Steiner's renewal of the Christian sermon for a scientific age, moving from doctrine toward living, pictorial, symbolic speech that still reaches the soul.
The Art of Preaching in Anthroposophy, in German die Kunst des Predigens, is Rudolf Steiner's renewal of Christian sermon-craft, set out in the 1921 theologians' course Lectures and Courses on Christian Religious Work I (GA 342). Steiner names the practitioner's central problem directly: in souls shaped by recent scientific education, the words Christ, grace, and redemption no longer find an echo, and even sincere preaching meets an inner resistance. His answer turns the sermon away from doctrinal teaching toward living, pictorial, symbolic speech, the symbolum that, when pronounced, penetrates the soul more deeply than dogmatic content. The art belongs to the heart and the Sentient Soul, not the reasoning intellect. This course, given to a circle of mostly Lutheran pastors and theology students at Stuttgart, seeded the priestly practice of The Christian Community, the movement for religious renewal founded by Friedrich Rittelmeyer in September 1922.
The Art of Preaching is Rudolf Steiner's treatment of how the Christian sermon can be renewed for a modern consciousness in which Gospel-content no longer resonates. Delivered to working theologians in 1921, it diagnoses the disintegration of religious life under scientific education and proposes a turn from doctrine toward pictorial, symbolic, living speech, the word that still reaches the heart when teaching alone has stopped landing.
In Steiner's Own Words
And there is a full awareness, even among the relatively lower clergy, that the symbolum, when pronounced, penetrates extraordinarily deeply into the soul, much deeper than the dogmatic content, than the doctrinal content and that one can contribute much more to the spread of religious life by expressing the truths of salvation in symbolic form, by giving the symbols a thoroughly pictorial character and not getting involved with the actual teaching content. You know, of course, that the content of the Gospel itself is only the subject of a lecture within the context of the Mass in the Catholic Church, and that the Catholic Church avoids presenting the content of the Gospel as a teaching to the faithful, especially in its preaching.
What it Means Today
Steiner gave this course in June 1921 to a circle of mostly Lutheran pastors and theology students who had come to him with a stark recognition: the sermon, as they had been trained to deliver it, was no longer reaching the people in front of them. The problem was not bad theology. It was that scientific education had quietly drained the words Christ, grace, and redemption of their old resonance, so that even sincere preaching met an inner resistance in the listening soul. Steiner's response was not to argue the doctrine harder but to change the register of the word itself, away from teaching content and toward symbol, picture, and living speech that works on the heart before the intellect has a chance to object.
The direct heir of this work is The Christian Community (Die Christengemeinschaft), the movement for religious renewal founded by the former Lutheran preacher Friedrich Rittelmeyer in September 1922, growing out of these very lectures to theologians. Its priests still build the sermon and the Act of Consecration of Man around pictorial and symbolic speech rather than doctrinal exposition, treating the word as something that consecrates rather than merely informs. Thalira synthesis: Steiner's art of preaching is best understood not as rhetoric but as a Sentient-Soul craft, the deliberate shaping of speech so that an image lands in the heart and does the work that a proof once did, which is why the tradition it founded measures a sermon by what it kindles rather than by what it explains.
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