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Eslinger’s subtitle, “Living Options in Homiletic Theory,” implies that the old options are all dead (see excerpt below). While this may be an overly harsh assessment, there is no question that thinking about homiletics changed in the period around the original publication of this book. Eslinger may not be responsible for that fact, but many of those he writes about are. The genius of this book is that the author focuses on five of the key influences in narrative preaching (see list below), describing each preacher’s method, evaluating them, and then offering a sample sermon for each preacher. The five preachers chosen, particularly Lowry, Craddock, and Buttrick, truly have become known as the key disseminators of what has since been labeled “The New Homiletic,” focusing on narrative, induction, and phenomenology. Any preacher seeking to understand both the recent history and the practice of homiletics today will want to look carefully at this book.
Table of Contents:
1. Charles Rice – Preaching as Story
2. Henry Mitchell – Narrative in the Black Tradition
3. Eugene Lowry – Narrative and the Sermonic Plot
4. Fred Craddock – The inductive Method in Preaching
5. David Buttrick – A Phenomenological Method
Excerpt: Preaching is in crisis. This awareness has been with us for some time now, reducing pastoral morale and congregational fervor. But the way out, toward new effectiveness in preaching, is not yet clear. What is quite evident, though, is that the old topical/conceptual approach to preaching is critically, if not terminally ill. No longer buttressed by scriptural interpretation or the cultural ethos, this old orthodoxy of a discursive homiletic method persists in many pulpits simply for lack of a clear-cut alternative. Preachers gather together in workshops on their craft and chuckle when the leader refers to “three points and a poem.” Yet many pastors return from such events and continue to preach the propositions and illustrations mainly because for them “it’s always been done this way,” and it has become a familiar and seemly harmless habit. The inertia is aided and abetted in some situations by the persistence of a preaching service in which Scripture is minimally in evidence and is separated from preaching by all sorts of other liturgical “preliminaries.” As the great, last act of the preaching service, the sermon is not embarrassed either by proximity to the Word or by ritual acts of response which would iimply that there has been some call. But for whatever reason, the old homiletic persists well past its prime and on into its decline. (p.11)