Arts and Preaching: An Aesthetic Homiletic for the Twenty-first Century

By Sunggu A. Yang and John S. McClure

In our highly sensory and interactive age, how might drawing upon various arts--music, film, architecture, dramatic performance, painting, fashion, and more--expand the aesthetic experience and mode of preaching? This book presents a critical, practical answer to the question. As our society becomes more visually oriented, art-seeking, and body-positive, the practice of preaching is likewise challenged to demonstrate the mind-body, word-visual, and artistic proclamation of the Sacred (after all, isn't the writing of the Bible itself highly art-full and aesthetic?). In this book, Sunggu A. Yang, a seasoned preacher and experienced teacher of preaching, encourages preachers to utilize their unique artistic talents as critical sources of theological and homiletical imagination and as hermeneutical-perspectival tools to aid their rigorous exegetical process of interpreting Scripture, eventually toward artistic-holistic sermon composition and delivery. A sample syllabus, included in the appendix, will greatly assist any preaching instructor who wants to offer a creative course on arts and preaching.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Sep 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781532648571

Sunggu A. Yang

Sunggu Yang is Assistant Professor of Christian Ministries at the College of Christian Studies at Portland Seminary, George Fox University.

Book preview

Arts and Preaching

An Aesthetic Homiletic for the Twenty-first Century

Sunggu A. Yang

foreword by John S. McClure

A Sample Syllabus on Arts, Creativity & Preaching Included

Arts and Preaching

An Aesthetic Homiletic for the Twenty-first Century

Copyright ©

2021

Sunggu A. Yang. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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All biblical quotes appearing throughout the volume are based on the NRSV translation, unless noted otherwise.

All chapter images are copyright free found at unsplash.com and pixabay.com.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-4855-7

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-4856-4

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-4857-1

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Yang, Sunggu,

1980–,

author. | McClure, John S.,

1952–,

foreword.

Title: Arts and preaching : an aesthetic homiletic for the twenty-first century / Sunggu A. Yang ; foreword by John S. McClure.

Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books,

2021

| Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers:

isbn 978-1-5326-4855-7

(paperback) |

isbn 978-1-5326-4856-4

(hardcover) |

isbn 978-1-5326-4857-1

(ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Preaching. | Aesthetics—Religious aspects—Christianity.

Classification:

BV4211 .Y36 2021

(paperback) |

BV4211 .Y36

(ebook)

09/08/21

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright ©

1989

National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: A Proposal for Holistic-Artistic Preaching

Chapter 2: Picasso and Preaching (Cubism)

Chapter 3: Utzon and Preaching (Architecture)

Chapter 4: Chanel and Preaching (Fashion)

Chapter 5: A Cinemate Homiletic (Film)

Chapter 6: Preaching to Episodic Ears (Drama)

Chapter 7: Beyoncé Mass: Womanist Preaching, Reloaded (Music)

Appendix A

Appendix B

Bibliography

Praise for Arts and Preaching

Yang offers a variety of creative suggestions without limiting the preaching task to the question of what and how to preach. He develops a multidimensional approach of homiletical aesthetics for the encounter of the Holy Mystery in preaching. This volume must be a stimulating read for all preachers and teachers of homiletics. The focus is on the preaching task, to which, as Yang shows, many art forms contribute without leaving out hermeneutical and theological issues.

—Birgit Weyel, Chair of Practical Theology, University of Tübingen

"Brimming with concrete examples from the creative arts, the Bible, and academia, Arts and Preaching invites and challenges readers to consider hermeneutics and preaching from multiple artistic perspectives and disciplines. It offers preachers, teachers of preaching, and indeed any student of the Bible the freedom to depart from age-old, heavily rational means of biblical interpretation and proclamation. The book is an eye- and mind-opening enterprise that results in fresh ways of understanding, interpreting, and expositing the Scriptures."

