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This is the second and final installment of an interview with Leonard Sweet, who is professor of postmodern Christianity and dean of the theological school and vice president of Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. He is author of a number of books, most recently Soul Tsunami and Aqua Church.

PreachingToday.com: In some ways, image-based preaching sounds like classic evangelical preaching. George Whitefield and John Wesley, for example, created the evangelical movement with their preaching of the "new birth."

Sweet: We're really going back to some of the ways in which our evangelical forbearers started preaching on the frontier. It's also a type of preaching we find in the Black church. In many ways, African-American preaching styles are much more postmodern.

In fact, it may be time to bring back traditional evangelical metaphors that some have shied away from, like "the blood" imagery, especially in a culture bombarded with unholy violence. There was a medieval piety about dedication to the wounds of Jesus, and it may be time to do that sort of thing again. I did a whole book in which I just looked at the five wounds of Jesus and poked at each one of those wounds as metaphors for our own woundedness.

In letting images go forth without rational interpretation, the preacher is losing a lot of control of the preaching moment.

Well, you're trusting the work to God's Spirit. Everybody who does linear preaching has had the experience after the service of somebody saying, "Pastor, that sermon spoke so much to me this morning. After you said _____, I know now exactly what I have to do."

Then I go home and ask my wife, "Did I say that?"

Part of the heresy of the modern church is the notion that we are bringing Christ to people. No, Christ is already there in people's lives. God is already at work in the world and in the church and in every person sitting out there. Our job is to help people see how the Word is already at work in their lives, and trusting that the Spirit will point to and fasten on and resonate with that Word. The Word, the Logos, has a life of its own.

So we aren't bringing it to people. We're calling to their consciousness the Spirit who is already working in their lives.

What are the cautions and dangers of using metaphors? Should we try, for example, to avoid mixing metaphors?

That's a linear attempt to deal with metaphors. Jesus had no problem mixing metaphors. How many times does Jesus pile one parable upon another, like in Luke 15, with a parable about lost sheep, another about searching for coins, another about a prodigal son. Paul could use powerful metaphors and mix them: "The weight of glory." That's part of the spinning. You can spin it and even mix the metaphors you're trying to spin.

The real danger of metaphors is closely related to their worth. Images are friendly. They disarm you. Unlike linear points that are sharp and that'll cut you, metaphors are fuzzy. And fuzzy is good. Fuzzy logic is a logic being used in the most sophisticated form of computers. But precisely because they are fuzzy and can create wonderful connections in people, images can also lead to some misunderstandings.

Somebody can hear and experience through the power of those images something that is not gospel, something that is their own projection, something that comes from skewed and deformed metaphors in their own life. Some people, for example, who hear the word Father for God can think of nothing else but the abusive father who raised them.

So even if you're spinning biblical metaphors, people's own life experiences can warp those into all sorts of crazy stuff. That's why I think there needs to be a new step in preaching, which is time in small groups after the sermon to let people ask, "Okay, what did we all hear? What did we all experience?"

Are the days of propositional preaching over, then?

Jesus on the cross was flanked by two thieves. To one of those thieves Jesus said, "I'll see you today in Paradise." The other one of those thieves refused, couldn't get it. The church likewise has double focus. We have to take into consideration both of those thieves.

The Bible says Jesus did not speak to those outside the church except in parables. When he got to his disciples, he got linearhe explained things rationally. To me those two thieves are symbols of this double method of communication. Especially when we're communicating to the culture, we must use image-based preaching. But even those inside the church live in a culture saturated with images. We as a culture live and die by images, by metaphors, and we have to begin there. So most preaching should be image based. Still there is a place for the linear, especially in the classroom setting.

Where in our culture do you see examples of powerful metaphor-based communication?

Where our culture steals our stuff. Everybody knows the line from the movie Field of Dreams," Build it and they will come."I thought that had a certain resonance. So I did a little word study in a concordance. That phrase is similar to Haggai 1:8, where God says to build his house so he can come dwell there. I thought, They're stealing our lines! It's not building some fantasy diamond to which some fantasy figures are going to come. No, build God's house and the Ruler of the universe, the God of creation will come in all God's glory. That's what the church ought to be saying to this world.

Other examples are not deliberate metaphors, but they're there for the taking. We tell our people to be servants, or servant leaders, or to serve one another. But what does servant mean in our culture? Not much in the traditional sense, but the hottest thing in this high-tech culture, the best thing you could have is a dedicated servera computer that frees people to communicate on the Internet, that runs programs in the background, and so on. The metaphor is rich.

You sound like theologian Karl Barth, who said the pastor ought to preach with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.

Here's how I put it: I say preaching is holding in one hand the world of the visible and holding in the other hand the world of the invisible, and then clapping hands until the thunder rolls, the lightning strikes, and the heavens clap. So, really I'm talking about bringing together the culture and the world of God's Spirit.

Leonard Sweet is the E. Stanley Jones Professor of Evangelism at Drew Theological School in Madison, New Jersey, and Visiting Distinguished Professor at George Fox  University in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of SoulSalsa.