The goal of this paper is to apply the emphatic effects of biblical parallelism to preaching. In the developmental history of the theories of parallelism, the central issue has been how one defines the relationship between colon A and colon B in a poe...
The goal of this paper is to apply the emphatic effects of biblical parallelism to preaching. In the developmental history of the theories of parallelism, the central issue has been how one defines the relationship between colon A and colon B in a poetic line. According to Robert Lowth`s traditional view, the relationship between the two colons was viewed as the same thing being spoken twice. However, Kugel has denied the equivalence theory of Lowth and emphasizes that colon B always strengthens and heightens colon A. His principle of parallelism is often described as A is so, and what`s more, B. Kugel`s view has tremendously contributed to the advancement of the theory of parallelism and it is very beneficial to our understanding of the dynamics of parallelism in our preaching. In spite of his great contributions, his view has somewhat damaged the traditional view of equivalences and oppositions in parallel lines because of his unfiltered perspectives on the syntactic structure of biblical parallelism. Later on, Robert Alter adjusted and fine-tuned Kugel`s view about biblical parallelism while accepting Kugel`s basic idea of the emphatic character of colon B. In particular, Alter has identified the principles of emphasis between the colons, and thus, he has significantly contributed to our understanding of the emphatic relationship between the colons. His principles have provided us with the insights into the way by which we can compose effective parallelism in our preaching. Adele Berlin has further refined their theories through a balanced view on parallelism by emphasizing the dynamics of equivalences and contrasts between the colons. While the previous theories are mainly involved in the semantic dimension of parallelism, Berlin, accepting Roman Jakobson`s linguistic theory, has achieved a comprehensive theory of parallelism. Her view covers the diverse dimensions of parallelism such as the lexical and semantic aspect, the grammatical aspect (morphologic and syntactic parallelism), and phonologic aspect. Finally, I have attempted to prove the usefulness of these theories by analyzing a sermon of T. D. Jakes, a prominent American preacher who frequently uses parallelism in his sermons, and a sermon of Dongwon Lee, a prominent Korean preacher who often uses parallelism as a rhetorical device. According to my analysis of their sermons, they are effectively using various kinds of parallelisms to emphasize their messages. Because of this study that applies the theories of Kugel, Alter, and Berlin to preaching, preachers can easily learn how to make effective parallelisms in their sermons to appeal to their audience.