—Graig Flach, Lake Grove Presbyterian Church, Oregon

"In Arts and Preaching, Yang offers an evocative alternative to the flattened rationality of a preaching (and a teaching of preaching) that focuses on the sermon’s exegetical ‘how’ and its conceptual ‘what’ (method and message) at the expense of its ‘who’ and ‘why.’ He seeks to recover the mysterium tremendum in the preacher’s sermonic experience, the preaching classroom, and the pulpit. His holistic-aesthetic vision of preaching recovers its identity as art, a medium through which the numinous is both made possible and experienced. He invites preachers and teachers of preaching to open the treasure troves of six modes of artistic expression (cubism, architecture, fashion, popular cinema, drama and Beyoncé Mass), demonstrating how we might deploy their cultural relevance, theological richness, and communicative effectiveness to evoke spiritual transcendence and transformation. Readers of this book will find their experience of the transcendent beauty of art refreshed and their confidence in the power of the particular art form we call preaching enhanced."

—Alyce M. McKenzie, Director of the Perkins Center for Preaching Excellence, Southern Methodist University

In this absolutely superb book, Yang shows us dazzling forms of relationships between art and preaching. Art here is not a subdued artifact to be explored for the sake of preaching but rather a luminous partner that shares light with Scripture in the formation of a sermon. You don’t read Scripture from art or try to see art in Scripture. Instead, you see a continuum unfolding between art and Scripture in fascinating ways: a Cubist homiletic, architectural forms of reading Scripture, God as fashion designer with Coco Chanel, a cinematic homiletic, episodic-dramaturgical preaching, and Beyoncé Mass as a full liturgical environment. Grounded in vast literature, Yang’s unique work not only challenges and expands the field of art and preaching but gives fantastic tools for preachers to bring about the Word of God, already fully embedded in the many forms of our culture.

—Cláudio Carvalhaes, Associate Professor of Worship, Union Theological Seminary, New York

Sunngu Yang takes teachers of preaching to task for their lack of imagination, calling forth a new holistic and fully sensory experience for learning preaching. Sparking the imagination of preachers while edifying them in knowledge about different art forms such as architecture and cubism, Yang has brought together insights from artistic masters as well as homiletical theorists who have gone before him, resulting in his own art form of homiletical-pedagogical reflection.

—Carolyn B. Helsel, Associate Professor in the Blair Monie Distinguished Chair of Homiletics, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary

Yang’s book cogently articulates the need for biblical preaching to include a broader hermeneutic. Biblical texts display an artistic aesthetic that transcends our cognitive senses and elicits reactions of wonder, inspiration, confusion, and mystery. Accordingly, Yang compels us to capture this aesthetic in our preaching in order to be faithful to the essence of the biblical canon.

—Roger S. Nam, Professor of Hebrew Bible, Candler School of Theology

In this lively and creative book, Sunggu Yang considers painting, architecture, fashion, drama, film, music, and more. He calls for preaching not just about the arts or with the arts but as an art that can learn from other art forms—all on the way to evoking deeper and more holistic encounters with God.

—Ted A. Smith, Professor of Preaching and Ethics, Candler School of Theology

"In Arts and Preaching, Sunggu Yang practices what he preaches about the practice of preaching. Challenging the rationalism and unidimensionality advanced in much homiletical theory, Yang pushes preachers to engage Scripture for sermon development in terms of Scripture’s aesthetic possibilities and revelatory incompleteness. Through an exciting blend of homiletical theory, preaching praxis, and model sermons, Yang fosters an approach to sermon creation that is open-ended, deconstructive, and multiperspectival. In service of this goal, Yang engages a variety of aesthetic fields—from cubist painting to Danish architecture, from high fashion to contemporary cinema. His book offers much for preachers and homileticians to ponder."

