Giving Blood: A Fresh Paradigm for Preaching

by Leonard Sweet

Networking is the central metaphor of the new economic system. The path forward is not a ladder of success but a web of connections. It’s no wonder the Internet has been the “great equalizer” of societies East and West. The hierarchical systems of the past with their command-and-control structures and top-down “authorities” cannot withstand the social networking mind. Whereas hierarchies channel communication into conduits (trust the process), networks connect people to each other (trust the connection). An age of connection deserves an introduction to Jesus’ relationship-first theology.

One of the surprises to emerge from the Second World War was that when an Allied or Axis city came under attack, no matter how savage the assault, both alcoholism and suicide declined significantly. When a community rallies together behind a common cause, even a defensive one to ward off catastrophe, it diminishes personal problems. Binding together with others in community releases positive impulses toward the future.

“Those who are in love with community, destroy community; those who love people, build community.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

in the words of Charles Haddon Spurgeon about Puritan preacher John Bunyan, the preacher’s “bloodline” is “Bibline”: “Bunyan is a living Bible! Prick him anywhere; his blood is Bibline, the very essence of the Bible flows from him.

Scriptures are the red blood cells of our message. They carry the oxygen of divine presence into our lives. Scriptures and sacraments are the soul’s bread and butter. In Scripture we find the stories and sacramental identity of Jesus that courses through the blood. This is what the “authority” of the Word means: the stories are alive and “at work in you who believe.

Preaching is not voicing thoughts from ancient texts. Preaching is giving voice to God — the sound of whose voice can break cedars, heal broken hearts, repair relationships, transform commitments, alter lifestyles, overturn philosophies. The aim of preaching is not to make the Scriptures come alive but to awaken oneself and help one’s people come alive to the Scriptures, to be alive to the living story, to increase our capacity for pleasuring in the Word, and for embracing and experiencing Jesus: “The text is being fulfilled today, even as you listen.

what voice would the Spirit have? It’s not a propositional voice, but a storytelling, poetic voice. That’s how you know when Christ is in your midst or when it’s merely the preacher.

the Holy Spirit reveals Scripture. The disciples grasped the meaning of a passage only after Jesus “opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures.”6 The Scriptures have authority over the follower, and Jesus has authority over all. Therefore, the blood of Jesus needs to be in the veins of every sermon.

“this strange new world of the Bible.”16 Preaching is nothing less than the craft of making the familiar strange. When we make the familiar even more familiar, we find ourselves on homiletic cul-de-sacs. When our usual ways of “knowing” the Scriptures have become too cozy and comfortable, only defamiliarization enables us to hear the challenging stories of judgment and the hope that lies within and behind the texts.

Defamiliarization forces us to look with different lenses and to preach familiar texts with a new prophetic voice — one that gives a new edge to the story and provides a new bloodline for connecting with Christ. Some successful preachers contend that it is best to choose “emotionally neutral subjects.” The only problem with limiting yourself to emotionally neutral subjects is that what it is for you, it will be for others. You cannot connect your whole self to that which has been emotionally stripped.

We don’t preach the Scriptures; we let the Scriptures preach through us as they point to Christ. True preaching starts when the Scriptures start preaching themselves.

one of the few things biblical scholars agree on is that the kingdom of God was the cornerstone of Jesus’ preaching. The “kingdom of God” is an interesting phrase, because it not only denotes a theological meaning but an exegetical method expressed in the acronym PaRDeS, representing the third of the four basic types of Jewish exegesis used during the first century. To review what we learned in chapter 1, these methods were peshat (simple inquiry), remez (hinting, typological), derash (complex metaphorical midrash), and sod (intuitive, revelational).

The methodologies used to understand meaning that most closely echo the PaRDeS Hebrew exegetical method might well be described as the methods of deduction, induction, abduction, and transduction. The first three are well known as knowledge-producing methods. The last, which I add here, transcends traditional means of knowledge making and allows for a depth and interplay only possible in the relationship between divine and human.

Transduction is the interactive unfolding of internal revealed meaning, revealed truth. Like abduction, it includes intuitive right-brained inquiry but adds reception and animation. The origin of transductive knowing is interactive and relational. It originates within the relationship between knower and known. It involves a search for truth, not fact or proof. While in abduction, the seeker of meaning forms a creative but reasonable hypothesis that is later proven in experience and action, in transductive knowing, the seeker of meaning engages in relationship with the disseminator of revelatory knowledge and immerses in a story and/or image that bears on and bares the soul. Reveling in revelation rather than grounded in reason alone, transincaration transforms meaning and truth through the relational engagement of faith itself.

