CHAPTER 17: Puritan Preaching
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Puritan Preaching
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Then said the Interpreter, Come in, I will shew thee that which will be profitable to thee … he had him into a private Room, and bid his Man open a Door: the which when he had done, Christian saw the Picture of a very grave Person hang up against the wall, and this was the fashion of it. It had eyes lift up to Heaven, the best of Books in his hand, the Law of Truth was written upon his lips, the World was behind his back; it stood as if it pleaded with Men, and a Crown of Gold did hang over his head.
Then said Christian, What means this?
Interpreter. The Man whose Picture this is, is one of a thousand; he can beget Children, travel [travail] in birth with Children, and nurse them himself when they are born. And whereas thous seest him with his eyes lift up to Heaven, the best of Books in his hand, and the Law of Truth writ on his lips: it is to shew thee, that his work is to know and unfold dark things to sinners; even as also thou seest him stand as if he pleaded with Men: And whereas thou seest the World as cast behind him, and that a crown hangs over his head; that is, to shew thee that slighting and despising the things that are present, for the love that he hath to his Master’s service, he is sure in the world that comes next to have Glory for his Reward. Now, said the Interpreter, I have shewed thee this picture first, because the Man whose Picture this is, is the only Man, whom the Lord of the Place whither thou art going, hath authorized to be thy Guide in all difficult places thou mayest meet in the way.
Thus Bunyan profiles the ideal Christian preacher.
The same ideal is projected in a complementary way by the Westminster Directory for the Publick Worship of God, in its section on the spirit and manner in which preaching must be done.
Preaching of the Word, being the power of God unto salvation, and one of the greatest and most excellent works belonging to the ministry of the gospel, should be so performed, that the workman may not be ashamed, but may save himself and those who hear him.…
The servant of Christ is to perform his whole ministry:
1. Painfully [i.e., taking pains], not doing the work of the Lord negligently.
2. Plainly, that the meanest may understand; delivering the truth not in the enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect; abstaining also from an unprofitable use of unknown tongues, strange phrases, and cadences of sounds and words; sparingly citing sentences of ecclesiastical or other human writers, ancient or modern, be they never so elegant.
3. Faithfully, looking at the honour of Christ, the conversion, edification, and salvation of the people, not at his own gain or glory; keeping nothing back which may promote these holy ends, giving to every one his own portion, and bearing indifferent [equal] respect to all, without neglecting the meanest, or sparing the greatest, in their sins.
4. Wisely, framing all his doctrines, exhortations, and especially his reproofs, in such a manner as may be most likely to prevail; showing all due respect to each man’s person and place, and not mixing his own passion or bitterness.
5. Gravely, as becometh the Word of God, shunning all such gesture, voice, and expression, as may occasion the corruptions of men to despise him and his ministry.
6. With loving affection, that the people may see all coming from his godly zeal, and hearty desire to do them good.
7. As taught by God, and persuaded in his own heart, that all he teacheth is the truth of Christ, and walking before his flock, as an example to them in it; earnestly, both in private and publick, recommending his labours to the blessing of God, and watchfully looking to himself, and the flock whereof the Lord hath made him overseer.
So shall the doctrine of truth be preserved uncorrupt, many souls converted and built up, and himself receive manifold comforts of his labours even in this life, and afterward the crown of glory laid up for him in the world to come.
A third projection of this ideal emerges when Richard Baxter speaks to his fellow-preachers about their preaching:
How few ministers do preach with all their might, or speak about everlasting joys and everlasting torments in such a manner as may make man believe that they are in good earnest! Alas, we speak so drowsily or gently, that sleepy sinners cannot hear. The blow falls so light that hard-hearted sinners cannot feel. The most of ministers will not so much as exert their voice, and stir up themselves to an earnest utterance. But if they do speak loud and earnestly, how few do answer it with weight and earnestness of matter! And yet without this, the voice does little good; the people will esteem it but mere bawling, when the matter doth not correspond. It would grieve one to the heart to hear what excellent doctrine some ministers have in hand, while yet they let it die in their hands for want of close and lively application.…
O sirs, how plainly, how closely, how earnestly, should we deliver a message of such moment as ours.… In the name of God, brethren, labour to awaken your own hearts, before you go to the pulpit, that you may be fit to awaken the hearts of sinners. Remember they must be awakened or damned, and … a sleepy preacher will hardly awaken drowsy sinners. Though you give the holy things of God the highest praise in words, yet, if you do it coldly, you will seem by your manner to unsay what you said in the matter.… It is only here and there, even among good ministers, that we find one who has an earnest, persuasive, powerful way of speaking, that the people can feel him preach when they hear him.…
Though I move you not to constant loudness in your delivery (for that will make your fervency contemptible), yet see that you have a constant seriousness; and when the matter requireth it (as it should do, in the application at least), then lift up your voice, and spare not your spirits. Speak to your people as to men that must be awakened, either here or in hell. Look around upon them with the eye of faith, and with compassion, and think in what a state of joy or torment they must all be for ever; and then, methinks, it will make you earnest, and melt your heart to a sense of their condition. Oh, speak not one cold or careless word about so great a business as heaven or hell.
