"Preaching in a Postmodern Wor[l]d: Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics
as Homiletical Conversation"
"Preaching in a Postmodern
Wor[l]d: Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics as Homiletical Conversation"
Jeffrey F. Bullock, Ph.D.
Dean of the Seminary and Vice President of the University
University of Dubuque Theological Seminary Dubuque, Iowa 52001
November 22, 1997
1997 AAR/SBL
Christian Theological Research Group
Introduction
There is a charcoal drawing framed in rustic
wood hanging on the wall of a professor's study. It is a large creation,
approximately eleven inches wide by seventeen inches in height. The charcoal
image is a little blurry. The image's borders are unclear, and sometimes even
seem to run together. After a time of gazing, however, the image becomes more
clear. The image is a portrait of a religious figure who is probably a rabbi.
His beard is long and it flows into his robe. He is sitting down, as rabbis do
when they teach, but rather than an open mouth, the rabbi has one of his hands
cupped behind his ear. The first move in the rabbi's lesson is a cupped ear
rather than an open mouth, is to listen rather than to speak.
This portrait is a contrast to the image
that has often been associated with religious speakers. Some preachers have
been recognized as charismatic, enlightening, and inspiring, but many others
who practice the art of preaching have been portrayed as argumentative,
overbearing, and full of empty words. Webster defined a preacher as one who
exhorts in an officious or tiresome manner,1
and Kierkegaard contended that there existed in Christendom no shortage of
"...an everlasting Sunday babbling about Christianity's glorious and priceless
truths."2
Throughout much of its history, homiletical
practice has begun with an open mouth rather than a cupped ear. This essay is
an effort to re-center homiletics in ontologically experiential conversation
rather than the transmission of information. Homiletics should fundamentally
label an experience that one undergoes, rather than an experience that
someone has, controls, or possesses. The first move that any practicing
homiletician should make before he or she delivers a sermon is to listen
rather than to speak.
Contemporary Homiletical Theory
For the last twenty-five years,
practitioners of what has come to be known as the New Homiletic have attempted
to discover a way through the crisis of preaching to a new effectiveness. A
growing cadre of homileticians are speculating that, in order to preach this
homiletical promised land, it may be necessary to turn away from the more
traditional disciplines of biblical and theological studies and to
contemporary rhetorical and hermeneutical theory. More recently, New
Homileticians have looked to story, narrative, and semantic imagination as
ways to move from a homiletical practice that is based in argument and
representational language to one that is more experiential or presentational.
However, the weakness in this collective move lies in the way that New
Homileticians continue to locate their efforts in a representational view of
language. Consequently, there continues to be a fundamental distinction
between the linguistic world and the nonlinguistic world or, as Aristotle
said, "Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are
the symbols for spoken words."3
Because homiletical theorists continue to adhere to a representational view of
language, the Second Helvetic Confession's statement, "The preaching of the
word of God is the word of God,"4
is an epistemological ideal rather than an ontological reality. Whereas the
Confession embraces a kind of ontological unity between the spoken word of the
preacher and the word of God, the theoretical commitments of
those who preach this word imply an ontological separation between the world
of the signifiers and the world of the signified.
Hans-Georg Gadamer's Philosophical
Hermeneutics
In the philosophical hermeneutics of
Hans-Georg Gadamer, homileticians may find views of language and communication
that allow them to move beyond constraints imposed by contemporary homiletical
theory's language commitments to a unique appropriation of conversation (homileon)
as a means of facilitating an experience (Erfahrung)5
with the word. Gadamer's perspective claims that words, that is, talk,
conversation, dialogue, question and answer, produce worlds. In
contrast to a traditional, Aristotelian view of language where spoken words
represent mental images and written words are symbols for spoken words,
Gadamerian linguisticality emphasizes a fundamental unity between language and
human existence. Interpretation can never be divorced from language or
objectified. Because language comes to humans with meaning, interpretations
and understandings of the world can never be prejudice-free. As languaged
beings, humans cannot step outside of language and look at language or the
world from some objective standpoint. Language is not a tool which human
beings manipulate to represent a meaning-full world; rather, language forms
human reality. "Being that can be understood" cannot be separated from wor[l]d,
from language.
