1: Emotional Power of Narrative Form
The gospels are narrative. And it has become almost universally axiomatic that narrative is so effective because it engages with our emotions.
Similes, metaphors, etc speak directly to the emotional mind because it connects with pre-existing ideas and memories.
Emotional content then is essential if we want our people to learn. Some people are more attuned to them than others.
Not everyone, however, is not well-connected to their emotional mind.
2: Emotional problems encountered by the preacher
As we preach the gospel narratives, those narratives will not always be heard by emotionally healthy people. Many people will be damaged, regardless of whether the psych department declares them within the bounds of 'normal'.
Some are normal.
Some overfeel and lives are chaos.
Others are scared and threatened by emotions.
Some of them attack others because of this fear.
Some who've suffered trauma can have emotions diminished.
Some just aren't connected emotionally, naturally.
This is your congregation.
And, of course, you're not immune yourself. :)
3: Narrative in therapy
While narrative works best with an emotionally healthy person, it also has a role in helping those who are not. We now have even something called 'narrative therapy'.
We all tell ourselves a story of our lives, complete with things that help or hinder us from moving forward. When the story told is not a positive one, the therapist helps the person re-story their history and thus re-story their future. This recognises the power of the narrative to help and affect people.
4: Healing through Gospels preaching
The narratives themselves hold the key to solve the problems that themselves make the narratives hard to grasp. As the spirit makes new, it does so emotionally too.
The preacher models how to perceive the narratives in order to have it rightly order the emotions.
(He's doing so much, not sure I can blog this right now, sorry, or I'll miss it all myself!)
Narratives entangle people.
The discourse is 'what's in front of you'. Pay attention to it, and you'll see how a narrative works its narrative power.
What you want is for the actual reader to become the implied reader. For the reader to become the person for whom the text was written. And it's the preacher's job to help this.
Emotions have a significant role in the reading experience, because the narrative uses them to entangle the reader. Why are we revolted by the pharisees? Because the text makes them revolting. (Not sure what he said in that last sentence. it's not what I just wrote,though, I'm pretty sure. But you kinda get the idea. I hope)
Of course it's good to use the narrative study tools to analyse the gospels as narrative, and yet they're far too complex to be categorised by simple schemata.
Nope, brain fried. Just listening for a bit.
Narrative studies recognise that the affective elements of a text are key in helping the reader to comprehend the text and make the text meaningful. The emotions are not simply an 'after effect' of the text, but they are intimately involved in the exercise of comprehension itself. It's also predictive. It helps the reader to anticipate an outcome well before the actual thinking or encountering of it takes place.
Narratives work by producing an affective impact. They don't only address the cognitive mind, but work by engaging, affecting and manipulating (in a positive sense) the emotions of the reader towards a certain goal.
But towards what?
The gospels, generally, move people towards following Jesus, the Son of God.
yet, complex narratives show a high degree of indeterminacy, so that the goal can be different for different readers so that their responses become more or less unique to them. We're nervous about diffferent meanings for different people here.
But what I'm suggesting is that there is a clear forward movement of the narrative itself, but there are individual outcomes by the person who is affected by it.
When we talk about application, therefore, we need to leave a large degree of room for the Spirit and text to do its individual work on the individual hearer?
It this is so, what is emotional exegesis?
Well, because a text will rub up against the previous emotional experiences of the reader, emotional exegesis will anticipate this interface and help and aid it.
A suggestion is that the sympathy that readers are designed to feel helps to make them a better human being, thus to become more empathetic.
EE won't read a book as a flat text, but as an emotional landscape, with movements and shift and change.
A case study in Emotional Exegesis
Luke 23:55-24:8
Two explicit emotions.
- Perplexity
- Fear
What is the effect on the reader when emotions are explicitly mentioned? The reader will map the even that they're seeing to an event where they've experienced the same emotion themselves. So you may never have discovered an empty tomb, yet you'll have had their feeling of perplexity before, and so can enter into that. Same with angel-induced fear.
Because we, the readers, know what it is to be afraid and to be afraid of death, we are drawn into the text and with them waiting for the next thing to happen.
As we hear the angel's words to the women, we are enabled to hear that speaking coming into our own experiences of perplexity and fear. "He is not here. He is risen."
(again, masses of gold I can't get down quick enough. Ie, the presence of women softens the scene for us. The presence of the spices tells us we're in the place of grief. etc...)
The thick presence of death, in the stench of rot and the sweetness of spices, enlivens the feelings of death that hangs over us all as a sentence. Death is the stench in the text.
And so everything that we're expecting, and that the characters are expecting, is the opposite of what they find. What they find is so foreign to all the elements being set up so far that the perplexity is given a much fuller sense for the narrative reader.
...
The effects
The affective elements of the text help us to move to a different world than that with which we are familiar. "He is not here, he is risen." This sentence now stands against the reality in which we stood, which is under the shadow of death. The same world that we live in is the same world in which a man rose from the dead.
Emotional Exegesis: A Preacher's Checklist
- Who are the Characters and How are they Related?
- What emotions are explicitly mentioned?
- What emotional nuances lie behind the words?
- How does the text use language of the senses?
- What is the direction the passage moves its reader towards?
- What outcomes might be provoked, but perhaps not prescribed?
- And so on...
Preaching the gospels for divine effects
Preach the gospels in the way they come to us. Touch on the emotions in the text, such that they touch the emotions of those we are preaching to.
Questions:
Q: Any comments about how our congregations are so familiar with the gospel stories and so we lose the disfamiliarity part of the the process and skip it and so lose the effect.
A: With a well-told story, we can still cherish it. It's a bit hard to actually be a first-time reader.