Divided by a common language: the issue of American dominance in homiletic theory

My research topic is the contemporary practice of English Christian preaching in the light of Maurice Halbwachs' concept of collective memory. The issue I intend to highlight here is the problem posed by the hegemony of American texts in homiletical theory.

The practice of preaching, like most other human endeavours in the early twenty-first century, takes place within a pluriform social environment in which many and diverse influences from the widest possible arenas of human activity have a bearing.  In other words, globalisation, and the pluralism that goes with it, has an impact on preaching as it does every other type of communication.  That said, preaching in social terms remains predominantly a locally-focused activity, and sermon style and content are usually closely related to the specifics of the sub-cultural frames in which the life and self-understanding of the congregation in which it takes place is set.  Consequently, the power of the local context is a key factor underlying what the historian of preaching OC Edwards observes as the immense diversity of contemporary sermon styles.  As he puts it, such diversity shows 'how radically ad hoc all Christian preaching is' (2004, p. 835).

Ad hoc yes, but not simply the preacher's whim since what is said has to relate somehow to scripture and the Church's understandings of it.  The preacher as hermĕneutikos enters the stream of the ongoing flow of a living tradition and strives to be part of that lively continuity through homiletic activity; what Walter Brueggemann understands as a continuing process of 'traditioning.'  Brueggemann's perspective on the preaching task fits well with collective memory theory in that it is essentially presentist in its nature.  Indeed Brueggemann's insistence on what the text means now provides a theological and ministerial undergirding of the processes of collective memory.  His understanding of imaginative remembering as the core tool of the preacher's interpretation re-positions those collective memory processes as purposeful rather than simply inevitable.

In Brueggemann's thought preaching becomes a key component of contemporary biblical interpretation in that it makes explicit in a demonstrable way just how tradition works.  The essential rootedness of homiletics in a faith tradition becomes its greatest strength.  This point needs to be underlined because it is not to be taken as special pleading for preaching as an exceptional kind of communication that must by its nature be allowed an ideological position inappropriate elsewhere.  Instead this is a declaration that the explicit rootedness of preaching exposes the reality of similar, but frequently denied rootedness, in other areas of discourse.  And further that that very rootedness provides a platform for a sometimes radical re-evaluation of realities previously simply assumed; what Brueggemann understands as a construal of alternatives.  In terms of collective memory, the recasting of memories becomes not the rather defensive mechanism Halbwachs described in his consideration of religion but a creative and imaginative weaving of new possibilities out of the warp and weft of what has been inherited.  This allows an adjustment of Halbwachs' rather positivistic functionalism towards a more phenomenological perspective that is alert to the dynamism inherent in the tradition itself.  Some words from Peter Ochs' study of Peircean pragmatism in relation to scripture (1998) seem apposite:

For the Christian community, the Bible is thus not a sign of some external reality, but a reality itself whose meanings display the doubly dialogic relationships between a particular text and its context within the Bible as a whole, and between the Bible as a whole and the conduct of the community of interpreters.  (1998: 309)

The denial of an objectivising distance between the preacher and the text may be justly assumed in the ministry of preaching, but Ochs' study and Brueggemann's practice are suggestive of more than that: they point to a kind of knowing and learning only available through tradition.  What is being challenged here is the easy assumption that a tradition-free, abstract, universal rationality is superior to such tradition-embedded thinking.  Indeed 'traditioning' considered in the widest terms must put a question mark against the very idea of tradition-free knowing.  

The 'generative nature of tradition,' and Brueggemann's understanding of the significance of preaching in this generative work has a famous antecedent in the American literature of homiletics.  Phillips Brooks delivered the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching of 1877 at the Divinity School of Yale College.  One-hundred-and-thirty-two years later they are still in print.   They mark the beginnings of the hegemony of American texts on preaching.  Such has been the influence of Brooks' insistence on preaching as 'the bringing of truth through personality' (1904, p. 5) that Brooks' thought continues to be expressed in just the same terms in contemporary works like those of Day (1998, p. 6), Killinger (1985, p.8), and Stevenson and Wright (2008).  In dwelling on the preacher's personality Brooks managed to encapsulate what in the 1870s was a new and burgeoning interest in the human psyche.  It was hardly coincidence that his lectures were delivered in the same decade William James became America's first professorial-level teacher of psychology (Harvard in 1875) and G. Stanley Hall the country's first PhD in psychology.  Unwittingly perhaps, Brooks reflected on novel intellectual ideas of his own day and in doing so identified within preaching practice what was to become a major preoccupation in many areas of discourse in the twentieth-century, namely the human psyche and its relationship to action and truth.  What could appropriately be termed personalism, that is, an emphasis in preaching on the personal religious experience of the hearer somehow addressed very directly by the preacher, has been and continues to be a major component in sermon delivery and design.  Brooks' concept of preaching as 'truth through personality' became a kind of slogan for many preachers in the twentieth-century, and indeed remains a very influential mantra to this day.

