Nov 2nd 09
Posted by justin in CCR691
Tolar-Burton, Vicki. Spiritual Literacy in John Wesley’s Methodism: Reading, Writing, and Speaking to Believe. Waco: Baylor UP, 2008. Print.
Chapter One: John Wesley and the Rhetorical and Literacy Practices of Early Methodism
Summary:
There’s a lot going on in this section as it introduces the reader to Wesley’s program and also serves as the blueprint
for the remainder of the book. Early in the introduction, VTB lays out a couple of different goals for her work:
- Describe how Welsey’s Methodism encouraged/sponsored “spiritual literacy” that took place in private, communal and institutional contexts (2).
- Illustrate how Wesley – due to his understanding of the transformative power of language in spirituality – wanted to make “ordinary” Methodists readers, writers and public speakers (1).
- First contextualize then “tell the story” of the opportunities that Wesley offered ordinary, “lower-class” folks through a community literacy that “included personal practices [journals/diaries], small group leadership, distance learning, and publication” (4). In this process, Burton hopes to demonstrate how Wesley’s rhetoric was representative of the doctrine of “priesthood of all believers” that emphasized egalitarian spiritual principles and the importance of lived, personal experience.
In the sections that follow, VTB contextualizes the Methodist movement in the contexts of religious rhetoric and the religious and political climate of the early 18th century. After building context, VTB explains the philosophic theories undergirding Wesley’s program (Lockean emphasis on the primacy of experience) before briefly sketching the class tensions that arose because of Wesley’s community literacy efforts. The first chapter closes with a mapping of the book in total.
Method:
- In addition to laying out these broad goals for the study, VTB also discusses her method in bits and pieces throughout the introduction. She is primarily interested in composing an account that treats with equal measure the principles and questions of New Literacy Studies scholars like David Barton, Mary Hamilton, Deborah Brandt, Ellen Cushman, and Beverly Moss as well as historians of literacy like Heidi Brayman Hackel and Jonathan Rose.
- VTB also recognizes that her study takes up intimately the study of women. In this way, VTB’s work is one of feminist historiography as it employs both a “her-story” approach to the literacy practices of women in the early Methodist movement as well as a narrative reconstruction of how women were integrated “into the fabric of Methodist history” (5). In so doing, she hopes to demonstrate women’s agency and power in this particular sociohistorical moment.
Useful Quotes:
- My approach to early Methodist texts is influence by the work of David Barton and Mary Hamilton, who suggest that literacy practices are “the general cultural ways of utilizing written language which people draw upon in their lives” and include people’s “awareness of literacy, constructions of literacy and discourses of literacy, how people talk about and make sense of literacy” (7) (9).
- My study stands with the poor, the ordinary people of early Methodism, by seeking to identify, describe, and understand the literacy and rhetorical practices available to the poor and laboring classes in eighteent-century Methodism and by including their texts and voices as they participated in practices of private, communal, and institutional spirituality. (7)
- John Wesley advocated a number of specific modes of public expression for Methodist women, including spiritual conversation, speaking or praying in bands and classes, public prayer, public testimony or witness, exhortation, and expounding upon a scriptural passage or some other text, which might be accomplished by reading it aloud and asking questions of those gathered as to meaning. (18)
- For Wesley, the rhetoric of experience begins with the perception of the inner and outer experience (which he describes using rhetorical language as a kind of testimony to the self from the senses). (24)
- This book describes the order of discourse in early Methodism, a new order that disrupted the British rhetorical hierarchy at the point of sexuality and politics. The uses wich Methodist women, the lower order, and the poor made of spoken and written discourse both threatened the existing order. . . and worked against revolutionary change. . . (30).
Questions:
- I find the sort of work that VTB is doing to be really, really interesting. I wonder what sorts of studies of “community literacy practices” are made possible through historiography?
- What are some of the ethical dilemmas of representation involved in rhetorical histories of literacy? How do we represent research subjects that are already in the process of being represented (through archival materials, second-hand sources, etc.)?
