I have been for years now teaching homiletical theories and methods to students at World Mission University in Los Angeles, California. I have been aware of certain problems in the theory and practice of preaching prevailing in the Korean church. One of the most critical issues is that Korean preaching largely consists of the topical-deductive method. Another is that a hierarchical structure enforces the gap between the preacher and the congregation. The study explores, within the framework of the theologian Johannes van der Ven’s empirical-theological research program, text-guided preaching, based on the American homiletician Thomas G. Long’s theory that the sermon should regenerate the impact of the biblical text, in the context of the Korean church and its tradition of preaching. The study looks at the history and characteristics of Korean preaching (Chapter 2) and also at the emergence, characteristics, and styles of new American preaching (Chapter 3). The empirical component of the study deals with a case study involving a preaching workshop for theological students as an illustration of the reception by Korean preachers of the proposed theory for preaching (Chapter 5). My proposal is that text-guided preaching (described in Chapter 4) will benefit those Korean preachers and students willing a homiletical exploration. The basic premise of this model of preaching is that a text seeks to impact its reader; or, to use Paul Ricoeur’s words, confronts its readers with a particular world of understanding; or, from the standpoint of speech-act theory, performs multiple illocutionary acts. Text-guided preaching as it is presented in this study incorporates the notion of application, a notion introduced to hermeneutics by Hans-Georg Gadamer that says that understanding a text always aims at some practical application. Homiletically refined by H. J. C. Pieterse and C. J. A. Vos, it means that the preacher’s understanding of a biblical text is partly determined by the particular, historically contingent situation of the congregation. This study adopts an empirical-theological approach to practical theology. As a part of the theological induction phase of the empirical-theological cycle, a preaching workshop was conducted with eight student-participants. The case study produced some significant results. The clearest finding has to do with the task of interpreting the life situation of the congregation. It leads to the conclusion that theological education at World Mission University has to be modified to include trainings that would produce competent interpreters of the cultural context of Christian life. / Thesis (PhD (Practical Theology))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Practical Theology / PhD / unrestricted

A descriptive analysis was given of the characteristics of the authors and citations of the articles in the journal Theological Studies from 1940-1995. Data was gathered on the institutional affiliation, geographic location, occupation, and gender and personal characteristics of the author. The citation characteristics were examined for the cited authors, date and age of the citations, format, language, place of publication, and journal titles. These characteristics were compared to the time-period before and after the Second Vatican Council in order to detect any changes that might have occurred in the characteristics after certain recommendations by the council were made to theologians. Subject dispersion of the literature was also analyzed. Lotka's Law of author productivity and Bradford's Law of title dispersion were also performed for this literature. The profile of the characteristics of the authors showed that the articles published by women and laypersons has increased since the recommendations of the council. The data had a good fit to Lotka's Law for the pre-Vatican II time period but not for the period after Vatican II. The data was a good fit to Bradford's Law for the predicted number of journals in the nucleus and Zone 2, but the observed number of journals in Zone 3 was higher than predicted for all time-periods. Subject dispersion of research from disciplines other than theology is low but citation to works from the fields of education, psychology, social sciences, and science has increased since Vatican II. The results of the analysis of the characteristics of the citations showed that there was no significant change in the age, format and languages used, or the geographic location of the publisher of the cited works after Vatican II. Citation characteristics showed that authors prefer research from monographs published in English and in U.S. locations for all time-periods. Research from the disciplines of education, psychology, science and the social sciences has increased, but authors preferred the use of theological sources for their research more than 70% of the time both before and after the council.