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J. Kent Edwards

Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

At the dawn of history, people preferred to communicate orally.  Storytellers were the guardians of history and sermons were often delivered in narrative form.  The development of the Greek alphabet, however, was a significant communicational innovation.  This new form of writing allowed and encouraged people to communicate more abstractly.  Written communication began to slowly replace oral communication as the preferred mode of communication.  Sermons began to reflect this literate influence by increasingly relying on force of argument and increasingly focusing upon abstract issues.

Guttenberg"s printing press was a technological innovation that, for the first time in history, put literature in the hands of the masses.  This invention had a great impact upon popular culture.  Oral communication was supplanted by written communication.  Booksellers replaced storytellers. Sermons began to reflect the dominance of literacy.  Preachers in the Gutenberg age tended to move away from narrative sermons and preach abstract points from syllogistically oriented outlines. Sermons began to sound like books and were often published as books.

The communication landscape continued to change with the introduction of television.  This audio-visual communication innovation has had a profound influence upon communication. As this technology has spread across the world, people began to prefer watching and listening to stories rather than read literature.  Once again, narrative became the preferred communication form.  The golden age of literacy was over.  The ancient storyteller had returned dressed in a cathode tube.  The most effective pulpits of this age understand the significance of television and its influence upon communication preferences.

Throughout the centuries, all communication forms, including sermonic forms, have been significantly influenced by innovation.  Our age is no exception.

Few people would deny that their everyday life has been profoundly altered by innovation. The introduction of technologies such as the wheel, iron, the internal combustion engine and the telephone, have dramatically changed the way we live our lives.  It was not that many years ago that my grandfather made a living hauling coal and ice on a horse-drawn wagon through the streets of Toronto.  If my grandfather were still alive today, he would have to amend his career path.  Changing technology has so dramatically changed the employment landscape that his job no longer exists.  While many cultural observers recognize the link between technological innovation and employment, far fewer recognize the relationship between technology and communication, and between technology and preaching.  Throughout human history, however, communication patterns have shifted significantly under the influence of changing technology.  Technological advancements in the area of communication have produced three distinct communication eras: oral, literate and electronic.

1. Communication within oral cultures

Oral cultures are those that primarily practice unaided interpersonal communication.  In oral cultures, people speak directly to those who are in close physical proximity.  Orality is the performance of one person's mouth to another person"s ear and hearing the spontaneous personal reply (supplemented by visual perception of bodily behavior).   It does not require the assistance of external technology.  Oral communication is the oldest, most "original" form of interpersonal communication. Oral cultures exist where, for reasons of history, geography or preference, people do not have access to technology.  It was the only form of communication possible in pre-technology eras.

Orality is a distinctive form of communication.  Oral communication is responsive.  "Here, surely is the essence of communication, a process of spontaneous exchange, varied, flexible, expressive, and momentary. (Havelock 1986, 64)" [It is extraordinarily adaptive, personal and immediate.  Oral communication is also concrete.  It is a particular and situational form of communication.  Orality personalizes meaning by anchoring it in what people do, feel, believe, and desire.  Rather than delivering long abstract discourses about justice or truth: oral communicators demonstrate the concepts in the lives of the heroes that populate their stories, poems, songs and proverbs.  Oral communicators also demonstrate a clear proclivity for narrative.  Of the many genres utilized within oral cultures, the most popular is narrative.  Oral cultures are invariably storied cultures. 

It is interesting to note that, according to cognitive research, the distinctive elements of oral communication result in "distinctive psychological processes.(Olson & Torrence 1996, 123)" It seems that there are hemispheric differences in the way that people in oral cultures process sensory material.  Laterality studies have shown that the right hemisphere is superior in the recognition of oral materials, while the left is specialized for the recognition of non-verbal shapes, patterns and nonsense figures (Cohen 1973, 349; White 1969).  I have discovered the veracity of this cognitive research on a personal anecdotal level.  My brother-in-law is Chief Pilot with Missionary Aviation Fellowship in Papua New Guinea, a primarily oral culture.  One of my brother-in-law's responsibilities is to train New Guineans how to fly planes into various remote airstrips.  He discovered that while he was able to train oral New Guineans to fly into specific airstrips, they were unable to abstract the lessons learned on one airstrip and apply it to other similar airstrips.  People in oral cultures think differently than those in literate cultures.  Physiologically, they process information concretely rather than abstractly.  