- Where do we start to look for materials like VTB is using in this text to examine the “lower ranks” of folks in the past? How is this process one of representation vs. re-creation? Does this diminish the ethos of the study at all?
- In keeping with the previous question, how do reclaimed rhetorical histories – I’m thinking of Glynn’s Rhetoric Retold or Unspoken: the Rhetoric of Silence – complicate our idea of historiography? How do the politics of research methods play into these reconstructions/re-evaluations? Are any historical methods apolitical? ( I doubt it, but it’s worth asking)
Oct 2nd 09
Posted by justin in Uncategorized
Cannon, Katie Geneva. Teaching Preaching: Isaac Rufus Clark and Black Sacred Rhetoric. New York: Continuum, 2002.
Introduction
In the introduction Cannon makes a couple of moves to situate the reader in the context of Black Sacred Rhetoric. She also dispels some arguments made against the need for teaching to be able to go preaching. I’ll use a list to hit the main points:
1. Clark believes to be a serious homelitician, one needs to develop a complex understanding of theoethical consciousness. (13)
2. According to Clark, there must be a person-in-the-know-of-God to accurately and effectively convey the word of God from the pulpit. In order to be a person-in-the-know, one must have taken a course of study with someone who was also a person-in-the-know of God. In essence, Clark argues that in order to be a preacher, you must know what you’re doing and have confronted the theoethical issues central to preaching. If you haven’t done as much, then Clark would call you a “jackleg” preacher. . . I’m thinking someone like Creflo Dollar or the other folks on the TBN network.
3. Clark’s main concern in his homiletics was to create “clear, precise, cogent, organized and prophetic utterance” (15).
4. In addition to knowing the what-meaning (Title/Subject) and the why meaning (Introduction) to Black sermonizing, Clark puts a huge emphasis on the how meaning. In other words, if the preacher “ain’t got no proposition, you ain’t got no sermon either” (16). So, to be effective it’s not enough to know what you’re going to talk about and why, you must also know how to go about talking it. To establish this how, Clark relies on homiletics. Homiletics, etymologically, can be broken down into homily and rhetoric. So, rejoined, homiletics is the production of persuasive preaching.
5. Clark notes that the essence of black preaching has developed in the following steps: 1) divine activity where the 2) Word of God is 3) proclaimed or announced 4) on a contemporary issue 5) with an ultimate response to our God. I suppose, to some degree, this is his homiletic method.
6. Clark rejects ideas that preachers don’t need education on the basis that Jesus didn’t have any. Instead, he points to the fact that Jesus studied at temple from age 12 and was a student of a man-in-the-know, John the Baptist.
To end the introduction we get a nice summation of Clark’s program:
Clark says he wants to use the most communicative kind of human expressions for convincing and persuading men and women to live creatively under God, which is crucial in expressing faith meaningfully for edifying the saints, and for winning unbelievers to our God. In essence, Clark’s language is grounded in a non-negotiable theological mandate: to apply the principles of rhetoric to the particular ends and means of the Christian gospel, for the purposes of liberation, reconciliation, and maturation in the deepest theological sense of the term, so that as professionals of the Word of God we will never be guilty of unconsciously tampering with people’s souls. (23).
Chapter One: Taking the Holiness of Preaching Seriously
In this chapter, Clark discusses why his class, his pedagogy and the act of preaching especially is a HOLY endeavor. After making reference to Rudolph Otto’s Idea of the Holy, Clark explains that his course and his person is Holy in the sense that [in Otto’s words]: “What Otto means primarily is the idea of the holy has to do with something distinctive in quality of being. Holy means something unique, something with a character that is different from the common world of things in existence. Holy means something that nothing else is like in kind, nowhere. And it is in light of this distinctive, unique, particular, different meaning of holy that Rudolph Otto endeavors to think and talk about God” (28).
