PEOPLE IN PRINT
April 1, 1991
Preaching to the Video Generation Imagining a Sermon by Thomas H. Troeger, Abingdon, $10.95 Reviewed by Grant Lovejoy, preaching instructor, Southwestern Baptist Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas Rhetoric has served our culture long and well, but vivid images, not logical progression, dominate culture today. Television, movies, home videos, and slick photo magazines represent today's authority. The video message, however, is disturbing. Its core tenets: -The fittest survive. -Happiness consists of limitless material acquisition. -Consumption is inherently good. -Property, wealth, and power are more important than people. -Progress is an inherent good. The video generation, with both its values and its preferred means of communicating, poses a stiff challenge to preachers, many of whom are from the print generation. In Imagining a Sermon, Thomas Troeger, teacher of preaching at Crozer Theological Seminary in Rochester, New York, suggests that if sermons are to reach the video generation, they need to become more imaginative and less rhetorical, for it's imagination that infuses ideas with the power to transform lives. But imagination is more than a technique for Troeger. Our imaginative capacity is part of what it means to be human. Imagination is "the God-power of the soul," as Henry Ward Beecher put it. To exclude imagination is to deny a part of God's creation and to miss that part of reality that eludes rational analysis. Troeger has found, however, that some preachers have reservations about using the imagination in preaching. After all, Luther and Calvin denounced imagination as corrupt. In addition, some wonder if imaginative approaches diminish the objectivity of divine revelation. As to Luther and Calvin, Troeger observes that their ...
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