As it relates to the interpretation of sacred
texts and homiletical theory, Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics is a theory
of interpretation which acknowledges that every sacred text comes to us with a
history or tradition, but it is nevertheless a sacred text that must be
encountered again and again as it intersects with the living out of community
life. Therefore, to be meaningful, to be understood, to be experienced as
Erfahrung rather than Erlebnis, each tradition-bound text must be
applied or field-tested; it must be in conversation with the community of
faith as it endeavors to live out its faith. This hermeneutical approach calls
forth a fundamental shift in the role of the preacher. In this model, the
preacher is first a pastor, a listener, not only to sacred texts as they come
to him or to her in tradition, but also to the ways in which sacred texts
intersect with the lives of the congregation. In this approach, the preacher
is not the resident expert whose function is to dispense
methodologically-acquired truths. The preacher is a conversation partner, an
attuned participant whose sermons incorporate elements of interpretation and
application and manifest themselves as articulated practice.
Two Approaches to Preaching as Conversation
Preaching as conversation is a metaphor
that one well known homiletical theorist recently began to pursue, but the
model Lucy Rose envisioned was fundamentally different from one that is
informed by Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. I can most economically
introduce my sense of preaching as conversation by clarifying how Rose's
model, which seems to echo important aspects of Derrida's version of play,6contrasts
with a model anchored in Gadamer's markedly different understanding of play.
Rose argued that preaching was a time
"...to gather the community of faith around the Word where the central
conversations of the church are refocused and fostered [and this is] a
conversational understanding of preaching."8
She saw this vision of preaching as an addition to current theory.8
She justified the need for this addition by locating her theory in the new
"postmodern world" where, by definition, all definitions can be reworked, and
where there is room for her and others to share "experiences" that have
previously been left on the margins of the modern world.9
She contended that,
In the postmodern world these "small
stories," our lived experiences from the fringes of the modern world, are no
less important than the stories of those who were "sombodies" in the "old
country." In fact our "small stories" become our starting points for
expanding former definitions. We attend to and reflect on our experiences,
our actual practices, and our hopes as preachers. Then, as we speak and
write these reflections, in the postmodern world, since we are preachers,
the meaning of the word preaching by necessity stretches to embrace
us.10
In Rose's conversational model, the
experiences of "conversational partners"11are
elevated onto a level that is equal to the experience of the preacher whose
responsibility it is to focus the homiletical conversation. She contended that
the content of this "postmodern" preaching did not "slide into the quagmire of
relativism," however, because "...the sermon's content is a proposal offered
to the community of faith for their additions, corrections, or
counterproposals."12
In this "postmodern" world, "no 'truth' is objective, absolute, ontological,
or archetypal [;] [rather], the only way I can speak of 'truth' is
eschatologically."13
Conversational preaching values "...poetic, evocative language because of its
ability to invite to the sermonic round table the experiences" of other
conversational partners, and the inductive sermons of Craddock and the
narrative sermons of Lowry are "...potentially heuristic forms that invite the
congregation to work out their own meanings in a give-and-take with the
Spirit.... Conversational preaching is communal, heuristic, and
nonhierarchical."14
Rose's interest in a conversational approach to
preaching was an important contribution to contemporary homiletical theory
because it indicated a growing concern among homiletical theorists about what
and even how to preach in a postmodern world. Because of Rose's intentional
interest in the "practice" or the "flesh and blood" of what preachers actually
do, she invited a dialogue between contemporary homiletical theory and
Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. However, as I have indicated, the
trajectory that she pursued was quite different from the trajectory intimated
by Gadamer. The difference between the two trajectories can be condensed into
the difference between Gadamer's and Derrida's understanding of play.
Derrida comes as close as he ever does to
articulating a Position on the meaning of play in an interview with
Julia Kristiva. He states that, "Dífferance is the systematic play of
differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of
which elements are related to each other."15
For Derrida, the a of dífferance refers to the generative movement in
the play of differences.... Differences are the effects of transformations,
and from this vantage the theme of dífferance is incompatible with the
static, synchronic, taxonomic, ahistoric motifs in the concept of structure."16
Like Kierkegaard, Derrida almost always communicates indirectly, playfully.