I confess I must speak it by lamentable experience, that I publish to my flock the distempers of my own soul. When I let my heart go cold, my preaching is cold; … and so I can oft observe also in the best of my hearers that when I have grown cold in preaching, they have grown cold too; and the next prayers which I have heard from them have been too like my preaching.… O brethren, watch therefore over your own hearts: keep out lusts and passions, and worldly inclinations; keep up the life of faith, and love, and zeal: be much at home, and much with God … a minister should take some special pains with his heart, before he is to go to the congregation: if it be then cold, how is he likely to warm the hearts of his hearers? Therefore, go then specially to God for life.…
Puritan preaching has had a bad press in these latter days: the caricature is that Puritan sermons were regularly long, abstruse, and dull. In fact, one hour was the recognised length, practical biblical exposition was the actual substance, and liveliness was a regular mark of the style. Puritan preaching prolonged the down-to-earth raciness of presentation, with verbal pictures, narrative illustrations, and allusions to Bible stories scattered throughout in abundance, that the sermons of Hugh Latimer exhibit, and that probably represents a tradition, stylistically speaking, that goes back to the Lollards and the friars. What made Puritan preaching into the reality that it was, however, was less its style than its substance. Puritans preached the Bible systematically and thoroughly, with sustained application to personal life, preaching it as those who believed it, and who sought by their manner to make their matter credible and convincing, convicting and converting. Puritan rhetoric was servant to Puritan biblicism; Puritan pulpit passion was the product of a desire to be a transparent embodiment for the congregation of what it means to grasp, and be grasped by, God’s revealed truth concerning grace and godliness, life and death, heaven and hell. ‘In preaching there is a communion of souls, and a communication of somewhat from ours to theirs.’ If we are to understand Puritan preaching, it is with this Puritan perception of the preacher’s task that we must start.
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The ancestry of the Puritan sermon goes back at least to the day in 1519 when Huldreich Zwingli started to preach his way verse by verse through Matthew’s Gospel in Zurich Minster; but Cambridge was its proper birthplace.
The Puritan tradition in preaching was created there at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the leaders of the first great evangelical movement in that university—William Perkins, Paul Baynes, Richard Sibbes, John Cotton, John Preston, Thomas Goodwin and their fellows. The Puritanism which they had in common was not an ecclesiastical reform programme. Here, in fact they were not agreed at all; Perkins and Baynes dreamed with Cartwright of Presbyterianising the establishment, Cotton and Goodwin became Independents, Preston was a nonconforming Anglican, and Sibbes remained a meek conformist. Their Puritanism was rather the deep Calvinistic piety and urgent concern for vital religion that our previous chapters have described. Their principles in preaching, first formulated by Perkins in his Arte of Prophecying, found their best balanced expression in the Westminster Assembly’s Directory for the Publick Worship of God, and reached perhaps their highest point of development in the pastoral and evangelistic sermons of Richard Baxter.
By the end of the seventeenth century sermon structure had been generally simplified from what it was in the Puritan heyday, and the modern ‘three-pointer’ had been born, but the heirs of the Puritans maintained in this new form the old practical thrust. In the eighteenth century Dissent claimed to uphold the letter of the Puritan tradition, but it was the Calvinistic Anglican evangelicals (who devoured Puritan theology almost as their staple diet) who best sustained its spirit. Charles Simeon restated its basic principles in a more precise and vigorous form in his edition of Claude’s Essay on the Composition of a Sermon and illustrated them at length in the 2,536 skeletons which fill his 21-volume Horae Homileticae. C.H. Spurgeon, J.C. Ryle and Alexander Whyte, self-confessed heirs of the Puritans, maintained the tradition with distinction to the close of the nineteenth century; Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones, almost alone, carried it on through the twentieth century. Today, other models and styles of pulpit work prevail, and Puritan preaching is in eclipse. It is hoped, however, that the following pages will commend the writer’s conviction that the well-being of the church today depends in large measure on a revival of preaching in the Puritan vein.
