This conversation will begin with a brief and broad consideration of the typical text-reliant, systematic hermeneutical approaches of today. With those markers in place, Tom and Bill will spell out what they are offering by way of an oral hermeneutic and model this in a practical storytelling demonstration.
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This conversation will delve into Tom and Bill’s chapter on how orality has shaped and interfaced with text in the making of the canon. The goal will be to help illuminate how our text-centric paradigm as a holdover from the Enlightenment (that was discussed in episode 3) is a relatively recent development. Furthermore, it will help illuminate how rather than orality being considered some new or modern trend, it has been instrumental all along.

In this conversation, Tom & Bill answer the question: How did we get to this place communicatively in the twenty-first century? The discuss will offer some brief descriptions of Christian communication prior to the Enlightenment and then delve into how the Enlightenment played such a critical role in reshaping the nature of thinking and communication. With that established, we can then explore how things are changing today and what we mean by the “right-brain” rising. The goal will be to provide broad categories of how epistemological shifts have occurred and how relevant those are to us today as we engage God’s word and seek to share it. We will need to openly acknowledge these developments have been, broadly speaking, within the Western world, but have had massive impact on Majority World contexts as well.

Narrative: In the first episode, we explored how biblical orality invites us into a bigger communication narrative of embodied, interpersonal communication with the Triune Creator himself. This episode shifts the attention from the vertical axis to more of the horizontal one: how did God design human persons to live and communicate in community with one another? Picking up where the first episode finished, this conversation will explore creation, Eden, and divinely ordained early Hebrew practices that created such a rich symphony of oral, but also multi-modal, embodied, communication.

In this episode, Billy Coppedge explores why orality is critical for the future of global missions. It will approach this by briefly looking at the nature of global missions today and critical issues that are being raised. One of the themes running through all such discussions is the nature of human persons and an argument can be made that most (if not all) of today’s crises involve some failure for interpersonal communication to happen. We will explore how critical this is because at the heart of all reality is the interpersonal communion or communication within the triune God himself. All reality flows out of the God who himself lives in perpetual interpersonal communication between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

This places communication not just on a pragmatic footing—how do we get our message across, but on a much theological foundation. When we talk about interpersonal communication, we talk about the nature of God himself. We will delve into how this is unique for human persons who communicate in time and space and how significant embodiment is to human interpersonal communication. This naturally will open the door to talk about the Incarnation and begin discussing the communication methods God himself is modeling for us in and through the story of his people and Christ Jesus. All of this discussion paints the backcloth for the why of orality.