What Kind of Seminary Can Produce a Preacher?
Chapter 13: The Seminary and the Sermon
Peter Jensen
Some years ago Kent Hughes and I discussed the question of homiletics training in seminary and the usefulness of a preacher's becoming a professor. Not all good preachers can teach others how to preach. In fact, the two skills do not necessarily belong together at all. Kent himself combines the two abilities, and a seminary might therefore feel that its homiletics instruction would be set to rights by the addition of Dr. Hughes to its faculty.
But would that be a correct judgment? If I were advising a preacher who had been offered a position as homiletics professor, I would suggest a close analysis of the seminary. The question I would ask is this: why is this seminary looking for a practicing preacher as its homiletics professor? Is it because it sees itself as having a weakness in this part of its offering, a weakness that it plans to fix by the simple expedient of adding a good preacher to its faculty? If this is the case, it is likely that the appointment will not succeed and that the new professor will end up frustrated by the experience.
It Takes an Entire Seminary to Produce a Preacher
Classes on homiletics, even classes by master preachers, do not by themselves yield good preachers. It is the business of the whole faculty and the whole curriculum to produce preachers. If the total aim of the seminary is not the sermon, there is no way in the world that the addition of a preaching luminary is going to make much difference. I would advise the would-be professor not to contemplate joining a faculty unless it is clearly the aim and reality of the whole program to graduate good preachers. The instructor in the biblical languages, the church historian, and the pastoral theologian must share this goal, and the curriculum, indeed the life of the community, must be based on it.
This is not such a strange idea. In an earlier day it was the clear aim of Protestant seminaries to graduate preachers. This accounts for some of the features that we still observe in the program. The offering of the biblical languages, for example, is an indication that the graduate is expected to use them in fulfilling his chief pastoral duty, namely, the instruction of the people of God through preaching the Word of God. When seminaries began to make the languages optional, it was a sign that the preaching ministry was no longer regarded as the central role of the pastor. It was also an invitation to those who taught the languages not to teach them in a way that would help with the exposition of the Word. Professors were invited to become scholars or technicians instead of academic pastors, chiefly interested in helping students to acquire and use the skills that they themselves possessed.
This was brought home to me while visiting seminaries in order to learn better how to be the principal of Moore College. The lack of a clear focus on preaching troubled me. I could, of course, understand this in seminaries devoted to shaping the next generation of priests in the Catholic tradition. The formation of such priests in a tradition of heavy emphasis on the sacraments animating pastoral ministry might include preaching, but the priestly role did not center on the Word. However, I discovered in colleges and seminaries of an alleged Protestant persuasion a certain coyness about taking preaching as the main business for which they were set up. This all became strikingly apparent in one famous institution where I asked about preaching. I was promptly told that the student body of the college in question was an expression of the body of Christ. Just as in the body there are many gifts, so one would expect to find in the college a similar range of gifts, with preaching only one of them.
This was an evangelical Protestant college dedicated to graduating ordinands. There was a time when such an institution, clear as to its goal of preparing men for the ministry of the Word, would glory to be known as "a school of the prophets." It is true, of course, that during the twentieth century many of the great Protestant seminaries widened their scope. They accepted many students who did not have a preaching ministry in mind but who wanted to study the Word of God in order to equip them for other ministries. But this hardly seems like a fair reason to set at risk the one fundamental ministry that must be the mark of every church, the ministry of the Word.
Indeed, the effort to produce such ministers would have been entirely consistent with graduating those who labor in other ministries. But a generalist path became dominant. Electives multiplied, and academicians became self-chosen specialists rather than academically gifted pastors. In such a context, it is of hardly any use to employ an eminent preacher to carry the burden of making sure that those who want to be ministers of the Word are properly prepared for such a ministry. By the time they take his courses, the die is cast. Students have not been shaped by teachers or a curriculum or fellow students who have the preaching ministry in mind.
Why It Takes a Whole Seminary to Produce a Preacher: The Nature of a Sermon
Is the issue as crucial as I am suggesting? Consider the reality of the sermon. The wise and godly pastor will minister the Word in a number of ways. There will be the visitation of the sick and dying; there will be the visitation of the home; there will be the one-to-one occasion; there will be the Sunday school class and the lecture; there will be opportunities for question and answer. But basic to all these is that moment when, on a Sunday, as the people of God gather to meet the Lord Jesus Christ in his Word and by his Spirit, their pastor stands before them all to declare and apply the Word. It is the Head of the church supplying the church with his wisdom, exhortation, direction, and rebuke through his under-shepherd. It is the minister's weekly confession of faith - his faith, their faith, the faith. It is a solemn and fundamental occasion for the church.
