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Jeffrey D. Arthurs and Ben Jackson

Multnomah Bible College, Portland, OR

Communication methods evolve as new media develop, and the evolution results in sociological and epistemological shifts. This paper outlines the evolution from the ancient world of orality, to typography, to the current electronic milieu.  After describing the electronic age, the paper suggests how preachers should respond.  Before we blindly adjust the sermon into something visual, affective, and minimalistic, we must discern where the act of preaching is inherently at odds with today's sensorium.

"Homiletical form is usually experimental, because preachers are developing rhetoric to match the shape of a new, forming human consciousness."

David Buttrick, 1994, p. 67.

The invention of new media technologies, arising from "mere" orality, to the phonetic alphabet and chirography, to typography, to today's electronic age, has done more than make life easier (or at least faster).  The inventions have also formed their own audiences.  The Athenian peasant listening to a rhapsode in the age of orality experienced something different than the man-of-letters pouring over Latin texts in the age of typography, and neither of them experienced television commercials flicker and flash before the eye.  Section one of this paper describes the methods of communication in the electronic age and some sociological and epistemological effects of those methods; but to describe where we are, the paper first describes where we came from -the ages of orality and typography.  Section two then applies this knowledge to preaching, asking how, in Buttrick's phrase, preachers should adapt to "the shape of a new, forming human consciousness."  The word "should" is important because the essential nature of preaching is at odds with some of the sociology and epistemology common to the electronic age. 

The Shift in Media 

The Oral World

In the world before Gutenberg, communication was done face-to-face.  To be sure, some long distance media were used, such as beating a drum, and some asynchronistic media were used, such as writing letters, but orality dominated.  Oral communication is evanescent and personal.  From these simple exigencies of orality, culture was formed (Ong 1967, 1982).  The following paragraphs describe the methods of communication in the oral world with some sociological and epistemological effects accompanying those methods.

The primary medium of oral communication is sound"the speaker"s voice.  Since sound is evanescent, the most important aural features in oral cultures are rhythm and repetition.  These features help ideas lodge in the mind.  Rhythm and repetition may strike the literate ear as stylistic flourishes, pleasurable, quaint, or even bothersome, but in the oral/aural world they are essential. Lost elements can never be recovered.  Whether those elements are key ideas in a speech or key values in a tribe, they must be repeated.  Thus oral cultures use methods of communication that aid retention.  The ancients spoke and thought in "alliterations and assonances, in epithetic and other formula expressions, in standard thematic settings (the assembly, the meal, the duel, the hero's "helper," and so on), in proverbs which are constantly heard by everyone so that they come to mind readily and which themselves are patterned for retention and ready recall" (Ong 1982, 34).  Aristotle's topoi ("commonplace arguments" that could be plugged into nearly any speech) and Homer's stock phrases ("the wine-dark sea" and "the rosy-fingered dawn") are formulas that aid oral communication.

Besides being aural, orality is also "embodied."  That is, communication occurs face-to-face as the speaker literally stands with the words.  Oral cultures are "high context"; that is, meaning is derived largely from extra-linguistic factors such as the speakers' relationship, the time and place of the communication event, as well as nonverbal cues such as haptics (touch), proxemics (space) vocalistics (intonation), kinesics (body movements), and objectics (objects including dress and artifacts).  Communication in the ancient world was a multi-sensory holistic experience (Chesebro and Bertelsen 88-90).  Furthermore, in face-to-face communication feedback is always present.  Listeners embody their messages just as speakers do, and together they jointly construct meaning.  Because orality cannot be divorced from sound and presence, small wonder that memory and delivery were the most important of the traditional rhetorical canons (Chesebro and Bertelsen 95).

The constraints of oral/aural media influenced the sociology of the ancient world.  For example, oral cultures are traditional and conservative (Chesebro and Bertelsen 93).  Since knowledge has to be repeated to be remembered and transmitted, persons with the longest memories or greatest experience are revered.  The "elders" are the repositories of culture.  Stories, rituals, and proverbs distill and transmit culture as they are shared around the fire, on the hunt, or at the grinding stone. Interestingly, in an oral culture knowledge must not only be remembered, but some of it must also be forgotten.  Chesebro and Bertelsen comment:  "Retaining information no longer necessary would burden the memory and disrupt cultural equilibrium and continuity. Accordingly, forgetting information that is no longer useful would be as important a process as remembering.  Indeed, discarding irrelevant information contributes to cultural homeostasis by freeing the mind to focus on present events" (94-95).  The only people who are qualified to decide what is important enough to remember are those with enough experience to sift the grain from the chaff.

