I read about T. David Gordon’s Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers
Gordon’s basic warning about Protestant church life is that, in a society shaped more by recorded music and by television than by printed text and public performance, preaching has suffered.? Borrowing his insights from Neil Postman and others, he diagnoses these changes as “media-ecological” shifts that will not simply go away but also do not stand as inevitable.? If seminaries and aspiring ministers, Gordon argues, will cultivate habits of careful reading and deliberate composition, preaching as a Christological art form stands to come back from its descent in the last few decades into a jumble of random observations related, if tangentially at all, to the sermon’s Biblical text.
Gordon argues for a shift in educational emphasis for ministerial candidates, starting with the bold suggestion that people planning to attend seminary should major not in religion or (in my tradition) Bible but in English literature, focusing as much as possible on pre-twentieth-century poetry.? The study of poetry first and classical languages second prepares the mind, Gordon contends, to read texts as texts that can transform the reader in the act of reading rather than as sources of sound bytes for the sake of confirming one’s own prior point.? By learning to read slowly, to discern the texts’ primary emphases as one moves from epic to lyric to oracle, means to let the text form the person rather than forcing the text to conform to the person.
This was not a book that introduced me to earth-shattering new ideas, but it was a good, brief reminder of why I teach English and why, ultimately, I’d like to teach English in a Christian college.? Even knowing what Internet Monk has predicted for the future of evangelicalism, and even knowing that Christian colleges are not likely to last too much longer the ways I remember them (though they could if research universities keep going down the road of outsourcing the teaching of sciences and humanities to the young and if small Christian colleges unapologetically present themselves as the more sensible alternative), I still think that I could be part of the movement that Gordon names in this little book and that I’ve been imagining myself as a part of for most of my academic career.