The Sermon as Truth
The sermon ought to be marked by at least three elements. It must be true, applied, and listenable. First, a sermon must be true. We cannot waste our time on such a solemn occasion with the opinions and the speculations of men. The people gather with all their life experiences, all their needs, all that burdens them and distracts them, all their sins that need to be dealt with, their false and worldly thoughts, their lack of love for one another. They need to hear a word from the Lord. Their needs can be met only through the preaching of the Scriptures, and the best way to accomplish that on a regular and consistent basis is by what we call exposition. There is a place for doctrinal preaching, a place for what we may call topical preaching. But the steady and constant diet of the people of God needs to be the preaching that conforms most closely to their own daily reading of the Scriptures.
There is no substitute for exposition. The basic rule of biblical interpretation is this: the Scriptures interpret the Scriptures. A theological education is a very wonderful experience and almost indispensable for the preacher. But the truth of the matter is that it is only adding marginally to an attentive reading of Scripture based on a confidence that what we are reading is the infallible word of God and that it will interpret itself. It is the good rule of the Reformation that the Scripture is clear enough to be studied by the unlettered and to speak powerfully even to the person whose only book is the Bible. It is the communication of the God who loves to communicate and is well able to speak to us by this method.
The method of exposition by which we move through the Scriptures in an orderly manner is the only one that will deliver us from the conceit of trying to feed the people each week with the husks of our own spiritual experiences or, worse, the heated up version of what we have read during the week in a newspaper. It allows God to set the agenda for the church; it allows Christ to have his right as the head of the church to rule over it with his word and not merely the word of man. If it were not for expository preaching, I would not know what to say to the congregation, and I would fear to stand before them.
Whatever else a theological education does, it must help the pastor to be able to preach in an expository manner. It has failed if it cannot help him do that. The theological education of the pastor has to deliver to him, as far as possible, an understanding of the whole of Scripture. Each part of the Bible has its context both in the book in which it may be found, but also in the Bible as a whole. The skill of the expositor is not in principle different from the skill which any faithful Christian may bring to the task of reading. The more we read the Bible, the better able we are to interpret the individual parts of the Bible.
But the time of intensive study that the pastor is able to give the Scriptures in his seminary days and then, as he is freed to do so, during the week, enables him to have a deeper grasp of the all-important context. In particular, he should be fully aware of the narrative of the Bible, its unfolding theological story, so that he can locate a particular passage on the theological time line; and he should be aware of the overall teaching of the Bible on the subjects that belong to it, so that his reading and exposition of any passage will be enriched by the total revelation of the knowledge of God. In other words, he must have a biblical theology, a theology of the whole. These understandings may legitimately be expected by any congregation of its pastor. The lack of them would constitute a severe disability in the task of pastoring. But is a seminary education geared to produce them?
The Sermon as Application
First, then, the sermon must be true. Second, it must be applied. If we recollect that it is through the Word that Jesus Christ as the head of the church rules his people, we are entitled to expect that the preacher will make clear the connection between the Word that he is expounding and the life of the church. To say that this is often handled poorly is an understatement. Sometimes no attempt is made at all, and the preacher simply delivers exegesis in the place of exposition. At other times the application is the same on every occasion ("we must evangelize more - please bring people to church with you!") no matter what part of the Word is preached. At other times the Word becomes merely the source of illustrative material for the preacher's doctrinal or pietistic or political fantasies. Often the call to repentance is muted or trivialized, like the "mint, dill and cumin" of the Pharisees. It seems very difficult to listen to the Word itself and accept its direction for our thoughts and lives.
I have used the word application for this process, but it is inadequate for what needs to occur. For a start, it suggests two processes, exegesis and application, two tasks that have to be attended to separately in the process of sermon construction. But we do not read the Bible like that. We are looking for it to edify and instruct us more directly than the word application suggests. It gives some grounds for the results I have portrayed above. I wonder whether the word implication may be better - not so much the application but the implication of a text. We need to draw out what is there rather than to add on something that we hope is consistent with what is there.