A second sociological characteristic of the oral world is tight community.  Since communication occurs face-to-face and meaning is jointly constructed, community is formed.  Communication is a social event, not a private event like reading an article in the library.  In oral communication, the past exists when it is re-created in speech and ceremony, but that re-creation always occurs in the present.  Orality thus unites past and present in the current experience of the community.  Fisher argues that narrative in particular, the oldest and most powerful mode of communication, binds the community in a common experience and transmits common knowledge and values (Fisher 1984).

Oral/aural media not only influence sociology, they also influence epistemology, but the level of influence is hotly debated.  Do media determine how we think?  In Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly Postman comes close to answering "yes."  Similarly, Walter Ong states that "writing has transformed human consciousness" (1982, 78), and in The Medium is the Message, McLuhan argues that the brain adjusts itself to the medium (in Turner 23).  The authors of this paper do not adopt such a severe technological determinism which seems based on early theories of mass communication.  Those theories presumed a passive audience helpless to withstand manipulation.  Rather, the authors of this paper believe that humans use media for gratification.  We are active, not passive, agents.  Of course, when a person finds gratification from the form or content of a medium, he or she will be influenced by that medium.  Groothuis explains:

Human thought is too complex to be reduced to simple cause-effect structures, but it is influenced by communication media.  Orality shaped epistemology in three ways:  thinking was additive, referential, and empathetic.

Since oral communication occurs in time, with past elements gone forever, it cannot depend on receivers being able to reconstruct those past elements with precision.  Its method of organization must be additive, not subordinative.  It strings ideas one after the other rather than subordinating those ideas in analytical hierarchy (Chesebro and Bertelsen 93; Reymond).  Furthermore, since oral communication depends on the give-and-take of continuous feedback, meaning grows organically, not geometrically.  A speech from the oral world would not follow an "outline," but like the book of  First John, would loop around a theme, progressing by the addition of one idea to another even as it often doubles back.

Thought in the oral world is also referential.  It is concrete.  Ideas are linked to persons, actions, and objects.  Lovejoy states, "As African pastor John Oginga put it, 'There is no idea without a head.'  To oral communicators like him, no idea exists in a free-floating abstract state.  Every idea is attached to the person who uttered it and the context in which it was uttered.  The more strongly ideas are rooted in whole events and concrete experiences, the better their chance of being remembered" (5).  For example, a "history of ideas" would be unlikely if not impossible in an oral culture.  Instead, history would be genealogy and stories.  Ideas must be embodied.  Similarly, in argument, the most convincing proof is ethos, not logos.

Since oral communication depends on joint construction of meaning, thought is empathetic in the oral/aural world.  The knower (speaker) and the known (message spoken) cannot function without receivers (listeners).  Thus, as Sample states, "An issue that comes up will be considered in terms of the family and communal ties one has.  Moral, social, and religious beliefs will be understood much more in relational than discursive ways" (5).  Even the "self is understood in terms of the responses of others in the community.  Without the community, there can be no definition of self" (Chesebro and Bertelsen 96). 

The communication media of orality dominated the ancient world and influenced sociology and epistemology.  These shifted when typography became dominant. 

The Typographic World

Words in the oral world are event - encounters with persons in time experienced by using multiple senses.  Words in the typographic world are abstractions - arbitrary symbols arranged in space experienced by using sight alone.  Ong summarizes:  "All script represents words as . . . quiescent objects, immobile marks for assimilation by vision . . . . The alphabet, though it probably derives from pictograms, has lost all connections with things as things.  It represents sound itself as a thing, transforming the evanescent world of sound to the quiescent, quasi-permanent world of space" (1982, 91).  The shift from multi-sensory experience to sight alone resulted in profound sociological and epistemological changes.