—Jacob D. Myers, Associate Professor of Homiletics, Columbia Theological Seminary

"Arts and Preaching is an invitation to preaching professors and practitioners to move as artists through sermon formation and proclamation. Yang’s homiletic is a breath of fresh air, an exhortation to follow the Spirit into new artistic dimensions of preaching beyond the rational/mind/word dimension which has dominated for so long. Do not fear! Yang is clear that all of us are artistic in our own way, so this book is not limited to self-proclaimed preacher-artists. Yang’s kaleidoscope of preaching possibilities beyond deductive/inductive design is liberating. As a preacher, Yang’s project makes me want to stop at every chapter and play around with sermon design in novel ways. As a teacher of preaching, Arts and Preaching makes me want to overhaul the syllabus and bring students into a more aesthetic, embodied space for sermonic creation.

—Casey T. Sigmon, Assistant Professor of Preaching and Worship, Saint Paul School of Theology

Taking cues from the long line of influential homiletical scholars such as Henry Mitchell who have engaged preaching as art, Yang creatively draws upon a wide variety of artistic expressions and plays with pedagogical possibilities for the teaching and practice of homiletics. Yang’s work invites homiletical pedagogists and practitioners to rethink dominant methodologies that potentially restrict the practice of preaching and explores fresh approaches to encountering and proclaiming the Good News.

—Andrew Wymer, Assistant Professor of Liturgical Studies, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary

"Yang conceives of preaching with artful brilliance, holistic theology, and ingenious contextualization. Carefully interfacing theory and praxis, Arts and Preaching highlights the life-giving and perspective-altering potential of artful, biblical homiletics. A must-read for preachers and teachers of preaching today!"

—Lisa J. Cleath, Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies, George Fox University

"In this theologically rich, engaging, and extraordinarily helpful book, Yang challenges preachers and, even more, teachers of preaching to reorient and deepen their work through attentiveness to the ‘holistic-aesthetic’ aspects of Scripture and proclamation as embodied in the cultural arts. An adept and patient tour guide, Yang leads the reader through an exploration of how art, drama, architecture, fashion, film, and music might inform and reinvigorate engagement with the biblical text, preaching content, and sermon form and formation. The writing and ideas are compelling and potentially transformative for both the pulpit and the preaching classroom. Though cram-full of robust arguments about the nature and needs of contemporary preaching, sophisticated theological convictions, and insightful exegetical work, this book is fantastically accessible with practical examples and applicable guides woven throughout the text. This provocative work is clearly driven by Yang’s longing for preaching (and spiritually formed preachers) to meet and engage contemporary congregations through aesthetically informed proclamation that is both astonishingly familiar and yet wonder-filled, with the hope that they might together encounter the mysterium tremendum. A wonderful gift and invitation!"

—Kimberly Wagner, Assistant Professor of Homiletics, Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago

Becky

beloved companion of preaching

Foreword

The relationship between the biblical text and today’s context can be conceived in many different ways. Much of the recent work in hermeneutics for preaching has focused on the interplay between the social and ideological factors at work in and around the production of biblical materials and the same factors impinging on us today. In this book, Sunggu A. Yang proposes that the interpretation of the Bible for preaching might run in a somewhat different direction, toward the interplay between the aesthetic aspects of the biblical text and cultural artifacts today. The result is what might be called a hermeneutic of aesthetic encounter whereby preachers permit various artistic forms (then and now) to generate encounters with the mysterium tremendum within the text-to-sermon process. In some instances, it is contemporary art that leads the way in this transaction, and in other instances it is the aesthetic prompting of the biblical text that takes control.

Unlike some scholars of preaching who attempt to articulate the aesthetic qualities of preaching, Yang is not a homiletical escape-artist. He does not try to tuck the preached word of God off in a unique, world-transcending, beautiful or sublime realm, requiring only our worship or adulation. Instead, in each chapter of the book he shows how different aesthetic encounters with the word of God create their own unique homiletical experiences and forms. These experiences and forms are not to be understood procedurally, but holistically. According to Yang, much of what we know about God and about God’s world cannot be reduced to objective truth claims or normative claims about moral content. We know God and our world through a holistic encounter that is more presentive and intuitive than re-presentative or expository in nature.

