Renaissance Rhetoric and Born-Again Preaching

Abstract

“During the past generation, heirs of the Reformation have paid their respects to textual preaching and its power to change human lives; but we have also seen how familiar texts can serve to confirm people in their prejudices and previous behavior … The ‘literal sense’ becomes a literalist dogma about the text … Preaching becomes over-serious or over-cute … Preaching might become once again an occasion of discovery and transformation if it were conceived as part of a broader art of homiletics (‘homologein’), of ‘coming to say the same thing’ both with the biblical authors and with one another.”