Preaching in the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit: Yves Congar’s Pneumatology and Homiletics

Preaching in the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit: A Conversation Between Yves Congar’s Pneumatology and Homiletics

In her 2004 text *Yves Congar’s Theology of the Holy Spirit*, Elizabeth Groppe argues that Yves Congar’s distinctive contribution to contemporary Roman Catholic pneumatology lies in his integration of anthropology and ecclesiology. Prior to Congar, late nineteenth and twentieth-century Roman Catholic pneumatology was primarily characterized by reflection on the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the human soul without addressing how this might impact the structure and mission of the church. This exclusively anthropological lens impoverished both pneumatology and ecclesiology, resulting in a privatized, individualistic spirituality and a juridical image of the church. If Catholic theologians made a connection between pneumatology and ecclesiology, it was most often an appeal to the Holy Spirit as the source of the magisterium’s infallibility. Congar criticized an ecclesiology he described as a “hierarchology,” an understanding of the church as a divinely instituted pyramid in which the Holy Spirit was gifted exclusively to the hierarchy. Recovering an understanding of charisms, Congar linked anthropology and ecclesiology together by recognizing that diverse gifts of the Holy Spirit are given to all members of the community for building up the church. Reflection on the Holy Spirit’s activity must not separate the individual and the community. While this insight enabled Congar to bridge a gap that had developed within Catholic theology, it is also a valuable contribution to the field of Christian pneumatology more broadly. It was through ecumenical encounters with members of Protestant and Orthodox traditions that Congar developed a more robust theology of the Holy Spirit.  

This paper builds upon this central insight - the importance of integrating anthropology and ecclesiology within pneumatology - and uses Congar’s theology of the Holy Spirit as a foundation from which to construct an integrated pneumatological theology of preaching. I argue that theological reflection on the activity of the Holy Spirit in preaching continues to lack a robust integration between anthropology and ecclesiology. Christian theologians who have written about the Holy Spirit and preaching have often focused on the individual preacher at the expense of the community. Across Christian traditions, these accounts often emphasize the role of the Holy Spirit in authorizing, empowering, and inspiring the preacher’s preparation and delivery of a sermon. Some authors appeal to the image of the prayer closet to describe the preacher’s process, emphasizing an individualized and privatized encounter with the Holy Spirit. The direction of analysis often begins with the preacher and then moves to the hearers, implying that the preacher encounters the Spirit first on their own and then shares this with the hearers. I contend that this analysis bears similarities to Congar’s description of a “hierarchology” – a kind of top-down pyramidal model that creates a preacher-listener, teacher-student, expert-amateur paradigm. Within the field of homiletics, David J. Lose distinguishes between what he calls a performative homiletic and a participatory homiletic. In a performative homiletic, “the emphasis is almost entirely upon the preacher’s role to study, interpret, and proclaim the text” (*Preaching at the Crossroads: How the World and Our Preaching Is Changing*, 105). By contrast, a participatory homiletic invites the whole community into the encounter with the text. What if a theology of preaching began with the Spirit-filled community as the starting point rather than the individual preacher?

Congar wrote, “Pneumatology, like ecclesiology and theology as a whole, can only develop fully on the basis of what is experienced and realized in the life of the Church. In this sphere, theory is to a great extent dependent on praxis” (*I Believe in the Holy Spirit*, 1:172). In light of this truth, this paper approaches preaching not only as an application of theology but also as a source of theological reflection. It is an encounter between Congar’s more theoretical pneumatology and the practical field of homiletics. In his 1989 text *The Holy Spirit and Preaching*, James Forbes famously remarked, “The preaching event itself – without reference to specific texts and themes – is a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood expression of the theology of the Holy Spirit” (19). Reflecting more deeply on the Spirit's activity in the preaching event—particularly within the community—can help advance our pneumatology.