When We Meet God in Preaching through Our Bodies: A Ritualist Approach to the Divine Encounter in Preaching

Abstract

This paper articulates a way of the hearer's bodily experience of God in preaching by understanding it as a ritual knowledge that gained through the hearers' bodily practices in preaching and worship. In the application of ritual theory, embodied cognition theory, and social memory theory, this essay suggests ritual knowledge can be described as an embodied, imaginative, and social knowledge. On the basis of this concept of ritual knowledge, this paper will discuss how the hearer's experience in preaching can be understood in terms of ritual knowledge. As a result, it argues that the divine encounter in preaching is not merely a result of a cerebral intellectual understanding of the preaching contents but an event that may occur when the lived bodies of the hearers meet the Spirit in words and actions.

Keywords

• body
• experience
• worship
• ritual theory
• embodied cognition theory
• social memory theory
• ritual knowledge