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Four axioms underlay all Puritan thought about preaching. We have met them already, but it is convenient to restate them here.
First, belief in the primacy of the intellect. It was a Puritan maxim that ‘all grace enters by the understanding’. God does not move men to action by mere physical violence, but addresses their minds by his word, and calls for the response of deliberate consent and intelligent obedience. It follows that every man’s first duty in relation to the word of God is to understand it; and every preacher’s first duty is to explain it. The only way to the heart that he is authorised to take runs via the head. So the minister who does not make it his prime business, in season and out of season, to teach the word of God, does not do his job, and the sermon which, whatever else it may be, is not a didactic exposition of Scripture is not worthy of the name.
Second, belief in the supreme importance of preaching. To the Puritans, the sermon was the liturgical climax of public worship. Nothing, they said, honours God more than the faithful declaration and obedient hearing of his truth. Preaching, under any circumstances, is an act of worship, and must be performed as such. Moreover, preaching is the prime means of grace to the church. ‘The most wonderful things that are now done on earth are wrought in the public ordinances,’ declared David Clarkson in the course of a sermon entitled ‘Public Worship to be Preferred before Private’.
Here the dead hear the voice of the Son of God and those that hear do live.… Here he cures diseased souls with a word.… Here he dispossess Satan.… Wonders these are, and would be so counted were they not the common work of the public ministry. It is true indeed, the Lord hath not confined himself to work these wonderful things only in public; yet the public ministry is the only ordinary means whereby he works them.
Preaching is thus a very solemn and momentous enterprise. Both minister and congregation should recognise that their Sunday sermons are the most important and significant events of the week. Whatever else is neglected, sermons must not be.
Therefore, the minister who knows his priorities will plan his week round the allotted time for sermon preparation. And he will take care not to skimp his preparation. One meets on occasion, among students who are starting to preach, the idea that, after a time, if they walk faithfully with God, sermons will begin to come naturally, and the need for special preparation will grow less and less. Preachers in the Puritan tradition have not thought so, nor found it so. There were plenty of mid-seventeenth-century zealots who thought it needless to prepare their sermons, but the Puritan leaders rejected this idea. ‘Whereas some men are for preaching only extempore and without study,’ says Thomas Goodwin, ‘Paul bids Timothy meditate and study.’ Baxter states the principle positively:
If we give to reason, memory, study, books, methods, forms, etc., but their proper place, in subordination to Christ and to his Spirit, they are so far from being quenchers of the Spirit, that they are necessary in their places, and are such means as we must use, if ever we will expect the Spirit’s help.
Most of the Puritans were writing their sermons out in full to the end of their lives. Of Simeon’s sermons, Bishop Daniel Wilson, in a posthumous tribute, wrote: ‘Few cost him less than twelve hours of study—many twice that time: and some several days. He once told the writer that he had recomposed the plan of one discourse thirty times.’ To prepare good sermons may take a long time—but who are we, whom God has set apart for the ministry, to begrudge time for this purpose? We shall never perform a more important task than preaching. If we are not willing to give time to sermon preparation, we are not fit to preach, and have no business in the ministry at all.
Third, belief in the life-giving power of Holy Scripture. The Bible does not merely contain the word of God, as a cake contains currants; it is the word of God, the Creator’s written testimony to himself. And, as such, it is light for the eyes and food for the soul. Recognising this, the Puritans insisted that the preachers’ task is to feed their congregations with the contents of the Bible—not the dry husks of their own fancy, but the life-giving word of God. Better not preach at all, they would tell us, than preach beyond the Bible, or without utter and obvious confidence in the quickening, nourishing power of the biblical message. Reverence for revealed truth, and faith in its entire adequacy for human needs, should mark all preaching. How can we expect our preaching to beget such reverence and faith in others if it does not reflect this attitude in ourselves?
