This article is intended to provide a historical Context to understand preaching on the social issues presented through the American pulpit of the 1960s and to discover some clues about the way the pulpit was influenced by its socio-political context....
This article is intended to provide a historical Context to understand preaching on the social issues presented through the American pulpit of the 1960s and to discover some clues about the way the pulpit was influenced by its socio-political context. The reason to seek how preaching on the social issues and the sociality of preaching were historically formed or reformed as a homiletical genre in the modem history of preaching is to provide the possibility of social preaching for the Korean pulpit today, suggesting such a preaching as an alternative to overcoming the crisis of Korean pulpit lost social credentials and to recovering its sociality.
In order to clearly understand preaching on the social issues, it is imperative to study the broad social environment by which social preach-ing historically was shaped or reshaped. In considering the relationship between the pulpit and its context, this study reflects on the 1960s as a time of the emergence of a new homiletical concern for preaching on the social issues in the modern history of preaching and examine why the decade of the sixties is important to understand social preaching. To ac-complish this objective, it is necessary to describe and interpret the ten-sion between the pulpit of the sixties and its social context generating a response or a call to a prophetic voice from the pulpit.
Thus, this discussion focuses on historical challenges-that is, ex-ternal and internal problems which the pulpit of the sixties faced within its socio-political context, on their implications for the pulpit, and on their impact on the pulpit. For that reason, special attention will be given to two related themes, social movements and homiletical theologies during the period, especially the civil rights and antiwar movements and black and feminist theologies of homiletical hermeneutics.