Preaching God's Grand Drama , livre ebook

Cover
Endorsements
“The sermon is the best weapon in the pastor’s arsenal for taking every thought, and our imaginations, captive to Christ, which is why preaching may be the quintessential theological act. But what kind of act is it? Ahmi Lee describes the two prevailing models, didactic and dialogical, and proposes a third model, the dramatic, that preserves the best of the other two (the emphasis on doctrine and life experience, respectively) while avoiding their weaknesses. She rightly sees that the ministry of proclaiming God’s Word is an invitation to disciples to enter into the historical drama of Jesus Ch rist as actors who participate in this story made flesh. Lee’s proposal for a theodramatic homiletic provides pastors with the tonic they need to communicate the gospel effectively to our increasingly secularized, disenchanted age.”
— Kevin J. Vanhoozer , Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
“Too many homiletics books frustrate readers with predictable and played out hermeneutical scripts, such as the preacher-as-exalted-interpreter or the preacher-as-humiliated-subject. Thankfully, Ahmi Lee breaks free from these flat and stale patterns of description. Preaching God’s Grand Drama offers us a better script, a fresher performance than the typical proposals, one that holds promise for preachers and for preaching both now and in the future.”
— Jared E. Alcántara , Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University; author of The Practices of Christian Preaching
“Ahmi Lee has provided us with a fresh way of looking at the task of preaching. She calls us to acknowledge the ‘theodramatic’ nature of God’s work and our work in proclaiming the Word. For preachers who are weary of having to choose either ‘textual’ or ‘topical’ preaching, Preaching God’s Grand Drama offers a profoundly rich vision that will inform and inspire an alternative way of seeing that stretches the homiletical imagination to more theologically fitting dimensions. This book is a wonderful example of the kind of integrative thinking we urgently need to practice as preachers and teachers of preaching. I hope it will be widely read.”
— Michael Pasquarello III , Robert Smith Jr. Preaching Institute, Beeson Divinity School, Samford University
“Pioneering new homiletical territory, Ahmi Lee’s Preaching God’s Grand Drama invites propositional preachers and conversational preachers to explore their respective sermonic philosophies and methodologies. Well-written and insightful, Lee’s book presents an intriguing ‘third way’ explaining the art and craft of preaching that will meet and greet a wide spectrum of twenty-first-century listeners seated in the pews.”
— Matthew D. Kim , Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary; author of Preaching with Cultural Intelligence
“Ahmi Lee’s vision of theodramatic preaching presents a lively and artful middle way between propositional and conversational preaching. By centering on an encounter with God in both the sermon and the world, Lee proposes a homiletic that encourages preachers to offer an essential balm for our wounded times.”
— Paul Scott Wilson , Emmanuel College, University of Toronto
“In an effort to be serious about the Bible as the source of doctrinal truths, have we missed the forest for the trees? Have we atomized Scripture into so many disparate ideas that we have missed its central unifying drama? Ahmi Lee thinks so and wants to encourage pastors to preach the Bible as narrating a single dramatic story in which we are all characters as we dwell in Christ. The Bible narrates a cracking good story. And it is our story! Lee helps preachers perform this grand narrative in ways that will transform everyday lives in the light of God’s ongoing dramatic actions in the world.”
— Scott Hoezee , The Center for Excellence in Preaching, Calvin Theological Seminary
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2019 by Ahmi Lee
Published by Baker Academic
a division of Baker Publishing Group
PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.bakeracademic.com
Ebook edition created 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-1988-3
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2016
Scripture quotations labeled CEB are from the COMMON ENGLISH BIBLE. © Copyright 2011 COMMON ENGLISH BIBLE. All rights reserved. Used by permission. (www.CommonEnglishBible.com).
Contents
Cover i
Endorsements ii
Half Title Page iii
Title Page v
Copyright Page vi
Foreword Mark Labberton ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1. The Traditional Homiletic: Truth Mined, Truth Proclaimed 7
2. The Conversational Homiletic: Communal Meaning-Making 31
3. A Critique of the Conversational Homiletic 55
4. A Dramatic Approach to Theology 87
5. The Shape of a Theodramatic Homiletic 113
6. Four Perspectives at Play within a Theodramatic Homiletic 145
Index 169
Back Cover 176
Foreword
C ommunication is a miracle, and not a frequent one. This is both my observation and my experience, and I bet it may also be yours. Understanding our endless and daily efforts in communication—offered and received—takes us through the family, the school, the neighborhood, the workplace, the public square, and the wider society. It is not that we entirely fail to communicate or I would not bother to write this sentence nor would you bother to read it. Our efforts in verbal communication, however, are always proximate, negotiated, tentative. Their lapses, gaps, or conflicts frequently find us out and can unfortunately lead us down many different trails of disappointment, disconnection, and distrust. Yet we must necessarily keep at it. After all, we are made for communion, which presupposes communication, one to another.
This underscores that the stakes are frequently high in our communication with one another: communion made, tested, refined, or broken. What greatly raises the bar and the hope for communication lies near to the staggering claims of John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. . . . The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.”
Christians dare to trust that the Word-made-flesh is the One whose very being is communion and whose will involves communication. It’s only in light of this grounding theological reality that meaning, conveying, and understanding become possible. And if that is true for our daily interpersonal communication, how much more does it need to be so when anyone dares to try to communicate with and about God. The preacher knows this to the core.
What Dr. Ahmi Lee offers in this book is the chance to notice and to evaluate the conceptual frameworks that, consciously or not, shape the mind-set of the preacher and the presuppositions and experiences of the listeners. She lays out influences behind and around the predominant models of preaching, appreciating their value but underscoring their problems too. What Dr. Lee recognizes, and what I confirm from my own observations, is that many feel they are being expected to be epistemological trapeze artists!
On the one hand, many preachers grounded in an orthodox or evangelical expression of the church have confidence in the “recovery” process by which the Bible is interpreted: mining the text for what is “in it.” The assumption is that the intended meaning can be found through wise, educated, careful retrieval. For listeners to such preachers, the expectation is about the stable or fixed character of meaning through the nature of the Bible in particular, and of language more broadly. The validation of the “authority” of the preacher is their evident success at recovery and translation to today’s hearers. This is one epistemological trapeze.
On the other hand, a very different trapeze is the view that the Bible’s meaning is assumed to be largely “in front” of the text, in the community and experience of readers or hearers whose context affects their reception of the text, and whose perspective, community, and social location “makes” today’s meaning. With this trapeze, meaning moves from indeterminate to more determinate based on real-time interaction between preacher, readers, context, and text. The immediacy of experience and context is primary over (and sometimes against) the possible boundaries of the text or the tradition.
Both of the trapezes are in motion as the preacher prepares and preaches. The demands of history and the demands of relevance contrast and collide in various ways. The preacher, the congregation, or the context exercise pressure on the preacher and push easily toward opposite extremes of objectivity/history or subjectivity/relevance. Thus preachers can easily fail to benefit from a more nuanced combination that holds the two together, resisting reductionism and polarization. This dilemma is at play wherever preachers find themselves, whether urban or rural, whether mainline or independent, whether white or black, whether in the West or in the global South.
Where can the thoughtful preacher who cares about text and context, tradition and culture, objectivity and subjectivity turn for help in negotiating this epistemological tension? This explains why Dr. Lee turns in fresh directions to offer a significant alternative that recasts the assumptions of the whole preaching and communication exercise. Her incorporation of and reflection on Kevin Vanhoozer’s model of God’s theodramatic revelation is profou