It is worth noting here that just because preaching is feeding men with the bread of life, the Puritans defined pastoral work in terms of preaching first and foremost. It is our habit to think of pastoral work as a matter of visiting and personal dealing only, and to oppose it to the public preaching of the word; a man, we say, may be a bad preacher yet a good pastor; but to the Puritan, faithful preaching was the basic ingredient in faithful pastoring. Since this point is important we may quote from John Owen’s statement of it at some length:
The first and principal duty of a pastor is to feed the flock by diligent preaching of the Word. It is a promise relating to the New Testament, that God ‘would give unto his church pastors according to his own heart, which should feed them with knowledge and understanding’ (Jer. iii.15). This is by preaching or teaching the word, and no otherwise. This feeding is of the essence of the office of a pastor.… The care of preaching the gospel was committed to Peter, and in him to all true pastors of the church under the name of ‘feeding’ (Jn. xxi. 15, 16). According to the example of the apostles they are to free themselves from all encumbrances, that they may give themselves wholly unto to the word and prayer (Acts vi). Their work is to ‘labour in the word and doctrine’ (1 Tim. v. 17), and thereby to feed the flock over which the Holy Ghost has made them overseers (Acts xx).… This work and duty, therefore, as was said, is essential unto the office of a pastor.… Nor is it required only that he preach now and then at his leisure; but that he lay aside all other employments, though lawful, all other duties in the church, as unto such a constant attendance on them as would divert him from this work, that he give himself unto it.… Without this, no man will be able to give a comfortable account of his pastoral office at the last day.
The only pastor worthy of the name, in short, is the man whose chief concern is always to feed his people by means of his preaching with the enlivening truths of the word of God.
Fourth, belief in the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit. The Puritans insisted that the ultimate effectiveness of preaching is out of man’s hands. Man’s task is simply to be faithful in teaching the word; it is God’s work to convince of its truth and write it in the heart. The Puritans would have criticised the modern evangelistic appeal, with its wheedling for ‘decisions’, as an unfortunate attempt by man to intrude into the Holy Spirit’s province. It is for God, not man, to fix the time of conversion. ‘God never laid it upon thee to convert those he sends thee to. No; to publish the gospel is thy duty.… God judgeth not of his servants’ work by the success of their labour, but by their faithfulness to deliver his message’—so says Gurnall, and he speaks for them all. When the preacher has finished instructing, applying and exhorting, his pulpit work is done. It is not his business to devise devices in order to extort ‘decisions’. He would be wiser to go away and pray for God’s blessing on what he has said. It is God’s sovereign prerogative to make his word effective, and the preacher’s behaviour in the pulpit should be governed by recognition of, and subjection to, divine sovereignty in this matter.
We now proceed to describe the type of preaching which these convictions produced.
1. It was expository in its method. The Puritan preacher regarded himself as the mouthpiece of God and the servant of his word. He must speak ‘as the oracles of God’. His task, therefore, was not imposition, fastening on to Scripture texts meanings they do not bear; nor was it juxtaposition, using his text as a peg on which to hang some homily unrelated to it (‘take it in the writer’s meaning,’ said Simeon, ‘not as a motto’); the preacher’s task was, precisely, exposition, extracting from his texts what God had encased within them. ‘I never preach,’ said Simeon, ‘unless I feel satisfied that I have the mind of God as regards the sense of the passage.’ ‘My endeavour is to bring out of Scripture what is there … I have a great jealousy on this head, never to speak more or less that I believe to be the mind of the Spirit in the passage I am expounding.’ So, ‘when you cannot get at the full and real meaning of a passage, leave it alone.’
The Puritan method of ‘opening’ a text (their regular word, and a good one) was first to explain it in its context (they would have agreed with J.H. Jowett that ‘a text without a context is a pretext’); next, to extract from the text one or more doctrinal observations embodying its substance; to amplify, illustrate and confirm from other scriptures the truths thus derived; and, finally, to draw out their practical implications for the hearers. The Puritans were devotees of continuous exposition, and have left behind them magnificent sets of expository sermons on complete chapters and books of the Bible, as well as on single texts. Most of Matthew Henry’s wonderful Commentary, for instance, was first preached to his own flock at Chester.
