Abstract
In our current age, authenticity is a highly regarded virtue which has very real implications for preachers in how they present themselves to their hearers and how they craft their homilies. The work of Charles Taylor will help us explore these implications. Building on an understanding of preaching as testimony and combining Taylor's insight with Augustine's timeless advice on preaching, we can then construct a three-dimensional framework for contemporary preaching in a Western context. We then reflect on the practical implications of a dimension of authenticity understood as appropriate self-disclosure. An exploration and critique of authenticity will lay the groundwork for an enhanced understanding of the contemporary preaching enterprise.
Introduction
In the Australian television series Mystery Road Origins (2022), the main character Jay, a police officer, delivers a eulogy at the funeral of his father with whom he has had a difficult relationship. As Jay rises to speak, he takes out his written notes, looks at them briefly, then folds them up, puts them back in his pocket, and speaks extemporaneously; actions chosen, I presume, to convey to the viewer that Jay had chosen to speak from the heart, to set aside prepared words for more honest words.
I have attended worship where preachers have, at least metaphorically, followed the same sequence, saying something like, “I had a sermon prepared, but as I was driving to worship today, I felt called to speak on something else.” They have proceeded to do just that. I have also listened to and watched young preachers speak from a few handwritten notes, using what seem to be unrehearsed language and ideas. They often exhibit self-deprecation and admit to doubts about what they are saying, or doubts about how worthy their words are.
This is not mere discourtesy, false modesty, or laziness. This idea of putting away a prepared word in favor of a word from the heart, to be informal and real, reflects the age in which we live. Speaking from the heart is crucial because it is a marker of authenticity.
Why Authenticity Matters
Authenticity matters because, as Charles Taylor suggests, we could call our current times an age of authenticity. 1 Taylor proposes that since the 1960s there has been a growing moral and spiritual individualism in what he calls North Atlantic civilization, so that we now have “a widespread expressive individualism,” 2 a key indicator of the age of authenticity. Of course, expressivism has been in the lexicon of the avant-garde in the arts from the nineteenth century; however, what has changed in Taylor's view is that it is now a mass phenomenon. 3 As another writer puts it, “since the last decade of the twentieth century, authenticity has climbed to an unprecedented and unparalleled popularity in areas as diverse as marketing, the sociology of organizations and the theory of management, nation-branding, and so-called informal representation.” 4
For Taylor, significant contributors to this mass phenomenon of expressive individualism are a post-World War II consumer culture and a concurrent burgeoning youth culture. In his exploration of this background, Taylor provides a helpful definition of “a contemporary ethic of authenticity.”
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That each one of us has his or her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one's own, against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from the outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority.
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Taylor employs the helpful term “social imaginary,” which he defines as, “the way in which our contemporaries imagine the societies they inhabit and sustain,” 8 as a means of talking about the current age. This broader term helps us understand how Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australian cultures, or even subcultures within these national cultures, are observably different but nevertheless inhabit a shared social imaginary, holding common social ideals and values around self-expression and choice as markers of authenticity. Culturally, Australia and the USA may differ widely regarding the importance of the British monarchy but displaying and defending these differences takes place in a common social imaginary, of which the ethic of authenticity is a key aspect.
To help us understand authenticity in such an imaginary, Taylor suggests we consider fashion. Through buying Nike shoes, “I join others in expressing my individuality.” 9 As observers we might critique this and ask, “how is it expressing individuality if one's style is the same as millions of others?” But that is to misunderstand. What matters is that an individual has deliberately chosen what to wear. Intentional choosing, regardless of how many others have made the same choice, allows an individual to authentically express who they are. The fact that a person may choose to be a goth and socialize with a group of goth friends all wearing similarly styled clothes is irrelevant. What matters is that it is personal choice and as such it is an expression of individuality. Authenticity as self-expression is not a rejection of tribe and identity but rather a rejection of unthinking or imposed conformity to ideas and practices via authority and tradition. “Authenticity involves seizing upon everyday possibilities in a way that, because they are no longer everyone's, for they cease to be anyone's, they are appropriated as mine.” 10
What is also necessary for self-expression is an arena, or public square, in which to display one's choosing. Taylor wrote his book before the burgeoning of social media, but YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok exemplify the public arena in which individuals can display their authentic choices. People make deliberate choices expecting that their choices will be on display.
