The Twentieth Century
Preaching is indispensable to Christianity. Without preaching a necessary part of its authenticity has been lost. For Christianity is, in its very essence, a religion of the Word of God. No attempt to understand Christianity can succeed which overlooks or denies the truth that the living God has taken the initiative to reveal himself savingly to fallen humanity; or that his self-revelation has been given by the most straightforward means of communication known to us, namely by a word and words; or that he calls upon those who have heard his Word to speak it to others.
First, God spoke through the prophets, interpreting to them the significance of his actions in the history of Israel, and simultaneously instructing them to convey his message to his people either by speech or by writing or both. Next, and supremely, he spoke in his Son, his “Word . . . made flesh,” and in his Word’s words, whether spoken directly or through his apostles. Thirdly, he speaks through his Spirit, who himself bears witness to Christ and to Scripture, and makes both living to the people of God today. This Trinitarian statement of a speaking Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and so of a Word of God that is scriptural, incarnate, and contemporary, is fundamental to the Christian religion. And it is God’s speech which makes our speech necessary. We must speak what he has spoken. Hence the paramount obligation to preach.
This emphasis is, moreover, unique to Christianity. Of course every religion has its accredited teachers, whether Hindu gurus or Jewish rabbis or Moslem mullahs. Yet these instructors in religion and ethics, even if endowed with official authority and personal charisma, are essentially the expositors of an ancient tradition. Only Christian preachers claim to be heralds of good news from God, and dare to think of themselves as his ambassadors or representatives who actually utter “oracles of God” (1 Pet. 4:11). “Preaching is an essential part and a distinguishing feature of Christianity,” wrote E. C. Dargan in his two-volume History of Preaching. Again, “Preaching is distinctively a Christian institution.”
That preaching is central and distinctive to Christianity has been recognized throughout the church’s long and colorful story, even from the beginning. So before we weigh the objections to preaching, and consider how we should respond to them, it seems to me both healthy and helpful to set the contemporary argument in the context of church history. To be sure, neither time-honored opinions of the past nor influential voices of the present are infallible. Yet the impressive unanimity of their conviction about the primacy and power of preaching (and I shall deliberately draw from a broad spectrum of ecclesiastical tradition) will give us a good perspective from which to view the opposing position, and put us in a good mood to do so.
The only place to begin is with Jesus himself. “The Founder of Christianity was himself the first of its preachers; but he was preceded by his forerunner and followed by his apostles, and in the preaching of these the proclamation and teaching of God’s Word by public address was made an essential and permanent feature of the Christian religion.” Certainly the evangelists present Jesus as having been first and foremost an itinerant preacher. “Jesus came . . . preaching,” Mark announces, as he introduces the public ministry (Mark 1:14, cf. Matt. 4:17). So it was entirely legitimate for George Buttrick, later chaplain of Harvard, to take these three words as the title of his 1931 Lyman Beecher lectures at Yale. The synoptic evangelists summarize his Galilean ministry in these terms, “Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom.” (Matt. 9:35, cf. 4:23 and Mark 1:39.) Indeed, this was Jesus’ own understanding of his mission at that period. He claimed in the Nazareth synagogue that, in fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah 61, the Spirit of the Lord had anointed him to preach his liberating message. Consequently, he “must” do so. It was “for this purpose,” he explained, that he had been “sent” (Luke 4:18, 43, cf. Mark 1:38 “for that is why I came out”). John’s witness to Jesus’ self-conscious mission as preacher and teacher is similar. He accepted the title “Rabbi,” he claimed to have “spoken openly to the world” and to have “said nothing secretly,” and he told Pilate he had come into the world “to bear witness to the truth” (John 13:13; 18:20, 37).
That the apostles after Pentecost gave priority to the ministry of preaching is specifically stated in Acts 6. They resisted the temptation to get involved in other forms of service, in order to devote themselves “to prayer and to the ministry of the word” (v. 4). For it was to this that Jesus had primarily called them. During his lifetime he had sent them out to preach (Mark 3:14), although temporarily restricting their ministry to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 10:5–7). After his resurrection, however, he had solemnly commissioned them to take the gospel to the nations (e.g. Matt. 28:19; Luke 24:47). According to the longer ending of Mark, “they went forth and preached everywhere” (16:20). They proclaimed in the power of the Holy Spirit the good news of the death and resurrection, or the sufferings and glory, of the Christ (1 Pet. 1:12). In the Acts we watch them doing so, first Peter and the other Jerusalem apostles who “spoke the word of God with boldness” (4:31), and then Luke’s hero Paul in his three missionary expeditions, until Luke leaves him in Rome under house arrest, yet “preaching the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ quite openly and unhindered” (28:31). In this Luke is faithfully reflecting Paul’s own perception of his ministry. Christ had sent him to preach the gospel, he wrote, not to baptize; so he felt a certain “necessity” or compulsion to do so. Besides, preaching was God’s appointed way by which sinners would hear of the Savior and so call on him for salvation, for “how are they to hear without a preacher?” (1 Cor. 1:17; 9; 16; Rom. 10:14–15). Then at the end of his life, knowing that he had fought his fight and finished his race, he passed the commission on to his young lieutenant Timothy. In the presence of God, and in anticipation of the return of Christ to judge and to reign, he solemnly charged him, “Preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, and exhort, be unfailing in patience and in teaching” (2 Tim. 4:1–2).
So prominent was the place of preaching and teaching in the ministry of Jesus and his apostles that it is hardly surprising to find the same emphasis on it among the early church fathers.
The Didache, or “Teaching of the Lord through the Twelve Apostles,” dating probably from near the beginning of the second century, is a church manual on ethics, the sacraments, the ministry, and the second coming of Jesus. It refers to a variety of teaching ministries, to “bishops and deacons” on the one hand and to itinerant “teachers, apostles and prophets” on the other. Travelling teachers are to be welcomed, but practical tests are given by which their genuineness may be assessed. If a teacher contradicts the apostolic faith, if he stays more than two days and/or asks for money, and if he fails to practice what he preaches, then he is a false prophet (11:1–2 and 12:1–5). If he is genuine, however, he must be listened to with humility. “Be long-suffering and pitiful and guileless and gentle and good and always trembling at the words which thou hast heard.” Again, “My child, him that speaketh to thee the Word of God remember night and day; and thou shalt honor him as the Lord”(3:8; 4:1).