2. Puritan preaching was doctrinal in its content. The Puritans received the Bible as a self-contained and self-interpreting revelation of God’s mind. This revelation, the ‘body of divinity’ as they called it, is, they held, a unity, to which every part of ‘the best of books’ makes its own distinct contribution. It follows that the meaning of single texts cannot be properly discerned till they are seen in relation to the rest of the ‘body’; and, conversely, that the better one’s grasp of the whole, the more significance one will see in each part. To be a good expositor, therefore, one must first be a good theologian. Theology—truth about God and man—is what God has put into the texts of Scripture, and theology is what preachers must draw out of them. To the question, ‘Should one preach doctrine?’, the Puritan answer would have been, ‘Why, what else is there to preach?’ Puritan preachers were not afraid to bring the profoundest theology into the pulpit if it bore on their hearers’ salvation, nor to demand that men and women apply themselves to mastering it, nor to diagnose unwillingness to do so as a sign of insincerity. Doctrinal preaching certainly bores the hypocrites; but it is only doctrinal preaching that will save Christ’s sheep. The preacher’s job is to proclaim the faith, not to provide entertainment for unbelievers—in other words, to feed the sheep rather than amuse the goats.
3. Puritan preaching was orderly in its arrangement. The preachers knew the value of clear headings, and deliberately allowed the skeletons of their sermons to stick out. Peter Ramus, a Huguenot academic killed in the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572, had formulated an educational theory in which analysis becomes the key to understanding, and the Puritans took his point at least to the extent of making sure that the layout and structure of their messages was as clear and logical as possible. The importance of this appears when we remember that the Puritans taught their congregations to memorise the sermons they heard, looking up references and taking notes if need be, so that they could ‘repeat’ the messages afterwards and meditate on them during the week. The ministry of the word was thus a co-operative activity, in which the laity were to labour to learn just as hard as the minister laboured to teach. A sermon that was needlessly hard to remember was for that very reason, of necessity, a bad sermon.
4. Puritan preaching, though profound in its content, was popular in its style. Learned pulpiteers vied with each other in stuffing their sermons with what Thomas Goodwin called ‘the eminentist farrago of all sorts of flowers of wit that are found in any of the Fathers, poets, histories, similitudes, or whatever has the elegancy of wit in it’. Preaching thus degenerated into a sophisticated entertainment for the cultured, and an occasion for the preacher’s self-display. Baxter spoke for the Puritans generally when he condemned this ‘witty’ preaching as ‘proud foolery which savoureth of levity, and tendeth to evaporate weighty truths’, and complained that its practitioners ‘deal liker to players than preachers in the pulpit’. Preaching that exalts the preacher, the Puritans said, is unedifying, sinful preaching. Baxter went on in the passage quoted to lay down the principle that determined the Puritans’ own homiletic idiom: ‘the plainest words are the profitablest oratory in the weightiest matters.’ To borrow Ryle’s autobiographical phrase, they ‘crucified their style’. They systematically eschewed any rhetorical display that might divert attention from God to themselves, and talked to their congregations in plain, straightforward, homely English. Not that their speaking was slipshod or vulgar. Dignified simplicity—‘studied plainness’, as one of their number once put it—was their ideal. In fact, the ‘studied plainness’ of Puritan preaching often possesses a striking eloquence of its own—the natural eloquence that results when words are treated not at all as the orator’s playthings, but entirely as the servants of a noble meaning. One thinks at once of Bunyan and Baxter here.
5. Puritan preaching was Christ-centred in its orientation. ‘Young man,’ said veteran Richard Sibbes to fledgling Thomas Goodwin, ‘if ever you would do good, you must preach the gospel of the free grace of God in Christ Jesus.’ Puritan preaching revolved around ‘Christ, and him crucified’—for this is the hub of the Bible. The preachers’ commission is to declare the whole counsel of God; but the cross is the centre of that counsel, and the Puritans knew that the traveller through the Bible landscape misses his way as soon as he loses sight of the hill called Calvary. Simeon’s sermons had three avowed aims—to humble the sinner, to exalt the Saviour, and to promote holiness; and it was the second aim that gave point to the first and meaning to the third. In this Simeon was as authentically Puritan as it is possible for a man to be.
