The Voice of the Great God: A Theology of Preaching

Scripture focus

So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

Romans 10:17 KJV

At a glance

Summary of the chapter

Edwards inherited his homiletic instincts from the Calvinist Puritan tradition: manuals such as William Perkins's Art of Prophesying urged a 'plain style' that opened Scripture without ornament, while his own father Timothy and his grandfather Solomon Stoddard modeled animated, revival-producing pulpit ministry. Stoddard bluntly insisted that a preacher who does not speak often of the danger of damnation is failing at 'good Preaching.'

The plain New England meetinghouse, stripped of imagery in reaction against Anglican and Catholic ornament, placed the sermon at the center of a ten-part Sunday liturgy, with Edwards typically preaching sixty to ninety minutes to a congregation of roughly seven hundred out of a parish of thirteen hundred, alongside a sacrament service every eight weeks and additional sermons on fast and thanksgiving days.

Wilson Kimnach traces three periods across Edwards's thirty-seven-year preaching career: an 'apprenticeship' (1722-27) of tightly structured, almost Bach-like sermons; a period of 'mastery' (1727-42) in which preaching became chiefly 'an instrument of awakening,' growing more complex and feeding into his emerging treatises; and a final period beginning in 1742 of even longer, more theologically dense productions — even as Edwards, revising sermons for print, still carefully built each one toward a rising rhetorical climax.

Key points

• Edwards inherited a 'plain style' homiletic from Puritan manuals like William Perkins's Art of Prophesying, which prized clear exposition of the text over rhetorical ornament.
• His grandfather Solomon Stoddard, under whom Edwards served as assistant, modeled a powerful, confrontational revivalist preaching that shaped Edwards's insistence on preaching the danger of damnation plainly.
• New England's unadorned meetinghouse worship, with its ten-part liturgical order, placed the sermon at the structural and spiritual center of the Sunday service.
• Wilson Kimnach identifies three phases in Edwards's homiletics: an 'apprenticeship' of tightly structured early sermons, a 'mastery' period turning sermons into instruments of awakening, and a final period of even longer theological productions.
• Even as his sermons grew longer and more treatise-like, Edwards remained a careful literary craftsman, building each discourse toward a rising rhetorical climax.

A line worth remembering

when men don't Preach much about the danger of Damnation, there is want of good Preaching

McClymond & McDermott The Theology of Jonathan Edwards, ch. 31

Related Scripture

• 2 Timothy 4:2
• 1 Corinthians 1:21
• Nehemiah 8:8
• Isaiah 55:11

For reflection and discussion

1. What are the strengths and dangers of a 'plain style' that avoids rhetorical ornament in preaching?
2. Why might a sermon evolve, over a preacher's career, from a tool of awakening into something closer to a theological treatise?
3. What did New England's plain meetinghouse worship communicate about the place of preaching relative to sacrament and liturgy?