Trivializing this elevation of authenticity, choice, and self-expression as self-focused, or highlighting the inconsistencies or contested meanings of authenticity is ultimately unhelpful. 11 “In a culture of authenticity, authenticity becomes a fundamental question for religious actors and social scientists alike.” 12 Authenticity is an idea with which we must grapple, simply because being authentic in an age of authenticity matters.
Authenticity as a Virtue
A key influencer in the authenticity project was Martin Heidegger and his notion of Dasein or “being-in-the-world,” outlined in his 1927 book Being and Time. Heidegger explored what it meant “to be” through a phenomenological lens, that is, through our lived experience and the phenomena of our “factical lives.” His conclusion was that the authentic self is the self realized through anxiety and angst. The authentic self lives intentionally as a being-in-the-world. Dasein is authentically itself in the mode of primordial individuation of reticent resoluteness that expects anxiety of itself … The self that is revealed by the reticence of resolute existence is the primordial phenomenal basis for the question the being of the “I.”
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Such opprobrium means that people often fight very hard to resist being labeled as a hypocrite, refusing to consider it as a possibility. They will instead deceive themselves as to their motives as well as the merit and result of their actions, rather than admit they are hypocritical. In his book, I Told Me So, Gregg Ten Elshof points out that such hypocrisy-avoiding self-deception is too often unchallenged in contemporary society, 14 simply because we value authenticity so much. Because a great deal of the philosophy of the twentieth century, building on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and others, was framed around the concept of the good person as the authentic person, authenticity got a promotion to a supreme virtue, and its opposite, self-deception, got a matching promotion to a supreme vice. For Ten Elshof, when self-deception was a derivative vice that merely facilitated or masked the more serious vices, we were prepared to admit to it. But once self-deception became a supreme vice, it became much harder to accept. Therefore, in this social imaginary, hiding one's vices has become a worse sin than having vices and confessing to them. It is better to confess to brokenness than to hypocrisy. As Andrew Root points out, scandals in the church and among church leaders hurt the church but it is not because they show that church leaders “have given themselves over to the devil.” 15 Rather, if church leaders “preach one thing and do the opposite they expose the church as inauthentic and fake. [And] worse than being evil is being inauthentic.” 16
In a context where too many church leaders have been revealed as inauthentic hypocrites and choice-obviating institutional authority is rejected, people are not going to listen to you just because you are a priest! In fact, they are more likely to refuse to listen for that very reason. Given such a context we need to consider if crafted words from polished preachers can still be effective and to help us do so, we need to remind ourselves of the role of preaching and the preacher in worship.
Preaching
Preaching occurs within worship where, according to Anne McGowan, there is a “fourfold paradigm for worship,” 17 what Constance Cherry calls the “four rooms for encountering God,” 18 and Robert Webber describes as the “four basic acts” of worship. 19 These four acts are the gathering of the people, the Word where “the scriptures are proclaimed and preached,” 20 the response to God's Word, and then the sending. McGowan suggests that through preaching in worship, “Christians hear and reflect on the Scriptures to remember their identity in Christ, strengthen their hope … and appropriate God's saving action.” 21 While the relative importance of preaching in worship is not consistent across the Christian traditions it has played a central role in worship in Protestant traditions building on the Reformers’ belief that “a balanced twofold worship experience of Word and Table was central to biblical and historical worship.” 22 Even in traditions with a scripted liturgy, where the celebration of the eucharist rather than the homily is central, just as in the Protestant traditions, preaching is the element of worship where the authenticity of the speaker is most on display.
