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According to experts in communication theory the human race
has lived in three communication eras. As Walter Ong puts it:
"... it has become evident ... in terms of communications media,
(that) cultures can be divided conveniently and informatively
into three successive stages: (1) oral or oral-aural (2) script,
which reaches critical breakthroughs with the invention first of
the alphabet and then later of alphabetic movable type, and (3)
electronic ... these three stages are essentially stages of
verbalization. Above all they mark transformations of the word."1
The biblical word of God has been preached in each of these
communication eras of Western culture. Biblical preaching in
these succeeding eras is powerfully shaped by the communication
culture in which it lives. Preaching in an oral-aural culture
differs markedly from preaching in the era of writing and print,
for example. Communication cultures change very rarely in human
history. As we have heard from Walter Ong, and

nearly all scholars in the communications field agree with his
demarcations, there have really only been two major shifts in
communication culture in the entire history of humankind. We
stand today at the beginning of the second major shifting of the
eras. We stand today at the transition between print and
electronic, literate and post-literate, cultures. This means that
the task of preaching must be reexamined in our day. Preaching in
an electronic culture will be quite different from preaching
shaped in the previous communications culture of print. Before we
can propose what form preaching might take in this new era we
need to understand more fully how the task of preaching was
impacted in the past by the communications culture in which it
lived. Examining the morphology of preaching up until this era of
change is the task of this chapter.

Preaching In An Oral-Aural Culture
The primary form of communication in an oral-aural culture was
the human voice. In an oral culture the word is something that
happens, an event in the world of sound. The ear, on the other
hand, is the sensory apparatus that receives the communication.
Marshall McLuhan taught us that the medium is not only the
message; the medium is also the massage. McLuhan believed that
the way we receive information (the massage) is as important as
the message itself. In an oral-aural world it is the ear that is
massaged. The fact that the ear is the primary receiving sense
shapes the nature of oratory, the nature of preaching, that can
be received by the ear.
The word is an event in the world of sound. This stands in
contrast to a word in the writing culture which will follow where
a word lives in space. Word as sound has several characteristics.
Sound is more real or existential than other sense objects. Sound
alone is related to present actuality rather than to the past or
future. Sound penetrates being. It comes out of the interior of
one person and reaches the interior of another person. Sound,
therefore, may be a physical means of God's

presence to us just as water and bread and wine in the sacraments
are physical signs of God's presence. The preached word enters
peoples bodies!
Where the sounded word is received by the listener there is
always community. It takes two to sound! Sound situates us in
human community in contrast to later print culture which makes it
possible to learn in isolation from other people. Print is the
technology of individualism. With sound we are placed in the
middle of a world and in simultaneity. Vision, on the other hand,
puts us in front of things and in sequentiality.2
It is only in recent times that scholars have discovered the
dynamics of oral cultures. "Oral literature" that has been handed
down to us from antiquity has traditionally been studied in the
same way as we study literature from the world of writing and
print. Breakthroughs into the dynamics of oral literature came
first with studies of Homer by Milman Parry during the first
third of this century. Parry discovered that Homer's poetry was
shaped completely by orality and not by literary canons. Oral
tellers of tales rhapsodized. According to Webster's New World
Dictionary our word rhapsody comes from two Greek words: rhaptein
which means one who strings songs together, and oide which means
song. To rhapsodize, therefore, is to stitch songs/stories
together.
The storyteller "... dips into a grab bag of phrases and
adjectives and, driven by the rhythms of the lyre, spins the yarn
of a tale. ... The lines of the Iliad do not consist of a series
of words. Those who sang it were driven by the rhythm of the
lyre. ... Homer sang as a prehistoric rhapsode. ... Homer's art
consisted of stitching together a series of stock words and
phrases."3
The philosopher, Plato, stood at the bridge between oral and
written culture. "Plato was not Greece's first author. But he was
the first uneasy man of letters. He was the first to write with
the conviction of the superiority of thought unrelated to
writing."4 In his monumental work, The Republic, Plato excluded
oral poets from his ideal world ruled by philosopher kings.
Walter Ong refers to this as the first media clash in

human history. "Plato's exclusion of poets from his Republic was
in fact Plato's rejection of the pristine aggregative, paratactic
oral style thinking perpetuated by Homer in favor of the keen
analysis or dissection of the world and of thought made possible
by the interiorization of the alphabet in the Greek psyche."5
In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong gives a detailed
description of the psycho-dynamics of oral culture.6 I will share
a brief summary of these psycho-dynamics and refer you to Ong's
work for further study. Ong indicates, first of all, that sounded
words have power and action. This world of sound is often
referred to as a "magical world of sound." "The interiorization
of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man [sic]
from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world."7
I witnessed this accent on sound as a missionary in Ethiopia
when I came to understand something of the oral precision of the
liturgy of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Until very recently the
priests in the Orthodox Church received a rather simple training.
What they learned most of all was how to recite the liturgy
perfectly. The illiterate worshiper expected a certain sound and
that sound could not be changed. We experience this in our time,
perhaps, when we read stories to children. They want the same
sounds; they don't want us to improvise. Sound has power!
Secondly, in an oral world one only knew what one could
recall. Knowledge was limited by memory. A speaker in this
culture had to have memnonic devices built into his/her
rhapsodizing so that the hearer would later remember the content.
Thirdly, the structure of sentences is quite simple. Rarely is
there a subordinative clause. Sentences are just added to each
other. We can observe this simple adding together of sentences in
many of the narrative portions of scripture. Sentences are simply
linked with the word and. In an earlier work I proposed what I
called "Jensen's First Law of a Boring Sermon." This law refers
to the fact that when we are bored by a sermon we ought to first
check out the length of the sentences. Usually

