The focus and function of The Witness of Preaching
Some of the book's strengths are also its limitations.
Read Roger Owens's article "The Witness of Preaching after three decades."
It’s true, as L. Roger Owens says, that The Witness of Preaching is a child of the heady days of the 1970s and ’80s when homiletics was gaining solid footing as an academic discipline. Not only were Ph.D. programs beginning to produce rigorously trained homiletical scholars, but a new understanding was emerging of practical theology as a generative field, with homiletics one of its disciplines.
Not everyone was convinced then—and doubters remain today—that homiletics (or any of the practical disciplines, for that matter) belongs in the academic club. As a doctoral student at Princeton Theological Seminary, I was once in the office of a dean filling out some routine paperwork when I heard the dean mutter, partly to me and partly to the atmosphere, that he couldn’t fathom how homiletics could be taken seriously as a doctoral-level discipline. This despite the fact that the corpus of scholarly literature in homiletics is older, far more voluminous, and at least as technically sophisticated as the literature in the dean’s own academic field.