The preacher then has a significant role to play in the life of the community and in “enacting the liturgy,” 23 to borrow Nicholas Wolterstorff's language. Those who play a role in the liturgical enactment, however, are not actors or performers because, as Wolterstorff reminds us: “we do not play the role of fictional characters but speak in our own voice.” 24
The preacher’s responsibility then is to speak in their own voice a faithful word from God that draws people into genuine encounter with God in worship. As we have noted, however, the preacher does this when at the same time the preacher's authenticity is on trial or at least subject to serious scrutiny.
At this point it is helpful to remember that preaching is fundamentally testimony. Indeed, Anna Carter Florence contends that, “testimony is our oldest model for talking about God. It is the ‘mother tongue’ of the church.” 25 Building on the ideas of Paul Ricoeur, she explains preaching in terms of “testifying to an event and reporting on what was seen and understood.” 26 Scripture is replete with testimony such as Isaiah's recital of God's mighty deeds and each gospel's eyewitness testimony. Importantly, such testimony “is not perception itself but the report, that is, the story, the narration of the event.” 27 Testimony, in Ricoeur's understanding, “gives something to be interpreted, and, at the same time, calls for interpretation.” 28
For Florence, such testimony is not the preacher merely talking about their own life and experience and, hence, a “code for narrative self-absorption.” 29 Ricoeur's thesis in Florence's understanding is that “experience relates to testimony as an encounter with God.” 30 As Ricoeur himself says, “The witness testifies about something or someone which goes beyond [them]. In this sense, testimony proceeds from the Other.” 31 If that is true, then it behooves the preacher to make certain their preaching is testimony of a deeply personal encounter with God through his Word but also bears witness to God's saving action.
If we accept Florence's contention, we can see that preaching-as-testimony of encounter is a meaningful way to frame preaching that expresses and reflects the social imaginary in which we live. Nevertheless, there are practical challenges for the preacher in navigating the space between Florence's ideal of preaching-as-testimony and the reality of a social imaginary that is skeptical of preachers and their message. The remedy is not to capitulate on preaching altogether, dumb down the content, or entertain more, but rather to construct a framework that will guide the preacher in preparing a message that can speak to our times and speak of our times.
Making our sermons shorter is not the answer either because short attention spans are not the problem. Human beings can concentrate for a very long time when they are doing something important. In fact, attention span is “task dependent” and reliant on “what the individual brings to that situation.” 32 In a 2016 journal article, 33 Neil Bradbury from the Chicago Medical School suggests that there is no primary evidence that attention spans have shortened or are in fact short at all. He proposes that this popular idea of a 15-minute attention limit is a myth. In fact, in one study he cites, students were more likely to retain what they heard in minutes 15–30 of a lecture than what they heard in minutes 1–15. 34 The crucial factors are active engagement and motivated attention combined with quality content.
Brené Brown's 2011 Ted Talk 35 on vulnerability is instructive. This 20-minute monologue has been viewed more than fifty-nine million times on the Ted website alone. The extraordinary number of views of what is essentially a secular sermon indicates that more is at play in the art of the spoken word than shortening attention spans. Brown's example demonstrates that quality, relevance, and heartfelt sharing are the critical factors in speaking eloquently and in a manner that engages a contemporary audience.
The Dimensions of Preaching
The preacher's goal is eloquent testimony. That is, to say something important and to say it well. This is not a new idea. Augustine of Hippo in Part IV of his work De Doctrina Christiana outlined the responsibility of the preacher to use all their eloquence in their preaching. Drawing on the rhetorical instruction of Cicero, Augustine declared that “the eloquent should speak in such a way as to instruct, delight, and move their listeners.” 36 He goes on to state, “A hearer must be delighted, so that [they] can be gripped and made to listen and moved so that [they] can be impelled to action.” 37 This eloquence was to assist in imparting the wisdom of Scripture. Eloquence alone is not enough. “Eloquent speakers give pleasure, wise ones salvation.” 38 The eloquent preacher speaks to the wisdom of God, “the true wisdom—the heavenly wisdom that comes down from the father of light.” 39 That is, according to Augustine, the preacher's goal is both eloquence and wisdom.