we will discover that the sentences are very long. What I
understand better at this juncture is that the length of the
sentence is not necessarily the problem. The problem lies with
sentences that are composed under the canons of print, sentences
that work wonderfully well for the eye. They do not work well for
ears, however.8
A fourth characteristic of oral cultures in terms of
communication is that the teller of the tale relies heavily on
stock words and phrases that can be shaped and reshaped to the
beat of the music. The rhapsodizer composed out loud by
improvisation. They composed and recited in the same moment.
A fifth characteristic is redundancy. The rhapsodizer repeated
some phrases over and over again. This is an aid to memory.
Written communication gives a sense of continuity outside of the
mind. Our eyes can always review the page for data we have
forgotten. Not so in an oral culture. The auditor relied heavily
on the redundant character of the story/song in order to be able
to remember what was said/sung.
Sixth, oral cultures repeat the traditions of their people
many times over. It is only in the telling of the tale that the
tradition of the people can be kept alive. The storyteller,
therefore, helps to conserve tradition.
Next, the tone of the story was often a tone of conflict.
There was a strong polemic in the storytelling of pre-literate
peoples. This story, after all, is the story that legitimizes
this community over and against other communities. The stories,
therefore, are filled with heros. The hero of the epic embodies
the values of the people. I am convinced that much of this tone
of conflict remains in the life of Martin Luther. Luther, like
Plato, lived at the junction of communication worlds. In Luther's
case it was the junction of a culture still oral in much of its
tone though it was filled with manuscript writing and stood on
the brink of the new world of the printing press. The oral world
was still lived in Luther. His polemical attitude is typical of
the culture of oral communications.
Eighth, we are to understand that storytellers in the oral
world lived in empathy with the world around them. When

writing came along the knower and the known became separated. One
wrote objectively about the world. One might describe a tree, for
example, by giving its type, its height, the color of its leaves
and so on. The tree is an object to be described.
The oral storyteller, on the other hand, generally described
the tree as a subject. They might speak of a tree as their
friend, one in whom they find comfort, one who has provided
solace for life.
Ninth, one of the purposes of the storyteller was to keep
balance in the life of the people. Oral cultures live very much
in the present which keeps itself in equilibrium by sloughing off
memories and stories which no longer have present relevance. In
his work on the Old Testament, Gerhard von Rad taught that each
generation of Israel had to become Israel. They did this by
bringing their story up to date. Some stories disappeared. New
stories arose. Contrast the Deuteronomic History and the
Chronicler's History, for example. Much of what these two
histories tell covers the same historical period. The stories
that are told, however, are very different because they were
written in different generational settings. Each generation
stitched stories together for its own time and place.
Finally, oral communities tell their stories in such a way
that particular stories are the way to grasp more abstract or
universal concepts. The particular is the way to the general. If
one wished to describe the universal reality of fear one did not
begin in the abstract by attempting to describe the dynamics of
fear. One began with the particular. One told a story in which
fear was a dominant motif.
This principle works just as well today. Good preaching should
also begin with the particular as the way to the universal. As an
old adage puts it: "one heart hit is universal."
I would like to engage in a bit of speculation. From these
clues about communication in an oral-aural culture I would like
to speculate on what form preaching might have taken in such a
world. My thesis is that preaching is shaped by the
communications culture of its time. How would oral-aural culture
shape preaching?

1. Stitching Stories Together
First of all, preaching might have consisted in stitching
stories together. This is really not speculation. We have the Old
Testament as our witness. Old Testament stories, like the stories
Homer knew, lived first in an oral environment. How, for example,
did the book of Genesis come together? That is, of course, a
highly complex question. At a simple level of the question,
however, I think it is possible to maintain that those who put
this material together had many stories to deal with and they
asked themselves in what order they ought to stitch these stories
together.
Much of the New Testament also shares in this story stitching
modality. Think of the way Jesus communicated to us the reality
of the Realm of God. He told stories. He said that the Realm of
God is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire
laborers for his vineyard. The Realm of God is as if someone
would scatter seed on the ground. The Realm of God is like a
mustard seed. The Realm of God is like a woman who took yeast and
mixed it with three measures of flour.
Our systematic instincts, a gift from the world of print, urge
us to organize Jesus' comments on the Realm of God in a more
linear way. "The Realm of God has six characteristics ...."
The gospels are clear examples of stories being stitched
together. We can see the gospel writers in our mind's eye with
many, many stories at their disposal. Which stories are they to
tell? In what order? Here, too, our linear instincts go to work.
Instead of dwelling on the way Matthew or Mark or Luke stitched
stories together we readily move to the more complex task of
understanding the theology of Matthew. The relatively new
biblical discipline of narrative criticism is a helpful tool in
enabling us to discover the narrative or story character of much
of biblical literature.
One of the things that struck me in my research in the world
of oral-aural communication is the fact that stories that were
stitched together did not have a linear plot line. At first I