Communicating information, even theological information, within an oral cultural context clearly requires cultural adaptation.  God knew this.  When God wanted to communicate theological information to a primarily oral society, he did so in ways that were compatible with the communication culture.     When the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures communicated in their primarily oral environments they did so in a "right-brained," holistic manner nature (Trotter 1976, 218).  While all of the genres employed by the writers of the O.T. exploit the oral culture in which they lived, it is interesting to note the emphasis given to narrative (McLuhan 1988, 67ff). "Narratives dominate the biblical landscape.... Narratives are the most common type of literature found in the Bible.  The OT makes up 75 percent of the Bible, and 40 percent of the OT consists of narratives (Klein, Blomberg, Hubbard, Jr. and Ecklebarger 1993, 261)."  The storytellers of the Old Testament were "brilliant literary artist[s] (Alter 1981, 10)" who used their skill with words to paint vivid pictures of revelatory truth in the minds of their audience.  The unique features of oral cultures required and received a unique communication approach.

While oral communication, (in its pure form) possesses many positive attributes, it also suffers from some serious limitations.  One limitation is memory.  Oral communication is forever lost unless it is committed to memory.  While oral cultures utilize various mnemonic devices, such as repetition and rhythm, the accumulation of knowledge on a large scale is impossible.  Human memory is both limited and imperfect.  Many narratives, poems and songs in oral cultures are forgotten completely or remembered imperfectly.  A second limitation of orality is that posed by distance.  Communicating in speech requires the co-presence of speaker and listener.  Oral communication cannot take place across any spatial or temporal distance.   In an oral culture, you can only speak to those who can physically hear you.  The inherent limitations of orality have provided the impetus for oral cultures to modify their mode of communication.  Emerging technology allowed this modification to take place.  Technology made it possible for literacy to develop.

2. Communication within literate cultures

Throughout the centuries, most oral cultures have changed into literate cultures.  Two major technologies are largely responsible for making this transition possible.  The primary technology that led to the development of literate communication and literate cultures was the alphabet.  The letters used to write this paper did not come into being suddenly.  Instead, the building blocks of our written communication developed an ever-increasing sophistication over an extended period.  The diagram below (Goody 1987, 7) indicates the various forms that writing has taken through the centuries.

Written communication began as iconographic: it utilized pictures (either individually or in series) to convey meaning.  While pictorial signs were incorporated into all early writing systems (Goody 1987, 23), only occasionally were they developed into sophisticated logosyllabic writing systems.  Logosyllabic writing (such as Chinese) uses images to refer to physical objects and sounds.  They are iconically related to its referent.  This form of writing allows its users to engage in more sophisticated communication than those employing pictograms.  Since, however, logosyllabic writing remains icon based, it encourages its users to continue to think concretely (orally) and requires them to master a massive vocabulary.  Logosyllabic writing is a visually based and unwieldy form of written communication.

In contrast to iconographic writing systems are the ideogram (the non-pictorial or abstract) forms of writing. An ideogram is a symbol that stands for a word but it is unrelated to the referent iconically.  The major iconographic writing systems of world history utilize phoneme"s.  A phoneme is an alphabet-induced concept in which a group of similar speech sounds represented by an alphabetic letter.  As demonstrated in the diagram below, phonetization is a very different from picture based iconographic systems.  The invention of the phoneme forces its users to think in a highly abstractly manner.  The diagram below describes exactly how this occurred (Coulmas 1999, 406).  Phonetic technology was not passive; it changed the way that people thought.

There are two dominant iconographic writing systems that use phoneme's.  The first major writing system in this tradition was the consonant script.  Consonant scripts such as Hebrew and Arabic are Semitic in origin and operate on a phonetic alphabetic system similar in many ways to modern English.  While consonantal writing was a significant advancement from the picture-based writing systems that it replaced, its influence would wane in light of the invention of ancient Greece.

Eric Havelock asserts that "surely, of all systems of communication used by man, the Greek alphabet has proven to be historically unique in its efficiency and distribution (Havelock 1986, 59)."  Why such praise for Greek?  First of all, the Greeks began with the highly efficient consonantal alphabet of the Phoenicians.  Through the centuries, most consonantal writing systems developed with an enormous number of syllables.  The sheer number of syllables made those languages cumbersome to use and hard to memorize.  The Phoenicians, searching for economy, reduced the total number of syllables by inventing a convenient shorthand.  Unfortunately, however, the Phoenicians purchased linguistic economy at the expense of ambiguity.  Written communication with this alphabet was not always as clear as oral communication.