The purpose of his play is to involve the reader in a moment of transgression,
a moment that is simultaneously upheaval and movement. Playful transgression
is a resistance to and a recognition of the "...limit [that] is always at
work,"17the
modern quest for absolute final definitions. If there is an absolute for
Derrida, it is the absolute of play, but it is an absolute that is controlled
by nothing. For Derrida, "there is no closure beyond the ceaseless play of
dissemination."18
In Rose's proposal, "conversation" served
as the playful metaphor for the reevaluation of modernism and its drive
for truth and absolute definitions. Rose foregrounded a Derridian playful
conversation, one where the limits of modernism's influence on the traditional
definitions of preaching may be transgressed. This commitment surfaced when
she wrote that she envisioned a practice "where no single story is 'the whole
truth and nothing but the truth' or where [m]y story or your story as the
preacher with our unavoidably particular wagers, interpretations, and meanings
is neither more nor less important than the story of every other believer,
congregational groupie, or hanger-on who hopes against hope to trade
secondhand beliefs for firsthand discipleship."19
This description of an ongoing conversation is genuinely attractive because it
is so open and inclusive.
But as I noted, there is a significant
difference between Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics and the kind of
homileoing that it facilitates, and Rose's conversational proposal.
Simply, Rose's conversational model transgresses the limits without
articulating a position. Gadamer's conversational model articulates a
position, but one that is always on the way to becoming, always already on the
way to being worked out in community life. One of the difficulties of
transposing Derrida's critical style onto the contemporary homiletical forum
is that Derrida is a critic who performs his criticism, and his performance
takes place through a style of writing that resists the "...theological
presence of a center."20
Through the style of "double gesture," Derrida struggles to avoid being pinned
down to a meaning, a word, for the double gesture is a word that is almost
"unspeakable." He asserts that, in the West, there has been a privileging of
speech over writing, a "phonologism,"21
the limits of which he endeavors to challenge in his particular style of play.
Following Derrida, Rose's proposal advocated a
free-flowing exchange where each participant's story shared equal authority
and meaning, where "truth" existed eschatologically, that is potentially,
around the Word. If there was a meaning that emerged from the sharing of
these conversations about individual experiences, it was akin to the kind of
meaning that participants experience in Derridian play. By extension, it seems
that one of the questions that emerges from Rose's proposal is whether it is
possible to actually "talk" about such an experience of play. After all,
according to Derrida, transgressive play is almost unspeakable and yet,
paradoxically, one of the essential components of preaching is speaking.
Gadamer also recognizes the central
importance of conversation within the hermeneutical enterprise. However, his
vision of conversation or dialogue is concretized in language. Rather
than the ceaseless nature of Derridian playful conversation, Gadamerian
conversation comes to its most complete fruition in language which
happens in the process of genuine playing. Gadamer asserts that
understanding begins "when something addresses us."22
Understanding occurs in language because "language is the medium where I and
world meet or, rather, manifest their original belonging together," and
understanding is always in the process of being concretized.23
Truth exits in the here and now rather than in some eschatological future. The
"whole value of the hermeneutical experience...seemed to consist in the fact
that here we are not simply filing things in pigeonholes but that what we
encounter in a tradition says something to us.... [Understanding] is a genuine
experience (Erfahrung)--i.e., an encounter with something that
asserts itself as truth."24
Gadamerian truth is not the truth of my subjective experience or individual
story, a truth that will only be known in some eschatologically future Day,
nor is it the truth of certainty that is ostensibly achieved through the use
of scientific method. Gadamer envisions a truth that is facilitated when
conversation partners are being played by the game. It is a truth that
emerges from being subject to a text and its traditions rather than
being the subject of one's own experience with that text. As Gadamer
contends, "What we mean by truth here can best be defined again in terms of
our concept of play."25
Elaborating, he says that,
When we understand a text, what is
meaningful in it captivates us just as the beautiful captivates us. It has
asserted itself and captivated us before we can come to ourselves and be in
a position to test the claim to meaning that it makes. What we encounter in
the experience of the beautiful and in understanding the meaning of
tradition really has something of the truth of play about it. In
understanding, we are drawn into an event of truth and arrive, as it were,
too late, if we want to know what we are supposed to believe.26
Contrary to Derrida and perhaps even to Rose,
Gadamer envisions a version of play that is out of our control, a play that
occurs when "something addresses us." Unlike Rose's version where the playing,
conversing subject is more or less autonomous, or the subject of and
center of the playful conversation, Gadamer contends that it is only
when historically effected beings are subject to the meaning of the
text as it comes in and through tradition that humans are able to be drawn
into an event of truth. As players, humans are subject to rather than
subjects of the game. Humans do not control their understanding, nor do
they operate as subjects over against objects. Humans are listeners,
receivers, men and women who are speaking and being spoken to, but men and
women who must finally find the words to speak the truth about which they are
experiencing, the truth which cannot be postponed to some eschatological
future. In order to be genuine, the Erfahrung experience of play must
finally find application in practical life. The experience of play cannot
remain wordless, as it may for Derrida, because human beings exits praxically,
continually, and immediately in language.