Transincarnation invites visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and other sensory experiences. It is relational truth that is discovered within questions rather than answers, in probes rather than proofs, through opening windows rather than shutting doors. It is not designed for “texterminators” — only “

“If we cannot in some measure understand God’s mind, all science must be a delusion and a snare.” — Charles Sanders Peirce, founder of semiotics

Best used in partnership with abduction, and often in conjunction with elements of deduction and induction, the addition of transincarnational meaning to the means of knowing transports the sermon out of a merely rational or philosophical discourse and places it within a faith-filled, fullflavored interactive experience of truth that admits that faith cannot be philosophically or rationally “known” but must be embodied communally, engaged holistically, and impressed deeply into both mind and heart.

Peirce is known as the founder of semiotics (the study of how meaning is communicated) and philosophical pragmatism.10 He famously defined a sign as “something which stands for somebody to something in some respect or capacity.” He was also the first experimental psychologist in America. He originated the use of light waves in the measurement of length. He designed the first electric switching-circuit computer.

Peirce came to see deduction, induction, and abduction as distinct but interdependent “stages of inquiry.”17 Lowest in Peirce’s scale of mental processes is “deduction.” At the core of an issue, analytic, deductive reasoning leads to no new information, only elaboration and a restating of the facts. Next up the ladder is “induction,” a synthetic form of cognition that issues in a creative insight of generalization and classification (“therefore”) but that does not entail the hypothetical leaps and explanatory power of “abduction.”18 The mind works first deductively and inductively. Deductive conclusions are drawn from close and sustained scrutiny of principles. Inductive conclusions are drawn from empirically gathered evidence. The highest level of thought, according to Peirce, is the abductive process: only the “hypothesizing” of the abductive process “most closely imitates the divine Mind, for that Mind is, at its most playful and musing, feeling, sporting here and there in pure arbitrariness.”19 Our abductive moments of risk and exploration “put us into direct, imitative contact with this abducting Divine Mind.

Peirce claimed that deduction is the language of mathematical logic while induction is the language of scientific empiricism. Abduction is creative philosophic inquiry, proven through experience and action. Hypothesis or inference is a posteriori, not a priori. A priori knowledge is conceptual and independent of experience, based on reason alone. A posteriori justifies a hypothesis, proposition, or assertion and is based on experience. A posteriori arguments cannot be based only on reason but must be proven through experience, or in a phrase Jesus used that Peirce liked to quote, “You may know them by their fruits.”21 You cannot reasonably assume that those who claim to have their hearts rooted in God live the life of the incarnated Christ unless their “fruit” is edible and ethical.

Abduction is creative philosophic inquiry, proven through experience and action. Hypothesis or inference is a posteriori, not a priori. A priori knowledge is conceptual and independent of experience, based on reason alone. A posteriori justifies a hypothesis, proposition, or assertion and is based on experience. A posteriori arguments cannot be based only on reason but must be proven through experience, or in a phrase Jesus used that Peirce liked to quote, “You may know them by their fruits.”21 You cannot reasonably assume that those who claim to have their hearts rooted in God live the life of the incarnated Christ unless their “fruit” is edible and ethical. Jonathan Edwards called this “remanation.” As God emanates the light of Christ into one’s life, one reflects back to God the light of Christ within. In other words, one’s life is a “sign,” a visible sign of the invisible presence of Christ in the heart. Jesus often told his disciples to stay awake and pay attention to the signs of God’s presence. To help us read the “signs” of God’s presence, Jesus told multiple parables describing the “kingdom,” which Christ himself has signaled by his own presence in the world.

Jonathan Edwards called this “remanation.” As God emanates the light of Christ into one’s life, one reflects back to God the light of Christ within. In other words, one’s life is a “sign,” a visible sign of the invisible presence of Christ in the heart. Jesus often told his disciples to stay awake and pay attention to the signs of God’s presence. To help us read the “signs” of God’s presence, Jesus told mult...

While the logic of mathematical deduction proves through formula, and the science of induction shows value through the triad of observation-interpretation-application,22 abduction measures the truth of a theory in relationship to experiences of its results. For Peirce conception must have some conceivable “apps,” some observable effects of its applications. In abduction, the “gate of perception” meets the “gate of purposive action.” Experience yields purpose yields action. In a sense, abduction is the semiotic signpost of Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith: one is justified by faith alone, but when filled with the presence of the Holy Spirit, one’s heart is necessarily provoked to acts of love and mercy. Fruits follow faith a posteriori. One first experiences Christ but then acts on that experience of grace with one’s own fruitful living.