was dumbstruck by this reality. My linear mind couldn't conceive
of such a thing. A story has to be linear! It must move from a to
z. It must move from beginning to ending. How else can one tell a
story or many stories?
In an oral-aural culture stories were stitched together in an
episodic manner. The goal of the story was not to move the
listener along from point a to point z. The goal was that the
listener participate in the inner life of the story: "The ancient
listener or reader encountered the text not by having it
'explained' but by entering its world."9 The goal of the
storyteller is that the listener participates in the world of the
story. This is one of the fundamental reasons that I believe that
a return to the world of story in our preaching is so vital
today. The gospel message told in story form invites people to
participate in the very reality of its life.
One of the critiques that I have heard about the use of story
in preaching is that the story category presents a problem
because it is always a story out of the past. Preaching, the
argument continues, is to be a present tense proclamation of
God's saving grace. Because a story is out of the past it cannot
be used for present tense proclamation. This criticism simply
fails to understand the power of story to invite us into the
reality of its world. We participate, in the present tense, when
a powerful story is told.
Once I got over the initial shock and could see that stories
could have a purpose other than developing a linear plot, I was
able to find contemporary examples of this ancient art. I would
maintain that most of the storytelling art of Garrison Keillor is
precisely episodic and not linear in nature. When I listen to
Keillor's stories on the radio or when I read them in his books I
do not necessarily listen or read in order to move toward the
resolution of the story. Keiller's stories very seldom resolve
themselves. It is not because of the ending of the story that we
listen and read so intently. We listen and read intently because
we enjoy the journey itself. We go to Lake Wobegone in our
imagination. We identify somehow with the populace of Lake
Wobegone. We know these people! We are

there. We participate. It is not the way the story ends that
gives it its power over our imagination!
Keillor's stories highlight another characteristic of oral-
aural culture. His stories are masterpieces of the way one moves
from the particular to the universal. If I had been the program
manager of a radio station 15 years ago and had been approached
by Keillor to see if my station would carry his program, I'm sure
I would have turned him away forthwith. Who in the world is
interested in stories of Norwegians in a mythical town in
Minnesota? As it turned out, people throughout the world are
interested in Lake Wobegone. Keillor's stories are very
particular stories of very particular people but they strike a
universal chord in the human spirit. (Except perhaps with the
people who actually live in rural Minnesota!) This living example
of the universal relevance of a particular world is a very
important fact to remember in regard to preaching! The particular
is the best way to the universal!

2. The Use Of Repetition
The storyteller/preacher in the oral-aural world had to tell
stories in such a way that the auditors could remember. This
required the use of significant repetition. The auditors could
not get printed copies or audio cassettes of the sermon. They
took away what they heard and remembered. It was important,
therefore, for the teller of the tale to tell it in such a way
that it could be recalled by the listener.
Preaching in the African-American culture retains this strong
use of repetition. We've all heard the advice of the African-
American preacher who said he first tells people what he will
tell them; then tells them; then tells them what he told them.
African-American preaching is preaching that almost always has
what I like to call a living center. There is a center, a focus
to the presentation. That center is returned to again and again
in the preaching event.

3. Situational Vs. Abstraction
Universal themes were treated through the instrumentality of
particular stories. The tellers of the biblical stories had

wonderful stories to tell! It was through the telling of
particular stories about Abraham and Moses and David and Jesus
that the preachers communicated the universal relevance of God's
self-revelation to Israel. The Jewish community has always been
and remains basically a storY-telling people of faith.
Our minds can follow people much better than they follow
ideas. In my Lutheran tradition we have many complex theological
realities that we seek to communicate. Luther, for example,
believed that the Christian person was totally righteous and
totally sinful at the same time (simul justus et peccator). This
is a very difficult reality to describe in the abstract. It is
not so difficult, however, to tell stories of people who are
saint and sinner simultaneously. I think of Peter in the gospel
story. In Matthew's story, chapter 16, we see Peter as two
different persons in almost the same moment. Peter answers Jesus'
question about his identity. He says: "You are the Messiah, the
Son of the living God (Matthew 16:16)."
Jesus went on to tell the disciples that he must go to
Jerusalem and undergo great suffering. Peter would have none of
it! "God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you." And
Jesus said: "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to
me ... (Matthew 16:22)."
Peter. In one moment saint. In the very next moment sinner. We
can recognize ourselves in such a story. We are much like Peter.
We are of two minds in relation to Jesus Christ. We are saint and
sinner in the same moment. A story that tells a particular
situation becomes for us the way to insight into universal truth.

4. A Tone Of Conflict
Preaching joined the battle against the enemies of faith.
Preachers in a dominantly oral culture told the stories of the
Bible as a way of establishing their identity as the people of
God. It is the people of Israel, not the Canaanites, not the
Assyrians, not the Babylonians who are the people of God.
Storytelling/preaching served this end. Preaching established
Israel as the people of God. Preaching told stories of how God

did battle with chaos in order to bring this world and this
people into existence. Preaching told stories of how God fights
the battles of this people, Israel. Preaching told stories of how
God brought this people out of bondage, through the sea, into a
land flowing with milk and honey.
I indicated earlier that this tone of conflict was very much
alive in Martin Luther. His preaching, too, had a strong tone of
conflict. "He (Luther) preached as if the sermon were not a
classroom, but a battleground! Every sermon was a battle for the
souls of the people ... a sermon was an apocalyptic event that
set the doors of heaven and hell in motion, a part of the actual
continuing conflict between the Lord and Satan."10

5. Right Brain Communication
Modern studies have established the difference between the
work of our right brain and our left brain. The right hemisphere
of the brain is, for example, holistic, artistic, symbolic,
intuitive and creative. The left hemisphere of the brain is
logical, mathematical, linear, sequential, intellectual and
analytic.11

6. Metaphors Of Participation
Several years ago John Dominic Crossan made a distinction
between two types of metaphors. Since story is really an extended
metaphor it is useful to ask how the story form of metaphor
works. Crossan distinguished between metaphors of illustration
and metaphors of participation. "... there are metaphors in which
information precedes participation so that the function of
metaphor is to illustrate information about the metaphor's
referent; but there are also metaphors in which participation
precedes information so that the function of metaphor is to
create participation in the metaphor's referent."12
To borrow the use of this understanding one would have to
conclude that storytelling and preaching in the oral-aural
culture told stories as metaphors of participation. The story was
not an illustration of a point so that once one grasped the

point the story was dispensable. These stories were rather
metaphors of participation. The goal of the storyteller was to
invite participation in the world of the story.
Contemporary literature in homiletics has picked up this
distinction. In most contemporary works on homiletics the point
is made that preaching must move from a time when stories were
told as illustrations of intellectual points to a time when
stories are told in such a way that the listener is grasped by
the reality of the story through the story itself. The idea of
using stories as illustrations for the ideas of a sermon has
fallen on hard times.