The first sociological result was individualism.  Since meaning in the world of typography is derived from printed words, not from face-to-face interaction, readers are isolated and autonomous.  No feedback or nonverbal cues are present to help readers jointly construct meaning.  Readers determine meaning from literary context, not social context.  This being so, literacy promotes idiosyncratic interpretations of texts.  Many scholars believe that the Reformation would not have been possible without typography.  Furthermore, Chesebro and Bertelsen contend that typography led to postmodernism with its assumption that texts always convey multiple and contradictory meanings (113).  When communication occurs in isolation, meaning is an individual possession, not a communal possession bound to tradition.  As media shifted from orality to typography, a new sense of self evolved - an autonomous self.

A second sociological shift concerns authority.  In the typographic world, authority resides with "experts," not elders.  Typography produced an explosion of knowledge since it could be stored in books called "encyclopedias," "histories," and "dictionaries." It no longer needed to be remembered.  "Experts" became those who read the writings on a subject and contributed their own writings.  Starting in the 1440s with the advent of the printing press, ideas began to "belong" to the one who published them.  Furthermore, in the literate world, hermeneutics is a crucial discipline since law, religion, technology, etc. is consigned to books.  Typography privileges the "literate class" since such knowledge of these essential concerns is not available to those who cannot read.

A shift in epistemology accompanied the shift in sociology.  Thinking became abstract.  Since writing reduces experience to symbols, and readers must interpret those symbols apart from the author's presence, they develop greater ability to analyze.  The reliance upon detailed analysis for understanding elevates logos over pathos or ethos.  Under typography, abstract thought is most trustworthy (Chesebro and Bertelsen 115).

Along with the ability to perform abstract thinking, typography also increases the ability to fragment ideas since communication occurs by sequential examination of letters on a page.  It is not a holistic, multi-sensory experience.  Since typographic man experiences texts by looking at words in rows, he tends to segment experience into linear and fragmented sequences.  Chesebro and Bertelsen give a helpful example:  Perceiving the ambiance of a restaurant as you walk in is a holistic experience. You view the people and the décor. You hear music, silverware, and voices.  You smell the food and imagine the taste.  In contrast, when you read about the restaurant, the ambiance is reified and transformed into a linear sequence that you experience as your eye falls on words in rows.  "With a beginning, middle, and end, the form of the sentence itself offers a sequential or linear organization of the information it presents" (113).

The communication media, sociology, and epistemology shifted again as culture left the world of Gutenberg and entered the global village of the electronic world. 

The Electronic World

Conrad Ostwalt summarizes the far-reaching cultural implications of the shift from typography to electronically mediated texts:

Because the electronic era dawned recently, scholars are still creating terms to describe the era: Fiction writer William Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" in his novel Neuromancer (1984); Neil Postman created the term "technopoly" to describe the hegemony of technology in our culture; McLuhan posited the "global village," reflective of Ong"s "secondary orality"; Jean Baudrillard spoke of the emergence of a "hyperreality"; and Jacques Ellul has identified our state as "la technique."   So many media are available in the electronic world that most of us are unconscious of their presence.  Like the proverbial fish in water, the telephone, fax, radio, film, television, computer, and the internet constitute our environment.  Gozzi and Haynes describe electronic modes of communication as possessing the capability to transmit electronically created messages "almost instantaneously from a distance, eclectically combining oral and written forms of mediation with facsimiles of primary sensory encounters, also storable, and often readily malleable" (in Chesebro and Bertelsen 135).

Three features of communication in the electronic world have implications for preaching.  Those characteristics are the increasingly interactive nature of the media, immediacy, and the dominance of images.  Taken together, today's media create "pseudo reality."

Originally, electronic media could be categorized as either telecommunication or interactive, but recently this dichotomy has broken down.  "Telecommunication" means "communication at a distance."  Telecommunication media began with the telegraph (1837) and progressed to radio, film, and television.  For many years long distance communication was one-way, but starting with ENIAC, the first mainframe computer, electronic communication has become increasingly interactive (Chesebro and Bertelsen 136).  Teleconferencing and the internet illustrate the changing electronic landscape.  Even traditionally one-way media such as television allow more interaction than ever before.  For example, the remote control has changed the way we watch TV.  "Channel surfing" gives viewers the power to construct their own programs as they select and edit with the touch a button.  Videotapes also blur the distinction between telecommunication and interactive communication systems since they enable viewers to record and watch their own programs whenever they want.