The second reason we pay tribute to the historical significance of the Greek alphabet, is that the Greeks invented and introduced five vowels into the Phonetic alphabet.  These five new vowel markers removed the ambiguity of the consonantal writing systems.  This combination of vowel and consonant was a landmark invention in human history.  This linguistic innovation supplied humanity with a visual representation of language that was both economical and exhaustive.  They supplied the world with a set of linguistic building blocks that provided an inexhaustible variety of combinations could, with reasonable accuracy, reproduce the entire range of human speech.  The Greek language was not merely an "adaptation" or an "improvement" over what was before, but a technological breakthrough.  For the first time oral language could be shaped acoustically for storage.  Oral communication had always fluency.  Now, for the first time, visual fluency was possible.

The linguistic economy, ease of use and precision that was made possible with the Greek language came with a price tag.  While arguably the finest language ever invented, Greek was unquestionably the most abstract language ever invented.  For the first time, a language existed that was entirely self-contained.  It did not need any oral interpretation or support.  It was the antitheses of oral communication.  Marshall McLuhan described Greek "an immense feat of abstraction (McLuhan 1988, 14)."  As one might expect, this language had a unique physiological influence upon those who used it.   Instead of being physiologically processed in the right hemisphere of the brain as oral communication has been, greek was a left brain language.  It required and encouraged abstract thought.  This language changed the way that people thought.  It is no accident that Greece produced Plato, Aristotle and Socrates.  Philosophy is one of the most abstract subjects and ancient Greece produced the finest philosophers the world had ever produced.  Did Greece dominate this field because they had greater intelligence than the rest of the world?  No.  They the technology of their language caused them to think differently than people ever had before.  The evidence indicates that Greece dominated this field because their language allowed and required them to think differently than people ever had before. 

An example of the change of thinking wrought by the greek language can be found in the syllogism.  The main tool of formal logic is the syllogism, an example of which is below. 

All A are B

C is A

Therefore C is B

All men are mortal

Socrates is a man

Therefore Socrates is mortal

Augustine"s On Christian Doctrine is the first and the most influential homiletical textbook in Christian history . . . (it) . . . set firm standards that became . . . the new orthodoxy . . . his first three chapters speak about sound biblical interpretation, and the fourth is primarily classical rhetoric adapted for the Christian preacher (Wilson 1992, 60-61).

Between 1517 and 1520, Luther"s thirty publications probably sold well over 300,000 copies . . . Lutheranism was from the first the child of the printed book, and through this vehicle, Luther was able to make exact, standardized and ineradicable impressions on the mind of Europe.  For the first time in human history, a great reading public judged the validity of revolutionary ideas (Dickens 1968,51).

Sermon literature also underwent significant changes as pulpit oratory became increasingly affected by the new powers of the press. . . Pedantic handbooks for preachers set forth rigid rules for pulpit oratory.  A revival of classical rhetoric . . . sparked by genuine Christian zeal . . . (produced)  lively sermons designed to keep congregations awake (because they) proved especially well suited to the new mass medium (Eisenstein 1979, 316.).

A speaker must always subordinate narration to the object of his discourse, the conviction or persuasion, which he wishes to effect.  He must not elaborate or enlarge upon some narrative merely because it is in itself interesting or follow the story step by step according to its own laws (Broadus 1979, 132).

New technologies compete with old ones . . .  for dominance of their world view. . . two great technologies confront each other . . . for control of the students minds. On the one hand, there is the world of the printed word with its emphasis on logic, sequence, history, exposition, objectivity, detachment and discipline. On the other, there is the world of television with its emphasis on imagery, narrative, presentness, simultaneity, (and) intimacy (Postman 1993, 16).

People are thinking, understanding, and speaking in ways that belie the homiletic textbooks we have inherited from the past.  So we need to think out the rhetorical ways and means appropriate to contemporary consciousness (Buttick 1994, 112).

Our task is not just to say the word, to tell the truth, but to get the truth heard, to effect a new hearing of the word . . . Without that hearing, glorious claims for content and substance remain functionally theoretical, boasts of ore as yet unmined (Craddock 1978, 19).