Introduction by Jaroslav Pelikan

Introduction 1. The Study of the History of Preaching

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH

is constituted by the preaching of the word of God and the administration of the sacraments. This axiom of Reformation

_ theology,' whose validity in one form or another would be acknowledged even by theologians standing outside the tradition of the Reformation, ought to have far-reaching consequences for the study of the history of the church. On the basis of it, one ought to pay careful attention to when and how the word was preached and the sacraments were administered, inquiring into the bearing of these activities on the faith, hope, and love of the church as the people of God. In practice, however, church history is usually written on the basis of a hierarchical and institutional definition of the church, rather than of a kerygmatic one." Not the preaching of the word and the administration of the sacraments, but the careers of popes and other prelates, the relation of the church as an institution to such other institutions as the state, and the schisms and divisions of churches and denominations have determined the outline and the content of books on church history. Similarly, the church's theology has traditionally represented itself as a faithful exposition of the word of God in the Bible, but the standard interpretations of the history of Christian theology do not take that representation very seriously." Therefore the histories

"See the comments of Wilhelm Pauck, The Heritage of the Reformation (2nd ed.; Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1961), p. 391, n. 13.

"This entire issue was put into new perspective twenty years ago by the programmatic essay of Gerhard Ebeling, Kirchengeschichte als

Geschichte der Auslegung der Heiligen Schrift (Tibingen: J. C. B.

Mohr, 1947).

*Cf. Jaroslav Pelikan, Luther the Expositor (Saint Louis:

Concordia, 1959), pp. 5-31.

THE PREACHING OF CHRYSOSTOM

of speculative systems far outnumber the histories of biblical exegesis.

It is, to be sure, far easier to lodge that complaint against the manuals of church history and of historical theology than it is to come up concretely with a narrative interpretation that is actually shaped by the centrality of preaching. At first examination, it seems that there exists an abundance of source material for such an interpretation. In the collected works of such a theologian as Augustine, the volumes of sermons bulk large;* the deposits of manuscripts in monasteries and libraries are often dominated by the homilies which formed so important a part of the required reading of monks and clerics;° and among the Puritans, where printed sermons were favored as reading matter for laymen, the mass of such books proliferated even beyond that of earlier times."

Closer scrutiny of this source material, however, uncovers some of the thorny methodological difficulties involved in its use. For one thing, most sermons that have been preached are now lost forever. Many of the sermons that are available in various collections—perhaps most of them—appear in a form that does not correspond exactly to their state when they were delivered. Some of them were written down by listeners and then edited for publication; from careful studies of how this was done by George RGrer in the preparation of Luther's sermons and lectures, we have reason to be suspicious of any interpretation based only on such sources.' Some sermons were delivered ex tempore and then written down or dictated by the preacher for wider circulation; this seems to have been the *F. van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop, trans. Brian Battershaw and G. R. Lamb (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961), pp. 405-67.

5 Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God:

A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York:

Mentor Omega Books, 1962), pp. 94-115.

"On Puritan preaching, see William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), pp. 128-72; Perry Miller, The New England Mind, 1, The Seventeenth Century

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 280-362.

* The work of RGrer, Dietrich, and other editors has been investigated several times, most notably perhaps in Peter Meinhold, Die

Genesisvorlesung Luthers und ihre Herausgeber (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1936).

INTRODUCTION

procedure which Cicero followed in composing at least some of his orations," and in this respect as in others Christian preachers imitated classical orators. But this makes the sermon more a written essay than an oral address, and a later scholar has great difficulty attempting to distinguish between what was actually said and what was added for effect when the sermon was transposed into the literary modality.

In addition, the sermons and homilies of the fathers that were used for edification in monasteries and sometimes in churches underwent further revision at the hands of later copyists, who, with the best of intentions, smoothed out the language and even the thought of the transmitted text." Thus it would seem that although one might be able to write a history of the sermonic essay as a literary form, one cannot write a genuine history of preaching.

Nevertheless, even a history of the sermon would be an extremely useful contribution to our understanding of the history of the church. This is especially true because of the use to which written sermons were put. It seems a safe generalization that in many periods of church history more sermons were being read from such compilations of traditional preaching than were being composed afresh by the preacher, whether in the study beforehand or in the pulpit itself. Even the Protestant Reformers, for all their insistence upon the responsibility of the parish minister to preach the word of God, found themselves constrained to prepare postils for the clergy as well as for the laity." These became a substitute for the pastor's own sermons or at least a present help in his time of need on Saturday night. And so a history of preaching based on written

"This problem has been studied by J. Humbert, Les plaidoyers écrits et les plaidoiries réelles de Cicéron

(Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France, 1925), pp. 252-76.

* As Johannes Quasten has summarized the situation in the case of Chrysostom, "The manuscripts present not infrequently two editions of the homilies, the one in a comparatively smooth style, the other in a rather rough state.

The former is a deliberate later revision of the latter, Thus the superiority and greater antiquity of the rough text is too evident to be called into question."

Patrology, III (Utrecht: Spectrum, 1960), 433.

THE PREACHING OF CHRYSOSTOM

and printed compilations of sermons would not be simply a chapter in the history of Greek, Latin, German, or English prose, but a fairly accurate study of how the word of God was proclaimed." Nor should the historian ignore the widespread practice of preaching from a manuscript of the preacher's own composition, or at least from an outline. With some deviation introduced ad libitum, the preacher spoke what he had written, and when one studies what he spoke and compares it with what he wrote elsewhere for publication, some extremely interesting historical observations may result. The church historian who fails to pay attention to the history of preaching, even though so much of the source material is to some extent artificial, will be impoverishing himself.

The same is true of the preacher. "How can men preach," asks the Apostle (Rom 10:15), "unless they are sent?" Part of this sense of being sent is assuredly the preacher's own consciousness of his personal vocation to the ministry of Christ's church. Another important part is his sense of commission as one who stands in the long succession of heralds of the gospel.

He follows in their train, and as he studies their achievements and failures, his own vocation comes into better perspective.

But he can also learn from the history of preaching not to expect either too much or too little from his sermons. The "princes of the pulpit' often seemed to leave their hearers undented, while some preaching that seems to us shabby or banal became a vehicle of authentic divine revelation. "Therefore having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us"

(II Cor. 4:1, 7). Beyond these benefits, is there not a great deal that the modern preacher may still learn from those who lived before the Enlightenment or even before the Reformation? Indeed, there are certain epochs in the history of the church and therefore in the history of preaching that commend themselves with special force to the attention of today's minis- ™ See the recent comments on the preaching of Ambrose in Angelo Paredi, Saint Ambrose: His Life and Times, trans. M. Joseph

Costelloe (Notre Dame:

University of Notre Dame Press, 1964), pp. 257-77.

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