imagining, selecting, and assessing examples and illustrations.70

70 James F. Kay, “The Word of the Cross at the Turn of the Ages,” Interpretation 53 (1999): 50.

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In this sense, the preacher as “one who sees,” is one who is able to see simultaneously

two levels of reality: “both the enslaving Old Age and God’s invading and liberating new

creation.”71 Similarly to understanding of apocalyptic visions, the preacher’s

proclamation is spoken and understood in the framework of what is seen.

Both of these tropes appear to be fruitful for extending our understanding of the

ministry of preaching, and consonant with the relationship of hearing and seeing to divine

revelation in the New Testament. Ultimately, in the New Testament, sight as a means of

divine revelation is linked to the eschatological presence of Jesus Christ. As in other

eschatological material, what is seen in the eschatological event provides the framework

for what is heard. As those who live in an in-between time, we are not able yet to see the

Lord. Yet, at this eschatological turn of the ages, nor we are not entirely without sight.

Understanding the preacher as “one who is seen,” her life itself provides a visible

framework for hearing the message. Alternately, for the preacher as “one who sees,” the

eschatological in-breaking of God’s new creation into the Old Age provides a visible

framework for hearing the message.

CONCLUSION

These, then, are gestures toward metaphors of preaching that emphasize the sense

of sight in proclamation. The importance of such metaphors is based on the rhetorical

epistemology of Kenneth Burke, who argues that we can understand the truth through the

ironic dialogue of many different perspectives, each of which offers a different viewpoint

on reality. With this epistemological basis, we have used the master perspectives of

herald, pastor, storyteller/poet, and witness to analyze the major theologies of

71 Kay, “Word”, 51.

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proclamation in the field of homiletics today. This analysis suggests that these major

options are all rooted in an understanding of preaching as oral/aural discourse, and do not

attend to the sense of sight in proclamation.

Moreover, through our heuristic exploration of the relationship of hearing and

sight to divine revelation in the New Testament, we have suggested that there is indeed

Biblical warrant for the development of a metaphor of preaching that emphasizes the

sense of sight. Of course more work must be done to develop fully such a metaphor.

Hopefully, though, we have answered the preliminary questions that could move us

toward understanding the preacher as “one who is seen,” and “one who sees.”

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Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of the Literary Form. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973.

Campbell, Charles L. Preaching Jesus: New Directions for Homiletics in Hans Frei’s Postliberal Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1997.

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