Preaching

First, they want persons who are able to explicate and apply the word of God with power. And second, they want pastors who know how to incorporate persons into the worshiping, believing community and bring to them the treasures of the gospel in the passages and crises of life, as well as support when life is routine and boring. With amazing unanimity, pulpit committees want two things, a pastor who can preach. Yet, in my experience, most pulpit committees would have difficult time explaining what is a good sermon. Many of them have never heard good preaching in the classical definition of the term and have a difficult time distinguishing the preaching of the gospel from entertainment, a moral exaltation, or therapy, or political advice. Indeed, it may require many congregations a period of time to become acclimated to really good preaching.

James Nichols of this faculty, once noted in a notable series of Frontier lectures that church services in the Reformed tradition are dependent upon a highly informed congregation. Informed biblically and theologically, there is an increasing paucity of such congregations. Yet congregations can be educated. A decisive test of the effectiveness of a minister is the difference between the sermon taste of the congregation when the minister arrives and the sermon taste of the congregation when the minister leaves. Once congregations have heard really good preaching of theological and biblical depth over a period of time, they find it very difficult to get used to poor preaching or to be enticed by actors or entertainers or moral exaltors or therapists in the pulpit.

Jesus came preaching and his followers have preached ever since. Sometimes preaching occurs in the great churches, but sometimes it occurs along the highways and in the public places of life, even in Hyde Park. Preachers have gone forth not because a job was offered, a financial security has been given, but because they have felt a compelling call to preach the gospel and to establish or to plant churches. The church in which I grew up as a boy was established by lay people in the 1760s, and for many years, it was maintained by pastors who had to earn at least a part of their living in non-ecclesiastical endeavors. The role of the great preachers include the Bonifaces, the Columbus, the Farrells, the Westlers, the Peter Cartwright, the Sheldon Jacksons.

There is finally only one justification for preaching, and that is the call of God. The support of an established church can make preaching more comfortable, but it cannot justify it. Preaching is the announcement of the salvation that has come in Jesus Christ, calling people to repentance and seeking to build up the Christian community. As Professor Smith has said it in the theological word book of the New Testament, the definition of evangelism preaching is a proclamation with authority and power. Signs and wonders accompany the evangelical message. They belong together, for the word is powerful and effective. Many patterns of preaching are effective. Many patterns of preaching are authentic within the Christian community. But it seems to me the recovery of the pattern of preaching that has made the greatest contribution to the One Holy Catholic Church in the Reformed tradition is the one which should be the focus of our attention.

And I shall take for that three examples. One, John Calvin. The second, the Puritans. And the third, Karl Barth. Calvin’s famous letter to the protector, Somerset, in 1548 is worth reading, but I shall not in which he speaks of the competence of preaching and the lively delivery of a sermon. Calvin understood preaching to be the will of God for his church. The justification for preaching is not in its effectiveness for education or reform. It is not a practice for which other practices may be substituted, should they prove to be more popular or useful. Preaching, Calvin believed, is rooted in the will and the intention of God. The preacher Calvin dared to say was the mouth of God. God does not wish to be heard, but by the voice of his ministers.

Calvin had no illusion about the impact of sermons. He knew, as he said in one sermon, there were as many or more people in the tavern than there were in the church to hear the sermon. He knew that preaching would create problems and difficulties. Preaching kills and makes alive. It hardens as well as renews. The validity of preaching does not depend upon the response it elicits. It is a witness, a testimony that God wills to be made in his world even if all people rejected. This emphasis upon the foundation of preaching in the will of God should not obscure Calvin’s concern for edification. He wanted preaching to edify, to convince. Certainly on the human level, he had confidence in its power. On a deeper level, however, he found justification for preaching not in edification, not even in its power under the Holy Spirit to create the Christian person and the Christian society, but then the intention and the will of God.

Calvin understood preaching to be a sacrament of the saving presence of God. Richard Stauffer suggests that preaching for Calvin was not only a moment of worship, not only a task of the church, but also something of a divine epiphany. When the gospel is preached in the name of God, it is as if God himself spoke in person. In preaching, the Holy Spirit uses the words of the preacher as an occasion for the presence of God in grace and in mercy. In this sense, the actual words of the sermon are comparable to the elements of the sacrament. The word in preaching accomplishes nothing apart from the work of the Holy Spirit who eliminates the mind. For Calvin, preaching is sacramental in the context of the order of salvation and the means of grace, not in the more general sense by which all creation may be sacramental.