7. Thinking In Story
The primary thinkers in early Israel were the storytellers.
The hermeneutic of these early thinkers was a hermeneutic of
"thinking in story." I am indebted to Thomas Boomershine for his
pioneering work in this area. I still remember him making this
point in a storytelling workshop which I attended. That was a
powerful "Aha!" moment for me. Much of what I had been thinking
about in terms of communication eras came together for me in that
moment. Marshall McLuhan has also understood that myths,
aphorisms and maxims, all forms of story, are characteristics of
oral culture.
I hasten to add that "thinking in story" is an alternative way
of thinking! It's not that "thinking in ideas" is real thinking
and any other way of thinking is unthinkable. "Thinking in story"
is certainly a mode of thinking that seems new to minds shaped by
the linear massage of print. Thinking can be done in ideas;
thinking can also be done in stories. "Thinking in story" is a
gift given to us by oral-aural cultures which can be
reappropriated today in a post-literate world.

8. Implications For Today's Preaching
It will be my argument in this work that the clues to the
renewal of preaching to people in our communications culture lie
in what I have projected to be the characteristics of preaching
in oral-aural culture. Preaching, after all, is an oral

form of communication! In my Lutheran tradition we speak much
about the power of the word in baptism and the eucharist. We have
not always understood as clearly that the preached word also has
power. The spoken word reaches the interior of the listener.
Sound, therefore, can be every bit as much a means of grace as
water and bread and wine.
Preaching is oral communication. One of the great problems
with preaching in our day is that preaching as we have come to
know it is basically preaching formed under the conditions of
literate culture. Literate preaching is in difficulty in a post-
literate culture. Our modern world has been re-oralized by
electronic communication. The world of silent print is behind us.
Sound has returned to our ears through the communication media of
radio and television. Walter Ong calls the world of electronic
communication a "secondarily oral" world. Our present
communication culture, based in electronic communication, has
much in common with the oral-aural world of communication. I
believe that one of the major sources for the renewal of
preaching today will come through going back to the future. It is
from a previous communication culture that we can find some of
the guidance we need for preaching in our audio-visual world. The
most important thing we can learn from our look "back to the
future" is insight into an old/new way of thinking: thinking in
story!

Preaching In A Literate Culture
Literate culture comes into being in two stages. The first
stage is the development of writing and particularly the
invention of the phonetic alphabet. The second stage of this era
which encompasses most of Western human history is the invention
of the printing press by Gutenberg in the 1450s. Stage one
necessarily precedes stage two for without the phonetic alphabet
there would have been no Gutenberg.
This movement from oral to literate culture represents a shift
in the human sensorium. Oral-aural culture massaged the ear. A
culture of writing massages the eye. As McLuhan often

put it, Western civilization (we are not talking here about the
world of the East) has given us an eye for an ear. It is this
shift in sensory massage that we must comprehend in order to
understand the enormous changes brought about through the
invention of the alphabet.
Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders go so far as to say that it is
alphabetic writing that brings the human race into existence.
This is so because of the unique character of the phonetic
alphabet which developed most fully in Greece somewhere around
720-700 B.C. "Pure, mature phonetic writing, which was discovered
only once ... is an oddity among writing systems in the same way
that the loudspeaker is an oddity among trumpets. The alphabet
records only sounds .... The alphabet does exactly the opposite
of what most hieroglyphics and ideograms and, most importantly,
what Semitic letters were created to do."13
It is important to notice this distinction made between Greek
and Semitic culture. It is most probably the case that Hebrew
culture, which did not use the phonetic alphabet, remained,
perhaps precisely for this reason, an oral storytelling culture
in contradistinction to the rational world of scientific thought
developed by the Greeks. These differences in alphabet and
sensory massage (eye or ear) produce enormous differences in the
way in which theology has been done in the Western world. Early
Christian theology soon left the world of the ear and entered the
world of the eye. Is it not the case that the gospel writers were
orally driven storytellers while Saint Paul was a literate Greek?
This matter of the uniqueness of the phonetic alphabet needs
further comment. McLuhan puts it this way. "Only the phonetic
alphabet makes a break between eye and ear, between semantic
meaning and visual code; and thus only the phonetic writing has
the power to translate man from the tribal to the civilized
sphere, to give him an eye for an ear."14 McLuhan asserts that no
other people in the world have been able to develop a true
alphabetic writing. "By the meaningless sign linked to the
meaningless sound we have built the shape and

meaning of Western man [sic]."15 The Western world, that is, is a
world of the eye. The ear is no longer necessary for learning.
The western world is a world dominated by the sense of the eye.
Words on paper differ in many ways from words of speech. Words
on paper take up space. They can be present all-at-once before
our eyes as indeed the words on this page are all present for you
simultaneously. Words can now be dissected into spatial parts.
Words can be rearranged and recorded in many ways. The word
processor, which is an extension of the eye, gives one a total
sense of control of these words in space.
Those people who first worked with the phonetic alphabet
experienced the beginning of a revolution! Their human
consciousness was restructured by the linear massage of print!16
I would describe it as something like putting new "software" into
the human brain. The mind learns how to think like an eye. The
mind learns to think in linear patterns. As Ong puts it, "It
appears no accident that formal logic was invented in an
alphabetic culture."17 McLuhan says, "The Greeks invented both
their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization
of the alphabet."18 This new alphabetic software package for the
brain changed the way humans think! "... during all our centuries
of phonetic literacy we have favored the chain of inference as
the mark of logic and reason."19
Humanity moved from ear to eye; from a world of hearing
dominance to a world of sight dominance. This is also a movement,
some suggest, from a culture dominated by right brain thought to
a world dominated by left brain thought. Walter Ong quotes a
scholar by the name of Kerckhove to this effect: "... more than
other writing systems, the completely phonetic alphabet favors
left-hemisphere activity in the brain, and thus on
neurophysiological grounds fosters abstract, analytic thought."20
Print situates in space. Eugene Lowry, in his book titled,
Doing Time In The Pulpit, indicates that this world of words on
paper has come to dominate preaching in our time. Our current
forms of preaching, that is, are forms shaped by the