About the middle of the second century, Justin Martyr’s First Apology was published. He addressed it to the emperor, defended Christianity against misrepresentations, and argued that it is true because the Christ who died and rose was the embodiment of truth and the Savior of mankind. Towards the end he gave an account of “the weekly worship of the Christians.” It is notable both for the prominence given to the reading and preaching of the Scriptures and for the combination of Word and sacrament:
And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and, as we before said, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen.
At the end of the second century, the Latin father Tertullian wrote his Apology in order to clear Christians of false accusations and demonstrate the injustice of the persecutions they were having to endure. Writing of “the peculiarities of the Christian society,” he emphasized the love and unity which knit them together, and then described their meetings:
We assemble to read our sacred writings. . . .With the sacred words we nourish our faith, we animate our hope, we make our confidence more steadfast, and no less by inculcations of God’s precepts we confirm good habits. In the same place also exhortations are made, rebukes and sacred censures are administered.
Tertullian’s contemporary, the Greek father Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, stressed the responsibility of the presbyters to adhere to the apostles’ teaching:
These also preserve this faith of ours in one God, who accomplished such marvellous dispensations for our sake; and they expound the Scriptures to us without danger, neither blaspheming God, nor dishonouring the patriarchs, nor despising the prophets.
Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea at the beginning of the fourth century and the father of church history, was able to sum up the first two hundred years of the Christian era in terms of the work of preachers and teachers:
They set out on journeys from home and performed the work of evangelists, making it their aim to preach to such as had not yet heard the word of faith at all, and to give them the book of the divine Gospels. But they were content to lay the foundation only of the Faith in some foreign places, appointing others as pastors to whom they entrusted the care of those lately brought in; then they would depart to other lands and nations, with the grace and cooperation of God.
From the later patristic period I will take only one example, indeed the most notable, namely John Chrysostom, who preached for twelve years in the Cathedral in Antioch before becoming bishop of Constantinople in AD 398. In an exposition of Ephesians 6:13 (“take the whole armor of God. . .”), he voiced his conviction about the unique importance of preaching. Like our human body, he said, the body of Christ is subject to many diseases. Medicines, correct diet, suitable climate, and adequate sleep all help to restore our physical health. But how shall Christ’s body be healed?
One only means and one way of cure has been given us . . . and that is teaching of the Word. This is the best instrument, this the best diet and climate; this serves instead of medicine, this serves instead of cautery and cutting; whether it be needful to burn or to amputate, this one method must be used; and without it nothing else will avail.
It was more than a century after his death that his greatness as a preacher came to be recognized and he was nicknamed Chrysostomos, “golden-mouthed”: “he is generally and justly regarded as the greatest pulpit orator of the Greek church. Nor has he any superior or equal among the Latin Fathers. He remains to this day a model for preachers in large cities.”
Four chief characteristics of his preaching may be mentioned. First, he was biblical. Not only did he preach systematically through several books, but his sermons are full of biblical quotations and allusions. Secondly, his interpretation of the Scriptures was simple and straightforward. He followed the Antiochene school of “literal” exegesis, in contrast to fanciful Alexandrian allegorizations. Thirdly, his moral applications were down to earth. Reading his sermons today, one can imagine without difficulty the pomp of the imperial court, the luxuries of the aristocracy, the wild races of the hippodrome, in fact the whole life of an oriental city at the end of the fourth century. Fourthly, he was fearless in his condemnations. In fact, “he was a martyr of the pulpit, for it was chiefly his faithful preaching that caused his exile.”
We jump now, in this brief sketch, more than five hundred years to the founding of the medieval mendicant orders. For “the Age of Preaching,” wrote Charles Smyth, “dates from the coming of the Friars. . . . The history of the pulpit as we know it begins with the Preaching Friars. They met, and stimulated, a growing popular demand for sermons. They revolutionized the technique. They magnified the office.” Although Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) was a man more of compassionate service than of learning, and insisted that “our acting and teaching must go together,” he was nevertheless “as committed to preaching as to poverty: ‘Unless you preach everywhere you go,’ said Francis, ‘there is no use to go anywhere to preach.’ From the very beginning of his ministry, that had been his motto.” His contemporary Dominic (1170–1221) laid even greater emphasis on preaching. Combining personal austerity with evangelistic zeal, he traveled widely in the cause of the gospel, especially in Italy, France, and Spain, and organized his “black frairs” into an order of preachers. A century later Humbert de Romans (died 1277), one of the finest of Dominican ministers general, said: “Christ only once heard Mass . . . but he laid great stress on prayer and preaching, especially on preaching.” And a century later still, the great Franciscan preacher St Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444) made this unexpected statement: “If of these two things you can do only one—either hear the mass or hear the sermon—you should let the mass go, rather than the sermon. . . . There is less peril for your soul in not hearing mass than in not hearing the sermon.”
From this surprising assertion of the primacy of the Word by Franciscans and Dominicans it is not a big step to that great forerunner or “morning star” of the Reformation, John Wycliffe (1329–1384). Associated all his life with Oxford University, and a prolific writer, his keen intellect gradually broke away from medieval Scholasticism, and he proclaimed Holy Scripture as the supreme authority in faith and life. Responsible for instigating the first complete English Bible (translated from the Vulgate), and probably sharing in some of the translating himself, he was a diligent biblical preacher, and from the Scriptures attacked the papacy, indulgences, transubstantiation, and the church’s wealth. He had no doubt that the chief vocation of the clergy was to preach:
The highest service that men may attain to on earth is to preach the Word of God. This service falls peculiarly to priests, and therefore God more straightly demands it of them. . . . And for this cause, Jesus Christ left other works and occupied himself mostly in preaching, and thus did his apostles, and for this, God loved them. . . . The Church, however, is honoured most by the preaching of God’s Word, and hence this is the best service that priests may render unto God. . . . And thus, if our bishops preach not in their own persons, and hinder true priests from preaching, they are in the sins of the bishops who killed the Lord Jesus Christ.
