Whose Judgement? Which Rationality?

Every now and again, you find yourself in the presence of a real orator of theological power. Their appearance breaks through the sometimes fusty, sometimes overly formal, sometimes overly casual character of the average Sunday service, refreshing what is always already there in a way which isn’t a mere flourish into some passing fad or other (2 Timothy 4:1–4) but genuinely stirs the bones of the congregation, sets into motion what was passive and breaks up the mechanical and dreary flow of simple cause-and-effect that typifies the mass society. This person is not recognisable by some objective metric—such a thought would be to develop a formula of proclamation, which is tantamount to misunderstanding the entire effort so poorly that one would possibly not even recognise kerygmic speech if it took flesh and drove them out of the temple—but by a collection of qualities, a family of characteristics, which may or may not be present within different agents at different times. Such is the humorous mechanisation of the Spirit, it seems, ready to subvert the technical demand of modernity by refusing to become an object of science.

Perhaps there is a flair of blood and guts, fire and brimstone, which is altogether a little too impolite for the middle-class comfort of postmodernity; perhaps a story which seems to catch the jagged edges of the congregation’s subjectivities, such is the earnest held there within; perhaps it is merely a presentation of the word without chatter or pomp, disappointingly short for the one who arrived in order to see the show. There is a great deal of variance here, of course, and I have no doubt that you are perfectly capable of bringing your own stories of such a thing to the fore—and, of course, your own stories of the inverse. However, there’s something present within the presence of the real orator that should bring us to pause: how does one exalt the ideal that raises the temperature of a sermon from the comforting churchiness of the preacher-entertainer to the fever pitch of “the offense” (Matthew 11:6) without invoking the temptation to engage in judgment? What would it mean to judge the other qua sinner when engaged in the often poorly-conceptualised act of “correcting” or similar?