Proclamation and Power: Toward a Phenomenology of Preaching and Its Affects

Preachers have long perceived that the power of proclamation can only partially be traced to sermonic language. Something is always stirring beneath the surface of our words—a sublinguistic property of preaching tugs at the attention and responses of our hearers. Many homileticians affirm that preaching is empowered by the Spirit. God gives preaching its efficacy, sometimes despite our language. We frequently describe effective preaching as anointed, evoking the distinctly divine quality of preaching. But preaching—like scripture, the sacraments, and the incarnation—is a mysterious union of the divine and the human, the Creator and the created. This essay focuses on a creaturely aspect of preaching, namely, the way it awakens, conjures, transmits, and configures emotion. The divine cannot be parsed from the experiencing body; however, affect theory offers insight into creaturely emotional interplay that elucidates what happens in preaching and how. This essay follows the lead of affect theorists who contend that activities such as preaching are always inherently affective, and that affects contribute to the structuring of social power. Attention to the emotional experiences of bodies in preaching offers a mode by which a phenomenology of social power in preaching may emerge.