Although Yang focuses ample attention on autonomous or high forms of art such as Cubism or the architectural genius of Utzon, he also draws our attention to the ways in which more heteronomous or popular forms of art such as film, drama, fashion, and popular music can help preachers gain access to the aesthetic, world-disclosing aspects of the Bible. In this way, he keeps our eyes trained on each generation’s unique aesthetic sensibilities. He does not, however, allow for the reduction of the aesthetic to the level of one’s tastes. Not only does he encourage preachers to explore a range of artistic visions beyond their preferences, but he invites them to look deep within each form of art in order to see how it critiques and challenges their preferred ways of thinking.

To his credit, Yang does not assume that the reader is fully knowledgeable about the art that he correlates with homiletical practice. He takes the time to carefully unpack six different forms of art, exploring in some depth not only their historical and situational contexts, but the forms of non-discursive or semiotic epistemology that preachers might engage and mold for their own purposes. In this process, Yang is a brilliant and accommodating tour guide, helping the reader experience each unique artistic universe as a treasure trove of homiletical possibilities.

Yang’s goal in this book is ultimately pedagogical in nature. Each chapter is meant to be a case study of what he expects from students who might use everything from songwriting, to graffiti or choreography, to accomplish something similar. He envisions classroom exercises of artistic appropriation and experimentation designed to help students generate more wholistic encounters with biblical materials for their preaching.

There is a profound pedagogy undergirding this entire project. It is profound because it embraces critically the culture, cultural languages, and forms of rationality through which students actually experience and make sense out of the world in which they live. And it is profound because it acknowledges that art contains within it both social critique and a powerful urge toward transcendence. Yang wants to harness all of these elements within his wholistic-aesthetic pedagogy.

The reader of this book will not only learn dynamic new ways to preach, but they will learn something new about how to learn preaching, in a way that is deeply interactive with the ways in which their own generation is artistically critiquing itself and asking and engaging ultimate questions. I encourage the reader to engage this book through the lens of their own artistic inclinations and interests, asking how the forms of art that they value most could become catalytic in a similar way for preaching. When this occurs, this book becomes the kind of homiletical text that can be generative for many, many years to come.

John S. McClure

Charles G. Finney Professor of Preaching and Worship

Vanderbilt Divinity School

Preface

This writing and the big idea in it—arts and preaching—has only come to light through numerous collaborations, supports, and heathy critiques. Over the past ten years of making, I received invaluable supports and sharp comments from multiple directions, including, but not limited to, colleagues of the Academy of Homiletics invested in the subject of arts and preaching. I truly appreciate all their generous inputs along the way.

I wish to acknowledge my thanks to the Louisville Institute and its generous grant program (Sabbatical Grant for Researchers) which made possible a semester leave at my current institution George Fox University and related research travels. During the leave that George Fox kindly allowed, I finished most of the manuscript and also final touches on the entirety. I also thank the Institute for granting me the Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2015, when I developed the initial idea of this book with a teaching appointment at Wake Forest University Divinity School. At Wake Divinity I created the novel course Arts, Creativity & Preaching, which garnered enthusiastic responses from students. I would like to extend my great appreciation to the Wake Divinity students who I taught and who also taught me more about the fruitful intersection between arts and preaching. As is often the case, students are the best collaborators.

I thank the Workshop for Early Career Theological Faculty 2018–19 and the subsequent Fellowship Program 2019–20 at the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion. Critical pedagogical conversations I had during the workshop with colleagues from various institutions in the United States were very helpful and further honed my course syllabus on arts and preaching. The fellowship allowed me the opportunity and support to extend my research on theological aesthetics and artistic preaching.