Chapter Two: Bearing the Cross in This Holy Course
I’m beginning to really dig Clark’s homiletics at this point. This chapter also provided me with a good deal to think about in the way of response. Anyhow, in Chapter Two Clark lets his students know that they will be bearing a Cross of burden in his class. To understand what he means, he lets the students know that they will be confronted with three central questions in his class.
1. Nature equals what we preach.
2. Method equals how preaching is.
3. Purpose equals why preaching is.
After making the absolutely lovely (imo) statement that preaching is dialogic in that the preacher should preach with a claim and answer questions arising from that claim (even if they are unstated) to make effective preaching, Clarke spends a bit of time explaining WHY this class will be a Cross to bear. Basically, Clark is letting the students know that the class will be a rigorous examination of their own “home” beliefs (which are often wrong) as well as a confrontation with new material from their professors. To engage in this process, Clark lets his students know forcefully that they will be required to tear down their old assumptions and integrate new approaches to the “WHY.” In the end, Clark lets his students know he does this out of LOVE. He notes, “The cross in this preaching course represents the deepest meaning of God in the deepest logical sense. Love in the deepest theological sense always comes with a cross mingled with it. That is why the cross is the symbol that we wear. God’s love has a cross in it. In the deepest theological sense, we are going to lead you again and again to Calvary” (40).
Chapter Three: A- Not the, but a – Theological Interpretation of Preaching
Clark notes that this part of the journey is one called “knowledge.” He states that knowledge is midway between understanding and implementation. It is in this chapter that Clark lays out the 5 step program I mentioned in the introduction of these notes. First, he discusses preaching as divine activity. Clark says that the implications of divine activity are two-fold. We must remember that even though we are the speakers we must keep God first. Second, always remember that preaching is really a reenactment of the creation. Next Clark discusses Proclaimed or Announced. In this section Clark notes how we must proclaim because “the contemporary implication for us as proclaimers is that we require conferences with our king; it is necessary for us to steal away in a programmed way for prayer and meditation, so that people will be aware that their heavenly king has spoken to us first, in order for them to be convinced that they need to obey our proclaimed/announced orders” (45). In a sense, this is a ethos-building activity. Word of God is next on the list. For Clark, the meaning of Word of God is holy stuff being delivered to needy people for the purpose of feeding hungry souls the manna most satisfying. We get a couple of definitions in this section for Sin (being basically rebellious, defiant, arrogant in trying to take over in God’s kingdom, basically against God) and Grace (a gift of forgiveness and power, wherein pardon, amnesty, and friendship are proclaimed in a convincing way so that sinner’s can move to God’s presence one again) (46-8) Finally, Clark discusses Contemporary Issues. He states that these are “the recommended definition of preaching has to do with relevant, existential context, real-life situation to which the gospel is addressed, relating the gospel concretely to problems burdening people down beyond human repair, helping people to overcome in the ultimate sense of the term” (49). The last section for Clark is the “Ultimate Response to Our God.” For this fifth and final element, Clark is discussing a choice to either live by God’s decree or rebel against it. In a sense, this is the responsibility of the preacher, but also the congregants that listen to the preaching.
Chapter Four: A Critique of Contemporary Preaching
In this chapter Clark indicts many preachers using the model he laid out in Chapter Three. He notes that the main reason people aren’t going to church, or at least aren’t motivated by the churches that they attend, is because the preacher isn’t doing a good job translating the message using the aforementioned technique (or any technique that makes it relevant). To a large degree this is a problem in preacher’s not understanding the contemporary issues issue. Clark using Billy Grahamism to note how nearly a million folks attended his crusade and thousands were saved. They did this not because of TV presence, plants, etc., but because they were HUNGRY and Graham had the food for the soul. For Clark, the preaching situation in mainline Protestantism is “shallow and in the shadows.”
Chapter Five: The Sermonic Text
In this chapter, Clark discusses the three important elements that define sermonic preaching. First there is the text, second the text must be of the Word of God and third, the text is frequently taken from the Bible (99.44% of the time actually). In addition to the bible, a preacher can use hymns, church history, rituals (baptism, etc. BUT TAKE IT SERIOUSLY).