The Renaissance not only preceded the Reformation, but paved the way for it. Beginning in fourteenth-century Italy, with brilliant scholars like Petrarch, whose “humanism” expressed itself in the study of classical Greek and Roman texts, it gained a more Christian flavor when it moved in the following century into Northern Europe. For the preoccupation of the “Christian humanists” like Erasmus and Thomas More was the study of the Christian classics, both biblical and patristic. As a result, they were critical of corruption in the church, called for reform according to the Word of God, and recognized the key role of preachers in securing this reform.
The most important function of the priest is teaching (wrote Erasmus), by which he may instruct, admonish, chide and console. A layman can baptize. All the people can pray. The priest does not always baptize, he does not always absolve, but he should always teach. What good is it to be baptized if one has not been catechized, what good to go to the Lord’s Table if one does not know what it means?
So the old adage that “Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched” seems to be true. Certainly Erasmus’ insistence on the supremacy of Word over sacrament, because the sacraments depend for their efficacy on their interpretation by the Word, was endorsed and amplified by Luther. “The Reformation gave centrality to the sermon. The pulpit was higher than the altar, for Luther held that salvation is through the Word, and without the Word the elements are devoid of sacramental quality, but the Word is sterile unless it is spoken.” In all his writings Luther lost no opportunity to magnify the liberating and sustaining power of the Word of God. Thus, “the Church owes its life to the Word of promise, and is nourished and preserved by this same Word—the promises of God make the Church, not the Church the promises of God.” Moreover, there are only two authentic sacraments, “Baptism and Bread,” because “only in these two do we find both the divinely instituted sign and the promise of the forgiveness of sins.” God’s Word is therefore indispensable for our spiritual life. “The soul can do without all things except the Word of God . . . if it has the Word it is rich and lacks nothing, since this Word is the Word of life, of truth, of light, of peace, of righteousness, of salvation, of joy, of liberty.” This is so because the Word centers on Christ. Hence the necessity of preaching Christ from the Word, “for to preach Christ means to feed the soul, to make it righteous, to set it free and to save it, if it believe the preaching.”
Since the health of the Christian and of the church depends on the Word of God, the preaching and teaching of it is both “the most important part of divine service” and the “highest and only duty and obligation” of every bishop, pastor and preacher. It is also such a weighty responsibility that it is extremely demanding. Luther gives nine “properties and virtues” of a good preacher. The first seven are fairly predictable. He should, of course, “teach systematically, . . . have a ready wit, . . . be eloquent, . . . have a good voice and . . . a good memory.” Next, “he should know when to make an end,” and, one might add, how to make a beginning, for he “should be sure of his doctrine.” Then, “eighthly, he should venture and engage body and blood, wealth and honour, in the Word” and “ninthly, he should suffer himself to be mocked and jeered of every one.” The risk of ridicule, the risk of losing life, wealth, and name—these according to Luther were the ultimate tests of “a good preacher.”
Such a statement was no mere academic theory; Luther lived by it himself, notably during the greatest crisis of his life. Excommunicated by papal bull in January 1521, he was summoned in April to appear before the Diet of Worms, over which the Emperor Charles V presided. He refused to recant unless both the testimony of the Scriptures and obvious reason proved him wrong, for, he said, “I am bound in conscience and held fast to the Word of God.” During the following days he was granted a hearing by a bench of learned judges. But in reality he had been condemned before the trial began. It ended with his ultimatum: “Even if I were to lose my body and my life on account of it, I cannot depart from the true Word of God.” It was the preaching of this divine Word, not political intrigue or the power of the sword, which established the Reformation in Germany. Luther put it later, “I simply taught, preached, wrote God’s Word: otherwise I did nothing. And when, while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my Philip and my Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that never a Prince or Emperor inflicted such damage upon it. I did nothing. The Word did it all.”
As Calvin wrote his Institutes in the comparative peace of Geneva, he too exalted the Word of God. In particular, he emphasized that the first and major mark of a true church was the faithful preaching of the Word. “Wherever we see the Word of God purely preached and heard,” he wrote, “and the sacraments administered according to Christ’s institution, there, it is not to be doubted, a Church of God exists.” In fact, this ministry of Word and sacrament, the audible and visible proclaimation of the gospel, must be adjudged “a perpetual token by which to distinguish the Church.”
The English Reformers were strongly influenced by Calvin. To a great extent they accepted his teaching that the sacraments derive their efficacy from the Word and lack efficacy without it, that Word and sacraments are indispensable marks of the church, and that the priesthood is essentially a ministry of the Word. Thus, Anglican Article XIX declared that “the visible church of Christ is a congregation of faithful (i.e. believing) men, in which the pure Word of God is preached, and the sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance.” And the bishop, while ordaining candidates to the presbyterate, not only gave a Bible to each as a symbol of his office, but exhorted him to be “studious . . . in reading and learning the Scriptures” and authorized him by the power of the Holy Spirit “to preach the Word of God and to minister the holy sacraments in the congregation.”
No reformer took this sacred task more seriously than Hugh Latimer, the popular preacher of the English Reformation. Born about 1485 as the son of a yeoman farmer in Leicestershire, and consecrated Bishop of Worcester in 1535, he never became prelatical or lost his homely, rustic touch. Instead, “He spoke from the heart, and his words . . . went to the heart.”
His great burden was that the people of England were still lost in spiritual darkness, and that the clergy were to blame for this because they neglected the ministry of the Word. Specially blameworthy were the bishops. They were so taken up, he said, with “ruffling in their rents, dancing in their dominions . . . munching in their mangers, and moiling in their gay manors and mansions” that they had no time for preaching.