Journals that published original forms of several chapters of the book were very helpful; Chapter 1 was published in Theology Today, Chapter 2 in Religions, Chapter 3 in Homiletic, Chapter 5 in Journal of Asian American Theological Forum, and Chapter 6 in HTS: Teologiese Studies. Their peer-reviews provided spirited insights and constructive critiques for substantial revisions that are included in this publication.

The final production stage was hardly possible without enormous editing aids from two of my student research assistants at George Fox University; Rachel Crawford and Lilly Pittman. Together, they read the entire manuscript for copyediting and gathered the sophisticated bibliographical information. Additionally, while registered in my Arts and Christian Speaking course, Lilly herself practiced some aspects of the preliminary writing of this book in the classroom and showed great potential in creating artistic preaching. I was very glad to see Lilly and other students making good use of the insights found in the book.

All in all, the sense of beauty and various arts encountered in the entire Christian Scripture is the most fundamental contributor to this book. Scripture, counter-intuitively to some, is full of artistic expressions waiting for the preacher’s careful mining in the making of faithful aesthetic-holistic proclamation; Scripture is far more than (but surely includes) a collection of didactic religious propositions. Thus, Scripture itself compels the preacher to be more holistic-aesthetic or artistic-creative in her sacred presence at the pulpit. In that sense, I should thank Scripture as a fascinating multifaceted entity of the arts.

As we move forward to detailed discourses on the given subject in the following pages, here is a piece of advice I received years ago from one of my preaching mentors that I would like to share:

Don’t worry if you think you don’t have any special artistic talents to be an artistic preacher. Still, you can be one. For life itself is art, full of artistic expressions. If you ever sang in your car, if you ever swayed on the concert hall floor, if you ever drew a smiley face on your notebook, if you ever decorated your room with an IKEA painting, if you ever played a piece of Mozart like Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, if you ever baked a small loaf of bread, if you ever put on a Halloween costume, or if you ever told a fascinating story to your friend over the phone with real enthusiasm about a March Madness game you just watched, guess what? You’re an artistic storyteller already! You already know what the art is and have had enough experiences of it. If you approach the artistic Scripture with that simple artistic mind, then you will be totally fine; indeed, more than fine. You’ll be great.

So, just begin now.

Introduction

Concepts create idols, only [aesthetic] wonder understands.

—Gregory of Nyssa

¹

In our highly sensory and interactive age, how might preaching draw upon various arts to expand the aesthetic experience and mode of preaching? With this emerging question, this arts and preaching project started. Those in the pews today are strongly aesthetically oriented, visually and aurally aware, body-focused, and holistic-artistically educated about the Bible and life itself. This multi-intelligent epistemological situation of the people, well-noted by Howard Gardner,² invites a significant paradigmatic shift in preaching education and practice. How should we respond?

My critical and practical response is the (re)discovery of intersectionality between arts and preaching at the pulpit so that preaching can reinvent itself as a more holistic-aesthetic encounter of the Word of Christ. This solutive proposal of mine may not sound really new. One may find other similar works that emerged in the past decades. What distinguishes my work from previous ones on the subject of arts and preaching is its intra-dynamic hermeneutical approach to existing illustrative and integrative approaches. For instance, when it comes to the homiletic correlation between the art of painting and preaching, the preacher may refer to Picasso’s cubist work as a simple verbal illustration in the sermon (illustration approach) or even actually show a piece of the cubist art on the digital screen as a more integral part of the sermon (integral approach). By contrast, my intra-dynamic approach goes further by attempting to create an actual cubist sermon (the topic of Chapter 2). In the cubist sermon, Picasso’s name or work would not necessarily appear or be used as an illustration or integral prop, for the sermon itself is cubistic intra-dynamically. Another example is Chapter 3 on architecture and preaching. In the chapter I show that preaching can be experienced as highly architectural on its own even without a single mention of a famous architecture or without showing a short film clip about aesthetic architecture.

