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I’ve been chatting with the trainees at CBS about preaching recently, and have come up with a slightly different way to describe the preaching task. See what you think …

I have a newish definition of preaching to run past you. 

Or at least, a newish angle from which to view what we’re trying to do when we preach. (And by ‘preach’ I mean what we normally mean in our circles—the public exposition of a passage of Scripture.)

I ended up thinking about preaching more than I expected to while working on the PhD, between 2015 and 2018. My actual topic was all the other word ministry that happens in a Christian community apart from preaching—the ‘one-another edifying speech’ that we engage in as Christians, to edify, encourage, exhort, admonish and exhort one another. 

But this required me to think about preaching as well, in order to understand and differentiate these two broad kinds of speech—the one-to-many communication that teaches and applies the word to the congregation, and the one-another communication that spreads and applies and generally ministers that word to each other in multiple ways. 

In the course of all this, I found myself dabbling in ‘speech-act theory’. If you’re not familiar with it, ‘speech-act theory’ is a currently popular way of thinking about how language works. It rests on the insight that all language is a form of action. When we ‘say’ something we’re never just ‘saying’. We’re always doing something through the words that come out of our mouths. We might be explaining, answering, promising, commanding, warning, entertaining, exclaiming, interjecting, declaring, exhorting, comforting, and so on. 

Speech-act theory goes into some detail to analyse and describe this process. Putting it a bit simplistically, speech-act theory differentiates three main aspects of any utterance:

* the action of the speech (the kind of thing you’re doing as you speak: promising, telling, asking, explaining, exhorting, and so on);

* the propositional content of the speech (what it is you’re promising or explaining or asking); and 

* the hoped-for outcome of the speech (what you’re expecting to happen as a result of your speech-action: for your hearers to trust the promise, to understand the explanation, to heed the exhortation, and so on). 

A number of biblical scholars have picked up on this idea and applied it to Scripture. Perhaps most prominently, Kevin Vanhoozer has argued that the Bible is God’s communicative action. When God speaks in the text of Scripture, he is always doing something—declaring, explaining, teaching, urging, commanding, and so on—to fulfil his covenant purposes through the words of the human author. And like all speech, this speech-action that God is ‘doing’ has certain content, and certain expected outcomes. God’s speech is living and active and purposive. 

Now, the biblically alert among you might have already figured this out, even without the geniuses of speech-act theory to help you. You might have read and believed these famous verses, for example:

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it. (Isa 55:10-11)

God is intentionally doing something whenever he speaks. Speech-act theory highlights this, and in a basically helpful way it seems to me.

What has this got to do with preaching? 

Well some other clever chaps (most notably the British evangelical scholar, Timothy Ward), have argued that if God’s word is an action, then what we are doing when we preach is re-enacting the wo