What Peirce does not allow is a definition of faith that goes beyond concretized imagination, the insight that leads to perception by the mind. Proof of faith resides in visible signs. There can be no hidden or invisible signs secreted in what the Hebrew exegetical method would call the sod. For Peirce the pilgrim’s search for God is not immersion but inquiry, not truth but still a form of knowledge. Though freed from analytics and linearity, abduction still remains without “proof,” a fallible knowledge and a faulty reason. The inquiring mind is still in control and self-authenticating. Peirce said that in the abductive process the seeker still initiates the purposeful change. Abduction seeks answers and strives to prove results (concretized truth) rather than to provoke questions and probe mysteries (incarnated truth).

For Peirce abduction must be ultimately proven by the visible signs of purposeful action: “Nothing is in the intellect that is not first in the senses.”24 In transduction (or transincarnation), the moment itself is revelational. It discloses truth not yet through action but through trust, insight, relationality, intuition, and healed perceptions. It is John Wesley’s “strange” feeling of a “warmed heart,” an experience not yet differentiated in action but distinguished by what chaos theory calls the “strange attractor”25 that constrains and directs what is missional, relational, and incarnational (MRI). It is an inner experience of the whole being — mind, body, spirit.

Transincarnational preaching doesn’t aim to “influence” the hearer, but to imbed in the hearer that recognition of truth, a re-cognition that is felt in the core of our being, as our humanity is ever after defined in and redefined by our relationship with our Creator.

The Hebrew PaRDeS is intended as a fourfold exegetical method, all four parts necessary to a full and comprehensive homiletics.

If we take the four means of expressing meaning and think about the ways in which we can experience the Scriptures as the blood of Christ, we can also see four ways of “giving blood” — of connecting the lifeblood story of Jesus to the life of the congregation. We need to know the blood type in order for a transfusion to take place.

Deductive preaching has something to declare. From that “big idea” or “central thesis,” it then deduces points and subpoints. Like the deductive argument, it is almost algebraic in nature, conceptually clear and memorably formulaic — or for those of us who flunked algebra, obscure and out of range. The deductive sermon sets out to demonstrate the validity and reliability of a truth. It often consists of an introduction, multiple points, and a conclusion. Deductive reasoning is the primary form of the “expository” method. Its chief proponent is Haddon Robinson, the Johann Sebastian Bach of homileticians. Robinson defines deductive preaching as “the communication of a biblical concept, derived from and transmitted through a historical, grammatical, and literary study of a passage in its context, which the Holy Spirit applies first to the personality and experience of the preacher, then through him or her to the listeners.”27 Robinson admits that “it is more a philosophy than a method.

The strengths of deductive homiletics are obvious: studied, sturdy, sharply pointed. But the weaknesses of deductive homiletics are also obvious. You can’t hug a skeleton. You can’t hold hands with a bone. And points are hard to pick up without getting cut, and that cutting can seem at times like the splitting of hairs on the heads of angels dancing on the heads of pins, or what Sigmund Freud called “the narcissism of small differences.” In this not much has changed since the “plain preaching” tradition of the Puritans, when a sermon was made up of diligent exegesis, a rigorous theological framework, and a workedover and drilled-down proposition or principle.

Twenty-first-century listeners can’t tolerate long investments in linear reasoning anymore. “For effective preaching [today],” Burghardt concluded, “the analytic mind is not enough by half.

“Human beings, vegetables and cosmic dust, all dance to a mysterious tune intoned in the distance by an invisible player.” — Albert Einstein35

Inductive preaching is more of a journey than an arrival and is often manifested as narrative preaching.38 With the inductive sermon, we move from literalisms and linearisms to storyboards, character development, and plotlines. The inductive sermon can still be expository, especially when referring to specific biblical narratives. But most often the journey of discovery and dot connecting typical of the inductive sermon privileges a narrative style.

The inductive sermon moves from predictability to surprise. It doesn’t so much provide an answer as suggest an answer, gather a response, imply a solution, narrate a reply. I wish I could preach as inductively as Winston Churchill (or was it W. C. Fields?), who, while intoxicated at a party, told a woman he detested, “You are ugly.” To which she retorted, “And you are drunk!” “But,” he responded, “in the morning, I’ll be sober.” That’s inductive communication.

The inductive way of preaching is concerned with “How do you make your case?” Or “How can you assemble ‘evidence’ to prove a thesis or make a point?” Like the Hebrew remez, it intimates an answer. It is not launched from a predetermined point but gathers evidence until the unstated is inescapable. The inductive sermon argues a line of reasoning, stacking one brick at a time, climbing one rung of the ladder after another. This is the kind of “logic” that concludes that cottage cheese makes you fat, so everyone eating cottage cheese is fat or cottage cheese thighs are never

Eugene Lowry is the most potent voice against propositional preaching, which “distorts and even deforms the experiential meaning” of the gospel. Since the Bible is mainly “nonpropositional,” he argues, only narrative forms are faithful to the “aesthetic communication” intrinsic to the Scriptures.