I hope that this artistic intra-dynamic approach will challenge our heavily text-driven, barely aesthetic homiletic education and preaching practice today. For that purpose, Chapter 1, as the theoretic foundation of the entire book, lays out the urgency and significance of aesthetic education and practice of preaching in the twenty-first century. The eventual goal of this fresh artistic-holistic preaching is to meet two particular needs of the church: 1) the dynamic spiritual formation of the preacher, and 2) the holistic-artistic and multi-sensory exposition and experience of the Holy Scripture both by the preacher and the congregation.

I had an opportunity to share a research paper on this topic at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Homiletics 2015, entitled, Homiletical Aesthetics: A Paradigmatic Proposal for a Holistic Pedagogy of Preaching, that was consequently published in Theology Today (2017); the paper has now become chapter 1 of the book. Based on the proposed pedagogy, in the spring of 2016 I taught an advanced preaching course at Wake Forest University School of Divinity entitled Creativity, Arts, and Preaching, and in the fall of 2019, Arts and Christian Speaking at George Fox University (an undergraduate Christian ministry major course), to both of which students responded enthusiastically.

Whether I presented the paper to other preaching professors or taught students with this aesthetic orientation, I received the same inquiry: Do we have a textbook or textbook-like manual for this kind of preaching education and practice that can help implement the holistic-artistic approach? I do not think their inquiry is simply about wanting to read another textbook, but rather, on a deeper level, reflects today’s urgent demand both for a holistic-artistic preaching education at the seminary and for the resulting practice of preaching in the church’s pulpit. Indeed, this urgency felt both at the seminary and in local churches is what has prompted this book project.

I undertook the project in three stages. The first task was to rediscover the aesthetic-artistic quality of the Holy Scripture. As Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar point out, the aesthetic nature of God’s word is one of the most important hermeneutical traits of the whole Scripture, without which biblical interpretation is incomplete.³ Going further, Rahner contends, theology as a whole is not complete unless we explore the divine revelation aesthetically. Building on their ideas, I revisited the Holy Scripture from an aesthetic-artistic point of view and was able to see so much (hidden) artistic treasure in it that awaits the preacher’s keen attention.

The second stage was to study and explore various modern art forms on their own terms. One of the critical mistakes that we theologians and homileticians, as well as preachers, make when exploring the arts is to use theological markers and rulers as primary barometers of art analysis. By doing so, the arts suddenly become secondary subjects in the service of theology. This analytical practice is significantly misguided. In order for the arts to become an equal interdisciplinary dialogical partner to theology and preaching, the arts must be approached on their own terms. For this purpose, along with a relevant literature review, I visited sites to perform extended research on various artworks firsthand—particularly, such artistic domains as painting, music, architecture, dance, film, design, fashion, installation, and the like.

The third and concluding stage was to develop a firm aesthetic preaching practice through the interdisciplinary homiletic collaboration between the arts and homiletic theories. Here, I made use of the results from the above first and second stages of my research. For this final multi-faceted phase, a literature review on rhetoric and homiletic theories—both ancient and modern—and field research were crucial. As my research moved on, concrete book chapters emerged on topics such as Chapter 2, Picasso & Preaching (Cubism); Chapter 3, Utzon & Preaching (Architecture); Chapter 4, Chanel & Preaching (Fashion); Chapter 5, A Cinemate Homiletic (Film); Chapter 6, Preaching to Episodic ears (Drama); and Chapter 7, Beyoncé Mass: Womanist Preaching, Reloaded (Music).

As mentioned, Chapter 1 explores the homiletic theoretical foundation for the entire book. In the chapter I propose a paradigmatic change in homiletical pedagogy. In North America today, most homiletical training at the seminary is either text-driven or know-how-driven (or, at times, topic-driven). Thus, the homiletical training focuses on 1) how to exposit a text for a key topic, 2) how to structure a sermon, 3) how to deliver a message, and 4) how to analyze the text-driven sermon. While admitting the usefulness of this current textual or know-how pedagogy, I suggest the addition of a holistic-aesthetic component of