Latimer’s best known—and perhaps most powerful—address is known as “The Sermon of the Plough,” and was preached in St Paul’s Cathedral on 18 January 1548, soon after he had been released from his incarceration in the Tower of London. His theme was that “God’s Word is seed to be sown in God’s field” and that “the preacher is the sower.” As he developed it, he drew on his personal experience of farming on his father’s Leicestershire estate. The preacher, he argued, should be like the plowman, because he should “labor at all seasons of the year.” But he bewailed the fact that instead the clergy spent their time meddling in business and pleasure. As a result, “by the lording and loitering, preaching and plowing is clean gone.” Then Latimer kept his hearers in suspense by this famous passage:
And now I would ask you a strange question; who is the most diligent bishop and prelate in all England; that passes all the rest in doing his office? I can tell, for I know who it is; I know him well. But now I think I see you listening and hearkening that I should name him. There is one that passes all the other, and is the most diligent prelate and preacher in all England. And will ye know who it is? I will tell you—it is the Devil. He is the most diligent preacher of all others; he is never out of his diocese; he is never from his cure; you shall never find him unoccupied; he is ever in his parish; he keeps residence at all times; you shall never find him out of the way; call for him when you will, he is ever at home. He is the most diligent preacher in all the realm; he is ever at his plough; no lording or loitering can hinder him; he is ever applying his business; you shall never find him idle, I warrant you. . . . Where the devil is resident, and has his plough going, there away with books and up with candles; away with bibles and up with beads; away with the light of the gospel and up with the light of candles, yea, at noonday; . . . up with man’s traditions and his laws, down with God’s traditions and his most holy word; . . . Oh that our prelates would be as diligent to sow the corn of good doctrine as Satan is to sow cockle and darnel!. . . There was never such a preacher in England as he is.
The conclusion of the sermon went like this:
The prelates . . . are lords, and no labourers; but the devil is diligent at his plough. He is no unpreaching prelate; he is no lordly loiterer from his cure; but a busy ploughman. . . . Therefore, ye unpreaching prelates, learn of the devil: to be diligent in doing of your office. . . . If you will not learn of God, nor good men, to be diligent in your office, learn of the devil.
I have referred to Luther and Calvin for the Continental Reformation, and to Latimer for the English. They were preachers, and they believed in preaching. Yet they were only leading examples of a widespread conviction and practice. Here is E. C. Dargan’s comment:
The great events and achievements of that mighty revolution were largely the work of preachers and preaching; for it was by the Word of God, through the ministry of earnest men who believed, loved and taught it, that the best and most enduring work of the Reformation was done. And, conversely, the events and principles of the movement powerfully reacted on preaching itself, giving it new spirit, new power, new forms, so that the relation between the Reformation and preaching may be succinctly described as one of mutual dependence, aid and guidance.
The prominence which was given to preaching by the early Reformers continued to be given in the latter part of the sixteenth century and in the seventeenth by the Puritans. They have been described by many names, some rude, others not so rude. But “the name which best sums up their character,” writes Irvonwy Morgan, “is the ‘Godly Preachers.’” He goes on to explain why:
The essential thing in understanding the Puritans was that they were preachers before they were anything else, and preachers with a particular emphasis that could be distinguished from other preachers by those who heard them. . . . What bound them together, undergirded their striving, and gave them the dynamic to persist was their consciousness that they were called to preach the Gospel. “Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel” was their inspiration and justification. Puritan tradition in the first and last resort must be assessed in terms of the pulpit, and the words of the ex-Dominican Friar Thomas Sampson, one of the leaders and first sufferers of the Puritan Movement. . . can stand as their slogan: “Let others be Bishops,” he says, “I will undertake the office of preacher or none at all.”
Among the seventeenth-century Puritans, Richard Baxter, author of The Reformed Pastor (1656), stands out as consistently exemplifying the ideals which the Puritan tradition and his own book set forth. He felt oppressed by the ignorance, laziness, and licentiousness of the clergy, which had been exposed by a parliamentary committee in their report The First Century of Scandalous Malignant Priests (1643), which supplied one hundred shocking case histories. So Baxter addressed his Reformed Pastor to his fellow clergy, especially the members of his Worcestershire Ministerial Association, and shared with them the principles which directed his own pastoral work in the parish of Kidderminster. “In a word,” he wrote, “we must teach them, as much as we can, of the word and works of God. O what two volumes are these for a minister to preach upon! How great, how excellent, how wonderful and mysterious! All Christians are disciples or scholars of Christ; the Church is his school, we are his ushers; the Bible is his grammar; this is it that we must be daily teaching them.”
Baxter’s methods of teaching were twofold. On the one hand, he pioneered the practice of catechizing families. Since there were about 800 families in his parish, and since he desired to enquire into their spiritual progress at least once a year, he and his colleague between them invited to their homes fifteen or sixteen families every week. Each family would come alone and stay one hour. They would be asked to recite the catechism, be helped to understand it, and be questioned about their personal experience of its truths. This catechizing would occupy Baxter two whole days a week, and was one essential part of his work. But the other part, “and that the most excellent because it tendeth to work on many,” was “the public preaching of the Word.” It was a work, he insisted, “that requireth greater skill and especially greater life and zeal, than any of us bring to it. It is no small matter to stand up in the face of a congregation and deliver a message as from the living God, in the name of our Redeemer.”
It would be quite mistaken to suppose, however, that the importance of preaching was recognized in the seventeenth century only by the Puritans. Just four years before Baxter wrote The Reformed Pastor, George Herbert wrote his A Priest to the Temple (alternatively entitled The Country Parson, His Character and Rule of Holy Life), although it was not published for another twenty years. There is evidence that the two men knew and respected one another. Certainly Baxter applauded Herbert’s poetry and piety, although Herbert has been described as an early Anglo-Catholic. Yet he laid an essentially “Puritan” emphasis on preaching. His seventh chapter, entitled “The Parson Preaching,” begins: “The Country Parson preacheth constantly, the pulpit is his joy and his throne.” Moreover, he draws his message from “the book of books, the storehouse and magazine of life and comfort, the holy Scriptures,” for “there he sucks, and lives.” His main characteristic is not that he is “witty, or learned, or eloquent, but holy,” and so earnest is he in his desire to communicate that he even interrupts his own sermon with “many Apostrophes to God as ‘Oh, Lord, bless my people, and teach them this point.’”
On the other side of the Atlantic, and a few years later, Cotton Mather, the American Puritan, was exercizing in Boston a ministry whose influence was being felt on both sides of the ocean. Fellow of Harvard, scholarly theologian, and prolific writer, he provided in his book Student and Preacher what he termed “Directions for a Candidate of the Ministry.” His view of the Christian minister in general, and of the preacher in particular, was extremely exalted. His preface begins:
The office of the Christian ministry, rightly understood, is the most honourable, and important, that any man in the whole world can ever sustain; and it will be one of the wonders and employments of eternity to consider the reasons why the wisdom and goodness of God assigned this office to imperfect and guilty man! . . . The great design and intention of the office of a Christian preacher are to restore the throne and dominion of God in the souls of men; to display in the most lively colours, and proclaim in the clearest language, the wonderful perfections, offices and grace of the Son of God; and to attract the souls of men into a state of everlasting friendship with him. . . . It is a work which an angel might wish for, as an honour to his character; yea, an office which every angel in heaven might covet to be employed in for a thousand years to come. It is such an honourable, important and useful office, that if a man be put into it by God, and made faithful and successful through life, he may look down with disdain upon a crown, and shed a tear of pity on the brightest monarch on earth.