6. Puritan preaching was experimental in its interests. The preachers’ supreme concern was to bring men to know God. Their preaching was avowedly ‘practical’ and concerned with experience of God. Sin, the cross, Christ’s heavenly ministry, the Holy Spirit, faith and hypocrisy, assurance and the lack of it, prayer, meditation, temptation, mortification, growth in grace, death, heaven were their constant themes. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress serves as a kind of gazetteer to the contents of their sermons. In their treatment of these matters they were deep, thorough, and authoritative. They spoke as holy experienced Christians who knew what they were talking about. Their rule was formulated by David Dickson when he charged a young minister at his ordination to study two books together: the Bible, and his own heart. The Puritans made it a matter of conscience to prove for themselves the saving power of the gospel they urged on others. They knew that, as John Owen put it, ‘a man preacheth that sermon only well to others, which preacheth itself in his own soul.… If the word do not dwell with power in us, it will not pass with power from us.’ Robert Bolton was not the only one who ‘never taught any godly point, but he first wrought it on his owne heart’. Their strenuous exercise in meditation and prayer, their sensitiveness to sin, their utter humility, their passion for holiness, and their glowing devotion to Christ equipped them to be master-physicians of the soul. And deep called to deep when they preached, for they spoke of the black depths and high peaks of Christian experience first-hand. An old Christian who heard young Spurgeon, still in his teens, said of him, almost in awe, ‘he was as experimental as if he were a hundred years old in faith.’ That was a mark of all Puritan preaching.
7. Puritan preaching was piercing in its applications.Over and above applicatory generalisation, the preachers trained their homiletical searchlights on specific states of spiritual need, and spoke to these in a precise and detailed way. Earlier we noted how Perkins in his Arte of Prophecying distinguished the different classes of people that the preacher could expect to be addressing in any ordinary congregation: the ignorant and unteachable, who needed the equivalent of a bomb under their seats; the ignorant but teachable, who needed orderly instruction in what Christianity is all about; the knowledgeable but unhumbled, who needed to be given a sense of sin; the humbled and desperate, who needed to be grounded in the gospel; believers going on with God, who needed building up; and believers who had fallen into error, intellectual or moral, and needed correction. Other subcategories spring to mind, once one starts thinking of congregations in these terms, such as the discouraged, the hurting, and the depressed (sufferers from ‘melancholy’, as the Puritans called it); perhaps Perkins had some of these in mind when, rather mysteriously, he identified as his final type ‘a mixed people. A mixed people are the assemblies of our churches.’ (Could ‘mixed’ here mean ‘mixed-up’?) To all of these different groups the word of God must be applied.
To Perkins’ classification of types of people we must now add the list of types of application that the Westminster Directory for Publick Worship gives. Having laid it down that the preacher, after establishing and clarifying a truth, must ‘bring it home to special use, by application to his hearers’, even though ‘it prove a work of great difficulty to himself, requiring much prudence, zeal, and meditation, and to the natural and corrupt man will be very unpleasant’, the Directoryspecifies application (‘uses’) of six kinds:
(1) instruction or information in the knowledge of some … consequence from his doctrine; (2) confutation of false doctrines; (3) exhorting to duties; (4) dehortation, reprehension, and publick admonition; (5) applying comfort; (6) trial [self-examination], (which is very profitable … ) whereby the hearers may be able to examine themselves … that accordingly they may be quickened and excited to duty, humbled for their wants and sins, affected with their danger, and strengthened with comfort [encouragement], as their condition, upon examination, shall require.
These types of application are all pastoral and evangelistic: the preacher should ‘wisely make choice of such uses, as, by residence and conversing with his flock, he findeth most needful and seasonable; and, amongst these, such as may most draw their souls to Christ.… ’ In form they are inferential and logical, being structured thus thus: since this is ture (‘this’ being the truth just taught), you must (1) be sure of the following further truths, which implies;(2) abjure the following errors, which it contradicts; (3) do such-and-such good things, which it requires; (4) stop doing, or avoid doing, such-and-such bad things, which it forbids; (5) take to yourself the encouragement which it offers; (6) ask yourself where you stand spiritually in the light of it, and how far you are living by it. The quality of a preacher depended ultimately, in the Puritan estimate, on the clarity, wisdom, authority, and searchingness that hearers found in his application.
It was not, of course, possible for any preacher to make all six types of application to all seven types of listeners in any one sermon. Forty-two distinct applications would take all day! But Puritan pastoral preachers would spend half or more of their preaching time developing applications, and anyone making an inventory of their published sermons will soon find examples of all forty-two specific applications, often developed with very great rhetorical and moral force. Strength of application was, from one standpoint, the most striking feature of Puritan preaching, and it is arguable that the theory of discriminating application is the most valuable legacy that Puritan preachers have left to those who would preach the Bible and its gospel effectively today.
8. Puritan preaching was powerful in its manner. The Puritan coveted unction in the pulpit. He aspired to be what Baxter calls ‘a plain and pressing downright preacher’, speaking from a full heart ‘in good sadness [good earnest]’, ‘with life, and light, and weight.’ He sought to preach (as was once said of a Puritan minister) ‘as if death were at his back’—in Baxter’s words:
As one that never should preach again,
And as a dying man to dying men.