It would be an exaggeration to say Brooks viewed religious truth as essentially something that can only be known in personal experience, but he did believe that truth was at its' most effective and powerful when known and expressed in personal terms.  He understood the truth of the Christian faith to be universal and invariable with personality as the site where it was 'realized' through variable and particular understanding and appropriation (1904, p. 15).  So although he was clear gospel truth was a message to be transmitted, he insisted that it could only be transmitted via the voice of a witness, that is someone for whom it had become an indispensable part of that person's own experience (1904, p.14).  In terms of memory maintenance, Brooks' approach assumes that the preacher is deeply cognizant of the Christian tradition and is, as it were, a bearer of it in his or her own person.  Here is the link between Brooks and Brueggemann - although Brooks is far more personal in the sense that he assumes a straightforward appropriation of the tradition by the individual whereas Brueggemann lays emphasis on the strangeness or 'otherness of the scriptural text.  Brooks saw the task of preaching as always needing an essential grounding in the very personhood of the preacher, in this regard he meant truth communicated through personality in an absolutely literal sense, where Brueggemann has a much more communal sense of what traditioning is.  Nevertheless somehow living in the tradition is seen by both as fundamental to the preaching task. 

Here also is the problem these American texts pose for preachers this side of the Atlantic.  That immersion in the tradition, as Rowan Williams phrases it, is arguably much more difficult in our social circumstances than theirs.  Chains of memory, the linking, handing-on process of memory maintenance (Hervieu-Leger) are much weaker in Europe than in the United States.  As Berger, Davie and Fokas characterise it in their book Religious America, Secular Europe? Western Europe has a secular elite overlaying a largely indifferent Christian population with only a residual attachment and lacking much continuing knowledge about the Christian faith, whereas Golden-rule Christianity holds sway over most of the American population which is more Christian and more actively so in ways that resist both secularism and religious extremes.  Or to sum it up crudely but appropriately - to the European mentality religion is a problem, to the American, it's a resource.  The pragmatism and purposefulness of tradition as exemplified in their different ways by Brooks and Brueggemann as attractive as it is, comes out of a profoundly different social religious environment.  Can it therefore be of any use in redefining preaching as anamnestic rhetoric in the UK?

Brooks' conviction was that a sermon is essentially a tool and not an end in itself. (Brooks, 1904, p. 110).  He was insistent that preaching is not an art form, he wrote:

[T]he definition and immediate purpose which a sermon has set before it makes it impossible to consider it as a work of art, and every attempt to consider it so works injury to the purpose for which the sermon was created. (1904, p. 109)

When REC Browne wrote in 1950s Manchester of the sermon as art-form (1958, p. 76) he was reacting to those who had taken Brooks' evident pragmatism and utilitarianism as regards technique and turned it into a bald instructionalism that claimed too much for itself and was simply tedious.

Walter Brueggemann himself delivered the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching (1988-9) under the title Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation.  The somewhat enigmatic quality of the title is typical of Brueggemann's style but arguably this particular title signifies more than presentational quirkiness.

Finally Comes the Poet is Brueggemann's echo of a line from a poem entitled Passage to India in the Walt Whitman collection Leaves of Grass (1871):

After the seas are all cross'd, (as they seem already cross'd,)

After the great captains and engineers have accomplish'd their work,

After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the

geologist, ethnologist,

Finally shall come the poet worthy that name,

The true son of God shall come singing his songs.

The poem has its' origin in Whitman's reflections on the grand technological achievements of his day exemplified by the Suez canal and the American transcontinental railway.  Its' reference to great and new achievements as 'but a growth out of the past' indeed fits well with Brueggemann's insistence that the 'old' texts of scripture when imaginatively interpreted are productive of 'new' ways of seeing and living in the present (2000:6) but there is perhaps a more playful and a yet more profound echo at work than simple topical reiteration.

Whitman began Leaves of Grass as a conscious response to Ralph Waldo Emerson's call in 1845 for the United States to have its own indigenous and unique poetry.  The poems, although full of traditional biblical cadences, were to prove controversial since they used an innovative verse form with frequent colloquial language and some of them exalted the body and sexual love.  Whitman worked on the volume through out his life; the first edition of 1855 contained just 12 poems but that grew to nearer 300 by the so-called 'deathbed edition' of 1891-2.  In other words Whitman's work represents an ongoing creative enterprise that in its imaginative expansion and re-working sought to offer a new perspective on experience in an authentically American idiom of English.  In that sense the poet comes last as it were to take imagination to shores far beyond those to be reached by rail or sea; as the poem concludes:

For we are bound where mariner has not yet dare to go,

And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

O my brave soul!

O farther farther sail!

O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God?

O farther, farther, farther sail!

Imagination that goes beyond the immediately obvious, creativity that constructs alternative ways of giving an account of reality, and an interpretive language that profoundly resonates with the contemporary are all themes that figure prominently in Bruggemann's work.  In his Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination he writes,

The tradition that became Scripture … … is not merely descriptive of a commonsense world; it dares, by artistic sensibility and risk-taking rhetoric, to posit, characterize, and vouch for a world beyond the "common sense." (2003:9)

My argument is that English preachers must strive for that same kind of rhetoric but in a way that is fully aware of the degradation of Christian collective memory in Britain.  Part of the work needed to achieve that is the recognition of the strangeness of the text from which the preacher works.  Rowan Williams makes this point in his postscript to his study Arius where he writes,

Scripture and tradition require to be read in a way that brings out their strangeness, their not-obvious and non-contemporary qualities, in order that they may be read both freshly and truthfully from one generation to another.  1987:236)

Homileticians, and the congregations they serve, are 'outside' the text in this sense and are required therefore to give it that heightened attention and seriousness of consideration demanded of people traversing 'a strange land.'  The traveller makes things difficult for herself by the very fact of travelling but the exhilaration of new possibilities, discoveries and achievements are not available without that risky venture.  Similarly working with scripture and tradition requires a 'making things difficult' in order that their essential beauty and simplicity can be discovered anew.  Like the traveller also, however, those engaged in the homiletic task seek, as it were, the advice of earlier travellers, follow paths new to them although they have been travelled by others in the past, and aim to appreciate the sights others have found impressive.