The power of preaching as the word of God does not reside in the sound of the words themselves, even in their meaning. The power of preaching is the act of the Holy Spirit, which makes the words the sound and their meaning the occasion of the voice of God. If the sermon is preached, Calvin said to 100 people, this is when he was feeling optimistic, 20 receive it with the ready obedience of faith, while the rest told it valueless or laugh or hiss or loathe it. On other occasions, as when he was preaching on Esau, he reduced the 20% to 10. Yet the ultimate difference in the response does not reside in the sermon, the sound of the words, the rhetoric or the meaning, but the electing grace of God. Calvin’s sacramental doctrine of preaching enabled him on the one hand to understand preaching as a very human work, and on the other hand, as the work of God.

The characteristic, that is, Calvinist perspective that pervades all of Calvin’s theology, which on the one hand emphasizes the transcendence of God and refuses to identify the transcendent God with any finite and determinate object, and which, on the other hand, emphasizes the eminence of God in creation, and more particularly, the means of grace as particular application here. The sermon is a human work. And from one perspective, the human work of the sermon is critically important. The sermon’s fidelity to scripture, the skill of the syntax and rhetoric, The liveliness of the delivery are fundamental importance that ought not to be minimized. From another perspective, a sermon is the work of the Spirit of God, which makes the poor sermon the occasion of God’s presence and a brilliant sermon barren of power.

Calvin unites the work of God and the work of the preacher in the sacrament and in preaching, without separation, without change and without confusion. In practice, he may have claimed too much for the minister and for the words of the sermon. Yet in doctrine, he knew that the words of the sermon are at best fragile, frail human words, but words which can, by the power of the Holy Spirit, become the occasion of the presence of God. For Calvin as for Luther, the ears alone are the organ of the Christian man. That is from Luther’s lectures on Hebrews. Hearing the word of God makes one worthy of the name Christian. Calvin’s preaching presupposed a biblical and theological framework. Sermons were part of a structured and clear vision of reality.

Calvin’s hearers knew that human life had its origin and the purposes of God, and that God would determine the destiny of every human life. Human life was lived under the lordship of God, whose purposes would be accomplished in human history. The clarity of the biblical and theological framework made each sermon part of one clear vision of reality. Calvin had written the institutes for this purpose, that is to provide a coherent framework for his preaching and teaching and pastoral care. Calvin’s theology may lack homogeneity, but not unity. For example, the way Calvin understands transcendence in the evidence of God, the distinction between God and creature gives a unity to his doctrines of the person of Christ, of the presence of Christ in the sacraments of the Church, of the human work, and a divine work.

Or again, there is a unifying perspective relating and holding together Calvin’s understanding of revelation in Jesus Christ and general revelation of of grace and nature, of gospel and law, of church and society. There is a unifying theme preeminently expressed in the doctrine of predestination, but permeating everything Calvin said, emphasizing the immediacy of the divine activity and the initiative of divine grace. On a still deeper level, there is a unity created by Calvin’s conviction that the knowledge of God involves and knowledge of human beings, and that the knowledge of human beings involves the knowledge of God, and that the whole of theology in his and the explication of this relationship. In some, Calvin had a vision of theological reality expressed in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, very similar to Augustine’s in the last twelve books of the City of God.

It is this theological framework which informed all of Calvin’s preaching and made of his preaching a unity and gave it a direction which otherwise would have been lacking. And closely related to this vision of reality formulated theologically is a ground plan as it were of the Bible which was very clear in his mind and which also had been explicated in the institutes of the Christian religion. The Bible as a whole and Calvin’s theology as a whole impends upon every sermon which he preached and all of his sermons fit into one biblical and theological whole. The importance of this unifying theological and biblical context cannot be overestimated. It means that the preacher must be a person knowledgeable in theology and in the Bible if the preacher is to stand in the Reformed tradition.

Calvin also had a vision of the Christian life, vision of the Christian society, which he could express briefly and succinctly. Thus, Calvinist preaching in the beginning was very powerful. Donald R. Kelley has commented, in all this ideological uproar arising from religious sentiments, the most effective agent of the transmission of the religious sentiment remains popular preaching. To this, other forms of expression, psalm singing, iconoclasm, public dialogue, and disputation were subordinate. The sermon elaborated and dramatized other forms of religious expression, including the catechism and confession. It gave emotional focus to the congregation and public thrust to its enthusiasm. It gave impetus to other kinds of demonstration, gave impetus to other kinds of demonstration, both musical and militant.

