PULPITS
5
fulness, but they respected the freedom of the listeners. Contention, debate, dialectic, philosophic inquiry-these were the weapons of his enemies. Christ was silent before Herod, who longed for argument. And it was Pilate who indulged in absh¡act speculation when he asked "What is truth?" The question was, of course, a legitimate one; but for Christ the answer was much too precious for a debater's game. Christ wanted to reveal something of the mystery of his Father, and he chose the language of poetry rather than the language of abstraction as the best means of doing this. He ignored the prevalent Graeco-Roman rhetoric in favor of the stories, parables, and symbols of the Old Testament tradition. He was inductive and concrete in the oriental fashion. In the same way, he ¡preferred the discussion, the conversation, the dialogue to the oration or lecture. Christ, the great teacher, clearly favored the small seminar in an intimate setting over the lecture method in an aula maona. Our difficulty is, of course, that "proclaiming the Good News" has taken on a restrictive meaning which it did not have in the New Testament. "Preaching" has come to mean a sort of sacred oration or lecture, a monologue from a rather clear and structured text, given customarily before a silent audience. But for Christ and the men of the New Testament who were active "in the ministry of the Word" (Acts 6, 4), this would have been far too narrow a concept. Karl Hermann Schelkle reminds us in his book, Discipleship and P1'iesthood: "For its description of preachi;,g and proclamation the New Testament employs thirty different expressions: say, speak, expound, declare, teach, announce ... proclaim, admonish, censure, preach, testify, confess, persuade, convince--among others. lf our modern language is much less richly endowed, then this is not only a decline in language, but a sign that we have lost much of the actuality as well. The abundance of expressions echoes the abundance of overflowing vitality in the ancient church." The preaching of Christ and of his disciples, then, was wider and more encompassing than the "pulpit preaching" of later times. The "proclamation of the Good News" was such a rich and expansive concept that it would not be limited in rhetoric