The task still remains difficult. It requires a knowledge of human nature, of the life of the church, of the world around us, and of the meaning of the text that addresses us as the Word of Christ. But here we come to the indispensable part played by Christian doctrine in preparing the preacher. The homiletics professor cannot do his job unless the teachers of theology are doing their job. Indeed, if a seminary that is genuinely trying to graduate preachers has to choose between having an instructor in preaching and a theologian, there should be no hesitation in choosing the theologian. The job of the theologian in training preachers is far more important. The role of the homiletics professor is secondary. It cannot be remedial for a prior failure in theology.
Systematic theology is the central, organizing subject of the theological curriculum. It is most close to the knowledge of God that is the one great theme of the whole curriculum. It summarizes the teaching of the Bible on all the major subjects of the Bible and shows how they interrelate. It deepens and corrects exposition in the light of the whole biblical Word. It enables the student to begin the task of comparing and critiquing the theological systems that lay claim to being Christian. It sets the foundations for the study of theological ethics and pastoral theology. It is the bridge over which Christian truth marches to confront and interact with the ideas and practices of the world.
It is tragic that much of the way in which systematic theology is approached leaves the student wondering what it has to do with his chosen task of preaching the Word. Where theological study consists of extended expositions of the great names in theology, where students are expected to know a great deal about Barth or Calvin but not the scriptural sources from which these giants of theological study drew their inspiration, the student is never equipped to do his main job. The study of contemporary theology, the study of classical theology, have their place. But they cannot take the place of the study of God's Word. The business of the theological professor is not to introduce his students to Berkhof or Pannenberg but to introduce them to God with whatever help Pannenberg and Berkhof and Calvin and Athanasius may give to this enterprise. The student must be left with the impression that the supreme textbook of the theology course is the Bible itself.
A failure at this point is fatal to the enterprise of producing preachers. The Sunday morning congregation could quite easily exist without ever knowing that a man called Calvin ever walked the earth. They are not looking to be fed Barth. They seek the Lord in his Word. Systematic theology is a crucial discipline for bringing out the implications of the Word and showing its relevance to the world we inhabit. If the theologian does not consistently handle the Scriptures in a way that shows these links, we cannot expect his students to do it. The aim of the theology class cannot be less than to help students know God and be equipped to make him known.
The Sermon as Listenable
The third necessary element of the sermon must be that it is listenable. To state the obvious, the sermon must obey the laws of genuine communication; the boring sermon is a deadly thing. Now it may be thought that here at least the homiletics professor is on home ground. In some cases he has been appointed precisely because he has mastered the art of communication and is adept at getting people to listen to him. It is hoped, although the hope may well be confounded, that he has sufficient self-knowledge to be able to analyze his own success and pass the secret of it on to others. In fact, of course, it may well be that the best professor, like the best athletics coach, may not be outstanding at doing the task himself; he may be outstanding in his insight as to what needs to be done. However, let us assume that the fine preacher and the fine teacher are found in the best person. Let us assume that he can do the (admittedly important) work of training preachers to communicate effectively. It may still do nothing to save the seminary from producing poor preachers.
We are not, after all, looking for mere rhetoricians. Indeed, some of the best preaching, even the most listenable preaching, does not meet the usual criteria for style and communication. Or, to put the matter another way, its communication is of a truth so powerful that it grips by its substance, not its style. Its essence is dramatic, not because it tries to be dramatic, but because, in this world, truth is inherently dramatic. Let me explain.
The essence of drama is conflict. That is what makes audiences turn out night after dreary night to watch television. The hook that brings us back is conflict, conflict of persons, of ideas, of events, of moral choice. Television is soul-destroying because it uses the cheapest of tricks to create drama, such as in the endless deployment of the crisis in human lives caused by murder. Conflict creates suspense and uncertainty; it exposes the nature of human beings and life; it exposes the audience to moral and spiritual dilemmas. Interestingly, it is very rare for drama to succeed over any extended period if it does not contain a morally appropriate end. We actually prefer virtue to triumph; we do not like programs in which evil wins consistently. Of course in the world of television this is low-grade stuff, morally deadening and often demeaning. But in the hands of a master, drama can shake and transform. There is a high moral purpose at work, which we recognize as something that intersects with our world and even challenges our sense of identity. It can create profound change by telling the truth with power.