And in general, it represented a prime mover of public opinion. In the context of oral culture, there’s certainly no other kind of discourse better illustrates the transition from private conviction to public cause, from profession of faith to concerted propaganda and even platform of action. In the Reformation, as in the earliest Christian times, the ideological priority was clear, and the gospel must first be published among all nations. And so the sermon must be the heart of anyone’s attention as to the transmission and the effective power of the early Protestant movement. The second pattern of preaching is the Puritans. The Puritans, like Calvin, believe that the only power they needed was the freedom to preach the word of God, and therefore to create a godly public opinion.

They were convinced that by preaching, the grace of God is mediated to human beings, and that that life society has changed. The history of Puritanism demonstrates the power of preaching to build up communities, to shape personalities, and to form societies. Puritan preaching, as was the case with Calvin, took place within a unified theological vision of reality. This vision found classic expression in the Westminster Confession and catechisms. Furthermore, the Puritans had even a clearer vision, some would say a far too clearer vision, of what it is to be a Christian and of the Christian life. The Puritans, like Calvin, gave attention to the style of preaching. They too emphasized that preaching must be plain style, that is free from rhetorical flourishes.

From the beginning, the form emphasized simplicity and authenticity. These virtues were closely related to theology, to the authenticity of theology. On the one hand, this emphasis upon simplicity, upon plain style, expresses their doctrine of God which insists on the evangelization of the church that is the removal of all human trifles and flourishes from the life of the church which impede the grace of God. God’s grace is neither contrary to nor an extension of the human wisdom of psychology or public relations or drama. It is it is free. The grace of God is free to use such wisdom so long as it doesn’t not allow this wisdom to intrude upon the gospel or become a substitute for it. In worship as in preaching, human wisdom to ease the living comes, human trifles according to Calvin.

Simplicity for Calvin was close to sincerity. Simplicity uncovers truth. The pompous, the pretentious, the ostentatious, the contrived, cover-up truth. The plain-style preaching was also related to the Augustinian Calvinist understanding of what it is to to be a human being, with his emphasis upon the self-determining self, upon the will, and the call for decision. It was a rejection of magic in preaching. Magic in relation to God is the attempt to fasten the infinite and indeterminate God to that which is finite and determinate, such as the elements and the communion of the techniques of preaching and revivals. Magic in relation to human beings is the attempt to bypass conscious choice and decision. The Puritans, as with Calvin, rejected magic.

Or to put it, I once put in an encyclopedia article that the Protestants rejected magic, and I got it back saying that represented an anti-Catholic bias. So I changed it then to say that this emphasized conscious choice and decision. to an effort to elicit either a yes or no from those who’ve heard. Good preaching always elicits a response of a yes or a no. In connection with the plain style preaching, one has to note the Puritan concern for language, for language that is appropriate to the word of God. For a century and a half, the Puritans had struggled with the task of putting the word of God in English, in the vernacular and doing this in an appropriate way. William Haller, the great Puritan scholar, has a magnificent paragraph from which I think we can learn a good bit.

He says the authorized version of 1611 was a culmination of the effort of a long succession of English churchmen to put the word of God into the vernacular. Verse though they were, in the learned tongues and read in the tradition of letters, The translators did not do their work upon the level of academic Latinized English. Neither on the other hand did they English the Bible upon every day of a vulgar play. They turned their learning and their skill to the task of developing out of the familiar common speech and English appropriate to the lofty matter they had in mind. Yet moving and intelligible to the plain unlearned reader. The result was a marvelous idiom of the English Bible. This language of the English Bible has shaped American culture decisively, at least up until the Second World War.

In its simplicity, it opened up reality. Hence, it was a matter of speaking very appropriate to the theological reality. Those who heard the Puritans preach had a sense of hearing reality, of being touch with reality. The heroes felt the force and reality about which the preacher was speaking. Some attention should be given to the Puritan theology of homiletics summarized beautifully in the directory of worship of the Westminster Assembly, stated better, more detailed by William Perkins in the art of prophesying, two brief statements on homiletics that every preacher, and seems to me, ought to have to read, especially if he or she preaches in the Presbyterian Church. A third explicit doctrine of preaching is to be found in the theology of Carl Barth.

