The Homiletical Plot, Expanded Edition: The Sermon as Narrative Art Form by Eugene L. Lowry

Author:Eugene L. Lowry [Lowry, Eugene L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Presbyterian Publishing Corporation
Published: 2000-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

One does not begin with the idea that we have in the New Testament verbal statements that are obscure into which we must introduce the light of understanding; rather, one listens to the Word hopeful that it will shed light on our own situation which is obscure. The Word of God is not interpreted; it interprets.31

Nowhere is the sense of inversion articulated more clearly than in Barth’s section “The Strange New World Within the Bible” found in The Word of God and the Word of Man.32

The fundamental mistake of the liberal Protestant pulpit of the last forty years is that it presumes that the gospel is continuous with human experience. It would be closer to the truth to say that the gospel is continuous with human experience after the gospel has turned human experience upside down. Barth notes that we come to the Bible with our questions, and find only our own reflection, instead of “a new world, the world of God.”33

The trouble with the “neo-orthodox” reaction to liberalism, however, is that in the process of being true to the gospel, the position becomes untrue to human experience—especially in the preaching event itself. The liberal preacher is apt to make effective contact with the congregation and its human needs, fears, and hopes, but to effect little or no homiletical transformation. The Barthian preacher, on the other hand, is apt to walk into the pulpit with scriptural exegesis and exposition as the initial homiletical approach, only to discover that when the time comes for application the congregation has long since walked out existentially and left him there—standing on his head with the gospel! To recall Paul Scherer’s sentiments: There are two kinds of preachers. The one has something to say but doesn’t know how to say it, and the other knows how to say it but has nothing to say. I nominate the Barthian for the former case and the twentieth-century liberal for the latter.

Is there a way of avoiding the two untenable positions identified by Scherer? I believe the view of preaching as a narrative plot which includes the principle of reversal as the decisive clue to resolution offers another alternative. The preached sermon as I am envisioning it begins with the establishment of contact with the congregation at the point of their human predicament and moves through stage two (analysis) inductively in good liberal tradition form. But rather than mobilize the resources of the gospel to fulfill human aspirations, it reveals such human aspirations for the dead-ends they are. By disclosing the clue to resolution, which typically involves some kind of reversal, it opens a new door, and prepares the context in which the Word of God can be proclaimed—deductively ordered in good Barthian fashion.

Central to this schema, then, is the principle of reversal—which may occur in at least four forms: 1) the cause-effect reversal, 2) the inverted cause reversal, 3) the inverted assumption reversal, and 4) the inverted logic reversal. Once the clue to resolution is articulated, the

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