The implications of Gadamer's project for
practicing homileticians are far reaching. Preachers who are informed by
Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics paradoxically preach with a cupped ear.
Their first move is to listen rather than to speak, to be subject to the
events that make up the life of the congregation. Their preaching can
therefore be a communicating, a verb, an ongoing interaction or activity that
intersects with and emerges from their actual practice of ministry. Even then,
their arrival, their utterance, their sermon, is always already a heralding, a
pointing to something that surpasses their own horizon of understanding. They
will never receive or have the final word. They must therefore be cognizant of
the "open space" that surrounds every sermonic utterance, the "space" that
leaves an open door for genuine listening, questioning and answering, the
to-and-fro, the give-and-take of authentic interpersonal communicating,
"...the discipline that guarantees truth."27
Such preaching is a process of conversation, of homileoing, that is
facilitated in and through language, an experience of
conversation between both preacher and congregation.
Conclusion
Gadamer's ontological understanding contributes
to homiletical theory in two ways. First, it introduces a way of thinking
about homileoing that is a process of ongoing conversation rather than
a method of retrieval and/or representation of biblical
texts. As Stanley Deetz writes,
The genuine conversation [that Gadamer
has in mind] does not require the baring of one's feelings, nor the hearing
out or accepting of another's opinions through these may accompany it. The
genuine conversation is characterized more by giving in to the subject mater
and allowing it to develop in the interchange. As Gadamer showed: "To
understand what a person says is...to agree about the object, not to get
inside another person and relive his experiences." This kind of conversation
develops less from the will of the participants than from the power of the
subject material... The ideal is not, then, of "self-expression and the
successful assertion of one's point of view, but a transformation into
communion, in which we do not remain what we were."28
Second, Gadamer's ontological
understanding articulates a different sermonic experience, an experience (Erfahrung)
that happens in the interchange of genuine conversation, in
communicating, rather than an experience (Erlebnis) that happens
because of language. As understanders who participate in speaking and
listening, Gadamer recognizes that human understanding is always already
underway and never completely finished. Human horizons are always limited and
incomplete, and they exist inside and not outside of language. Gadamer's
ontological understanding contributes to homiletical theory by introducing a
way of thinking that is more of a process of ongoing homileoing or
dialogue in language than a method of retrieval and expositing of
biblical texts. One who seeks to understand is in conversation with a given
text, with the author of that text, and with the tradition that carries a
specific text. This hermeneut as understander does not view texts as objects
or artifacts, but as communicatings29
that are still communicating. Therefore the hermeneut's words, their talk,
their conversation, their language does not mirror reality, it constitutes it.30
Their words constitute their worlds. This view of understanding does not see
language as a tool but as a mode of being human. As Stewart contends, there is
only one kind of human world, "a pervasively languaged kind."31
Functioning more holistically than exegetically, this view of hermeneutics
posits that conversation and dialogue contribute more to understanding than
analysis or argument.
Therefore, it would appear that the Gadamerian
homiletician would be more of a participant in an ongoing conversation that a
scriptural expositor. He or she would be more of a herald than a preacher, one
who announces and shares his or her experience of the wor[l]d, but one who,
nevertheless, realizes that the "free space" that surrounds his or her
understanding aptly characterizes the necessity for further reflection and
conversation. This preacher would embody the recognition that it is through
talk, question and answer, and genuine dialogue, that "The preaching of the
word of God, is the world of God. As with the two men on the road to Emmaus in
St. Luke's gospel, understanding for this preacher arises out of genuine
conversation, out of homileoing.
Notes
1
Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield:
G. and C. Merriam Company, 1981.)
2
Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, ed. and trans.,
Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1991) 35.