I do not suppose that Amos went to homiletics lectures or would have benefited much from such attendance. It is true that we can see rhetorical device and technique in how he delivered the Word of the Lord. But his technique was not the essence of his potency and his ability to arrest his audience. Classes in Hebrew rhetoric would not have made him a better prophet. The truth that he had from God contradicted everything his contemporaries believed and hoped in. It placed him in deep conflict. He was an unforgettable - and eminently listenable - prophet because he was first of all confronted by the word of God in his own person and then spoke it with a blazing passion and boldness which were startling and provoking.
Why It Takes a Whole Seminary to Produce a Preacher: The Nature of the Preacher's Message
The preacher is a living contradiction: as a sinful and finite creature, he preaches on behalf of the eternal and holy God. That contradiction is both his despair and his hope. It is his despair, because he sees contradiction in all he does and recognizes that the root cause of it is sin. He cannot keep to the high standards that he preaches. He finds that his own love for the world is greater than his love for God. He also recognizes that the truth that he preaches is contradicted by the world he lives in at innumerable points. He is angered by the very sin of which he is part. Furthermore, the Scriptures are beyond his intellectual, moral, and spiritual grasp. He sees in them depths and difficulties that cry out for investigation and understanding.
Struggling with the Text
And yet these contradictions are also his hope as a preacher. The difficulties of the text force him to struggle and wrestle with it until light comes. I am not suggesting for a moment that it is the duty of the preacher to share his doubts with the congregation; a man in the grip of systemic doubts should step down from the role of ambassador of Christ until those doubts come to some sort of resolution. I am saying that there is an interrogative mood in which Scripture is to be approached - submissive and yet questioning. There is a variety of smooth preaching that replicates what it sees as the main theme of a text but does not bring to the surface anything in the text that surprises, contradicts, creates tension. Smooth preaching rushes too easily to solutions, or more frequently, fails to see or fails to mention the stress points. In doing so, it becomes dull; more important, it dulls the Word of God and fails to challenge.
But it is not simply a matter of a difficulty of exegesis. The preacher must also struggle against a text that contradicts his life as a sinner. Personal repentance is a priority for the preacher. His listeners will sense that struggle in what he says, and they themselves will begin to recognize their human position as sinful and yet beloved creatures. His struggle against sin, his own striving to be holy, will be apparent in his intensity, in the moral force and power with which he speaks. This is not something of which the preacher will be aware; you cannot manufacture it; an artificial godliness will soon expose itself as a sham. But the most powerful prophetic preaching comes from those who have themselves met sin and evil on the field of battle and triumphed in the Lord's strength.
Struggling with the World and Contemporary Culture
The preacher struggles against sin. But he must also struggle against the world, against the culture in which he and his listeners live. Entering that contest will enable him to speak transformingly into the ears of those who themselves are being tempted to conform to the world. Exegesis is the indispensable groundwork of the sermon, but only the groundwork. If expository preaching is merely the deliverance of exegesis, it fails in its duty. From exegesis through biblical theology to systematic theology and so to the culture beyond is the route that must consistently be followed. If it is followed, and if the culture is understood, the sermon will inevitably have all the drama of truth about it.
How can the Christian faith so preached be anything else but dramatic? We live in a culture of the closed world order. Instinctively, our educated contemporaries believe that the world is governed by unbreakable laws of science; that, if there is a God, he lolls on his throne, letting the world run its own aimless course while he fails to intervene. The Christian preacher is charged with the impossible task of declaring that a resurrection has occurred in history, and that of a man born of a virgin. These are utter impossibilities. So great is the confrontation that our society turns its face away by treating these claims as though they are myths. You may have your consoling story, the world declares, as long as you do not trouble me to think not only that they did take place, but that such things could take place in a world such as this one. Announce them as myths and I will smile at you; announce them as facts and I will scorn you, so says our world.
And yet, Sunday by Sunday the preachers of the faith announce the resurrection as though it were as important and confronting as a suburban train journey. There is no shock, no drama, no conflict, because we choose not to confront the world that declares that such things do not happen. We may believe that we are announcing an historical event, but we announce it in such a way as to make the congregation yawn and our culture smile. We do not analyze unbelief and call it out. We do not even seem to have the intellectual resources to do so. I would gather a crowd more easily to a speech on climate change than to a speech in which I announced that a man has risen from the dead.
