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7. Shaping Paradise through Preaching
- Baylor University Press
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127 s shapiNg paradise Through preaChiNg 7 The various communities that gather around fictional sermons are conflicting in their expectations, diverse in their form, and imprecisely defined. Above all else, they are imagined. That in itself is not a problem. Despite the apparently gloomy sociological prognosis that the only viable communities in contemporary society are imagined communities , this pessimism is more apparent than real. Imagined is not the same as imaginary, and the potential of imagined community, as opposed to imaginary, was demonstrated in benedictAnderson’s famous study of nationhood. It finds that nations are before all else imagined communities in that, although their members do not know each other, “the image of their communion” and “deep horizontal comradeship”1 are active realities in their minds. This imagined communion exists in church politics in the notion of the Anglican Communion, the Methodist Connexion, and other denominational groupings and in ecclesiology, in the doctrine of “one holy, catholic and apostolic church” as well as in the doctrine of the communion of saints. homileticians in the continuing development of homiletical theory have recently adopted the concept , too. before discussing the sermons in the novels of A. s. byatt and Toni Morrison, two writers who have little in common with each other, besides shared gender and appreciation of the community-shaping role of sermons in church, a discussion of views from selected homileticians about real-life preachers and the communities shaped by their preaching will inform an analysis of fictitious preachers and their communities. 128 The Novel as Church s because language constitutes a world whenever a speaker speaks, preachers’ words are the building blocks of symbolic worlds that enable congregations “to view the ‘real’ world in some new way, perhaps as a realm of God.”2 In effect, the use of imagination in preaching is capable of “forming faith-consciousness”3 and shapes a new world for congregations to inhabit.4 The same assumption lies behind most of the essays recently collected in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, affirming the notion that worship forms a believing community that is taught, trained, or encouraged to behave in a particular way. For instance, “Listening: Authority and Obedience,” by Scott Bader-Saye argues that in a world of competing convictions the conflict between authority and freedom often reflects the conflict between community and individual. how can the individual be free when the community wants to exert some degree of legal or moral control? This tension is potentially reconciled ritualistically in liturgy, through which a community gathers around authoritative texts, namely the bible, the sermon, and the creeds.5 Indeed, any healthy community requires collaborative, negotiated, and mutually agreed-upon authority of this sort;6 freedom is found in the individual’s choice whether to belong and participate. The notion that the human capacity to imagine enables people to “envision new realities”7 underpins this book. Walter brueggemann, one of the greatest exponents of this highly creative potential in the fields of both biblical scholarship and homiletics, describes the art of preaching as “the reimagination of reality.”8 For brueggemann, this view is informed both by his exposition on the Old Testament as a document for an exilic community and the partial dissolution of the church in the postmodern age. because of the diversity of congregations, the old monologic model and enlightenment script of church absolutes can no longer be trusted.9 The tradition of dominating, authoritarian preaching had prevailed from the time of the Constantinian establishment , which made Christianity an ally of power through the Catholic system and focused power on the church, to both the reformation and Counter-Reformation, which continued absolutist claims. But it can be sustained no longer. Some fictional sermons in contemporary novels fit the pattern of hegemonic authoritarian preaching, partly because many novelists are using a remembered genre but also because they are using sermons as a shorthand way of expressing a dominant [3.237.46.120] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:03 GMT) s Shaping Paradise through Preaching 129 voice of faith to which their characters are reacting. such preaching had two facets. One is that it was propositional: it claimed universal credence stemming from unquestioning certitude. The other is that sermons tended to adopt a three-fold structure; first describing a universal problem, then defining a clear solution that is universally applicable , before finally stressing that the new possibility is everywhere available.10 such preaching, or “thin discourse,”11 is now impossible in a decentered church...