3
Aristotle, De Interpretatione, 16a, trans. E. M. Edghill,
The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. R. McKeon (New York: Random House,
1941) 40.
4
Office of the General Assembly Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), "The Second
Helvetic Confession, The Book of Confessions (Louisville: Office
of the General Assembly, 1991) 5.0004. Karl Barth also picks up this theme in
his Dogmatics. Barth declared that, "Real proclamation as this
new event, in which the event of human talk is not set aside by God but
exalted, is the Word of God." Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 2nd
ed., 14 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1986) I.1:47-99.
5
By experience, I mean something akin to Gadamer's sense of
Erfahrung as opposed to Erlebnis. Erlebnis is something one
has; something which is embedded with a subject/object dichotomy. In this
context, an aesthetic experience that a preacher imparts or provides for a
congregation. Erfahrung, however, is something that one undergoes; the
subjectivity of the subject/object dichotomy is overcome by an event of
understanding. In this context it implies an integrative event in which
preacher and congregation participate in coming to an understanding of text
together. Since it is difficult to point to one place in Truth and
Method where these terms are clarified, see the overview of the
distinctions between Erlebnis and Erfahrung in the translators' preface of
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Second Revised Edition,
Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, trans. (New York: Continuum, 1993)
xiii-xiv.
6
Rose did not cite Derrida in either her article or her dissertation. However,
in a telephone conversation on February 10, 1996, she said that Derrida was
influential in her understanding of conversation as play. See Lucy A. Rose,
"Conversational Preaching: A Proposal," Journal for Preachers
19.1 (1995), and Lucy A. Rose, "Preaching in the Round-Table Church," diss.,
Emory 1995.
7
Lucy Rose, "Conversational Preaching: A Proposal," 27.
8
Rose, 26-27.
9
Rose, 26.
10 Rose, 27.
11 Rose, 28. These conversational partners
include participants in: 1) divine-human conversation between members of the
community of faith, 2) divine-human conversations between community of faith
and God, 3) human-human conversations (27). Additionally, these "conversation
partners" include "...those who preach and those who do not, those we are
confident in matters of faith and those who find themselves awkward and
unsure, those for whom church is a second home and those who rarely set foot
in institutionalized holy space, those who are 'like us' and those whose ideas
come from 'off the wall' or 'out in left field,' those who are glib and those
who are mute, those who are successful in the eyes of the world and those
whose true selves have been slammed and silenced" (28).
12 Rose, 28.
13 Rose, 28. Rose elaborated on her
understanding of "truth" as eschatological by saying that, "There will come a
Day when we will understand, but until that Day we live by faith and hope, not
by sure knowledge, clear facts, or unambiguous truth" (28).
14 Rose, 28.
15 Jacques Derrida, Positions,
trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) 27.
16 Derrida, "Semiology and Grammatology, 27.
17 Derrida, "Implications," 12.
18 Neal Oxenhandler, "The Man with the Shoes
of Wind," Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter,
Eds. Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1989) 266.
19 Rose, 29-30.
20 Derrida, "Implications," 14.
21 Derrida, "Implications," 14.
22 Gadamer, Truth and Method,
256.
23 Gadamer, Truth and Method,
474-476.
24 Gadamer, Truth and Method,
490. My emphasis.
25 Gadamer, Truth and Method,
490.
26 Gadamer, Truth and Method,
490.
27 Gadamer, Truth and Method,
491.
28 Stanley Deetz, "Conceptualizing Human
Understanding: Gadamer's Hermeneutics and American Communication Studies,"
Communication Quarterly 26 (1978): 19-20.
29 In a way that is analogous to Gadamer,
Brenda Dervin attempts to think through the value of philosophizing as a
process rather than a product which is an approach that presumably will lead
to more "relevance" (51-52). She argues that "Differences come into existence
in communication; differences are bridged in communication; and differences
are destroyed in communication" (51-52). For Dervin, it is the actual praxis
of communicating grounded in phronesis that motivates communication theory.
Brenda Dervin, "Verbing Communication: Mandate for Disciplinary Invention,"
Journal of Communication 43 (1993): 51-52.
30 John Stewart, Language as Articulate
Contact: Toward a Post-Semiotic Philosophy of Communication (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1995) 115.
31 Stewart, 124.
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