And unless the Spirit was upon him, so that he felt what he spoke, it was to the Puritan mind hardly preaching at all. Later evangelicals were in agreement; Simeon said:
It is easy for a minister to prate in the pulpit, but to preach is not easy—to carry his congregation on his shoulders, as it were, to heaven; to weep over them, pray for them, deliver the truth with a weeping praying heart; and if a minister has grace to do so now and then, he ought to be very thankful.
That was why Baxter insisted, as we saw at the beginning, that
a minister should take some special pains with his heart, before he is to go to the congregation; if he be then cold, how is he like to warm the hearts of the hearers? Therefore, go then specially to God for life; and read some rousing, awakening book, or meditate on the weight of the subject of which you are going to speak and on the great necessity of your people’s souls, that you may go in the zeal of the Lord into his house.
Such was Puritan preaching, and such was evangelical preaching generally till recent times. It was preaching of this kind that made evangelicalism great in the past, and there seems little likelihood that evangelicalism will be great again without a return to it. The churches of the West are currently in confusion about the way to make preaching spiritually significant for the modern congregation, and are treating the problem as primarily one of devising appropriate techniques. Technique is, of course, necessary in preaching, and it would not be false to say that the Puritan technique of exposition and application has been our theme in this chapter. But the Puritans themselves would be the first to insist that there is more to significant preaching than mere technique, even applicatory technique: and it seems appropriate to close by allowing Richard Baxter, ‘Mr Reformed Pastor’ as we may well call him, to speak once more, and make to his fellow-preachers the point—the cluster of points, rather—which today’s church is too apt to forget.
All our work must be done spiritually, as by men possessed of the Holy Ghost. There is in some men’s preaching a spiritual strain, which spiritual hearers can discern and relish.… Our evidence and illustrations of divine truth must also be spiritual, being drawn from the Holy Scriptures.… It is the sign of a distempered heart that loseth the relish of Scripture excellency. For there is in a spiritual heart a co-naturality to the Word of God, because this is the seed which did regenerate him. The Word is that seal which made all the holy impressions that are in the hearts of true believers, and stamped the image of God upon them; and, therefore, they must needs … highly esteem it as long as they live.…
Our whole work must be carried on under a deep sense of our own insufficiency, and of our entire dependence on Christ. We must go for light, and life, and strength to him, who sends us on the work.… Prayer must carry on our work as well as preaching; he preacheth not heartily to his people, that prayeth not earnestly for them. If we prevail not with God to give them faith and repentance we shall never prevail with them to believe and repent.
1.John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (Oxford University Press: Oxford, Oxford Standard Authors series, 1904), pp 36f.
2.The Westminster Directory is currently in print in The [Westminster] Confession of Faith (Free Presbyterian Publications: Glasgow, Banner of Truth: Edinburgh). The section ‘Of the Preaching of the Word’ is pp 379–381. The quotation in the text is from p 381.
3.Loudness marked a number of Puritan preachers: Thomas Hooker was once (at least) referred to as ‘bawling Hooker’, and William Whateley was known as ‘the Roaring Boy of Banbury’.
4.Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (Banner of Truth: London, 1974), pp 174f, 61f.
5.Ibid, p 149.
6.David Clarkson, Works, pp. 193f.
7.Thomas Goodwin, Works, IX:378f.
8.Baxter, Works, (George Virtue: London 1838), I:726.
9.W. Carus, Memoirs of…the Rev. Charles Simeon (3rd edition, 1848), p 595.
10.John Owen, Works, XVI:74f.
11.William Gurnall, The Christian in Complete Armour (Banner of Truth: London, 1964), second pagination, p 574.
12.A.W. Brown, Reflections of the Conversation Parties of the Rev. Chas. Simeon (1862), p 177.
13.Ibid, p 183.
14.Goodwin, Works, II:lxivf; cited above.
15.Baxter, Works, II:399; cited above.
16.Goodwin, Works, II:lxxi.
17.Owen, Works, XVI:76.
18.Edward Bapshawe, ‘Life and Death of Mr. Bolton’ (bound with M(r). Bolton’s Four Last things, 1632), p 13.
19.William Perkins, Works, II:665f.
20.Ibid, pp 380f.
21.Brown, op cit, pp 105f.
22.Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, p 62f.
23.Ibid, pp 120–23.