world of print; the world of the eye. He says that when he
conducts preaching workshops he finds that almost every preacher
he encounters, from whatever tradition, begins the sermon
building task with the assumption that one must first structure
one's ideas in space. I take this to mean that we all begin by
formulating an outline which is a spatial way of putting our
ideas together.
I mention Lowry at this point as a prelude of what is to come
in terms of our preaching task today. Lowry wants to move us from
structuring our sermons under the categories of space to ordering
them under categories of time. He wants to move us, that is, from
thinking in ideas to thinking in narrative event and experience.
But we are getting ahead of our story.21
In the world of the eye, in the world of the linear massage,
linearity now comes to dominate storytelling. Up until the time
of print, Ong tells us, the only linearly plotted story line was
that of the drama which from antiquity had been controlled by
writing. We have spoken earlier of the fact that stories were
told in an oral-aural culture in order for auditors to
participate in the story and not necessarily to have them follow
a linear plot.
The world of writing, that is, fundamentally changes the way
thinking takes place. We must understand that this shift did not
come about instantly with the development of the phonetic
alphabet. Very few people in any culture were educated in the
ways of writing and reading. For perhaps as many as 2,000 years
the world of orality and the world of writing lived side by side.
The educated elite lived in the world of writing. They are the
ones who have passed the culture on to us. The culture as we have
received it, therefore, is a culture of ideas and abstract
thought. The world of the ordinary citizen remained very much an
oral world. It is only in the late middle ages that writing
begins to take hold of the whole culture. Even then vestages of
oral culture were powerful. Those who could read, for example,
usually read aloud. Sound was still a part of the culture. Saint
Augustine, for example, was stunned that Ambrose could read without making any sounds! The world of
silent print had not as yet developed.
It is in stage two of the communications culture of writing
that the impress of linearity begins to shape whole cultures.
This transition comes with the development of the printing press
in the 1450s. The printing press democratized the linear eye
massage and set the stage for a rapid shift in human
consciousness. Walter Ong puts it this way, "Thus the development
of writing and print ultimately fostered the breakup of feudal
societies and the rise of individualism. Writing and print
created the isolated thinker, the man with the book, and
downgraded the network of personal loyalties which oral cultures
favor as matrices of communication ..."22
McLuhan says: "... print carries the individuating power of
the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could
ever do. Print is the technology of individualism."23
Descartes signified this shift into an individuated culture
when he said, "I think, therefore I am." An individual thinker,
cut off from human community, could now make a unique claim to
individual being. That's only possible when one is surrounded by
books, by the world of silent print, as companions in thought.
Humans in an oral culture might have said something like: "We
talk, therefore, we are."
We recognize immediately that Martin Luther is a modern man, a
man of print. Against the weight of empire and church, against
the weight of accepted human communities, Luther could say: "Here
I stand." And there he stood, with his books. So it was in the
church. Authority in the medieval church was vested in the
teaching office of the church. Authority was vested in people.
Luther stood with the book of the Bible and his own books against
this traditional world.24
The very locus of believing changed. With the advent of the
world of print we come to a world where seeing is believing. That
is a far remove from the oral world where hearing is believing.
I did not realize until I moved into the world of media how
far reaching is the significance of the printing press for

Protestant tradition. Much of Luther's success as a reformer can
be attributed to the fact that the printing press was at hand and
his material could be spread far and wide. No reformer prior to
Luther had this technology available. The interesting thing to me
is that Luther appears to remain a quite oral person in the midst
of this emerging literate world. Much of the material that we
have from Luther comes from the notes of his students. Luther
delivered the material orally and it was brought to print later.
I believe that it is true to say of the Lutheran Church that
it is the first church in the history of the world to be helped
to birth and helped to definition by the mass media. That mass
media, of course, is print. Luther, therefore, who is very much
an oral person, becomes probably the first mass media figure in
human history. Some authorities say that Luther's German Bible
was the first mass media product that had an impact on the daily
life of people. His Bible translation gave the German people a
common language.
Pierre Babin quotes Richard Molard to the following effect:
"Protestantism was born with printing and has been the religion
in which printing -- the printed Bible, the catechism, newspapers,
and journals -- has played a vital part. The present crisis in
these publications is undoubtedly a sign of a very deep crisis of
identity. How is it possible to be a Protestant in a world in
which radio and television are the easiest forms of
communication?"25
Molard begins to point to the crisis now faced by literate
protestantism. For the moment, however, let us reflect a bit
further on the very deep connection between protestantism and
print. Something as simple as Luther's Catechism became a
bestseller. Here was a whole new way of teaching! And it was
standardized. Uniform. Everyone had the same information.
Lutherans, a people of the book, would later craft the Augsburg
Confession and gather all their basic documents in a book: The
Book of Concord,1580. Lutheranism and books belong together. It
was not possible until the invention of the printing press to
make use of books in this way. Prior to the