If we map out Augustine's advice to the preacher (Figure 1), the creative tension here is felt on two axes. In the first axis, the continuum moves from making no concessions to eloquence to holding the hearer's interest through well-crafted content. That is, from dullness to eloquence. The eloquent preacher who wants to delight and grip their listener seeks to use language, stories, humor, tension, and imagery in such a way that the hearer is captivated and held in the sermon for the entire narrative.
The eloquence axis.
But as Augustine has reminded us, preaching involves more than eloquence alone and so a second axis is also in play (Figure 2). For while people can be very eloquent on all sorts of topics, the preacher's call is to speak true wisdom. And so, on the second axis, the continuum moves from saying that which is entertaining but superficial to proclaiming the heavenly wisdom that is of God.
The wisdom axis.
The goal of the preacher, at least for Augustine, is to use all their rhetorical art to delight and persuade the congregation and to say something deeply rooted in Scripture. If we put them together, Augustine's preaching matrix looks like Figure 3.
Augustine’s preaching matrix.
In this matrix, the goal of the faithful preacher is “upper right” preaching. We can see how it is possible to preach in a way that is dull and shallow, or eloquent but still shallow. We can see that it is also possible to be wise but dull, but that it is best to be wise and eloquent. Such preaching is designed to deliver eloquent testimony that proclaims the word of the Lord and is more than mere moral instruction or the passing on of propositional truths and is instead “hearing from God rather than talking about God.” 40 In the language of Ricoeur, it is “testimony that proceeds from the Other.” 41
Eloquence and wisdom, however, are expressed differently in different places and in different ages because the gospel is always contextually mediated. The preacher always preaches in a particular social imaginary which means a third dimension is in play in effective preaching; however, this third dimension varies from age to age.
For example, in the age of reason, the third dimension in play was experience versus reason; so we have a famous preacher such as John Wesley decrying mere experience: “As to the nature of enthusiasm, it is undoubtedly a disorder of the mind; and such a disorder as greatly hinders the exercise of reason.” 42 Wesley's personal testimony of his famous Aldersgate experience added in 1748 to a sermon originally written in 1733, while noticeable for its personal pronouns, is barely more than 100 words: “I know he hath loved me, and given himself for me. He hath reconciled me, even me, to God.” 43 Stories of his homelife, his travels, personal revelations, and vulnerability were not a hallmark of Wesley's sermon while ordered thought and reason certainly were.
In our current social imaginary, however, it is no longer enough to speak with impeccable logic. Rather, in the social imaginary of authenticity, the third axis in play is that of self-expression. That is, vulnerable, open, honest sharing of one's own story. This means that the third axis that speaks to our age, authenticity expressed, moves from self-disguising to self-disclosing (Figure 4).
Three-dimensional preaching matrix.
In our current social imaginary, listeners expect their preachers to be authentic and to share their personal journey and their own Christian pilgrimage. Congregants expect preachers to be honest and to admit to their flaws and failings. Appropriate and helpful self-disclosure of the “real you” is vital for the contemporary preacher.
We can see that with the addition of this third dimension, “upper right” preaching has become more complex. It is possible to speak eloquently and wisely but to speak with a reserve that may not connect with contemporary listeners. We can see that it is possible to speak in a vulnerable way of the deep things of God but to do so with a lack of eloquence that obscures the message. We can see that it is possible to speak in a vulnerable and eloquent way without saying anything of substance. Effective preaching draws on all three dimensions.
None of these axes preclude thoughtful preparation and artfully crafted language and thoughts. I would contend that the reverse is true. To preach profoundly and eloquently from a place of personal encounter with appropriate self-disclosure requires significant preparation, theological insight, and self-reflective practice.