Cotton Mather died in 1728. Just a decade later, newly returned from two years in Georgia, disillusioned because in his own judgment unconverted, John Wesley was granted his “heart-warming” experience in which, he said, he put his “trust in Christ, in Christ only for salvation,” and an assurance was given to him that his sins had been taken away, even his, and that Christ had saved him from the law of sin and death. At once he began to preach the free salvation he had just received. True, influenced by his reading of Richard Baxter, he encouraged a house-to-house ministry and a catechizing of converts. But preaching was his own characteristic ministry. In churches and church yards, on village greens, in fields, and in natural amphitheaters, he proclaimed the gospel and “offered Christ” to the vast crowds who gathered to listen to him. “I do indeed live by preaching,” he commented in his journal on 28 August 1757. All the time his textbook was the Bible, for he knew that its overriding purpose was to point to Christ and enlighten its readers for salvation. In his preface to the Sermons he wrote:
I am a spirit come from God, and returning to God: just hovering over a great gulf; till, a few moments hence, I am no more seen; I drop into an unchangeable eternity! I want to know one thing—the way to heaven: . . . God himself has condescended to teach the way: for this very end he came from heaven. He hath written it down in a book. O give me that book! At any price, give me the book of God! I have it: here is knowledge enough for me. Let me be homo unius libri (a man of one Book). Here then I am, far from the busy ways of men. I sit down alone: only God is here. In his presence I open, I read his book; for this end, to find the way to heaven.
And out of his biblical meditations John Wesley preached, sharing with others what he had found and pointing the way both to heaven and to holiness.
Although John Wesley has become better known to the public than his younger contemporary George Whitefield (probably because of the world-wide Christian denomination which bears Wesley’s name), Whitefield was almost certainly the more powerful preacher. In Britain and America (which he visited seven times), indoors and out of doors, he averaged about twenty sermons a week for thirty-four years. Eloquent, zealous, dogmatic, passionate, he enlivened his preaching with vivid metaphors, homely illustrations, and dramatic gestures. By these he would hold his audiences spellbound as he either addressed direct questions to them or begged them earnestly to be reconciled with God. He had complete confidence in the authority of his message and was determined that it should receive the respect it deserved as God’s Word. Once in a New Jersey meeting-house, he “noticed an old man settling down for his accustomed, sermon-time nap,” writes John Pollock, one of his biographers. Whitefield began his sermon quietly, without disturbing the gentleman’s slumbers. But then “in measured, deliberate words” he said:
If I had come to speak to you in my own name, you might rest your elbows upon your knees and your heads on your hands, and go to sleep!. . . But I have come to you in the name of the Lord God of hosts, and (he clapped his hands and stamped his foot) I must and I will be heard.” The old man woke up startled.
Charles Simeon was born in 1759, the same year as William Wilberforce, who became his lifelong friend. His career overlapped just over ten years with Whitefield’s and thirty-two years with Wesley’s. Having been converted while an undergraduate at Cambridge, he longed to have the opportunity to preach the gospel there. Walking past Holy Trinity Church in the heart of the university campus, he used to say to himself, “How should I rejoice if God were to give me that church, that I might preach his gospel there, and be a herald for him in the midst of the university.” God answered his prayer, and in 1782 he became the church’s vicar. At first, however, he met with the most violent opposition. The seat-holders boycotted the services and locked the doors to their pews, so that for more than ten years the congregation had to stand, and often there were rowdy scenes. But Simeon persevered and gradually won the respect of both town and gown. For fifty-four years he occupied the pulpit of Holy Trinity Church, systematically opening up the Scriptures and determined without compromise, as his memorial stone in the chancel reads, “to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”
Simeon’s lofty understanding of preaching arose from his concept of the minister as an ambassador. He wrote to John Venn on the occasion of his ordination in 1782, some four months after his own:
My dearest Friend, I most sincerely congratulate you not on a permission to receive £40 or £50 a year, nor on the title of Reverend, but on your accession to the most valuable, most honourable, most important, and most glorious office in the world—to that of an ambassador of the Lord Jesus Christ.
This is certainly how he viewed his own ministry. He once expounded the text containing Jesus’ injunction “Take heed therefore how ye hear” (Luke 8:18) in such a way as to give “Directions How to Hear Sermons.” One of the reasons why Jesus gave this caution, he argued, was “because God himself speaks to us by the preacher.” He went on:
Ministers are ambassadors for God, and speak in Christ’s stead. If they preach what is founded on the Scriptures, their word, as far as it is agreeable to the mind of God, is to be considered as God’s. This is asserted by our Lord and his apostles. We ought therefore to receive the preacher’s word as the word of God himself. With what humility, then, ought we to attend to it! What judgments may we not expect, if we slight it!
Throughout the nineteenth century, in spite of the assaults of the higher criticism on the Bible (associated with the name of Julius Wellhausen, his contemporaries and successors), and in spite of the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, the pulpit maintained its prestige in England. People flocked to hear the great preachers of the day and read their printed sermons with eagerness. There was John Henry Newman (1801–1890) at the University Church in Oxford, Canon H. P. Liddon (1829–1890) at St. Paul’s Cathedral, F. W. Robertson (1816–1853) in Brighton, and, most eminent of all, Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–1892) in his Metropolitan Tabernacle in London.