Because electronic media are transmitted at the speed of light, today's communication milieu emphasizes a sense of immediacy.  In the old days of typography, detached contemplation of "current" events was the norm, but today we experience the Kennedy assassination, the moonwalk, the Gulf War, and O.J. Simpson weaving in and out of traffic as they happen.  Electronic media obliterate geography.  For example, though not physically present, millions of viewers saw the tragic explosion of the Challenger space shuttle.  Electronic communication has "minimized, even shattered the traditional barriers of space and time" (Mitchell 192).  Christians notes: "TV has the tremendous advantage of enabling us to participate, as it were, in events as they occur.  Television gives spectators the gift of ubiquity" (342).

A third feature of electronic media is the dominance of images.  To be sure, these media still use words, but today words caption images (Jamieson 53).  Words are secondary.  The freight of communication is transported by images.  Jacques Ellul constrasts constructed and natural images.  Residents of the oral world experienced natural images in face-to-face encounters - the social context, the ambiance of the environment, facial expression, and so forth - but the electronic world is composed of a "proliferation of artificial images . . . . A universe of images surrounds us: photos, films, television, advertising, billboards, road-signs, illustrations, etc." (in Mitchell 204).  These images dominate pop culture and are now common in social structures such as our educational systems.  For example, in a 1983 study, only 8% of  2,000 teachers regularly integrated TV and video into classroom activities; in 1991, the number rose to 11%.  By 1997, 53% of teachers frequently integrated television and video into their school curricula (Corporation for Public Broadcasting 13).

Electronic media affect sociology and epistemology.  In brief, electronic media construct pseudo realities.  In terms of  sociology, the electronic world creates pseudo-intimacy and pseudo-community even though that intimacy is broadcasted.  Television, as the most dominant communication medium, establishes the norm.  The dominant image on a television screen is a close-up shot of a human face since "the constraints of the [TV] screen's boundaries force producers to develop the drama by concentrating it in the faces of the characters and entrusting them to unfold" plot and character (Christians 341).  A medium which sends pictures at the speed of light into a box in our living rooms and bedrooms lends itself to voyeurism, gossip, and eavesdropping.  For example, an analysis of 200 talk shows found an average of sixteen personal disclosures per episode.  Those content of those disclosures was a personal attribute, sexual activity or orientation, abuse, criminal activity, or an embarrassing situation (U.S. News and World Report 8).  When viewers identify with the persons on the screen pseudo-intimacy results.  Normally intimacy occurs in face-to-face communication, not public settings, yet TV creates the impression of personal communication.  As Chesebro and Bertelsen explain, when a "broadcast image is encountered by the audience, it distorts the perception of physical presence in the immediate situation" (153).  No wonder so many television preachers are successful in eliciting financial contributions from the "dearly loved friends" of the ministry (Schultze 1995, 471).

The intimacy of the electronic world is not the intimacy of the oral world.  Fabricated and mediated intimacy is no replacement for the intimacy of a physical, face-to-face relationship. Even interactive media such as chat rooms cannot provide authentic intimacy.  Groothuis explicates:

The pseudo-intimacy of the electronic world leads to pseudo-community.  Western culture has arrived at the final stage in Ong's cultural scheme, which he calls "secondary orality."  This new orality "has striking resemblance to the old [primary oral cultures] in its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even its use of formulas"; but it differs from primary orality in that it "generates a sense for groups immeasurably larger than those of primary oral culture - McLuhan's 'global village'" (in O"Leary 785-786).  In the electronic world, community is no longer constrained by the geographical limitations of the oral world.  Today a game of bridge can be played with a foursome from Sydney, Rio, Bonn, and New York.  Common interest is the basis of community in the electronic world, and face-to-face communication is passé.  The elusive nature of cyberspace community remains questionable.  Can there be authentic community in cyberspace?  As O'Leary notes: "What online [community] . . . lacks, in and of itself, is precisely the quality of physical presence . . .  . In cyberspace we are seeing relationships develop that have no other embodiment but in textual interchange" (804-805).

