Test jesus under plastic

As communion with the Sunday paper has replaced church-going [she writes in 1979], there is a tendency to forget that sermons had a one time been coupled with news about local and foreign affairs, real estate transactions, and other mundane matters. After printing, however, news gathering and circulation were handled more efficiently under lay auspices.

Such considerations might be noted when thinking about the 'secularization' of 'desacralization' of Western Christendom. For in all regions (to go beyond the 18th century for a moment), the pulpit was ultimately displace by the periodical press and dictum 'nothing sacred' came to characterize the journalist's career.

She goes on to note that print culture broke the link between community and communication (we don't often gather to hear the public speech at church or areopogus).  But "communal solidarity was diminished; vicarious participation in more distant events was also enhanced... links to larger collective units were being forged."

Elizabeth Eisenstein still hold the definitive work the subject matter defined by her book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Volumes 1 and 2 in One).

I believe that this concept of a distant, primarily unknowable God is at the heart of postmodernism. The major proponents of postmodern approaches to human communication rarely contend that there is no higher power. They simply assume that such a power cannot be known intimately by human beings, since sacred texts are presumably just as prone to deconstruction as any other texts.
...
The more I study Hebrew and Christian traditions, however, the more struck I am by the ways that these monotheistic faiths incorporated deconstruction within their understanding of ultimate reality. I make no joke when I say that the account of the fall from grace in the beginning of the book of Genesis can be "read" as both an explanation and description of the cosmic disconnect between symbol and referent. From what I can tell, Adam and Eve represent the first postmodernists as a result of their alienation from God. Ashamed of their disobedience, they feared both self-revelatory and God-revelatory discourse.

Quentin Schultze, "The God-Problem in Communication Studies" Journal for Communication Research 28 (March 2005), 13-14

(Etching of Jesus is 1647 by Rembrandt)
O.C. Edwards writes an encyclopedia article on the History of Preaching:

There are several genres of Christian preaching, including at least the missionary or evangelistic, catechetical [teaching/training], and the liturgical [context of worship]. ... Such a sermon may be defined as a speech delivered by an authorized person applying some point of doctrine, usually drawn from the biblical passage, to the lives of the congregation with the purpose of moving them to accept that application and to act on the basis of it

Clearly there is little in the New Testament that can be identified according to these criteria as Christian preaching. ... The preaching of Jesus could be thought to provide an exception, but it fails to on at least two counts. First, since it's content was the breaking in of the reign of God, and it refers only by implication to its proclaimer's role in that inauguration, it is not, strictly speaking, Christian preaching.
Edwards Jr., O.C. “History of Preaching” in Willimon, W., & Lischer, R.. Concise Encyclopedia of Preaching. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995.

Edwards goes on to invalidate most of Paul as a model for preaching as well. I'm not sure I could disagree more. If Jesus proclamation doesn't fit out definition of Christian preaching, isn't it time to examine our definition?

My model for "preaching" for a number of years has been modeled on Jesus, phrased perhaps as:

"Like Jesus, we use stories, (i.e. narrative, setting, character, plot (tension), etc) set in our down-to-earth lives to illustrate (<-- too weak...embody?) the kingdom of the heavens—the subjective revealing the objective, the temporal as eternal. We tell stories contrasting what life is like inside the kingdom and outside the kingdom for the ears of four "rings" of people within earshot: the absolutely committed, the followers, the apathetic or curious, and the skeptics."

This is my model of preaching, using what I find from Jesus. I know it's not typical of whole streams of the church's exegetical preaching. But I think this is one that many got wrong. I wonder what O.C. Edwards would think.

More from Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy (1982). (long I realize, but try it anyway)

Most persons are surprised, and many distressed, to learn that essentially the same objection commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus and in the Seventh Letter against writing.

Writing, Plato has Socrates say, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only int the mind.  It is a thing, a manufactured product.  The same of course is said of computers.  Secondly, [Socrates] urges, writing destroys memory.  Thos who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack...  Today, parents and others fear that pocket calculators provide an external resource of memorized multiplication tables.  Calculators weaken the mind, relieve it of work that keeps it strong.

One weakness in Plato's position was that, to make his objections effective, he put them into writing.

Writing and print and the computer are all ways of technologizing the word. Once the word is technologized, there is no effective way to criticize what technology has done with it without the aid of the highest technology available. Moreover, the new technology is not merely used to convey the critique: in fact, it brought the critique into existence. Plato's analytic thought...was possible only because of the effects that writing was beginning to have on mental processes.

Communication theorist Walter Ong speaks about communication ages: orality (pre-literate), literate, and secondary orality (age of radio, TV, etc). It seems appropriate, with the debate (likely?) coming tonight, to note some of his thoughts on presidential debates:

"The contrast between orality in the past and in today's world well highlights the contrast between primary and secondary orality. Radio and television have brought major political figures as public speakers to a larger public than was ever possible before modern electronic developments.
…
The old style oratory…is gone forever. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, the combatants--for that is what they clearly and truly were--face one another often in the scorching Illinois summer sun outdoors before wildly responsive audiences of as many as 12,000 or 15,000 persons…The debaters were horse and physically exhausted at the end of each bout.

Presidential debates on television today are completely out of this older world. The audience is absent, invisible, and inaudible. The candidates are ensconced in tight little booths, make short preparations, and engage in crisp little converstations with each other in which any agonistic edge is deliberately kept dull.
…
Candidates accommodate themselves to the psychology of the media. Genteel, literate domesticity is rampant. Only quite elderly persons today can remember what oratory was like when it was still in living contact with its primary oral roots."

Walter Ong is most famous for his book Orality and Literacy.