standardized possibilities brought by print authority had to rest
in the hands of people!
Zwingli and Calvin moved even further into the print ordered
world. In the arena of worship, for example, Luther basically
kept the liturgy which the church had handed down and purged it
of the elements that he thought were doctrinally suspect. Zwingli
and Calvin used a book, the Bible, as the ordering power of
worship life. "The radical reshaping of the liturgy by Zwingli
denied any such sacramental relationship; materiality and faith
were separated. The believer was oriented to God solely by faith
and scripture. Christian worship centered not on the eucharist
but on the reading, hearing and interpretation of the Bible.
Emptied of visual images, liturgical space became a place in
which preaching and the reading of scripture were paramount."26
The mainline Protestant churches are churches largely shaped
by the technology of print. That is a very large part of the
dilemma facing these churches today. Print technology is being
replaced by electronic technology. Churches that were born out of
their ability to function with the new technology of print must
now make an adjustment to the world of electronic communication.
The success of these churches into the 21st century will depend a
great deal upon their ability to adapt to today's media.
Print media, of course, did not conquer the world in a day. It
took time for print to become established as the communications
media of the day. Most sources indicate that it was not until the
18th century that print media became dominant in the western
world. According to Neil Postman, 18th and 19th century America
may have been the most dominant print culture that had existed up
until that time. Gregor Goethals suggests that the strength of
Christianity in America, shaped by the tradition of Calvin and
Zwingli, is at least partly responsible for this fact.27 Postman
indicates that the literacy rates in early American life were
very high. Books sold at astounding rates. The book most widely
read was the Bible.

Postman, in his book titled, Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, is fascinated by
literate America. His book is a lament about the loss of print-
shaped America. He cites Aldous Huxley's Brave New World
approvingly. Huxley predicted that we would fall in love with our
new technologies and become enslaved to them. George Orwell, in
1984, was wrong. Our new technology did not become Big Brother
watching over us with a menacing glance. As Postman puts it: "Big
Brother turns out to be Howdy Doody."28 In other words, we are
being enslaved by our new technologies but we don't recognize our
slavery. In fact, we like what we see and hear. We are, as his
book title puts it, amusing ourselves to death.
Postman's work is very much relevant to a book on preaching.
As you will have noticed, the subtitle of his book indicates that
he is really interested in the shape of public discourse.
Peaching, of course, is public discourse. Preaching is not the
subject of Postman's book but his comments are very helpful in
understanding how public discourse has been changed in America.
Here is the thesis of his work. "... this book is an inquiry into
and a lamentation about the most significant American cultural
fact of the second half of the 20th century: the decline of the
Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television.
This change-over has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the
content and meaning of public discourse, since two media so
vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas."29
My overall thesis is basically similar to Postman's.
Electronic technology is taking over from print technology.
Discourse is changing. I am more optimistic than Postman that the
public discourse of preaching can adapt itself to this new
technology. Before we come to that discussion, however, we need
to note Postman's very important contribution as he discusses how
discourse is shaped by typography. Postman is very helpful in
understanding what literate discourse is all about.
"In the 18th and 19th centuries, religious thought and
institutions in America were dominated by an austere, learned

and intellectual form of discourse that is largely absent from
religious life today."30 The point that he is making is very
important. He shows us how print shapes oratory! The lineal,
analytical structure of print was mirrored in the expository
prose of the day. He draws three conclusions for the shape of
discourse when the Typographic Mind is at work.
1. Oratory, including preaching, that is based on the written
word has a propositional content. It communicates ideas. In a
print culture one learns to think in ideas. (Remember that in an
oral culture one learned to think in stories.) "Whenever language
is the principal of communication -- especially language
controlled by the rigors of print -- an idea, a fact, a claim is
the inevitable result ... there is no escape from meaning when
language is the instrument guiding one's thought."31
2. Oratory based on print is serious discourse because it
demands to be understood. "... when an author and reader are
struggling with semantic meaning, they are engaged in the most
serious challenge to the intellect."32
3. Oratory based on print follows a line of thought. It is
crafted as a rational argument. "In a culture dominated by print,
public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent, orderly
arrangement of facts and ideas .... It is not by accident that
the Age of Reason was coexistent with the growth of print
culture."33
Postman reflects also upon the preaching of the time. He tells
us that the great preachers of the age were highly literate in
their presentation. Jonathan Edwards, he writes, "... read his
sermons, which were tightly knit and closely reasoned expositions
of theological doctrine. Audiences may have been moved
emotionally by Edward's language, but they were, first and
foremost, required to understand it."34
Postman, therefore, would posit that preaching based on the
Typographic Mind (his term) would be a communication of ideas
following a line of thought toward the goal that people could
understand what was being communicated. As I gave Postman's
theses some thought I realized that this was exactly how I was
taught to preach. Preaching was about the proper

ordering of ideas. I didn't take any advanced courses in
preaching when I was in seminary. The basic advanced course that
was offered was a study of the great literate preachers of the
19th century. I doubt that anyone would offer such an advanced
course in preaching today. The literate preaching of the 19th
century would simply not work in our post-literate world.
Thomas Troeger, in his work titled Imagining A Sermon, gives a
summary of what literate preaching is like that echoes much of
what Postman has just said. Troeger tells us that when the
classical rhetoric of Greece dominated what he calls "the city of
homiletical wisdom," that city gave instruction that preaching
should be:
ùthe clarity of the argument;
ùthe logic of the outline;
ùthe tightness of the transitions;
ùthe development of the main point;
ùthe persuasiveness of the reasoning;
ùhow well the illustrations fit the principles;
ùand the theological defensibility of the message.35
The dominant motif of Postman's book is his establishment of
the fact that public discourse has been so radically altered by
the advent of electronic media that the kind of serious,
propositional, linear discourse of the past will not work
anymore. He cites the Lincoln-Douglas debates as an example. They
debated the issues for seven hours a day and did not feel they
had time to fully explore the issues. In our day we get
presidential debates that call for a two minute answer, a two
minute response and a one minute rebuttal! Television has given
us a peek-a-boo world of rapid fire information coming at us in
small bits and pieces. Sound bytes on the evening news have
shrunk from 45 seconds a few years back to 10 to 15 today.
Postman argues, and it is difficult to disagree, that television
is changing public discourse. It has become difficult, if not
impossible, to communicate serious ideas through this medium! I
think Postman is essentially correct in his analysis.
In a chapter titled "Shuffle Off to Bethlehem," Postman
applies his thesis to religion and television. He believes that