Just as electronic media have influenced sociology, so have they influenced epistemology.  In particular, how we think has been influenced by the bombardment of quickly moving images.  In 1984, Postman noted the average time of a cut on television commercials was 3.5 seconds (1985, 86).  Today, MTV and TV commercials have reduced even that miniscule segment.  While viewers seem to be able to assimilate information at higher speeds, some scholars believe viewers are losing typographic man's ability to analyze.  Os Guinness explains: "Hearing and reading are slow, sequential, demanding, and analytical processes.  They put a premium on truth, understanding, and judgment.  Visual communication, by contrast, is faster, easier, more immediate, and more intuitive.  But it is often so 'obvious' that it bypasses critical thought" (100).  Turner agrees:  "Because images create feelings before analysis, watching TV is not primarily a thinking but rather a feeling experience made up of laughing, crying, fearing, worrying and so forth.  Tension, not reflection, flows through one's body during a violent TV scene.  Watching murder, rape, arson, and immorality spills out adrenaline, not reason. . . . [A]nyone desiring to mediate on images must visit an art gallery" (29).  In a culture of rapid-fire images, our ways of thinking are changing.  O'Leary asserts:

Another epistemological shift in the age of television is that we expect, perhaps demand, that all communication be entertaining.  TV creates this expectation.  Since television is driven by commercial motives, that is, since its life blood is ratings and sponsors, it must attract  and hold viewers.  The best way to do this is by gratifying those viewers.  Watching TV must be pleasurable.  It must entertain.  This is true even of programs that purport to be educational, such as the evening news.  Robert MacNeil, an insider to the television industry, describes the thinking of producers and directors:  Their motive

The mania to entertain prompts TV, movie, and video game producers to keep "upping the ante."  They must provide ever more visual stimulation to attract and hold viewers.  The result for viewers is desensitization.  Brown may overstate the case, but his cry is worth hearing:

TV, video games, and surfing the internet are fun, but they lead users to believe that information and images have no purpose but entertainment.  Pseudo reality becomes indistinguishable from real reality, or perhaps a substitute for it.  This is the world of electronic media.

The question we turn to now is how to preach in this world.  But perhaps a prior question is in order: Do we need to adapt or should we still preach as in the days of typography?  To answer that question, Lovejoy offers this statistic:  only about 20% of North Americans can be classified as "literate," or "highly literate."  Four times that number are "illiterate," "functionally illiterate," or "semi-literate."  Lovejoy states, "The question is not simply whether people can read, but how well they learn through literacy-influenced forms of communication" (6).  The electronic world, not the ordered world of typography, influences the sociology and epistemology of North America.  In contrast, most preachers, certainly the readers of this essay, are highly literate.  We have been trained in hermeneutics and exposition since we are interpreters of a Text, but to stand between the worlds of Text and audience, we must adapt.  However, this adaptation must not circumvent the essential nature and mission of preaching.  Adapting the sermon into something like virtual reality would circumvent that nature and mission since preaching is a communication event nonpareil in its proclamation of Reality.  Yet, if preaching is communication, adaptation must take place. What adaptations can be made without compromise? 

Adapting Without Compromise 

When adapting to the electronic world, three qualities of preaching must not be compromised:  preaching is incarnational, proclamatory, and transformational. 

Incarnational Preaching

By "incarnational" we mean that God has ordained that human agents represent Him.  Preachers are "heralds" of the King"s message, "stewards" of the Master"s Word, and "witnesses" to his saving grace (Stott).  God has placed his treasure in "earthen vessels."  To remove the "personality" from Brooks" famous definition of preaching is to remove something essential, but the electronic media are prone to do just that.  Pixels and disembodied words on a screen are the media of the day, but a flesh-and-blood person is the medium of preaching.  Okrent indicts pseudo community by stating that it is only "a shadow of community; the interaction with another human being that is held out as the great virtue of Web community is actually interaction with the facsimile of a human being" (40).  The electronic media, TV and the internet in particular, tend to reduce personality to performance.  As Veith states, the media turn life into theater.  This is true in politics, where

To adapt to this exigency - this assumption that public communication is merely performance"preachers must create venues for incarnational communication.  Today's listeners need to see God's message embodied, but they may not trust that embodiment if it occurs only in public presentations from the pulpit.  We suggest that preachers augment their public communication with interpersonal dialogue (Arthurs and Gurevich).  We should create venues for discussion, application, and counseling following the sermon.

