From the Archives: "Preaching the Christian Faith"
Each month, our blog features articles from the archives of Liturgy. Our goal is to share the wisdom from decades past so that we might celebrate the work and insights of these excellent ministers and scholars.
David Buttrick
In 1982, Liturgy published an article by David Buttrick entitled “Preaching the Christian Faith.” Writing in 1982 about preaching, homiletics professor David Buttrick discusses the difficulties of developing ideas about matters as complex and profound as faith in a culture that only has patience for what he calls “little homilies” (which we might also call sermons) that have to be ten minutes at most. He decries the impossibility of raising sufficiently challenging theological ideas or exploring biblical imagery richly enough in too brief a timeframe.
Buttrick argues that not only does expectation of a too-short homily/sermon turn the preacher toward a simplistic one-note focus making it difficult to show connections between biblical reality and the socio-economic structures of our own time. This limits the preacher’s ability to counter the cultural norms by preaching prophetically. It becomes He places blame on the listeners’ unwillingness to ask for longer sermons not because of lost attention spans due to television but on language that has become “unstable.” We no longer have words in common.
Selected Quotes from
“Preaching the christian faith”
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“Most rhetoricians teach these days that assemblies need nearly three minutes to grasp a simple idea, to hear a single, clear sentence. At the same time, contemporary assemblies have a short attention span, and seldom, if ever, focus on particular ideas for more than three minutes. Thus, preachers find themselves in a peculiar bind: congregations need time to comprehend ideas, but they will not attend any idea for long. The preachers time limits are desperately narrow.”
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“In preaching, every idea must be imagined and, if possible, connected to actualities in human experience.”
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“Shrewd homilists soon realize that little of substance can be said in only a few minutes. They
prefer to elaborate one idea, a single topic distilled from scripture. ”
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“A homily that distills “objective truth” from the parable will ignore the performative power of the parable which intends an actual reforming of faith-consciousness. Dedicated preachers may try to design a homily which, like the parable, will not only instruct but also perform.”
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David G. Buttrick was an American Presbyterian minister who later joined the United Church of Christ and became the Drucilla Moore Buffington Professor of homiletics and liturgics at the Vanderbilt University Divinity School. He is best known for his major work, Homiletic: Moves and Structures (Fortress, 1987).
If you would like access to this article, please follow this link:
David G. Buttrick, “Preaching the Christian Faith,” Liturgy 2, no. 3 (1982): 51–56, https://doi.org/10.1080/04580638209409844.