The Department of Religious Studies
Brown Bag Lunch Colloquium Series
University of Pittsburgh
Presents
Pulpit, Politics, and Pathos: Protestant Rhetoric and
the National Socialist Revolution
Angela Dienhart Hancock
Assistant Professor of Homiletics and Worship, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary
January 16, 2013
12:00 Noon
2628 Cathedral of Learning
By the end of the Weimar years, the vocabulary of public discourse in Germany was dominated by the categories, complaints, and
catchwords of the nationalist right and the far left, drowning out the center. Some of the words, symbols and tropes that prevailed on the
streets found their way into Protestant pulpits, where inherited homiletical practices proved all too hospitable to theologicallylegitimated reactionary visions and chauvinistic fears. Consciously and unconsciously, the church’s language about God and itself had
been infiltrated by the dominant political rhetoric of the day. What was it about the prevailing understanding of the nature and purpose
of Christian proclamation that left room for the conflation of gospel and Germanness? Where did the preachers who welcomed National
Socialism from the pulpit seek and claim the revelation of God, and what was the homiletical ground beneath their feet?
Angela Hancock’s scholarly interests include systematic theology, homiletics, liturgical theology, rhetoric, performance theory, history,
and philosophical hermeneutics; her research is focused primarily on the relationship between theology, politics, and rhetoric. Her
forthcoming book, Karl Barth’s Emergency Homiletic, is a contextual interpretation of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth’s “emergency”
venture into the field of homiletics at the University of Bonn in the early 1930s, based on unpublished archival material. Her current
project, tentatively titled “Preaching in Tongues: Postliberalism and the Rhetoric of the North American Pulpit,” extends her work to the
North American context.