An emphasis on incarnation in an age of pseudo personality also suggests that preachers should use conversational language and delivery.  Today's listeners have been conditioned to receive public communication in private environments such as cars, living rooms, and bedrooms.  Today people want to be address in public communication as if it were interpersonal communication.  As McKenzie states, "For several centuries we have prized the memorable, formal, respectable qualities of written discourse.  Now we are shifting to one that prefers communications that epitomize the colloquial, seemingly spontaneous character of oral communication" (in Mitchell 21).  Jamieson argues that FDR was one of the first to respond to this exigency by adopting a new style of delivery.  FDR realized that he should chat by the fireside with individuals rather than orate to crowds even though he was addressing millions at once (43 ff.).  Alistair Cooke, patriarch of British radio, concurs.  In the early days of radio he discovered that most broadcasters simply wrote and delivered essays.  Those essays were hard to follow.  They were poorly suited for oral communication.  Cooke "suddenly realized that there was a new profession ahead.  Which is writing for talking.  Putting it on the page in the syntactical break-up and normal confusion that is normal talk" (2).  Cooke attributes much of his success to conversational language and delivery since, as Jamieson observes, "Radio and television changed the rules for speakers of public words and for their listeners" (42; see also Mitchell 64-68).  Since so much of the meaning in oral communication is conveyed through the nonverbal channel, preachers must not put on a pulpit persona. They must speak naturally and sincerely if they are to communicate incarnationally.  We must not give listeners the impression that we are performing.

Perhaps the most significant adaptation we can make to preach incarnationally is by judicious use of self-disclosure (Gurevich and Arthurs).  Audiences have been conditioned to expect it, and preachers can use it to embody the truth.  Jamieson states, "Public discourse is now more personalized, self-disclosive, and autobiographical; today's public speech comfortably includes Fala, Checkers, Amy, and Nancy.  Audiences too have changed. . . . Public address now seems a collaborative and intimate act that enmeshes speaker and audience" (44-45).  When preachers reveal how God's Word has impacted them, today's listeners will sit up and take notice and likely apply the same truth to themselves.

If electronic media are not well suited to incarnation, the question naturally arises whether preachers should use those media in their sermons.  Should they show movie clips and use power point?  Our answer is that media can be used to support preaching, but that the act of preaching itself is best done face-to-face.  We advocate the use of electronic media if those media augment the essence of preaching which is a living soul addressing living souls.  Just as Jesus used "media" such as writing in the dirt, bread and wine, and the birds of the air when he taught the people of "primary orality," so we should use media as we address the people of "secondary orality."  Pictures should be used to connect with people who think in pictures, but let us remember that the most crucial "picture" is the personality of the preacher conveyed earnestly and sincerely through words and deeds. 

Proclamation

A second essential element of preaching is kerygma, or proclamation.  If a sermon fails to announce God's Word, it falls short of a biblical definition of preaching.  Every sermon must be "expository" in the sense that it "exposes" the mind, heart, and will of God as revealed in the text.  However, like incarnation, exposition is difficult in this age.  The electronic media, TV in particular, lend themselves to entertainment, not proclamation.

To adapt to the constraints of the electronic age while still proclaiming boldly, we suggest two techniques.  The first is to create central ideas for sermons which are memorable and winsome.  Of course, there is nothing new in the exhortation to form a compelling central idea and repeat it often, but the reminder is worth making since we live in a sound-bite age.  Today's audiences are used to hearing speakers - positions distilled for the evening news.  As Jamieson states, "The capsulizing phrase or statement has always played a role in eloquent speeches; one of the facts that differentiates present from past is that that role is now central" (114).  The old eloquence formed in the days of typography emphasized subordinative verbal claims.  Today's eloquence takes us back to the days of orality and is marked by metaphor, redundancy, and verbal distillation.  Preachers should form central ideas which borrow the qualities of proverbs such as compactness ("It's Friday, but Sunday's coming" - Tony Campolo), rhythm and balance ("If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing simply" - Haddon Robinson), and metaphor ("Payday someday" - R.G. Lee).