Let that eminent Victorian Scot, Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), sum up for us the unique influence of the preacher. His witness is the more impressive because he was to some extent an outsider, for he wrote as a historian and was an outspoken critic of churches and their creeds. Yet fourth on his list of “heroes” or “great men” who exercize leadership in the community, he named the “priest,” by whom he evidently meant the “preacher,” “the spiritual Captain of the people.” As models he selected Luther and Knox: “these two men we will account our best priests, inasmuch as they were our best reformers.” What Carlyle admired in them was their lonely courage. At the Diet of Worms, Luther was undaunted by the most imposing dignitaries of church and state. On the one side sits “the world’s pomp and power”; on the other, there “stands up for God’s truth one man, the poor miner Hans Luther’s son.” “Here I stand,” he said, “I can do no other. God help me!” In Carlyle’s opinion it was “the greatest moment in the modern history of men.” Indeed, the vast work of human liberation in the following centuries, in both Europe and America, began then; “the germ of it all lay there.” Scotland’s debt to John Knox, “the bravest of all Scotchmen,” was similar: “This that Knox did for his nation, I say, we may really call a resurrection as from death. . . . The people began to live.” Such is the power of the preached Word.
The respect, almost the awe, in which the pulpit was held by many during the Victorian era is well illustrated in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). He gives a graphic account of the naval chaplain’s sermon in New Bedford, southern Massachusetts, which deserves to be quoted in full. On a stormy December Sunday, Ishmael was waiting to board a whaler in order to sail south. Being, as he later explained, “a good Christian, born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church,” he attended divine service in a little “whaleman’s chapel.” Inside he found “a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors’ wives and widows,” their “muffled silence” contrasting with “the shrieks of the storm outside.” Soon the chaplain entered, an old man named Father Mapple. Having himself been a harpooner in his youth, he retained his love for the sea and his nautical vocabulary. The lofty pulpit was reached not by steps but by a perpendicular ship’s ladder. Hand over hand, with an old sailor’s skill, Father Mapple mounted the preaching place, and then to Ishmael’s astonishment hauled the ladder up after him “till the whole was deposited within, leaving him impregnable in his little Quebec.” Melville goes on to describe the pulpit’s paneled front as being “in the likeness of a ship’s bluff bows,” while “the Holy Bible rested on a projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship’s fiddle-headed beak.” “What could be more full of meaning?” he asks.
For the pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is [that] the storm of God’s wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is [that] the God of breezes fair and foul is first invoked for favorable winds. Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.
The chapter which follows is entitled “The Sermon” and supplies a striking example of pulpit-power. Father Mapple, addressing his congregation as “shipmates,” preached from the story of Jonah. Although this book, he explained, was “one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures,” it yet contained “a two-stranded lesson, a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God.” To fugitives from God, Jonah was a model of true repentance. But he was also a fearful warning to every pilot-preacher who shirks his gospel duty and, “as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!”
“The pulpit leads the world.” Few would dare to advance this claim today, but it would not have sounded an exaggeration in the last century. At the same time, those who discerned the privilege of preaching were distressed by those who did not. One example of this distress was Dr. James W. Alexander, son of Archibald Alexander the first professor in the new Princeton Theological Seminary in 1812, and himself a professor there from 1849 to 1851. For twenty years he had been a pastor, however, for, as Charles Hodge said of him, “the pulpit was his appropriate sphere.”
I fear none of us apprehend as we ought to do the value of the preacher’s office. Our young men do not gird themselves for it with the spirit of those who are on the eve of a great conflict; nor do they prepare as those who are to lay hands upon the springs of the mightiest passions, and stir up to their depths the ocean of human feelings. Where this estimate of the work prevails, men even of inferior training accomplish much. . . . The pulpit will still remain the grand means of effecting the mass of men. It is God’s own method, and he will honour it. . . . In every age, great reformers have been great preachers.
Preaching is not only influential in the lives of others, Alexander later argued; it is also very fulfilling for the preacher:
There is happiness in preaching. It may be so performed as to be as dull to the speaker as it is to the hearers; but in favoured instances it furnishes the purest and noblest excitements, and in these is happiness. Nowhere are experienced, more than in the pulpit, the clear, heavenward soaring of the intellect, the daring flight of imagination, or the sweet agitations of holy passion.
Because of this power and this pleasure, small wonder that Alexander Whyte of Edinburgh, just after the turn of the century, could admonish a discouraged Methodist minister with these words: “Never think of giving up preaching! The angels around the throne envy you your great work.” That was in 1908. The previous year saw the publication of the Congregational theologian P. T. Forsyth’s book Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind. These are its opening words: “It is, perhaps, an overbold beginning, but I will venture to say that with its preaching Christianity stands or falls.”
Our century began in a mood of euphoria. Expectations—at least of the favored, educated minority of the west—were of a period of political stability, scientific progress, and material wealth. No clouds darkened the world’s horizons. The church shared in the general sense of bonhomie. It was still a respectable social institution, and the occupants of its pulpits were shown esteem, even deference.
The best example I have come across from this period of unbounded confidence in the beneficent effects of preaching is that of the Reverend Charles Silvester Horne, who delivered the 1914 Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale, and called them The Romance of Preaching. He died only days later on the boat which was bringing him home. He must have prepared the lectures in 1913, for they betray no apprehensions of approaching war. Horne was both a Congregational minister and a member of the British parliament. He had a reputation for eloquence in the House of Commons, and for passion in the pulpit. H. H. Asquith often went to hear him preach because, he said, “he had a fire in his belly.” Being both a politician and a preacher, he was able from personal experience to compare the two vocations, and he had no doubt which was the more influential:
The preacher, who is the messenger of God, is the real master of society; not elected by society to be its ruler, but elect of God to form its ideals and through them to guide and rule its life. Show me the man who, in the midst of a community however secularized in manners, can compel it to think with him, can kindle its enthusiasm, revive its faith, cleanse its passions, purify its ambitions, and give steadfastness to its will, and I will show you the real master of society, no matter what party may nominally hold the reins of government, no matter what figurehead may occupy the ostensible place of authority.
He was well aware of the preacher’s competitors in the art and business of communication. He spoke of the dramatist, the journalist, the socialist agitator, the novelist, the statesman, the poet, and the playwright. To this list we would today add the television writer and producer. He knew, as we do, that people’s ears were besieged by rival voices. Yet still he accorded the first place in the hierarchy of moral and social power to the preacher:
The real romance of history is this romance of the preacher: the sublime miracle of the God-intoxicated soul with vision of an eternal Will, and sense of an Empire to which all continents, tongues, races belong. This man stands serene amid the clash of arms and the foolish braggadocio of Force, asking only for the sword named Truth, for the harness of Righteousness, and the spirit of Peace. This is the world’s unconquerable and irresistible Hero. All its most enduring victories are his.