television is equally inimical to the presentation of serious
religious ideas. In the first place, television is presented
without apology as entertainment. "Everything that makes religion
an historic, profound and sacred human activity is stripped away;
there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and
above all no sense of spiritual transcendence."36
Secondly, he argues that television preachers cannot begin to
compare to the great learning, theological subtlety and powerful
expositional skills of the great literate preachers. "What makes
these television preachers the enemy of religious experience is
not so much their weakness but the weaknesses of the medium in
which they work ... not all forms of discourse can be converted
from one medium to another."37
Postman makes a powerful case that television has changed the
nature of public discourse. I agree with his argument. It is
certainly true that the political environment has suffered
because of the peek-a-boo style in which political ideas are now
presented. Images count more than substance. This is a real
problem.
I do not, however, agree with Postman when he applies his
argument to religion and television. Postman believes that
"literate" Christianity is doomed by electronic forms of
communication. We will no longer be able to communicate our faith
in the literate manner to which most of us have been accustomed.
Postman's problem is that he equates the content of Christianity
with the massage of the eye, with the form of thought created by
print. What must be remembered is that the world of the Bible has
been handed on from generation to generation for hundreds of
years prior to the development of the printing press. The
Christian faith does not need literate culture in order to
communicate its message! And how did they do it? They told
stories! If we told stories in the past as a way of thinking, as
a way of communicating our faith, we can do it again today. We
can go "back to the future" to find a way to communicate the
biblical story in a post-literate world. That will be the burden
of my next chapter. We can learn again how to "think in stories."

Characteristics Of Print-shaped Preaching
I would like to close this chapter by listing what seem to me
to be the basic characteristics of preaching under the impress of
print. It ought to be clear that print-shaped preaching has taken
many patterns over the ages. It does seem to me, however, that
one can extrapolate from the history of preaching certain common
characteristics. Having read a goodly number of homiletics
textbooks, and having given a good deal of thought to the nature
of preaching in a print-driven world, I would propose the
following characteristics:

1. Sermons are linear in nature.
We joke a lot in the world of homiletics about sermons that
are "three points and a poem." It is assumed in the Lutheran
tradition that the three point sermon is a "Lutheran" sermon. Not
so! Three point sermons have been around for an incredibly long
time. In 1322 Robert of Basevorn wrote an influential treatise on
preaching titled, The Form of Preaching. Basevorn, as others in
his day, prescribes a sermon in six parts: (1) theme: a
scriptural quotation; (2) protheme: introduction of the theme
followed by a prayer; (3) repetition of theme with explanation of
the sermon's purpose; (4) division or partition of theme (usually
into threes) with 'authorities' of various sorts to 'prove' each
division; (5) subdivision of theme; (6) amplification of each
division."38
Basevorn makes this argument for three points: "... in this
method of preaching only three statements, or the equivalent of
three, are used in the theme -- either from respect to the
Trinity, or because of a threefold cord is not easily broken, or
because this method is most followed by Bernard, or, as I think
more likely, because it is more convenient for the set time of
the sermon."39
Or consider Francois Fenelon (1651-1715) who wrote the first
modern (in the world of print) rhetoric. He tells us that in
every sermon there ought to be an orderly succession of proofs.
He summarizes this way: "First, principles; then facts;

and from these draw the conclusions which you desire to reach;
taking care to arrange the reasoning in such a manner as that the
proofs will admit of being borne in mind easily ... the hearer
should feel more and more the growing weight of truth."40
Literate preaching is linear preaching!

2. Structures ideas in space.
I believe Lowry is correct when he informs us that the first
task preachers do under the canons of print in preparing a sermon
is to "structure their ideas in space." First, we get an outline
on paper. With that done we are well on the way.

3. Sermons contain propositions as the main points.
Preaching under the impress of literate culture is
fundamentally about the delivery of ideas. The classic rhetorical
tradition of Greece came to dominate the form of Christian
preaching early on. Saint Augustine endorsed this tradition and
his work on preaching dominated Christian thought about preaching
for many centuries. Greek rhetoric placed a heavy emphasis on the
logic of persuasion. Ideas reigned!
Alan of Lille, the author of the first systematic treatment of
homiletics in the 800 years since Saint Augustine, argued clearly
that preaching is about forming hearers through the path of
reason. "Preaching is an open and public instruction in faith and
behavior, whose purpose is the forming of men (sic); it derives
from the path of reason."41

4. Sermons are analytical in nature.
The task of preaching is to analyze the ideas of a text. Texts
that are narrative in nature are analyzed to find their ideas!
The sermon is then formulated around the ideas. The narrative is
left behind!

5. Left-brain communication.
Those things which characterize the activity of the left
hemisphere of the brain dominate the preaching task.