An objection may arise that adaptation toward simplicity "dumbs down" preaching.  The people who make this objection, like Postman, probably value the epistemology of typography (the authors of this paper do too), but preaching is oral communication, not written.  We must communicate with the tools of orality.  This does not mean that argument is out of place in sermons or that analysis should be jettisoned.  It means that preachers recognize the simple fact that listeners are likely to remember only a few ideas from an oral presentation.  We must do our part to help them comprehend and value the central teaching of the text.  According to Lovejoy,  insisting that preaching use complex verbal claims and detached analysis creates an unbiblical stumbling block to the gospel (7).  Most people throughout history, and most people in the world today are not literate.  To require them to "reach up" to our level vitiates an essential feature of preaching - it is proclamation.

A second adaptation helps preacher proclaim in the age of images - the use of "visual language."  In the electronic world words simply augment pictures, but preaching is a verbal art; therefore, preachers should use words to conjure images in the minds of their listeners.  Wilson encourages preachers to make movies with words, and Chapell says preachers should think of themselves as photographers (in Mitchell 38).  Narrative preaching, concrete examples, and stories are natural vehicles for visual language.

Visual language may seem anemic next to the special effects wonders of video games and movies, but many researchers argue the opposite.  Images in the mind are actually more engaging than images that merely appear on the screen.  Since formation of mental images depends on the participation of the listener, mental images engage the listener more completely than images on the screen.  Adam Powell's claim for radio applies to preaching that uses visual language:  "Pictures are better on radio.  What you can imagine is almost always scarier, funnier, more real and more vivid than the explicit images of video and film" (in Mitchell 55).

Before leaving the subject of proclamation with visual language, a caution must be sounded.  Images without propositions proclaim nothing.  Images must illustrate or prove or apply an idea or value.  Buttrick argues that "without a logical structure in which these images can form, occur, and mean, they aren't going to do much for you.  They are simply going to be images which don't provoke contemplation" (in Mitchell 36).  Audiences today are conditioned to accept rapidly changing images with little verbal commentary.  These audiences are weak at discerning the "meaning" of shows, nor do the shows promote such reflection.  As a result, preachers who want to remain true to the ideal of proclamation while still using visual language, must work overtime to ensure that images communicate ideas.  Koessler quotes Willimon on this point:

Preachers should use images, but images do not speak for themselves.  They must be tied to propositions to be a tool of proclamation.  Furthermore, as Koessler implies, proclamation itself has a goal.  Proclamation is not simply bald assertion, not merely the announcing of  facts; rather, its goal is transformation. 

Transformation

Transformation is indispensable to preaching because of the nature of the thing preached - the Bible.  As Ramm states, "Holy Scripture is not a theoretical book of theological abstraction, but a book that intends to have a mighty influence on the lives of its readers" (113).  Auerbach puts his finger on this quality of Scripture:  "The world of the Scripture is not satisfied with claiming to be a historically true reality - it insists that it is the only real world . . . . The Scripture stories do not flatter us . . . . They seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected, we are rebels" (14-15).  Since God through the Bible seeks to transform readers, and since preaching is proclamation of God's Word, preachers must aim for transformation (Bullmore).

Transformation is a tall order in any day, but perhaps tallest in the age of entertainment.  "When was the last time you saw anything on TV that demanded action?  Other than an occasional weather report alerting a driver to leave early because of heavy snow or traffic, the main action TV generates is buying a product which may or may not be potentially helpful.  Even the prevalence of news, talk, and sports programming requires no or little action" (Turner 30).

How shall we preach to this society?  Simply by calling for action and preaching for decision.  Expect transformation.  Remember that the sermon is superior to the electronic media in producing transformation.  Preaching is "live," not mediated.  An earnest soul can connect deeply with listeners.  Preaching is targeted, not broadcast.  It addresses the current needs of a relatively small group of people.  Preaching is pastoral, not pecuniary.  It is selfless.  And preaching occurs in the context of worship, not the context of other images flickering in our living rooms.  It does not stand alone.  It is part of a larger experience that brings us into the presence of God.  The Holy Spirit uses the foolishness of preaching.  Trust that a sense of God's beauty and holiness will break through while a messenger who is captivated by His love proclaims the truth.  This is the vision of preaching we hold even while preaching in the electronic age.

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