So then, Horne continued, “who should be proud of their calling if not we? What other history has ever equalled ours? Think of the procession of preachers!. . . Gradually before their message ancient pagan empires tottered, heathen despots bowed the head.” He specially mentioned Savonarola, Calvin, and Knox as “supreme examples of the power which the man of the Gospel can exercize in shaping the civil and national life of free peoples.”
Another man, also a Congregational minister, who considered preaching more powerful than politics was Dr. J. D. Jones (died 1917), who for nearly forty years was minister of Richmond Hill Congregational Church in Bournemouth. Urged by the leader of a political party to stand as a parliamentary candidate, he declined and quoted as his reason Nehemiah’s answer to Sanballat and Tobiah when they tried to stop him building Jerusalem’s walls. “I am doing a great work,” he had said to them, “so that I cannot come down.” J. D. Jones emphasized the last two words. “It would have been a ‘come down’ to forsake the pulpit for the political arena,” he declared. “I do not disparage the work that Parliament can do in the way of bettering human conditions, but the ultimate healing of the world’s hurt is not to be effected by legislation but by the redeeming grace of God, and the proclamation of that redeeming grace is the highest work to which any man can be called.” The optimism of the century’s early years was shattered first by the outbreak of World War I and then by the horrors of mud and blood in the trenches. Europe emerged from those four years in a chastened mood, which was soon made worse by the years of economic depression. The utterances of churchmen became more sober. Yet confidence in the privilege and power of the pulpit ministry survived. Indeed, perceptive theologians like Karl Barth, whose former liberal optimism had been destroyed by the war and replaced by a new realism about mankind and a new faith in God, expressed their conviction that preaching had gained an even greater importance than before.
It is simply a truism [declared Barth in 1928], that there is nothing more important, more urgent, more helpful, more redemptive and more salutary, there is nothing, from the viewpoint of heaven and earth, more relevant to the real situation than the speaking and the hearing of the Word of God in the originative and regulative power of its truth, in its all-eradicating and all-reconciling earnestness, in the light that it casts not only upon time and time’s confusions but also beyond, towards the brightness of eternity, revealing time and eternity through each other and in each other—the Word, the Logos, of the Living God.
It stands to reason that every recovery of confidence in the Word of God, and so in a living God who spoke and speaks, however this truth may be defined, is bound to result in a recovery of preaching. This must be why so many great preachers have belonged to the reformed tradition. Another example is James Black of Edinburgh, who in his 1923 Warrack Lectures in Scotland and Sprunt Lectures in America issued a stirring exhortation to his student audiences to take their preaching seriously: “Ours is a great and magnificent service,” he said, “and deserves the consecration of any gift we possess. . . . May I ask you, therefore, to resolve early to make your preaching the big business of your life.” Again, “Our work is big enough for us to use all the preparation and all the talent we can bring to its discharge. . . . Yours will be the care and shepherding of souls. Bring to it all the enthusiasm and passion of your own rich life.”
Much more surprising is the priority given to preaching by a man of such theologically liberal views as Bishop Hensley Henson. Yet in 1927, in his sermons and ordination charges published under the title Church and Parson in England, he deplored “the spectacle, alas but too common, of a congregation settling down in sorrowful resignation, if not in shameless slumber, to the infliction of the sermon.” In contrast to this scorn for the pulpit he declared his own conviction: “of all the actions of the Christian ministry preaching is the highest, and the test of our reverence for our profession is our performance of the preacher’s duty.” Consequently he exhorted his fellow clergy: “Never allow yourself to take a mean view of your duty as preacher. . . . In a sense we may say truly that all the activities of the pastorate are gathered up in the ministry of preaching.”
The life and work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer are still being evaluated. While the courage with which he went to his execution in the Flossenburg concentration camp in 1945 is universally admired, scholars continue to debate what he meant by some of his theological statements. Those who knew him best, like his friend Eberhard Bethge, assure us that in his “non-religious” interpretation of Christianity, he never intended to dispense with the true worship of the gathered community. On the contrary, this is essential precisely because it is the occasion on which the call of Christ may be heard:
If we would hear his call to follow, we must listen where he is to be found, that is, in the church through the ministry of word and sacrament. The preaching of the church and the administration of the sacraments is the place where Jesus Christ is present. If you would hear the call of Jesus, you need no personal revelation; all you have to do is hear the sermon and receive the sacrament, that is, to hear the gospel of Christ crucified and risen.
In one of his lectures on preaching delivered before the outbreak of the war, Bonhoeffer stressed even more strongly the central importance of preaching:
For the sake of the proclaimed word the world exists with all of its words. In the sermon the foundation for a new world is laid. Here the original word becomes audible. There is no evading or getting away from the spoken word of the sermon, nothing releases us from the necessity of this witness, not even cult or liturgy. . . . The preacher should be assured that Christ enters the congregation through those words which he proclaims from the Scripture.
Even the Second World War, although it accelerated the process of secularization in Europe, did not quench preaching. During and after it three distinguished Methodist ministers occupied London pulpits and drew large crowds—Leslie Weatherhead at the City Temple, Donald Soper at Kingsway Hall (and also in the open air at Marble Arch and on Tower Hill), and Will Sangster at Westminster Central Hall. A wit once remarked that they could best be distinguished from one another by their three loves, since “Sangster loved the Lord, Weatherhead loved his people, while Soper loved an argument.” Of the three Sangster was probably the most eloquent preacher. Born a cockney, and leaving school at the age of fifteen to work as an office boy in the City, he yet became a Methodist local preacher when he was eighteen, and in 1950 was elected president of the Methodist Conference in Britain. In his well-known book The Craft of the Sermon (1954), he could scarcely find words lofty enough to describe the preacher’s task. Near the beginning he wrote:
Called to preach!. . . Commissioned of God to teach the word! A herald of the great King! A witness of the Eternal Gospel! Could any work be more high and holy? To this supreme task God sent his only begotten Son. In all the frustration and confusion of the times, is it possible to imagine a work comparable in importance with that of proclaiming the will of God to wayward men?