Inevitably the elements of surprise, discovery and reclamation inherent in this approach to working in and from tradition mean that that exposition will always have about it certain provisionality.  The preacher is always in the middle of things, often quite literally in that most preachers are also engaged in multifarious other activities alongside homiletical endeavour, but also in terms of the living tradition from which and in which he or she speaks.  The generative nature of tradition is such that it is productive of inexhaustible discussion.  The preacher dares, again an idea frequently used by Brueggemann, to pin-down that discussion in sermons directed towards the purposes of God for these particular people in this particular time.  Something is being produced and consumed in and for the present time out of the canon of inherited scripts.  That new scripting if authentic to the tradition from which it is seeded confronts the scripts people live by that are provided by common-sense and the status quo.  Preaching is not to be a generalised, abstract truth that is easily avoided but a particularised interpretation that offers an empowering and often contested alternative in real and present circumstances; Brueggemann writes:

All parties to this act of interpretation need to understand that the text is not a contextless absolute, nor is it a historical description, but it is itself a responsive, assertive, imaginative act that stands as proposal of reality to the community.  As the preacher and the congregation handle the text, the text becomes a new act that makes available one mediation of reality.  That new mediation of reality is characteristically an act of fidelity, an act of inventiveness, and an act in which vested interest operates.  Moreover, the preacher and the congregation do this in the midst of many other acts of mediation in which they also participate, as they attend to civil religion, propaganda, ideology, and mass media.  (2007:93)

Such particularity is of the essence of the preaching task.  The tradition is reworked and reframed so as to resonate now.  Inevitably that particularity will mean that changes of time and circumstance require further reworkings and reframings.  Framing or reframing is a key part of how the individual relates to collective memory according to Halbwachs (insert ref).  It is the structure provided by shared experience - the framework, in Halbwachs' terms - which enables the individual to remember and relate those memories to the wider group's shared memories.  The theological insistence on the particularities of preaching underscores collective memory theory's disclosure that shared, pertinent experience is vital to the maintenance of social memory.  Without the shared experience, however mediated, memory dies.  The preacher, in the exposition of what this text means in the particularity of here and now, aims directly to address current experience, both of the corporate body as well as of individuals.  In doing so the preacher acts effectively as a maintainer of the collective memory of the Church.  The theological point about the generative nature of the scriptural tradition, and the issue of how the developments born of that generative quality remain authentically Christian, make the sociological identification of the fact that social memories change with experience all the more significant.

Of course, the Church has always been in the business of passing-on the gospel inheritance.  What has changed is that the value of that passing-on is less appreciated in society as a whole than previously, and there has been a significant decline in the numbers of people who are familiar with the living stream(s) of the Christian tradition.  Simply put, if speaking from the tradition is so vital to living faith, inarticulacy in the tradition, for whatever reason, poses a real threat to the tradition itself.  A theology that adds weight, as it were, to the significance of telling and retelling the tradition in the imaginative construal of alternatives embedded in human experience, serves to emphasise all the more strongly the urgent need to address the issue of Christian memory work directly.

Christian Congregations as Fields of Mnemonic Practice

 I'm working on producing a sociologically informed theology that redefines preaching as a social memory mechanism.  The provisional generic definition of preaching I'm currently employing is “an authoritative voice in a congregation giving expression to the Christian tradition in such a way as to encourage and enable it to be applicable in some measure in the lives of the hearers.”  Needless to say such a definition is nearer to an ideal type than a straightforwardly literal definition, and a number of qualifications might need to be added by way of strict accuracy and application.  For example, it could be objected that preaching can employ more than one voice; might use music or images; can take place in an environment other than a congregation simply understood; does not always have the Christian tradition as its first focus; and need not necessarily be about the lived application of that tradition.  Nevertheless without further qualification that definition provides a skeleton that is accurate enough to be recognisable as an expression of so-called ‘classical preaching’ that speaks from faith, to faith, for faith, or as Barth expressed it,

We walk by faith not by sight (2 Cor 5:7).  If in this present time we were living by sight, we should have nothing to wait for: there would be neither yesterday not tomorrow.  But we live by faith, that is to say, we come from Christ and are going to Christ.   Peace and joy abound on either hand, but on this journey we go from riches to destitution and from destitution to new riches.   The preacher must show the real  nature of this journey in faith … … (Barth, 1963: 17)

In my last paper I suggested that the preacher rehearses the tradition in order that interpretation can be shared and meanings made operative in the lives of Christians.  Fairly non-contentious I think.  So, for example, it echoes Elizabeth Castelli's emphasis on 'meaning-making' in her work on Christian martyrdom, she writes that

'… memory is a social construction, the product of the individual's interaction with his or her group.'(p 11) Through the process of being retold, preserved, and ritualized, collective memories provide 'the conceptual and cognitive constraints that render past experience meaningful in and for present contexts.'(p 12)

That is a straightforward application of the presentist understanding of collective memory from its origins in the work of Maurice Halbwachs.