TYPE O: ABDUCTIVE PREACHING The only way to hit a moving target is to give it a lead. This is what it means to “lead” forward. In the abductive method, you lead forward through hunches, hypotheses, and intuitions. You leave behind lines of battle for fields of dreams.

In abductive preaching, the truth is not something we deduce but something we lean into, something we reach for beyond the confines of our limitations. Abduction uses the creative mind to make inferences, decipher signs, connect relationships, reframe images, change directions. The key to abduction is the ability to unsettle and surprise, which comes from diligent inquiry.

Abduction is the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis, or what we are calling a narraphor. In Peirce’s own definition, “It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea, for induction does nothing but determine a value, and deduction merely evolves the necessary consequences of pure hypothesis.”50 Abduction (“creative,” “inspirational,” “imaginative,” “feeling,” “intuitive”) doesn’t exclude either induction or deduction (“scientific,” “logical”). In fact, according to Peirce, “hypothesis produces the sensuous element of thought, and induction the habitual element.

Peirce insisted that faith in God comes not inductively or deductively but abductively, as the beauty of God opens in the imagination a leap of faith: “A man looks upon nature, sees its sublimity and beauty, and his spirit gradually rises to the idea of God. He does not see the Divinity, nor does nature prove to him the existence of that Being, but it does excite his mind and imagination until the idea becomes rooted in his heart.

Abduction differs from induction in that propositions and laws do not define the sign, but one “has to posit the code at the same time as making the inference.”58 As Thomas Aquinas saw long before quantum physicists did, “The act of the believer terminates in the reality, not in the proposition. For we formulate propositions only in order to know things by means of them.

According to Roger Penrose, the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Chicago and “one of the world’s most knowledgeable and creative mathematical physicists,”60 it is by metaphors that true thinking is done and that science moves forward: “Rigorous argument is usually the last step.”61 Perhaps a better name for those famous “thought experiments” of Einstein and other scientists is abductive imaginings.

According to Peirce, the first person in history who fully developed and deployed the abductive method was Jesus of Nazareth.63 One key element of Jesus’ parabolic style of communication was surprise. Herein lies our problem. Gutenberg culture didn’t like surprises: “The best surprise is no surprise.” Holiday Inn used this slogan in the late 1970s and early 1980s to promise “no surprise” experiences — everything predictable, standardized, and franchised. People today are looking for more than the assurance of clean linens and toilets in their spiritual life. They’re looking for ambushing surmises, big sunrises, and lurking surprises that God loves them even in the midst of their messiness, confusion, and pain.

“homiletics of surprise” celebrates that things are never the same. We walk under scaffolding fully aware of the danger. And we trust God to surprise us when the same words and metaphors say a brand-new thing that speaks to a brand-new reality in our always-changing culture.

The transductive sermon is not just to animate, much less illustrate. The transductive sermon orchestrates the whole being in the narraphor. Like the abductive method, this means in part not to supply right answers but to ask better questions. But even more it means to revel in the mystery of life, to accept that not every question should or must be answered, to embrace something deeper than knowledge and certainty: faith and assurance. Or as Eugene Lowry sums it up so beautifully, every sermon is “dancing on the edge of mystery.

“When grace enters, humans must dance.” — W. H. Auden

The phrase “new homiletic” was first introduced by David James Randolph.70 In his The Renewal of Preaching (1969), which was honored with a thirtieth anniversary edition in 1998, he argued for a “new homiletic” to go along with the “new hermeneutic.” The basic thesis was as simple as it was brilliant: what if we designed homiletic presentations that dovetailed with biblical formats? For example, if the text is story, the sermon ought to be in narrative form. If the text is poetry, so too the sermon, one which “does not so much state a thesis as create an effect.” If the biblical form is an essay or personal reflection, so too the sermon. Ditto oratory. It was a thesis more talked about than tried.

Randolph saw four biblical forms as most used in the new communication: concern, confirmation, concretion, and construction

The movement of homiletics from a “proposition-centered” focus to a “person-centered” approach74 required preachers to find a “new voice.”75 Randolph instructed preachers to focus on the sermon’s “eventfulness.” The issue is not what the sermon “is” but what the sermon “does.”76 But as much as Randolph saw the need for a changed homiletic, he still focused on creation of the sermon as performative event rather than participatory experience.

Both abductive and transductive preaching create space for the pas de deux. But pas-de-deux preaching requires a new theory of the congregation. The issue is no longer how you become a better preacher, but how your people become better participants and how you can create a better congregation. If the “company with the smartest customers wins,” the church with the smartest/ deepest/most empowered congregation wins. The new standard of excellence for preaching is not the quality of the performance but the quality of the participation. Preaching now is more a participation art than a performance art.