Adorning Doctrine

According to Wikipedia, homiletics is “the application of the general principles of rhetoric to the specific art of public preaching”. For those who have not studied rhetoric, its general principles are usually broken down as follows: ethos (the establishment of trust and credibility), pathos (appealing to the emotions) and logos (appealing to reason and logic). So then, homiletics has to do not so much with the content of the message, but rather with its composition and delivery. It is about taking a proposition and making it persuasive.

For Christian preachers, the starting point is the truth of God. Homiletics is about adorning it rather than veiling it, undermining it or otherwise sabotaging the attempt to communicate it.

Now, when Paul wrote Titus about “adorning doctrine”, the adornments he had in mind were primarily behavioral rather than verbal. Slaves were to enhance the appeal of the gospel to their masters by being submissive, competent and trustworthy — basically, by living it out. Changed lives are among the strongest arguments for the Christian faith, and they are fundamental to provoking interest in the message. But my real point is this: we think of adornment as something added to enhance underlying beauty. But the sort of adornment Paul is commending does not involve adding anything. The first century slave was simply to get out of the Holy Spirit’s way so that the gospel message could be heard undistorted.

I suspect the same principle holds true in platform ministry. Less is more.

Ethos, Logos, Pathos

A consistent and faithful pattern of behavior goes to the ethos portion of the principles of rhetoric, if you like, in that it establishes the trustworthiness and credibility of the speaker. That holds true whether he is preaching the gospel or teaching the word of God to believers. A 350-pound preacher may make a better technical argument for practicing self-control than a 180-pound preacher, but he undermines his own case in the way a smaller man does not. His credibility, at least on that subject, goes right out the window. He is better to stick to subjects he has come closer to mastering in practice.

The logos portion is straightforward if you have a true argument to make. Quite often, the writers of the New Testament provide a logical basis for the truths they are teaching or the practice they are demanding. The preacher or teacher’s job is simply to make that argument understandable to a modern audience. Other times the truth is simply self-evident as stated.

The pathos part is trickier, in that it is possible to preach error or heresy in a manner that appeals to the emotions as easily as truth, sometimes easier. A Christian preacher or teacher, then, needs to be careful to assure he has the right argument before he starts investing himself in selling it with passion.

So then, the same three rhetorical principles hold regardless of subject or audience: you’ve got to be believable, you’ve got to state your case with clarity, and you’ve got to hit the heart.

Formal Homiletics

Now, I have heard it argued (and I have argued it myself) that if a man possesses the spiritual gift of teaching, it is unnecessary to teach him homiletics formally. In a sense, this is true. Gifted teachers adorn truth content naturally, and sometimes the attempt to manage their delivery too rigidly can diminish a fresh, natural quality that it would be preferable to preserve. When the Holy Spirit has equipped a man, he will often do things instinctively that others will not know to do unless you tell them.

That said, we all have blind spots, and it never hurts to be made aware what they are. Some of these are so self-evident we might think nobody could miss them, and yet I see them happening on the platform here and there with disturbing regularity. Many of these are pre-homiletical, in the sense that they go directly to the manner of delivery rather than to the ethos/pathos/logos trifecta. Here are a couple worth keeping in mind.

1/ The Absence of an Argument is an Argument for Absence

The most glaring of these is the speaker who has no argument at all, or if he has one, it’s way in the back of his own head rather than expressed to his audience. I run into this regularly with speakers who have chosen a passage of scripture to exposit, then say almost nothing beyond what the text itself plainly states. They add nothing the audience could not have discerned for themselves. The question of what this portion of the word of God demands of its audience is never explicitly addressed.

Alternatively, a speaker will choose a topic, assembling a number of scriptures to show what the Bible teaches about something as universally agreed as, say, the value of honesty. Nobody but a sociopath or a Democrat needs you to tell him that lying is wrong, yet everyone in the audience has lied at one time or another, no matter how otherwise pleasant and agreeable he may seem. There are obviously underlying reasons we so commonly do things we know to be wrong than that we are sinful creatures, because to persist in a sin like dishonesty requires that we find a way to rationalize away our guilt. The value of teaching such a subject does not lie in reciting a series of verses everyone knows to reach a conclusion everyone believes, but rather in meditating on the subject deeply enough before coming to the platform that your illustrations and examples of sinful thought patterns reach the consciences of those in your audience who need to make changes.

2/ Digression Obsession

A speaker may be entirely orthodox and even practical as to his content, but deliver his message in such a distracting manner that none of those good, solid home truths sink in and register. Disclaimers, rabbit trails and other digressions are necessary parts of clearing up the faulty impressions of an audience, but they cannot be constantly intruding on the speaker’s main point.

I will often hear a man begin to state his case. Ten words into his first sentence he appears to suddenly recall an exception to his proposition, and immediately heads off to disclaim that instance before he’s finished telling you what he is trying to say. A man who does this five, ten or fifteen times in a sermon is not communicating with 90% of his audience. He may as well be speaking in tongues. If, while up there on the platform, you suddenly and unexpectedly think of an exception to the general principle you are trying to explain, by all means share it with your audience. But first, set out the entire general principle clearly and unequivocally. Speak in full sentences with beginnings and endings. Once you have fully set out your proposition, you are now in a position to add, “The exception would be …”

I suspect what is often happening in cases like this is a failure to meditate. The speaker simply hasn’t reflected long enough on his proposition to anticipate the arguments that might reasonably be raised against it. When one suddenly occurs to him, he goes off script and loses his audience as he wanders down his rabbit trail. The confusing digression undoes all the good he might have done by making his point plainly and without ambiguity.

In Summary

Assuming the audience is paying attention throughout, if its members can get to the end of the message without being able to sum up in a sentence or two what the speaker was trying to communicate, he has not done his job. He may not actually know what he was trying to communicate.

The art of adorning doctrine is less about adding our own ideas to the word of God, and more about getting out of the Holy Spirit’s way so that he can speak to our audience without distraction, confusion or misunderstanding.