I then went on to suggest that Halbwachs and those who follow him closely over-emphasise the rationality and reasoning involved in collective memory.  Using Clifford Geertz's development of 'thick description', I drew attention to what I call the performative aspects of collective memory, the network of significant symbols that are expressive of the 'really real' in Geertzian terms.  These things are performative in my understanding because they are communicatively salient whether or not they bear meanings.  In this I was using Pascal Boyer's notion of traditions as purposeful in themselves rather than as carriers of meanings.  I think it fair to say that in this area what I said had a rather rougher ride! 

The criticisms voiced came from two related directions: Stanley Hauerwas's notion of the church as 'a story formed community' and the associated idea that the Godly narrative of the Hebrew people and their struggles and its culmination in the story of Jesus is inextricably linked to dissectible meanings.  Commonplace ideas I think, so just one example of narrative linked to memory:

Allen Verhey's Remembering Jesus: Christian Community, Scripture and the Moral Life published in 2002:-

In the New Testament memory is not simply a mental process of recollection, not just disinterested remembrance of objective historical data; memory is to own a particular history as one's own, to own a past and to own it as constitutive of identity and determinative for discernment.  In the New Testament and in the church there is no identity apart from memory, and now no community apart from common memory. (p 24)

In preaching and prayer and hymn and sacrament the people remembered Jesus and owned his story as their story, his life as their life, the 'mind of Christ' as their mind. (p 26)

… all the particular histories of persons in the church must be submissive to the story of Jesus, which gives the church identity and makes the church a community.  All of our little certainties and all of our little virtues must be not only assimilated but also made submissive to Jesus, whose memory stills fills the church with knowledge and goodness. (p 44)

Here collective memory isn't a dispassionate recollection of some past events; rather it is the vital core of the church's existence in which is found its very constitution as an identifiable community.  The story of Jesus becomes the believing community's window on the world - it frames, it illuminates, it reflects and interprets; but this is more than narrative theory because the story isn't just a good story it’s a memory.  That's why Verhey can assert so strongly: no memory, no church.

I find this a very attractive notion, but there are two questions I want to raise:

Do the mechanisms of collective memory work like that?

and

Who is remembering?

I only have time for the first question today, I'll just mention the second as a parting shot later!

The concept of collective memory is much used in the study of social trauma, and I want to use one particular study as it clearly delineates some of the issues:

On 23^rd March 1944, during the Nazi occupation of Rome, an underground Resistance group linked to the Communist Party, using a concealed bomb attacked a marching unit of German police causing 33 causalities. At 10.55pm on the 24^th March the German Command of the city issued the following statement:

During the afternoon of March 23, 1944 criminal elements carried out an attack, by throwing bombs at a German Police column which was passing along the via Rasella. In consequence of this attack. 32 German policemen were killed and several wounded. This vile ambush was carried out by Badoglio-Communist elements. Investigation is still being carried out to clarify up to which point this criminal act is to be attributed to Anglo-American incitement.

The German Command is firmly determined to put an end to the activity of these heartless bandits. No one shall sabotage unpunished the renewed Italo-German cooperation. The German Command, therefore, has given orders that for every German killed, ten Badoglio-Communist criminals will be shot. This order has already been carried out.

In the retaliation 335 men were killed in an abandoned quarry on the via Ardeatina. The shootings took most of the day to complete.  I don't need to detail the gruesome particulars save to say that the cruelty used, the randomness with which the victims were chosen, and the hiding of the bodies means that the Fosse Ardeatine has become a principal symbol of the various massacres carried out during the Nazi occupation of Rome.

My research concerns the sermon in contemporary Christian practice analysed through the lens of the Halbwach's concept of collective memory. Concerns you might imagine to be a million miles from a World War Two atrocity. I use the Fosse Ardeatine, however, because how that symbol has been, and continues to be used, discloses some generalisations about collective memory that are pertinent to my study.

On the 25^th March 1944 Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican, reproduced the German press release and added editorial comment:

"When facing such events, any honest soul is deeply pained in the name of humanity and of Christian sentiments. On one hand, thirty-two victims; on the other, three hundred and twenty persons sacrificed for the culprits who have escaped arrest [. . .] Standing apart from and above the contention [. . .] we invoke from these irresponsible parties the respect for human life, which they have no right ever to sacrifice; and the respect for innocence, which is fatally the victim; from those in positions of responsibility, we ask that they be conscious of their responsibility toward themselves, toward the lives they are to safeguard, and toward history and civilization."

It is widely believed that the Germans asked the partisans to surrender themselves as responsible and only after that the partisans failed to do did they proceed with the retaliatory killings. This version still circulates despite the fact there never was any call to the partisans to turn themselves in; there is no evidence of it anywhere, and the German commanders admitted at their post-war trials that the killings were carried out within 24 hours and only announced after the event. This version of the memory is simply untrue - a court case in the 1950s established the partisans weren't responsible for the retaliation, and the Supreme Court came to the same verdict in 1999, and yet the untrue version remains a potent memory. Why?

