274 - The Four Codes of Preaching: Rhetorical Strategies

The Four Codes of Preaching: Rhetorical Strategies
by John S. McClure
Minneapolis, Augsburg Fortress, 1991, 201 pp. $14.95.

It is not every day that one has the chance to witness a discipline come of age. John McClure's book affords just such an opportunity for observers of the field of homiletics. To be sure, most will follow developments in this field with a kind of distanced bemusement akin to that felt upon spying the gangly teenager next door going out on a first date. Yet McClure makes a grand effort in demonstrating the promise of a courtship between homiletics and semiotic theory.

The premise of McClure's effort is that preaching is a practical-theological discipline requiring a self-consciousness on the part of preachers with respect to their "homiletical profiles." For McClure such profiles consist of a preacher's "definition of preaching, approach to biblical exegesis and interpretation, facility in language and communication, context of ministry and personal understanding of that context, and any number of other personal interests." To be sure, part of McClure's program is rooted in a frustration with the proliferation of homiletic models (inductive, narrative, and so on), all of which vie for the allegiance of preachers. Perhaps, however, something more underlies McClure's project: a desire for a fundamental diversity of preaching models grounded in practical-theological reflection on the unique worlds of discourse of individual congregations. The task, then, for preachers is to clarify their own homiletical styles by being aware of the four codes involved in the communicational interaction of preacher and congregation in the sermon: the Scripture code (remembrance), the semantic code (truth), the theosymbolic code (worldview) and the cultural code (experience).

Given the marvelous way in which McClure synthesizes his material

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in the conclusion, this reader wishes that he would have introduced his project with it rather than with the labyrinth of semiotic nomenclature in the beginning of the book. The ostensible goal of McClure's book is to aid not homiletic theoreticians but preachers in clarifying their own homiletical profiles for their practical-theological ordering of sermonic rhetoric. Unfortunately, the language of semiotic theory is so arcane that only the most sympathetic of readers will endeavor to find their way through it. Despite this problem, McClure makes an important contribution to the fledgling field of homiletic theory by seeking a way of connecting the discrepant frames of reference that leave it so much at the mercy and whim of other disciplines. If nothing else, McClure has helped to move homiletics away from its one-way dependence on biblical studies or rhetoric or systematic theology. For McClure, homiletics is more than the formula H = E + T (homiletics = exegesis + Toastmasters), rather it entails practical-theological reflection on the encoded communicational whole that is preaching.

Still, one question comes to mind when considering the book as a whole. Was it necessary for McClure to begin with the Scripture code and only then move to the semantic, theosymbolic and cultural codes? Perhaps this very ordering of the text needs also to come under critical scrutiny. One suspects a not-so-lurking Barthian theology of revelation joined to the generative trajectory of later structural-semiotic theory. To be sure, such a move does open up a variety of homiletical possibilities and even accounts for them within the universal theory of meaning that is semiotic theory. Yet, it seems a rather nostalgic return to a theory which, in a post-structuralist world, has been denuded of such universalistic pretensions. Perhaps the task of a preacher/ theologian is not to engage these codes along a generative trajectory rooted in the magic words of Scripture, but to start at the level of discursive syntax and semantics, that is, the preacher and congregation's culture, worldview - even their social location - and then work toward our already invested homiletical readings of texts. McClure's method accounts for the astonishing varieties of sermonic options open to the preacher, but does so in such a way that it treats the sermon more like an aesthetic object and the choices available more like those to be made in a cafeteria line.

Suffice it to say that our gangly teenager next door ought not to hurry out to purchase rings, nor arrange for the florist and photographer just yet. Thanks to McClure's ground-breaking work, homiletic theory has had the opportunity to test itself in relationship to a discipline that encompasses many fields, including literary criticism, linguistics, and anthropology. Moreover, his work demonstrates one possible way for homiletics to get its theoretical house in order. But McClure's work also demonstrates that homiletic theory, though come of age, still has some growing to do.

David Schnasa Jacobsen
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN