| Samenvatting (EN): |
Despite the rise of homiletics scholarship since the 1960s, churches in the West deal with a culture that contests its preaching. The Catholic Church encounters issues of credibility, mainline Protestant churches are numerically in decline, and Reformed confessional churches face increasing challenges in communicating the gospel. Protestant and Catholic preachers encounter a culture of skepticism, complacency, and contentment. The latter is observed by those attending confessional churches, be it Reformed or Roman Catholic. The former, skepticism, is the primary mode of life for many people in the megalopolises around the world—not always an immediate rejection of Christianity, but an uninformed doubt, a questioning attitude, or unbelief concerning religion. This culture, collectively, is a challenge for the preacher and the hearer—the churched and the unchurched. Philosophical endeavors, such as Nouvelle théologie, Radical orthodoxy, and (American) analytical philosophy, which have been appropriated in limited ways for homiletics, have made considerable efforts to present Christianity intelligibly and credibly.
Phenomenology, on the other hand, as practiced in recent French philosophy by Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, Emmanuel Falque, Jean-Yves Lacoste, and Jean-Luc Marion considers various themes and topics related to preaching, such as revelation, word, prayer, and Scripture. The field of homiletics has not made use of this approach of philosophy, even as the field of phenomenology has not considered preaching to be an area of consideration. Therefore, those with an interest in Reformed experiential preaching, in particular, could fruitfully apply implications of phenomenology—a philosophy that attempts to describe the structure of experiences.
As such, this study considers the central research question as to whether phenomenology, as in the French philosophy of the later part of the twentieth century, can be applied fruitfully to the preparation of the sermon or homily. This study, then, is structured in two parts: a conceptual foundation that is descriptive and exploratory in nature—assessing and appraising the works of twentieth-century French philosophers of phenomenology, particularly on the reading of Scripture and prayer; and a constructive proposal that identifies the possible limitations of phenomenology in French philosophy and suggests ways in which a contemplative phenomenology may be practiced while preparing a sermon or homily, manifesting itself as a witness, testimony, and confession. |