The genuineness of the preacher will also be tested by his willingness to speak the unpopular and divisive truth to the congregation on whom he depends for a living. In our day, the unpopular truth is about such matters as sexual ethics, divorce, and the ministry of women. True expository preaching will lead a preacher to these subjects as he expounds the Scripture systematically. The cowardly and man-pleasing evangelical preacher will ensure that he is missing in action when it comes to teaching these difficult parts of the Word. His preferred option will be to expound them in such a way that he does not have to make a choice. He will prefer peace to war; he will sound right to those who pay his stipend, but he will not speak with a prophetic voice, and the blessing of God will not attend his ministry no matter how eloquent he may be.
What Kind of Seminary Can Produce a Preacher?
Whether a preacher will be such a prophet should not be determined in the homiletics class. It has to do with what sort of man he is rather than what sort of communicator he is. It is true that a course in sacred rhetoric may be of benefit. It is true that a good professor of homiletics will raise the very points that I am making. But it is also true that if the seminary is such that it relies on the professor of homiletics alone to make these points, it has failed. For the shaping of the person of the preacher, his own personal encounter with the living God, his capacity to struggle and wrestle with the Bible and to struggle and wrestle with the world, his capacity, in short, to see in himself the contradictions and conflicts which go to make up prophetic drama, do not occur first and foremost in the preaching class. If they do not occur in the study, in the library, in fellowship with other students, in the classroom, and preeminently in the chapel, they will not occur in a course of lectures on preaching. If a preacher is not a man of God, it will be difficult to preach the Word of God.
Will a seminary produce preachers? Only if it actually tries to do so and if the whole program and the whole faculty are geared to that end. Only if it is God-centered and student-centered. There are few greater challenges than those involved in preaching the Word of God. In a relatively short, uninterrupted discourse, the preacher must expound the Bible in a way that is true, applied, and listenable. Furthermore, it is to be done to the same audience week in and week out. To do so effectively requires intellectual and spiritual qualities of the highest order. Indeed, it is a more demanding task than that of being a professor. The professor in a seminary is usually able to specialize in one branch of Christian knowledge. He or she may become an expert in the Old Testament, or in philosophy or church history. Professors can communicate with less than optimal skills, since their students are assessed and have to take the course. They can afford to dig deep and to take the odd excursus. They are not faced with the relentless demands of the pulpit.
If the seminary program is intended to train preachers, it must be assumed that the different disciplines that make up the program have some relevance to the preacher's task. Certainly I would argue that studies in subjects such as church history and philosophy contribute critically. But the preacher has to do what no professor does: he must bring together, focus, and use all the resources that the seminary gives him at one moment in time. Even if he makes no formal reference to church history in his sermon, his knowledge of history is what helps create the depth and texture of the sermon, part of what gives it authority. In other words, the preacher has to integrate all his learning as well as all his experience in a few moments.
And this is the final challenge for the seminary. Seminary education has become fragmented. The different disciplines ignore each other; the experts are interested in their own field of expertise; the student is permitted to choose his own courses to a significant degree. The very person in the seminary least able to integrate the learning - namely, the student - is being required to perform this feat on his own and thus equip himself for his major role as a preacher of God's Word. It is not surprising that even amongst evangelicals there has been a move away from exposition of Scripture to topical preaching with its accompanying dangers of shallowness and repetition. Where this occurs, it reflects the inability of the seminary to make its own studies coherent and actually useful for the task of training pastors who are preachers.
I believe that the seminary must center its program on the knowledge of God before it begins to think about any particular academic discipline. This knowledge of God, which is the basic aim of every course, comes via the Scriptures and has a necessary impact on the lives of students and faculty alike. This is the key to the integration of the seminary, not just the program of the seminary.
In short, the professor of homiletics has a great job. But it is worth doing only if he can be assured that the whole seminary is committed to producing expository preachers and that this is evident in the faculty as well as the program. The seminary that does this will not be less adept in its other roles of teaching the faith and apologetics and ethics and pastoral counseling and the rest, since preaching demands a skill in these roles. But if in the course of its history the seminary has wavered from this task, and has become a nursery for professors or church musicians or educationists or lay training, even the great Chrysostom himself would have difficulty in fostering preachers if he had the misfortune to be employed as the professor of homiletics in such a place.