Communicating the eternal truth of the Gospel in the continually changing context and language of contemporary culture can be a challenging task. In HEAR the WORD, author Dr. James A. Prette explores authentic Christian preaching in the postmodern culture. In this examination, Prette discusses the three essential elements of persuasive communication-pathos, ethos, and logos-and their parallels in Christian spiritual transformation-content, context, and conveyor. He offers a theological reflection exploring and defining a biblical paradigm for spiritual formation through the exposition of the biblical logos that crosses cultural and generational boundaries. He also delves into the cultural shift that has taken place in the ethos of western culture, from a modernist worldview to a postmodern one, and its impact on Christian life and ministry. HEAR the WORD offers nine important themes that can guide spiritual leaders in listening to and proclaiming the authentic word of God in this new postmodern paradigm.
HEAR the WORD
Listening to the Eternal Word in the Contemporary WorldBy JAMES A. PRETTEiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 Dr. James A. Prette
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4620-1374-6 Contents
Introduction...............................................................................................ixChapter 1: Communicating Spiritual Formation...............................................................1Chapter 2: The Content of Spiritual Formation..............................................................1 9Chapter 3: The Context of Spiritual Formation..............................................................58Chapter 4: The Conveyor of Spiritual Formation.............................................................94Chapter 5: Putting it All Together: The Logos, Ethos and Pathos of Spiritual Formation.....................169Appendix A The Survey......................................................................................195Appendix B The Follow-Up Interview Questions...............................................................201Appendix C The Statistical Analysis........................................................................203Bibliography...............................................................................................207
Chapter One
Communicating Spiritual Formation
The Communication and Contextualization Frameworks
Lesslie Newbigin returned home to England after serving as an Anglican missionary bishop in India. In his book Foolishness to the Greeks, he laments the fact that the Church has fallen into one of two traps as it has sought to engage its surrounding culture. The Church has either fallen into "indigenization," wherein the language, history, and culture of the surrounding ethos is compromised for the sake of preserving the peculiar culture of the Church, or into "adaptation," wherein the peculiar message of the Church is compromised for the sake of relating to the contemporary ethos of the particular culture.
The weakness of the former was that it tended to relate the Christian message to the traditional cultural forms—forms that belonged to the past and from which young people were turning away under the pervasive influence of "modernization." The effect was to identify the gospel with the conservative elements in society. The weakness of the latter term, adaptation, was that it implied that what the missionary brought with him was the pure gospel, which had to be adapted to the receptor culture. It tended to obscure the fact that the gospel as embodied in the missionary's preaching and practice was already an adapted gospel, shaped by his or her own culture.
Newbigin advocates the use of the term "contextualization" to help us understand the "culture of the moment," differentiating between the message of the Gospel, the context of the culture of the Christian missionary, and the context of his contemporary cultural environment. Bruce J. Nicholls describes contextualization as "the translation of the unchanging content of the gospel of the kingdom into verbal form meaningful to the peoples in their separate cultures and within their particular existential situations."
In this chapter we will examine the issues of effective communication in relation to Spiritual formation through biblical exposition. This will involve an application of communication theory to the discipline of preaching and an exploration of contextualization as a means to best translate the meaning of God's Word to each cultural context. An adaptation of Aristotle's three parts of persuasive speech (logos, ethos, and pathos) can be used to examine the effectiveness of the preaching act. The authentic logos (the content of God's Word) must be given in the authentic ethos (the perceived ability of the conveyor of the logos to connect with the receptor language, history, and culture of the contemporary context) with authentic pathos (the perceived authenticity, authority, and integrity of the conveyor of the message).
Authentic Christian Spiritual formation has always connected the logos of God to the ethos of the contemporary audience through authentic pathos. With Newbigin's warnings, one can evaluate whether a specific Christian proclaimer has committed "indigenization," wherein the ethos is compromised for the sake of logos, or "adaptation," wherein the logos is compromised for the sake of ethos. Rather, one must "contextualize" the unchanging logos to the contemporary ethos and speak with authentic pathos.
Newbigin also warns against the absorption of the logos into the ethos of the conveyor of the message. One must observe the "culture of the moment," differentiating between the cultural context of Spiritual formation and the context of the audience's cultural environment. One must evaluate all three dimensions of authentic communication in the act of Christian Spiritual formation in the experience of a sermon. Figure 1 shows a scale of how one might evaluate the logos of the message being preached. One can appraise whether a sermon reaches a low, medium, or high standard in the exposing of the actual meaning of the text being exposed.
Evaluating the Logos
The logos of the message can be evaluated on whether the messenger has correctly exegeted the text. This involves interpreting the message of the passage in its original contexts. These include its historical, cultural, and literary contexts. The text of the logos was written to a particular ethos at a particular time for a particular purpose. These contexts must be understood before one can apply the meaning of the text for the contemporary ethos. The message cannot mean what it never meant. One danger is to take the text of Scripture and apply it directly to one's contemporary ethos, as in figure 2.
This accounts for many awkward applications of texts, written for culturally sensitive occasions, being applied inappropriately in contemporary settings, such as requiring women to cover their heads in churches. Brian Hebblethwaite warns,
It is not even possible for us to mean what the writers of the Bible and the creeds meant just by saying what they said. We have to embark on the process of interpretation, in the light of our recognition both of their presuppositions and of our own, and struggle to express the truth of God and of God's acts for our own time.
An equally dangerous approach is when a preacher begins with his own contemporary ethos and approaches the biblical text, looking for material he can take out of context to have the Bible say what he thinks his ethos needs to hear, as in figure 3. The Big Idea of Biblical Preaching is a helpful book for applying Haddon Robinson's excellent concept of finding the one big idea in the biblical text passage and exposing it to the listeners through preaching. But the preacher must be most careful that his "one big idea" is not in fact his own "one small idea" eisogeted into the text, nor his own rendering of God's dynamic presence reduced to a mere moral principle or a feel-good, pop-psychology nuance.
Rather, what one must do is to listen to the biblical text (the logos) and interpret what its message was to the original audience (biblical ethos) in light of its original context. Then one must take...