First, there are broadly political reasons. All kinds of social forces and ideological commitments come into play: how far modern democratic Italy finds its origins in the wartime Resistance movement; the nature of the anti-Fascist struggle; the development of current political parties and how they are related to past experience; the meaning of Italy's own recent history and how individuals and communities position themselves in relation to it. Specific and located in place and time - seems bounded - but in fact it isn't because its ramifications are such it is remembered as significant now. Terdiman describes memory as 'the present past,' paradoxically when it isn't present it easily ceases to be. It simply falls out of mind. Fosse Ardeatine is in no danger of that.  It is about what matters now, rather than what mattered in 1944.

Second, there are more closely individual reasons that relate to feelings and indeed bodily expression. The commonsense belief that revenge would not be taken on 335 innocents without first seeking the perpetrators has come to dominate the narrative.  The beginnings of this distortion are already there in the newspaper of 25^th March: German police=victims; partisans= irresponsible culprits; the innocents killed=sacrifice or atonement after a crime. There is the beginning of the shift of guilt from the Nazi executioners towards the irresponsible partisans. You might say that also is a political/ideological bias given its source, but it is more than that.  There is an emotional and physical charge to these things that goes beyond what is known or knowable.

Third, there is the process of making sense of things personally. Alessandro Portelli's study of the awareness of the incident makes the point that even well educated, left-leaning activists assume the distorted memory is the truth.  It has a 'fit' about it, it makes the unacceptable somehow acceptable, the horrifically absurd more understandable, even reasonable. Indeed he admits that although he cognitively knows from years of research that the distorted memory is absolutely untrue, yet still he feels himself influenced by it. Sometimes memories that in reality cannot possibly be memories are incredibly tenacious as memories. He also cites what he calls 'mythic tales' where stories are told of family members involved in the debate as to whether the partisans should give themselves up, and people may be absolutely convinced that they, or an elderly relative, remembers these heated discussions. The personal power of these mythic tales is that they make those who recount them feel they or their families are closely involved in significant historical moments. This is part of 'my' history, 'my' family's experience, 'my' inherited take on the world.  It is personal, it 'weighs' heavy, it is hard to cast aside.

The memory of the Fosse Ardeatine discloses several things that are generalisable about collective memory that are pertinent:

It is presentist - as Halbwachs asserted it serves the needs of now. If it ceases to be present concern it is forgotten. In preaching this presentism has often been thought of in terms of relevance - what is relevant to this congregation now?  How to own the past as one's own, how to make that past in some sense operative now.

It is contentious - debate, struggle, conflict often figures. Fosse Ardeatine so clearly related to Italian political concerns - sustained as a memory by the conscious efforts of groups.  Collective memory isn't a metaphor according to Halbwachs, it is a social reality.  It is created and maintained by the communication that takes place within a group.  It is a core part of group identity, supports group boundaries , frames group behaviours.  The immense variation in what a sermon is should not be allowed to obscure the fact that content, style, and form all disclose identity characteristics that are markers of difference, conflict (muted or open), and struggle between varying claims of what it is to be Christian.  I don't think it an exaggeration to say that preaching is a site of contestation, not simply between the ways of God and the ways of the world but also between ways of seeing/understanding Christian faith.

It is variable and positional - it changes for all sorts of reasons related to understandings, context and physical space. In preaching physical space is often about more than simply being seen and heard, and style, structure and language may vary enormously, as may the content. Indeed the variability is such that on occasions what is declared to be sermonic may be seen by others as not being.

Commonsense understandings may influence it profoundly.  Without memory holders having to think about it terminology is used that 'fits' with the memory.  Halbwachs distinguished autobiographical memory (personal experience), historical memory (the past known only through historical records), and collective memory which is the past present in shaping our identities and sense of belonging.  No one, I think, would now claim that those distinctions are as clear as he thought.  As collective memory is so closely associated with identity, what the actor ordinarily understands about the ordinary world is related to it.  In terms of preaching, the social memories invoked relate the commonsensical and the 'other worldly' (for want of a better term) in a complex and often taken for granted manner.  The preacher speaks of eternity but in ways that connect to the everyday.  There is an unvoiced contract at work, and generally it is held to.  The incomprehensible is made comprehensible, but the preacher doesn't have to constantly rehearse issues of metaphor and comprehension.  [Body of Christ language, but not the Church of God a kingdom is]

Feelings and bodily expression weigh very heavily.  An individual's relationships to time highly subjective and particular, but also profoundly social.  Memories shared enable people to live events they haven't actually lived - vicarious memories.  And these may go beyond an individual lifespan.  Because memories are connected with emotions, we also create memories of things not actually experienced.  Such distortions also shaped by social norms, expectations, cultural patterns, and interactions.  Reminiscence and narration allows an individual to shape life to fit present concerns and needs.  And this isn't just language and the things that go with it; it is also about bodily practice for we associate memories with things done, with sensory apprehensions of movement and action.  There is both reassurance and challenge in this for the preacher.  Yes, emotionally charged sermons will be remembered, but veracity may too easily be overturned by this tactic.  Yes, what the preacher does matters, but a preoccupation with presentation techniques can reinforce a wariness of manipulation.

