therefore, certainly act to some extent as cultural ‘screens’ which may shield Christians from contemporary culture as well as shielding contemporary culture from Christian witness. Yet those individuals and groups who have the courage to take the gospel to the ‘streets’ may find that it yet has more influence there than many of us have dared to hope.
Theology
Christian theology is the Church’s continued reflection on the meaning of God’s revelation and its implications for our lives. It never stands still, for as the world changes, so our interaction with God’s unique self-disclosure, in Israel and above all in Christ, must change too.[14] For a simple example, we might take our response to the phenomenon of consumerism, just mentioned. The Bible and Christian doctrine give us much practical and challenging guidance about attitudes to money and possessions, and a vision of that which is of true worth. But consumerism as we know it is a new phenomenon, which requires new thinking about how we relate this teaching to our own culture. The depth, or shallowness, of our thought about what it means to be a Christian in a ‘consumer society’ will be evident to others. To what extent is it hypocritical to enjoy its benefits (which are real) while decrying its practices? Simplistic challenges to ‘give’ when most people are in debt will be heard for what they are. Is it possible to ‘give’ when, in truth, you don’t actually ‘have’? In wealthier churches (which includes churches composed of people who can just afford high mortgages), how can preachers and congregations remember the poor, who are precisely those most taunted and excluded by consumerism? Such questions require careful and creative theological thought, not simplistic answers.[15]
Preaching and theology (as we might say) ‘go back a long way’ together. In the early centuries of Christianity, before the Bible and other literature were widely accessible to the general public, and long before Christian theology broke from being an area of study confined to Church circles, preaching was the main means of both doing creative theology and voicing the theological thinking that had been shaping the Church. Indeed, some of those known as the greatest theological thinkers of the early Church are also those known as some of the greatest preachers, and vice versa: Origen, Gregory Nazianzen, Augustine.
If preaching is not such a ‘spearhead’ for theology today, this is not necessarily because either discipline has either declined or is discredited (though some say that both these things are true, of either or both discipline). It may be precisely because those early preacher-theologians did their job so well. For their preaching, and especially the Scriptural interpretation it contained, have survived to a remarkable degree in written form; nor did they see any divide between the oral and written aspects of their activity. Both were subsumed under what Michael Pasquarello (following old terminology) calls ‘sacred rhetoric’,[16] the entire enterprise of forming Christian minds and lives through the Church’s ministry of proclaiming and teaching the gospel. In the sixteenth-century attempts to reform the Church, the Fathers’ preaching and teaching was a vital guide.[17] And as, in the same period, both the Bible and other theological writings became available to vastly more people through the invention of printing and the growth in literacy, preaching no longer needed to be the gateway to theology that once it had been.
So it was that increasingly people did not need to listen to sermons to engage with what the theological thinkers were saying, nor did theological thought necessarily reflect the sorts of things that were being preached. A more radical step, however, came with the post-Enlightenment attempt to treat theology as a discipline that could, in principle, be subjected to the same standards of ‘objective’ rationality as any other, and thus be equally accessible to those beyond the Church as those within it. High academic standards had been nobly blended with theology in the mediaeval schools and above all in the faith-and-reason synthesis of Thomas Aquinas. But the overall framework remained an ecclesiastical one. The founding of the modern ‘secular’ university by Wilhelm von Humboldt in Berlin in 1810 signalled a fundamental questioning of why the study of theology should be confined to the one social grouping which had a deeply vested interest in it (even though that grouping, since the Reformation, had been internally divided).[18] This flew in the face of the Enlightenment ideals of detached reflection and the possibility, in principle, of any human being attaining growth in knowledge through the universal reason possessed by all. At the same time, there was a seminal attempt to divide up theology so that the descriptive, academic task of identifying ‘biblical theology’ was separated from the normative, constructive task of developing ‘dogmatic theology’.[19] The fact that a place was allowed for the constructive task shows that preaching, and other forms of Church-based theologizing, still had their place; but to carry credibility they had to be based on the biblical theology done in the academy.
One might argue that preachers have been on the back foot ever since. Distinguished theologian-preachers such as Schleiermacher and Barth (in very different ways) sought to reassert the Church’s authority in preaching: Schleiermacher by emphasizing the hearers’ actual experience, and the evocation of their innate sense of transcendence in preaching; Barth by emphasizing the power of God’s word to break into human experience in unpredictable and world-challenging ways. But they themselves produced works of academic theology which, arguably, have proved much more influential than their actual preaching. Can (and should) the preaching of the Church once again be an influence on the highest and most rigorous realms of study and exploration? If not – if the influence must inevitably be the other way round – does that mean that the Church is doomed to remain in the inappropriate-sounding role of handmaid of academic theology, even though such theology is not necessarily carried out within a Christian ethos? Given our contemporary awareness that the Enlightenment goal of ‘neutrality’ is a chimera, this must surely mean that the Church must open itself to being enslaved to presuppositions and modes of thought which, at least sometimes, fly in the face of ‘the mind of Christ’.[20]
Large philosophical questions are raised here, but our concern is to pursue the implications for preaching. Two very practical matters can be identified: the way in which a preacher’s own theological thinking is formed, and the operative frameworks or ‘ordinary hermeneutics’ by which a congregation’s theological mind is shaped.
The hope of ministerial training institutions is to enable those called to ministry to articulate the Christian gospel in a way that is faithful to orthodox Christian tradition, and both comprehensible and applicable to their contemporaries. This is a matter not only of imparting knowledge but also of inducting students into ways of thinking and practices of ongoing theological reflection which stimulate lifelong growth as preachers, as well as in all other dimensions of ministry.
Reality, of course, is messy, and the processes of learning and development are as unpredictable and non-linear for ministers as they are for anyone else. It is appropriate, though, for any preacher reviewing their ministry at any stage to ask what theological sources and modes of thought are most influencing their preaching ministry. The question is bound to reveal the haphazard nature of the influences upon us. We will all (probably!) have read the Bible. But we are all children of particular traditions; even those who come later into church life find themselves caught up in one tradition or another (or indeed choose one for themselves). We will have been directed to particular books and authors; we have heard particular teachers and preachers. Other writings or speakers we have come across quite by accident. Any or all of these we may have warmed to, reacted against or remained fairly neutral towards. Moreover, we are formed deeply by our theological friendships. The fact that a particular person is (or is not) sympathetic to a particular view may have great influence on the extent of our own sympathy to it.
Given the history of the academic ‘takeover’