In the self-disguising/self-disclosing dimension of preaching the call for preachers in our current social imaginary is to speak personally and honestly of their own spirituality. For the preacher such authentic self-disclosure is not self-pity, Florence's “narrative self-absorption.” Rather, this disclosure of the self in preaching is motivated not by self-love but by love for others that embodies Jesus’ commands (Matt 22:37-39); that with honest intention, the preacher's self-disclosure is offered out of genuine love for God and love for the hearer as neighbor. The preachers’ goal in all they say is the other's human flourishing.
This means that for the sake of their hearers, preachers have a pastoral obligation to employ honest self-reflection in crafting their self-disclosure to ensure they do not “inflict their [the preachers’] brokenness on them.” 44 Preachers do not preach to excuse their own failings, to elicit sympathy, or in the hope that not hiding their sins will excuse their sins. Self-disclosure is not a vehicle for conceit where preachers subtly boast of their own spirituality and hold themselves up as an exemplar of the faith and role model to be emulated. Nor is their disclosure self-promotion that seeks personal validation and affirmation as a means of assuaging some inner personal need.
Rather, it is the honest self-disclosure of the fellow seeker. As Fred Craddock realized long ago, the preacher speaks “As One Without Authority,” 45 taking the posture of fellow pilgrim. Authentic preachers do not hold forth in an authoritative public speaking voice using a manner reserved only for the pulpit but instead preach conversationally. They do not declaim to their flock; they speak to their friends. Preaching from such a posture and in such a way the preacher can express their doubts but is also obligated to express their hopes. They can say, “I do not know” but at the same time say, “this I do know.”
Practically, all this means that the preacher can and should, in an appropriate way, share their own stories and their own spiritual journey because such honestly intended self-expression is a marker of authenticity. It also means that preachers should avoid generic preacher stories sourced from books of sermon illustrations or the internet. That is not to say preachers must tell only personal stories and use only personal illustrations. That is not the case. Books, films, and real life are a rich supply of appropriate sermon illustrations. But the preacher can also let their personal love for God and others be seen.
Authenticity and Wisdom in Preaching
If eloquence is modified by self-disclosure in our social imaginary, the ethic of authenticity that necessitates appropriate self-disclosure is also modified by wisdom.
The ubiquity of the language of authenticity and the constellation of synonyms that surround it—honest, raw, real, vulnerable, self-actualizing, self-validating—in the current social imaginary may seem to make the ethic of authenticity impervious to critique. But the preacher has a particular obligation to point out the insufficiency of such an ethic. The preacher must not just consider how to speak in an age of authenticity, but also how to speak into an age of authenticity in a way that transcends its constraints and critiques its shortcomings, and here we return to the shallow/wise dimension of preaching.
Human flourishing is constituted by more than being sincere, authentic, and true to ourselves. After all, we can be sincerely wrong. Unchecked self-expression can be selfish. Speaking “our truth” can be hurtful to others. In our resolute seeking to live authentically, or at least to be seen as authentic, we may end up constructing a persona that is inauthentic. A relentless desire for self-expression can lead us to online pseudonyms that enable us to say all manner of hurtful things in an ironic hiding of our real self to express our true self. Unless Christ comes again, the age of authenticity will pass. There is much that is good in it: a desire to be real, to realize our potential, a willingness to share personal struggles, advocating for the rights of marginalized and vulnerable people to unashamedly be themselves and express themselves. Nevertheless, it is the preacher's task to help the people of God see past the constraints of our age, using the language of our age, and to help people see that being authentic, helpful as it may be, is neither the primary value nor the primary measure of human flourishing.
