Preach Magazine Issue 1 - Creativity and innovation in preaching | Page 47

FEATURE

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Rhetorical Innovation
Finally, rhetoric. Recently I’ve been
wondering, WWJT? (What would Jesus
tweet?) The extreme brevity of the
medium could be an advantage for
gnomic utterances and might give them
the ambiguity of a punchy parable. A
pastor in Hawaii invites congregants
– whom he knows will be on their
smartphones anyway – to text him their
answers to multiple choice questions that
he poses on his PowerPoint™ slides during
his sermon. Others allow Twitter feeds to
scroll past during the sermon. So it seems
that creative preachers restlessly search
for new technologically-enabled angles,
in the hope that they may thus compete
with the mass media technoscapes which
increasingly form the background and
even the foreground of the lives of their
listeners. In this they are arguably seeking
to emulate the rhetorical innovations of
the preaching of Jesus.
Rhetoric, or the art and science of
discourse, has universal rules codified by
Aristotle, refined by the Roman Cicero
and developed for Christian preachers
by Augustine. Logos, the argument or
power of the spoken word, is fatally
undermined without ethos, the listeners’
positive perception of the character and
integrity of the speaker. The argument
is also weakened without pathos – the
engagement with the listener’s emotions,
and by extension the relationship of the
message to real life. In the estimations
of the gospel writers, the ethos of Jesus
the teacher and preacher is unparalleled.
According to all four writers he spoke with
authority and power and wisdom that was
‘astonishing’. Luke refers to ‘amazement’
at the gracious words that came from his
mouth. Matthew contrasts the remarkable
authority that Jesus exhibited, compared
to that of the scribes.
At the same time as being virtually
universal, rhetoric is culturally embedded,
for the preacher cannot gain a hearing
without thought-forms and speechforms comfortable for the listeners, or

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without ideas and concepts that address
or correspond with the listeners’ felt
concerns. As cultural expressions develop
and change preachers need to know the
difference, say, between Wallace Simpson
and Marge Simpson as well as between
wheat and tares.
Where was Jesus wielding the rhetorical
tools of his culture, and where was he
making an innovative leap forward in
first-century CE rabbinical discourse? The
unequivocal evidence that would provide
for that study is not there, as far as I can
see. But the challenges that his preaching
discourse raises for preachers today are
instructive and inspiring nevertheless.
We could start with his use of parables
and enigmatic sayings (see Mark 4:11 and
4:33–34). However studying the parables
of Jesus we quickly learn that, as Robert
H Stein pointed out, Jesus was drawing
on a well-established Jewish tradition
of mashal.3 We learn also that the term
parable is an umbrella term for a wide
variety of figures of speech including
simile, extended metaphor, little story, and
allegory. The challenge of Jesus’s parables
(which is also the title of an excellent
compendium by Richard Longenecker) is
particularly that they convey a point not
only in intellectual but also in affective
ways. (Sometimes: Julicher’s ‘single
point’ understanding of parables has
been widely superseded.) And even that
summary risks undervaluing the way
parables work. Often they seem designed
to get past a mental guard, to get under
the skin, or to turn preconceptions on
their head so violently that laughter is the
first, but by no means the only response.
The deliberate withholding of clarity, as
in Luke 8:9–10, seems to be an innovation
too far for contemporary preachers who
strive to be clear at all times. There is a
challenge in Jesus’ use of parables to work
with ambiguity and mystery, to expect the
listener to do more work, and to preach
in ways that are less spoon-feeding