6. Metaphors of illustration.
Stories are used to illustrate the points of the sermon. They
are dispensable once the listener has the point.
In his book, The Cry For Myth, Rollo May asserts that there
are two main ways in which human beings have communicated. One is
a rationalistic language. "This is specific and empirical, and
eventuates in logic. In this kind of communication the persons
who are speaking the words are irrelevant to the truth or
falsehood of what they say."42
The second way in which humans communicate, May claims, is by
way of myth. May defines myth as ". . . a drama which begins as a
historical event and takes on its special character as a way of
orienting people to reality. The myth, or story, carries the
values of the society . . . . The narration always points toward
totality rather than specificity; it is chiefly a right brain
function . . . . Whereas empirical language refers to objective
facts, myth refers to the quintessence of human experience, the
meaning and significance of human life. The whole person speaks
to us, not just the brain.43
May's analysis is an excellent summary of two ways of human
communication; two ways in which the brain functions to
communicate reality to others. In literate culture it has
basically been the case that preaching has communicated through
"rationalistic language." Preaching has been a left brain
operation. Earlier human cultures communicated the meaning of
reality by telling stories. Preaching in such cultures was more
of a right brain operation. Preaching in our time will need to
make use of both ways of human communicating. Human communication
in our time has until very recently been dominated by the left
brain. We will need to learn some lessons from oral cultures in
order to learn to think also in more wholistic, right brain
patterns.

7. Thinking in ideas.
It is pretty much assumed in this world of thought that the
task of preaching is the presentation of ideas. This is how one
thinks. We study texts in search of ideas. Once we have our

ideas the sermon comes into shape. Commentaries are a great help
in this matter and they, too, are chiefly about the ideas found
in the text. The hermeneutical premise is that thinking in ideas
is the way to discover and present the material.
In the chart below the characteristics of preaching shaped in
an oral culture are placed side by side with the characteristics
of preaching shaped by a literate culture.

Preaching In An Oral Culture Preaching In A Literate Culture
1. Stitcting stories together. Linear development of ideas.
2. Use of repetition. Structure ideas in space.
3. Situational vs. abstraction. Propositions as the main points.
4. A tone of conflict. Analytical in nature.
5. Right brain communication. Left brain communication.
6. Metaphors of participation. Metaphors of illustration.
7. Thinking in story. Thinking in ideas.


1. Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word, (Minneapolis, University
of Minnesota Press, 1967) p. 17.
2. See the discussion in Ong.,
Ibid., pp. 111-138.
3. Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, The
Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, (New York, Vintage Books,
1989) pp. 15, 18, 19.
4. Ibid., p. 24.
5. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the
Word, (New York, Methuen, 1982) p. 28.
6. Ibid., Chapter 3, pp. 31-49.
7. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of
Typographic Man, (Toronto, The University of Toronto Press, 1962)
p. 27.
8. Richard A. Jensen, Telling The Story: Variety and Imagination
in Preaching, (Minneapolis, Augsburg, 1980) p. 38.
9. Don M. Wardlaw, editor, Preaching Biblically: Creating Sermons
in the Shape of Scripture, (Philadelphia, Westminster Press,
1983) p. 34.
10. Fred W. Meuser, Luther The Preacher, (Minneapolis, Augsburg,
1983) p. 25.
11. See Pierre Babin, The New Era in Religious Communication,
(Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1991) p. 55 for a complete chart of
left hemisphere and right hemisphere functions of the brain. 12.
John Dominic Crossan, In Parables: The Challenge of the
Historical Jesus, (New York, Harper & Row, 1973) p. 14.

13. Ivan Illich, op. cit., p. 9.
14. McLuhan, Gutenberg, op cit., p. 38.
15. Ibid., p. 65.
16. See Ong, Orality, op. cit., Chapter 4 titled: "Writing
restructures consciousness."
17. Ong, Presence, op. cit., p. 45.
18. McLuhan, op. cit., p. 75.
19. McLuhan, Understanding, op. cit., p. 87.
20. Ong, Orality, op. cit., p. 91.
21. Eugene L. Lowry, Doing Time in the Pulpit: The Relationship
Between Narrative and Preaching, (Nashville, Abingdon Press,
1985).
22. Ong, Presence, op. cit., p. 54.
23. McLuhan, Gutenberg, op. cit., p. 193.
24. "The new homogeneity of the printed page seemed to inspire a
subliminal faith in the validity of the printed Bible as
bypassing the traditional oral authority of the church, on one
hand, and the need for rational critical scholarship on the
other. It was as if print, uniform and repeatable commodity that
it was, had the power of creating a new hypnotic superstition of
the book as independent of and uncontaminated by human agency.
Nobody who had read manuscripts could achieve this state of mind
concerning the nature of the written word." Ibid., p. 176.
25. Pierre Babin, The New Era in Religious Communication,
(Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1991) p. 25.
26. Gregor T. Goethals, The Electronic Golden Calf: Images,
Religion and the Making of Meaning, (Cambridge, Cowley
Publications, 1990) p. 50.
27. Ibid., p. 55.
28. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in
the Age of Show Business, (New York, Penguin Books, 1985) p. 111.
29. Ibid., p. 8.
30. Ibid., p. 55.
31. Ibid., p. 50.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., p. 51.
34. Ibid., p. 54.
35. Thomas Troeger, Imagining A Sermon (Nashville, Abingdon
Press, 1990) p. 29.
36. Postman, op. cit., pp. 116-117.
37. Ibid., p. 117.
38. Richard Lischer, Theories of Preaching: Selected Readings in
the Homiletical Tradition, (Durham, The Labyrinth Press, 1987) p.
219.
39. Ibid., p. 220.
40. Ibid., p. 229.
41. Ibid., p. 10.
42. Rollo May, The Cry For Myth, (New York, Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc., 1991) p. 26.
43. Ibid.