‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved’, so Saint Paul says (Romans 10: 13). And he goes on: ‘How may they call on one in whom they have no faith? How may they have faith in someone of whom they have never heard? How may they hear without some one preaching? And how may they preach if they are not sent?’
Some one has to be ‘sent’, ‘apostled’ as the Greek (almost) puts it, as if calling on the name of the Lord depends on coming to faith, with coming to faith dependent on hearing about the Lord, and with this hearing dependent on some one preaching, proclaiming like a herald — and with that, in turn, dependent on the preacher's being ‘missioned’, endowed (so to say) with apostolic authority.
Fine — yet without people who listen preachers are stymied, no matter how apostolically mandated and authoritatively commissioned their message may be. Communication assumes there will be listening as well as speaking. Preaching requires listeners. Moreover, preaching assumes that what people hear will make sense. It may challenge and provoke but in the end, if there is to be communication, it must awaken some response in the listeners — resonate with what they already believe.
But listening never comes easily. Consider, for example, Prospero in the second scene of The Tempest, explaining the family history to his daughter Miranda: ‘The hour's now come. The very minute bids thee ope thine ear. Obey, and be attentive’. He expects her to attend obediently, but finds himself repeatedly accusing her of not doing so: ‘Dost thou attend me?’—‘Sir, most heedfully’— then again ‘Thou attend'st not!’—‘O good sir I do’—‘I pray thee mark me’, he persists: ‘Dost thou hear?—‘Your tale, sir, would cure deafness’, she replies, a little cheekily, not confirming that she has paid attention or actually taken in what her father has been saying.
It takes two to communicate. Shakespeare seems to have travelled back from London to Stratford quite frequently though he can never have been a hands-on parent, as Prospero is portrayed as being. (There is no Mrs Prospero.) Curiously Shakespeare left the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter Susanna (born six months after he wed Anne Hathaway). In the scene between Prospero and Miranda, however, Shakespeare is surely just playing on a familiar experience: an authority figure (such as a father) holding forth and the intended audience (in this case his adolescent daughter) either refusing or pretending not to attend or perhaps reluctant to admit to listening. After all, the manner in which authority figures hold forth sometimes makes people embarrassed to acknowledge that they have been paying attention and have understood the message perfectly well.
Whatever may be the case in such intergenerational domestic communication, it has to be admitted that these days, in society at large, while a great deal is said about how vitally important it is for politicians and suchlike to respect the beliefs and intelligence of the people whom they seek to persuade by their speeches, the fact of the matter is that, in the United Kingdom, they have, for a variety of reasons, largely lost credibility, even when we who listen to them have not descended into total (and, one might think, quite lamentable) cynicism about all public discourse. ‘You can't believe a word any of them say; they are all liars’.
As regards the Catholic Church we have (so far!) not had to confess in Britain to decades of cruelty to children and to deceitful protection of the perpetrators by bishops and others in authority. On the other hand, many of us have firsthand or anyway reliable information about what has been revealed elsewhere, in certain dioceses in Ireland and the United States, to mention deeply afflicted scandal-ridden communities to whom Catholics in England, Wales and Scotland have been indebted for many years, spiritually and intellectually. In Britain we like to think we are united, in comparison with the effects of the secular ‘culture wars’ on the Church in North America, not to mention what we regard as anarchy in the Anglican Communion. However, listening has never been easy, nor is preaching going to be effective unless it hears an echo in the minds and hearts of the listeners.
Paul of course could think of the congregation in Corinth whom he was addressing as ‘Christ's letter’—‘ministered by us’ indeed —‘inscribed not by ink but by the living God's Spirit, not in stone tablets but in tablets of fleshly hearts’ (2 Cor 3: 3). Yet even they were not all that united, if we attend to what he says of them elsewhere (1 Cor 1: 10–17).
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‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved’, so Saint Paul says (Romans 10: 13). And he goes on: ‘How may they call on one in whom they have no faith? How may they have faith in someone of whom they have never heard? How may they hear without some one preaching? And how may they preach if they are not sent?’
Some one has to be ‘sent’, ‘apostled’ as the Greek (almost) puts it, as if calling on the name of the Lord depends on coming to faith, with coming to faith dependent on hearing about the Lord, and with this hearing dependent on some one preaching, proclaiming like a herald — and with that, in turn, dependent on the preacher's being ‘missioned’, endowed (so to say) with apostolic authority.
Fine — yet without people who listen preachers are stymied, no matter how apostolically mandated and authoritatively commissioned their message may be. Communication assumes there will be listening as well as speaking. Preaching requires listeners. Moreover, preaching assumes that what people hear will make sense. It may challenge and provoke but in the end, if there is to be communication, it must awaken some response in the listeners — resonate with what they already believe.
But listening never comes easily. Consider, for example, Prospero in the second scene of The Tempest, explaining the family history to his daughter Miranda: ‘The hour's now come. The very minute bids thee ope thine ear. Obey, and be attentive’. He expects her to attend obediently, but finds himself repeatedly accusing her of not doing so: ‘Dost thou attend me?’—‘Sir, most heedfully’— then again ‘Thou attend'st not!’—‘O good sir I do’—‘I pray thee mark me’, he persists: ‘Dost thou hear?—‘Your tale, sir, would cure deafness’, she replies, a little cheekily, not confirming that she has paid attention or actually taken in what her father has been saying.
It takes two to communicate. Shakespeare seems to have travelled back from London to Stratford quite frequently though he can never have been a hands-on parent, as Prospero is portrayed as being. (There is no Mrs Prospero.) Curiously Shakespeare left the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter Susanna (born six months after he wed Anne Hathaway). In the scene between Prospero and Miranda, however, Shakespeare is surely just playing on a familiar experience: an authority figure (such as a father) holding forth and the intended audience (in this case his adolescent daughter) either refusing or pretending not to attend or perhaps reluctant to admit to listening. After all, the manner in which authority figures hold forth sometimes makes people embarrassed to acknowledge that they have been paying attention and have understood the message perfectly well.
Whatever may be the case in such intergenerational domestic communication, it has to be admitted that these days, in society at large, while a great deal is said about how vitally important it is for politicians and suchlike to respect the beliefs and intelligence of the people whom they seek to persuade by their speeches, the fact of the matter is that, in the United Kingdom, they have, for a variety of reasons, largely lost credibility, even when we who listen to them have not descended into total (and, one might think, quite lamentable) cynicism about all public discourse. ‘You can't believe a word any of them say; they are all liars’.
As regards the Catholic Church we have (so far!) not had to confess in Britain to decades of cruelty to children and to deceitful protection of the perpetrators by bishops and others in authority. On the other hand, many of us have firsthand or anyway reliable information about what has been revealed elsewhere, in certain dioceses in Ireland and the United States, to mention deeply afflicted scandal-ridden communities to whom Catholics in England, Wales and Scotland have been indebted for many years, spiritually and intellectually. In Britain we like to think we are united, in comparison with the effects of the secular ‘culture wars’ on the Church in North America, not to mention what we regard as anarchy in the Anglican Communion. However, listening has never been easy, nor is preaching going to be effective unless it hears an echo in the minds and hearts of the listeners.
Paul of course could think of the congregation in Corinth whom he was addressing as ‘Christ's letter’—‘ministered by us’ indeed —‘inscribed not by ink but by the living God's Spirit, not in stone tablets but in tablets of fleshly hearts’ (2 Cor 3: 3). Yet even they were not all that united, if we attend to what he says of them elsewhere (1 Cor 1: 10–17).