Not by accident, nor yet by the thrustful egotism of men, was the pulpit given the central place in the Reformed Churches. It is there of design and devotion. It is there by the logic of things. It is there as the throne of the Word of God.
Then toward the end of the book he expressed his personal conviction that “preaching the Good News of Jesus Christ is the highest, holiest activity to which a man can give himself: a task which angels might envy and for which archangels might forsake the court of Heaven.” As Andrew Blackwood similarly commented, “preaching should rank as the noblest work on earth.”
So we come to the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. The tide of preaching ebbed, and the ebb is still low today. At least in the western world the decline of preaching is a symptom of the decline of the church. An era of skepticism is not conducive to the recovery of confident proclamation. Yet there are not wanting voices which both declare its vital importance and call for its renewal. We hear these voices in virtually all the churches. I have chosen a sample from the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Free Churches.
Some Roman Catholic writers are very concerned about the low level of contemporary preaching. According to the elderly Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, one of the burning questions of the day concerns what he terms “the trouble with preaching.” This is the failure to relate the Christian message to the everyday world. “Many leave the Church because the language flowing from the pulpit has no meaning for them; it has no connection with their own life and simply bypasses many threatening and unavoidable issues. . . . ‘The trouble with preaching’ is becoming even more troublesome.”
But this should not be so for those who have read the documents which emanated from the Second Vatican Council. The sixth chapter of the “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation,” entitled “Sacred Scripture in the Life of the Church,” contains strong assertions about the duty to study and apply the Scriptures:
Catholic exegetes. . . and other students of sacred theology, working diligently together and using appropriate means, should devote their energies, under the watchful care of the sacred teaching office of the Church, to an exploration and exposition of the divine writings. This task should be done in such a way that as many ministers of the divine word as possible will be able effectively to provide the nourishment of the Scriptures for the people of God, thereby enlightening their minds, strengthening their wills, and setting men’s hearts on fire with the love of God.
Therefore, all the clergy must hold fast to the sacred Scriptures through diligent sacred reading and careful study. . . . This cultivation of Scripture is required lest any of them become “an empty preacher of the word of God outwardly, who is not a listener to it inwardly” (Augustine), since they must share the abundant wealth of the divine word with the faithful committed to them.
Christian people, the text continues, must also read the Scriptures for themselves. “In this way, therefore, through the reading and study of the sacred books, let ‘the word of the Lord run and be glorified’ (2 Thess. 3:1), and let the treasure of revelation entrusted to the Church increasingly fill the hearts of men.”
The “Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests” returns to this theme, and summons the Roman clergy to preach the gospel:
Since no one can be saved who has not first believed, priests, as co-workers with their bishops, have as their primary duty the proclamation of the gospel of God to all. . . . The task of priests is not to teach their own wisdom but God’s Word, and to summon all men urgently to conversion and to holiness. . . . Such preaching must not present God’s Word in a general and abstract fashion only, but it must apply the perennial truth of the gospel to the concrete circumstances of life.
The Anglican church, as we have seen, has been adorned by a long succession of gifted preachers. In recent years, however, no church leader has done more to stimulate the recovery of preaching in the Church of England than Donald Coggan, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1974 to 1980. An able preacher, who has described himself as having been for half a century “under the joyful tyranny of being a minister of the Word,” it was largely by his initiative that the College of Preachers (already well established in Washington D.C.) was founded in England. In his first book on preaching, Stewards of Grace (1958), he expressed his conviction about the indispensability of preaching in these terms:
Here is the miracle of the divine economy, that between the forgiveness of God and the sin of man stands—the preacher! That between the provision of God and the need of man stands—the preacher! That between the truth of God and the quest of man stands—the preacher! It is his task to link human sin to forgiveness, human need to divine omnipotence, human search to divine revelation.
My Free Church example is Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones who from 1938 to 1968 exercized an extremely influential ministry at Westminster Chapel in London. Never out of his own pulpit on Sundays (except during vacations), his message reached to the furthest corners of the earth. His medical training and early practice as a physician, his unshakable commitment to the authority of Scripture and to the Christ of Scripture, his keen analytical mind, his penetrating insight into the human heart, and his passionate Welsh fire combined to make him the most powerful British preacher of the fifties and sixties. In Preaching and Preachers (1971), first delivered as lectures at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, he shares with us his strongest convictions. His opening chapter is entitled “The Primacy of Preaching.” In it he declares, “To me the work of preaching is the highest and the greatest and the most glorious calling to which anyone can ever be called. If you want something in addition to that I would say without any hesitation that the most urgent need in the Christian Church today is true preaching.” Then, toward the end of the book he writes of “the romance of preaching”: “There is nothing like it. It is the greatest work in the world, the most thrilling, the most exciting, the most rewarding, and the most wonderful.”
With those superlatives I conclude my brief historical sketch. It is far from complete. It lays no claim to being a comprehensive “history of preaching.” Instead, it is a very subjective selection of witnesses. Nevertheless, it has at least a double value.
First, it demonstrates how long and broad the Christian tradition is which accords great importance to preaching. It spans nearly twenty centuries, beginning with Jesus and his apostles, continuing through the early fathers and the great post-Nicene theologian-preachers like Chrysostom in the east and Augustine in the west, going on through the medieval preaching friars Francis and Dominic, the Reformers and the Puritans, Wesley and Whitefield, and culminating in modern churchmen of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Secondly, this long and broad tradition is consistent. Without doubt there have been exceptions, who neglected and even denigrated preaching, and whom I have omitted from my story. But they have been exceptions, deplorable deviations from the norm. The Christian consensus down the centuries has been to magnify the importance of preaching, and to resort to the same arguments and vocabulary in order to do so. We can hardly fail to be inspired by this common testimony.
Here, then, is a tradition which cannot lightly be set aside. Certainly, it may be scrutinized and assessed. Certainly, it is challenged today by the social revolution of our era. Certainly, the challenges have to be met with openness and integrity, as we shall seek to do in the next chapter. Yet we shall be able to evaluate them with greater impartiality, and feel less threatened by the attack and less dazzled by the arguments, now that we have looked back over church history and glimpsed the glory of preaching through the eyes of its champions in every century.