It can be incredibly difficult to challenge or change.  Portelli surprised himself when he realised that the untrue version of Fosse Ardeatine remained powerful to him personally even though he is the foremost researcher in the exposure of its falsity.  According to Halbwachs one of the significant mechanisms of collective memory is its relationship to epochs in a person's life.  So childhood, for example, is an epoch where memories are fixed through the relationships and communications experienced as particularly significant.  Neighbourhood communities and families in war-torn Rome seems to have worked as epochs in individual's lives in terms of Fosse Ardeatine.  The preacher will often come across the power of collective memory arising from such epochs in individual's lives, eg. the power of what was learnt at Sunday Sunday school; or the power of a conversion experience or a distinct kind of church tradition experienced at a significant point of life.  In such circumstances the sermon is heard in the light of those memories.

It is personally empowering - this is 'mine' as well as 'ours.'  This is something that is repeated rehearsed so that it continues to be mine and so that belonging is reinforced.  This mechanism is, of course, used powerfully in therapeutic work, eg repeated stories of recovery from alcoholism are used in AA programmes so that the past is kept as current reality in order to discourage lapses, reinforce an intense awareness of the addict's actual circumstances, and maintain the sense of mutual support and belonging in a group where others face the issues.  It is not the details that really matter but rather the shared narrative.  The preacher similarly shares the narrative and in doing so strives to incorporate not only his or herself but the whole community that shares in the sermonic enterprise.  Position, in the sense of it being within some sort of liturgical event, again works to reinforce mutual endeavour.

So I agree with Verhey (and by extrapolation with Hauerwas) that the story of Jesus is the believing community's window on the world, but how that memory is operationalised is I think rather more problematic than I understand them to suggest.  Collective memory is shaped by a host of things - politics, economics, social circumstances, feelings, resistance, conflict, values, norms, etc. etc. - it malleable yet tenacious, it is certain yet contested, it is suppressible yet recoverable, sometimes hard to define yet recognisable.  According to Hervieu-Leger in contemporary society symbols are interchangeable so religion is always a composite.  It is the preacher's burden to maintain the authentic memories in the face of constant contestation and diversion.  In this the preacher is but a representative of the struggles of the whole church.

_________________________

The Aldi bag syndrome: Preaching as shamed consumption in a commodified social world.

The company website has a helpful questions and answers page.  One section reads, “Why do you have to pay for carrier bags at Aldi?”  “There is no such thing as a free carrier bag.  Many retailers add this cost into the prices of their products and so you pay for them indirectly.  At Aldi the decision to pay for carrier bags is yours.”

According to my teenage daughter, that’s a great relief!  Not, I should add, because she is worried about the environmental damage being done by millions of discarded supermarket plastic bags, but because it means that I am very unlikely to ask her to carry an Aldi bag.  According to my daughter, being seen with an Aldi bag is profoundly shaming, and to be caught with one at school will result in taunts and name-calling.  No matter that Aldi is a huge and successful company – 5000 stores worldwide, with 268 in the UK.  No matter that the company’s products regularly receive plaudits by the critics of the food press.  No matter indeed that some of those products are my daughter’s preferred taste choice – yes, their blackcurrant cordial is better than Ribena!  The fact, however, remains that she wouldn’t be seen dead carrying an Aldi bag; just as she would never admit to anyone of her friends that the chilled squash in her flask originated from that store.  That is the Aldi bag syndrome.

We who think of ourselves as more mature, all too easily dismiss my daughter’s reaction as the foibles of an over peer-group sensitive adolescent.  I suspect there isn’t a person in this room who isn’t susceptible to the pressures the Aldi bag syndrome represents!  I find Anthony Giddens’ account of the self as a ‘reflexive project’ a convincing analysis of individual identity creation and the social relationships that stem from it in what he calls late modern society.  We each of us weave/create our own ongoing autobiographical narrative in a way quite different from the predetermined and predictable life-courses so familiar to even our recent forebears.  In this reflexive project the things of commodities and consumption play a prominent role.  The place of exchange, the label, the price I pay, the style of the product, the social location of the product, the credibility of the commodity in terms of fashion and ownership – all those factors and more are parts of the social process of shopping and what I as shopper am achieving for myself as I shop.  No one in Europe or North America is outside this consumptive culture.

The shear power of consumptive culture is one of the reasons why I want to argue that what I have termed the Aldi bag syndrome is an incredibly forceful metaphor in analyzing preaching in contemporary British society.  The discourse of commodity and consumption is so dominant that its tentacles touch every aspect of our lives. 

Some definitions are required to keep this argument focussed.  I understand a commodity to be an article that is exchanged; bought and sold.  Traditionally a commodity has been thought of as something material; a product, an artefact, or a raw material itself, rather than an activity which has more usually been called a service.  The commodity/service distinction is, however, increasingly difficult to maintain as commodification literally colonises the rest of life.  Think of how many things that were once public services are now commodity exchanges.  As consumption as it were runs out of things to consume, activities are reified, made into things, and as commodities can therefore be exchanged.  I reserve that word commodification to this process whereby the habits and dispositions we have learned in the consumption of things that are literal commodities spreads into other arenas of human activity.  By the term consumer culture I understand that generalised way of life in which commercially organised consumption dominates personal and inter-personal activity.  This is in marked contrast to the focus on production of earlier ways of living.  In consumer culture, the accumulation of things, and of services and other less tangible activities and behaviours treated as things, is regarded as a principal marker of human well-being.  Commodification is perhaps the essential component of consumer culture.

