PREACHING AND PROMISE: ESCHATOLOGICAL PREACHING OF LIBERATION AND PROSPERITY THEOLOGIES AND THE POP CULTURE

Abstract

This paper aims to reflect on homiletics and Christian preaching as a voice of promise in a paradoxical context such as the Brazilian and Latin Ameri­can context. Initially it will reflect upon three characteristic types of relationships between preaching and promise: the eschatological and transcendentalist preaching that deposits the promise to the after life or in the end of time; the humanistic and liberating preaching that puts the promise in the dimension of the transformation of the socio-political struggle in the present; the individualistic and prosperity preaching which projects promise as material achievement and hedonistic satis­faction. Finally, faced with this reality, we seek for ways in the literature (Las dos Palabras, of Isabel Allende) and in the popular culture (Movie Central do Brasil, of Walter Salles) to assist in thinking a sermon that announces the promise amid the paradoxes of life in order to contribute not only to individual, ecclesial or ideological satisfaction, but which points to human and cultural transformations.