The Experience of God in Preaching That Leads to an Ethical Life

Abstract

This thesis argues that an important essence of Christian preaching is the experience of God’s beauty resulting in an ethical life. Aesthetics and ethics are essentially related to one other. Unfortunately, there has been a tendency in academia for each sphere to be dealt with separately. Arguably, both spheres can be combined in understandings of God, because God is the origin of both beauty and goodness. The topic is addressed in five chapters. First, Psalm 19 is one example in the Bible of a combination of aesthetics and ethics being used. In Psalm 19, various images encourage the faithful life of God’s people. When we understand this psalm from a canonical perspective that the psalm has unity, it becomes clear that the author knew the power of the combination of aesthetics and ethics. Second, from an historical viewpoint, Jonathan Edwards and Horace Bushnell are two figures who laid the foundations for theological aesthetics in the Reformed tradition. One of their contributions was to explain Christian experience from the perspective of beauty. This notion can be a foundation for how we understand the Christian life, that it needs to reflect God’s beauty. Third, the legacy of Edwards and Bushnell was inherited by neo-Calvinist scholars, such as Abraham Kuyper, Herman Bavinck, Hans Rookmaaker, Calvin Seerveld, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. These scholars help connect beauty and the Christian life in practical ways. They commonly emphasize that it is one of the responsibilities for Christians to reflect God’s beauty in the fallen world. Two final chapters show how important it is for preachers to focus on God’s beauty as central to the homiletic experience. By understanding the New Homiletic and theopoetic preaching, we can find out what preaching needs now and in the future. And lastly, as a specific homiletic model, an aesthetic and ethical homiletic for the Korean church is developed, “a homiletic of Mŏt.”