All this is a common enough theme in contemporary cultural studies, but I intend to extend that discussion into the practice of so-called mainstream Christian religion using preaching as the focus.  The shopping self, to use that term as a kind of shorthand, is the same self that sits through a sermon week by week.  The mental frameworks and categories that the shopping self uses in commodity discernment, purchase, and deployment and in recreation are applied with like vigour to worship and other aspects of Christian practice.  In other words, that Christian activity is not outside (as it were) the dominating consumptive culture, but embedded within it. 

Preaching is an aspect of Christian practice that is particularly susceptible to concepts drawn from consumer culture.  If only preachers would learn from the techniques of selling, promotion and entertainment, then people would pay attention to them!  Let the preacher beguile, amuse, stimulate, delight, entertain, and all in minutes or even seconds because the greatest error of all is to bore.  Let the preacher learn from the world, and then present the alternative. The analysis I am advocating offers an understanding quite contrary to that location of sermonizing socially.  In the context of an intensely commodifying culture I will argue that a sharp disjunction between technique and content, between worldly methods and spiritual message, is no loner tenable.  It is commonplace within the practice of preaching to draw a rigid distinction between the values that are attached to consumer/media culture and the values of Christianity.  Preaching in this view is essentially a translation process that enables the gospel to be heard within an alien culture.  Whatever cultural analysis the preacher undertakes is solely to facilitate the effectiveness of this translation process.  Before I go on to say why I don’t think that model works any longer, let me offer some examples of it:

This is Jolyon Mitchell in a much appreciated book examining preaching in the light of the development of radio –

Preaching then is facing a series of crises, which raise serious challenges for those seeking to invite their listeners to participate in the Christian story. First, the preacher is faced with the challenge of speaking to an easily distracted audience, many of whom are no longer accustomed to listening to a single speaker for a long period of time. Secondly, when so many other powerful forms of electronic communication are competing for their listeners' imaginations, the preacher can understandably lose confidence in preaching as an effective form of communication. Thirdly, as a communicator probably nurtured in a literary culture, the preacher needs to face the recent transformations in orality, such as those exemplified by the evolving discursive practices employed on television and radio. [1990:24]

Jolyon Mitchell, Visually Speaking: Radio and the Renaissance of Preaching (Edinburgh, T & T Clarke, 1999)

Notice that the crises in preaching are signified as communication problems.  Preaching takes its place amongst the innumerable other activities in our society defined as subject to ‘communication problems.’  As Deborah Cameron has suggested there has in recent generations been a marked shift towards defining all problems, in arenas as diverse as marriage, selling, the academy, health care and others, as communication problems.  As Cameron has noted, this is fundamentally a therapeutic model: diagnose the problem, determine a likely solution, and apply the strategy.  This is exactly the model Mitchell applies to preaching: understand the visual dominated orality used by radio and TV; diagnose the consequences of that for preaching [loss of social confidence in rhetorical skills, inability to maintain concentration, familiarity with the conversational as against the logically formal, etc]; develop a communication methodology in preaching that takes account of these things [this means learning new skills]; and apply that methodology. 

I probably caricature Mitchell’s position somewhat as he is quite subtle and nuanced in his use of the therapeutic model.  Rogness, a widely cited American Professor and teacher of preaching, is rather more assertive in his usage:

[But] people listen and hear differently in this world of television. When we preachers understand the dynamics of this new world, then the gospel can ring with new vigour and life in our preaching. [1994:10]

He continues,

While visiting many congregations I am constantly astonished to hear how much complaining there is about preaching. Faithful churchgoers find themselves wondering, "What's happened to good preaching?" "Where have all the good preachers gone?"

Preaching has fallen on hard times.

There are several reasons for this malaise. Some pastors don't work very hard on their sermons. Some are out of touch with their congregations. Others are ineffective public speakers. Much preaching is theological fluff. Another part of the problem is that people in the pews have such a wide range of expectations from the sermon that it is impossible to satisfy everybody.

Yet the truth is that many pastors work hard at their preaching, but sense it is not effective, and they cannot put their finger on the reasons why.

A fundamental reason for this situation is that we live in the midst of a massive communications revolution, which we have only begun to understand. This revolution inevitably affects the way people listen to sermons, and if we fail to take this into account in preaching we will not reach our audience. [11]

Michael Rogness, Preaching to a TV Generation (Lima, CSS Publishing 1994)

 
Leaving aside the obvious point about the apparently non-ironic use of the term ‘audience,’ one of the things that strikes me about Rogness is that all his remarks use the concept of effective communication defined precisely in the terms Cameron has highlighted as a skill to be learned.  In the passage I read, substitute for the word ‘preaching’ ‘marriage,’ ‘teaching,’ ‘retailing,’ or ‘men’s health’ and it will still make perfect sense!  Everything is a communication problem.

This brings me back to the Aldi bag syndrome.  In their focus on skills, delivery, effectiveness, and process, both Mitchell and Rogness [and the many others who take a similar line] have unwittingly created preaching as yet another commodity to be developed and consumed.  The procedures of presentation and the habits of interpretation familiar in the common-round of life in a consumer culture are applied wholesale to this aspect of religious practice.  Traditional ideas of formation and the dynamics of institutional belonging across time are jettisoned in favour of effective communication.  In doing this some of the shaming associated with the consumption of preaching is, like decanting the Aldi blackcurrant cordial, obscured, to the relief of the somewhat embarrassed consumers.  Whether it be a chat show-like conversational style, a business presentation-like address with flash overheads or a point by point explanation like a political pundit, the form follows categories learnt within a consumer world.  The familiarity of the forms provides a way towards legitimising an activity that is otherwise regarded with some suspicion.  The word ‘preaching’ is after all widely used in a derogatory way in popular speech, a usage fulsomely acknowledged in the Oxford English Dictionary.  The implication is that any reasonable person would surely have to justify subjecting her or his self to sermons.  Commodity categories may provide just such justification.

