Naming and nurturing reality from a heart renewed by grace

Abstract

This contribution investigates the unbearable tension between the homiletical act of naming reality (with the promise of exposing, challenging and/or triggering creative forces in it) on the one hand, and neglecting this same reality on the other hand, thereby causing it to return to an ignored, unchallenged and degenerated state. The author focuses on tension fields that are generated when preachers embark on the activity of naming realities in their proximate contexts and how they position, withdraw or distance themselves in a certain way when problematic elements (for instance the glaring and seemingly unbridgeable inequality in the situation of Dalits) are opened up by the act of naming. By means of a theological reflection on the renewal of the heart by God’s act of grace in Christ, the author attempts to identify key markers for a homiletic theory that will be able to link the act of naming reality with the act of nurturing (rather than neglecting) this named reality.