Preaching as the Word of God: Answering an Old Question with Speech-Act Theory

by Sam Chan, Graham Cole (Foreword)

According to the Reformers, preaching is the word of God. As the word of God, preaching is a foundation for the church. It is also vital for the personal growth of a Christian. But Christians are poorly equipped to understand how preaching is the word of God. Some Christians look for preaching that closely reproduces the text in the Bible. Other Christians look for preaching that creates maximal emotional and existential impact. And there is a lot of name-calling with Christians accusing preachers of "not preaching the word" But what type of preaching is the word of God? The purpose of this book is to equip Christians to understand how preaching can be God speaking. It accomplishes this with a survey of the problem in the history of the church, a detailed overview of key biblical texts, and finally the application of the contemporary philosophical tool of speech act theory.

292 pages, Paperback

Published July 12, 2016

About the author

Sam Chan (PhD, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School; MD, University of Sydney) is a public evangelist with City Bible Forum in Sydney, Australia where he regularly shares the gospel with high school students, city workers, doctors, and lawyers. He speaks at conferences around the world on the topics of ethics, story-telling, apologetics, and the practice of evangelism in a post-Christian culture. Sam blogs at espressotheology.com.

Reviews

[Kaz Okaya · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very helpful book that tackles the classic problem of preaching being the word of God. The author approaches this issues from a historical, biblical, and philosophical approaches (corresponding to the three sections of the book). The most helpful was the third section where he analyzes the phenomenon of preaching in terms of speech-act theory. There are some flaws in his logic and some over-generalizations, but overall a helpful book.

[Brodie · Rating 3 out of 5]

In preaching, how can we understand fallen humans to be speaking the very words of God?

Sam Chan provides a thorough survey of the positions of Luther and Calvin - who both conceive of preaching as the word of God - and traces through the teaching of scripture to answer this question. He then examines the inadequacies of some contemporary views, before applying Speech Act Theory to secure his verdict: "to preach the gospel as the word of God is to re-locute and re-illocute the divine speech act, the gospel, which itself was once locuted and illocuted by the prophets, Jesus, and the apostles, and which now continues to be locuted and illocuted in the canonical scriptures."

I found much of the body of this book a struggle to work through. The work on the reformers was a good review, but didn't help to answer the questions I was interested in (or that the book was seeking to answer), though it did establish the significance of the reformers' position. However, tracing through the biblical revelation and conception of 'the word of God' was helpful, and Chan's application of the tool of Speech Act Theory was very interesting.

I really appreciated the reminder to 'secure illocutionary uptake' from scripture. That is, to preach not just the content of scripture, but also to preach with the force & intention of that portion of scripture itself. Chan includes this as one of his requirements which together are sufficient to guarantee that proclamation is the word of God.

In all, I enjoyed the read, and appreciated the questions the book has provoked for me. It's helped me to have a loftier view of preaching.
There's also a short and interesting appendix on prophecy.