My argument isn’t that communications skills are unimportant in the process of preaching, nor that sermons don’t need to be effective, but rather that preaching, like other aspects of religion, is subject to the all-embracing power of commodification and consumption.  Like Vincent Miller, I believe that consumer culture has transformed, and is transforming, our religious beliefs and practices [2004:31].  The preacher, like everyone else, cannot stand aloof from that culture and determine from some illusory neutral spot how to subvert it.  The reality is that how we ‘avow, interpret, and employ the beliefs, symbols, values, and practices’ [Miller, 2004:31] of our religious traditions has been radically changed by consumer culture. 

In this context, easy talk of counter-cultural messages is probably beside the point.  Just as it is all too easy to unwittingly employ strategies born of consumerism in efforts to critique consumerism, and thereby neutralise the critique offered, so also the marketplace is incredibly adept in turning criticism into a marketing ploy.  Think of the call for simpler, purer products; or less packaging; or organic foodstuffs; or green environmentally friendly products.  All those criticisms and more have been turned into successful ways of selling yet more products.  Consumer culture simply encompasses dissent and uses it for its own purposes.  There is no reason to suppose that religious critiques are any less susceptible to this process.  Indeed, the reality is that all religious symbols, artefacts and ideas are a rich seam of material mined by commodifiers in a constant search for new products. The album Chant by the Benedictine Monks of Santa Domingo demonstrates how marketable religion can be.  As an aside, it is interesting to observe what amounts to the branding of Rowan Williams, reminiscent in presentation of the things published under Pope John Paul II’s name, and quite unlike the publications of previous Archbishops of Canterbury.  None of this means that Christian theological concepts cannot bring a critical voice to the consumer world, but simply that the processes involved work in more than one direction.  Preaching to be a critique has to do more than just assert itself as such. 

Part of the wiliness of commodification is that it de-anchors symbols from their moorings of tradition and exploits them in ways sometimes quite alien to their origin.  Colin Morris, for example, points out how TV’s penchant for the spectacular has tended to remythologise the great religions.  He writes,

They are treated as part of the main flow of a broad naturalistic view of the planet, its wild life, scenic vistas, exotic architecture and richly diverse human types. The camera has both rationalised and romanticised the life of the temple, mosque and shrine.

So Christians in the pew find themselves at the impact point of a clash of symbolism, trying to reconcile television's highly stylised version of the world's religions with the response offered by various theologies of mission, also highly stylised.

I need not labour the point. Not only the Church's understanding of mission but most aspects of its life suffer the impact of this clash of symbols offering different explanations of the same reality. It's a perennial problem for preachers required to mine the raw material of sermons from whatever vein of experience preoccupies the congregation. For years they have had to take account of the televisually mediated account of the world. [1984:202]

(Colin Morris, God in a Box, (London, Hodder and Stoughton 1984)

Our symbols are no longer our own, if indeed they ever were.

 To summarise: 

Such is the power of commodification that it is not possible for preachers to employ its advantageous techniques without further spreading the habits of interpretation that go with it.  Here the Aldi bag contains the embarrassing old style things of rhetorical authority, lived tradition over time, and learnt response.  At the same time beliefs, practices and symbols that form the framework for the Christian life are abstracted from that life, and commodified for easy consumption.  The communal, traditional setting which gave those beliefs, practices and symbols their power to shape human existence is effectively neutralised.  Here the Aldi bag is the logic of religious practice, doctrine, and rules which are dispensed with as overly rigid, restricting and exclusivist.  No one wants to be seen carrying doctrines around nowadays!

Such is the double bind of preaching in a commodifying culture.

Bibliography:

Cameron, Deborah

2000    Good to Talk?  Living and Working in a Communication Culture. 

London: Sage.

2003    Globalizing Communication in Aitchison, Jean and Lewis, Diana M,

2003 New Media Language.  London: Routledge.

n/d       Good to Talk?  The Cultural Politics of ‘Communication.’  Research

paper, Institute of Education, University of London

[www.ioe.ac.uk/lie/files/dctalk.html]

Giddens, Anthony

            1991    Self Identity and Late Modernity.  Cambridge: Polity Press.

Miller, Vincent J

2004        Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer

Culture.  New York: Continuum.

Mitchell, Jolyon P

1999        Visually Speaking:  Radio and the Renaissance of Preaching. 

Edinburgh: T & T Clark.

Morris, Colin

1984        God-in-a-Box. Christian Strategy in the Television Age.  London:

Hodder and Stoughton.

1996        Raising the Dead: The Art of the Preacher as Public Performer. 

London: Fount.

Rogness, Michael

1994        Preaching to a TV Generation.  Lima: CSS Publishing.

Tanner, Kathryn

1997        Theories of Culture.  A New Agenda for Theology.  Minneapolis:

Fortress Press.