Steven DeLay has written a paper summarizing Jean-Luc Marion's critique of Heidegger and authenticity. DeLay points out that for Marion, a French Catholic philosopher, Heidegger's existentialist notion of Dasein, being-in-the-world, resolute in anxiety, is simply inadequate. Authenticity at the end of the day is not “our highest possibility.” 46 Dasein's “resoluteness ignores the reality that the exigency of its own ideals—autonomy, responsibility, self-actualization, self-expression, etc.—like all worldly commitments are gutted by vanity.” 47 Marion's critique is built on the Teacher's cry in Ecclesiastes of “vanity of vanities! all is vanity” (Eccl 1:2); that “all is vanity and a chasing after wind” (Eccl 1:14). This cry then directs us to the fundamental test of our self-understanding when we ask the question: what does it matter? (A quoi bon?). Marion uses this question to test the claims of authenticity as being-in-the-world because for Marion, “Vanity disqualifies every certainty, whether it bears upon the world or upon myself.” 48 It certainly disqualifies any certainty we find in authenticity, for “in the final analysis [the existential analytic] cannot settle why being authentic matters.” 49 Heidegger's Dasein, Marion suggests, fails at this point because it cannot meaningfully answer such a question.
Marion's critique also extends to challenging the Cartesian certainty of being, cogito, ergo sum, I think therefore I am. He argues that even if we are certain of our existence that too is not enough. “Am I not, despite my certainty, in vain?” 50 If human flourishing is constituted by more than authenticity, it is also constituted by more than certainty of being. That is because, “[t]he certainty of my existence is never enough to make it just, or good, or beautiful, or desirable—in short it is never enough to assure it.” 51
So, then we ask, if certainty of being is not enough, and “if even the authentic life is an empty one, what are we to do?” 52 It is at this point that the world of phenomenology and preaching intersect in the experience of love, the foundation of Christian preaching, but a too-little-explored category in phenomenology. Inexplicably for Marion, “philosophers have in fact forsaken love, dismissed it without a concept and finally thrown it to the dark and worried margins of their sufficient reason.” 53 Marion contends that this should not be so and that love alone has an answer to the critique of vanity, “What's the use?,” and in fact points us to a better question. “To confront this demand, it is no longer a question of obtaining a certainty of being, but instead, the response to another question—‘Does anybody love me?’” 54
Marion argues that the core question of our lived experience (phenomenology) is not “do I exist?” or “how will I live authentically?” but rather “does anybody love me?” We know this because a life without the possibility of love is unimaginable or at least would be intolerable. Let us suppose that we were to propose to someone, anyone, to be with certainty … for an open-ended amount of time, with, as sole condition, the definitive renunciation of the possibility of someone ever loving that person—who would accept?
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God does not only reveal himself through love, as love; he reveals himself through the means, the figures, the moments, the acts, and the stages of love, the one and only love, that which we also practice.
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Of course, Marion's insights on the primacy of love have been critiqued and, as one reviewer pointed out, rather than pure phenomenology, “Is this not unvarnished theology[?]”; 60 however, that is of little concern to the Christian preacher who understands that love of God and love of the other are central to the Christian story and, therefore, will never cease to lie at the heart of the preaching enterprise. If the requirement to preach eloquently has never changed, the requirement to preach God's love has never changed either. Love is the supreme virtue and goal of human experience. Authenticity, although a virtue in our present age, does not trump love, but it can be a means of expressing love. Authenticity does not require eloquence, but in concert with eloquence and wisdom can add another dimension to contemporary preaching.
Conclusion
The contemporary preacher preaches in a particular social imaginary where authenticity is a primary virtue, and this has implications for the preacher. The three dimensions of preaching: eloquence, wisdom, and authenticity that speak to our current social imaginary, need to be brought into sermon preparation and used to shape the preacher's words so that their message speaks to the current age in the best way possible. Age-addressing, three-dimensional preaching is the vulnerable, thoughtful, and crafted testimony of a fellow pilgrim who understands the age in which they live, can speak the language of the age in which they live, and can thoughtfully critique the age in which they live. I am suggesting that preachers don’t put their sermon notes in their back pocket but rather spend more time on them to ensure that they have a timeless yet personal, well-expressed word of love for a passing age.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