As is well known, Karl Barth intended his theology to be a preacher’s theology. Hawaii wrote so many volumes if he intended that is a mystery. As is well known, Barth intended his theology to be preacher’s theology for sermons, and I’m convinced that you cannot get about a sermon aid than the biblical references and topical index to Barth’s church dogmatics. That ought to be in every preacher’s library, it seems to me. Barth’s doctrine of preaching is summarized in his conviction that there has been committed to the church the gospel, the good tidings of Jesus Christ, of the real act and true revelation of goodness in which God has willed to make and has in fact made himself the God of man and man his man. The great yes is its cause, it has no other task than this.

The church has the task of the explicit proclamation of the gospel in the assembly of the community in the midst of divine service where it is also heard directly and indirectly by the world, that is in what is denoted by the oven-burdened and unavoidable term preaching. Preaching differs from the exposition of scripture and from theological study or lecturing. It proclaims, summons, invites, commands. Preaching is a work of human speech, but it is a decisive significance for the life of the church. Indeed, the church lives by the hearing of the Word of God in preaching. The chief task of theology is to examine the church’s proclamation, primarily in preaching, in the light of the Word of God in Jesus Christ as are tested in Scripture. Preaching is a point where the whole theological task comes to focus.

For Barth, it was difficult to conceive how a person could be a Christian theologian without preaching. Indeed, he used the fact that Schleiermacher liked to preach as one evidence to say that perhaps Schleiermacher was, after all, a Christian theologian. One cannot be. A theologian in the Calvinist and Barthian sense without being a preacher. Furthermore, one test of all theology for Calvin was its preachableness. If a theology is not preachable, it is not good theology. A theology which cannot be preached is from the Reformed perspective and illegitimate theology in the church. Well, let me move on now to another theme. Preaching, especially as it has been practiced in the Reformed tradition and as illustrated in these two or three cases is at grave risk today.

Preaching is threatened by the preoccupation of our society with the present, by the power of the entertainment industry, by secularism, by pluralism, by the role of mass media in proclaiming in attractive ways alien philosophies and styles of life, and by a culture increasingly alien to Christian language and thought. Several characteristics of our society need special mention. The first is the great development of the entertainment industry. This development has two consequences. First, it induces people into finding the meaning of life and being entertained. Entertainment, soap operas, athletic events, even anchor news, relieve us of the uniquely human responsibilities to think for ourselves, to set goals, and to organize the energies and vitalities of life in the achievement of those goals.

In addition, entertainment distracts our attention from the critical issues of life. And finally, our heroes become not persons of substance and achievement, so much as celebrities who can attract our attention. Form takes priority over substance. In some entertainment, whether it is of the soap operas or political spectacles or athletic events, is an escape from the hard realities of life and from the questions for which Christian faith is the answer. The emergence of the communications and entertainment industry also presents another parallel to preaching. The communications industry has developed skills and techniques which enable human beings of very limited greatness, very limited human greatness, very limited education, very limited culture to have enormous power over other human beings.

This has been graphically illustrated to us in the power of preachers with very modest backgrounds and achievement to influence mightily millions of people. It was also graphically illustrated a movie a few years ago, Marjo. Marjo was a child evangelist getting his name from Mary and Joseph. As a child, he grew up knowing the techniques and skills of the trade. The movie depicts him as an adult who has repudiated the faith, and then for the sake of the media, he demonstrates the techniques of an evangelist in putting on an evangelistic service in which, by using techniques which the movie has him explain to the audience in breaks, to elicit predicted responses, whether these responses are the giving of money or physical manifestations such as uncontrolled bodily movements.

Speaking in tongues can be elicited by atheists who know the techniques if they have a willing audience. The movie Marjo was offensive, to me at least, to offensive to Christian senses. Tell it to me, I think I averaged going to a movie once every five years, but I happened to see this one. And I’m glad it did, though it was offensive. It illustrates human fraud at the worst. However, those in the ministry who have the strength see it, ought to see the movie. Religion is always on a narrow, razor’s edge in distinction from magic. Magic is always a temptation for persons in religion. Magic in relationship to God is the attempt to get control of God and in relationship to human beings to bypass their conscious decisions, as I’ve said. And one of the greatest temptations for any minister is the practice of magic.

On this point, we should all be critically self-critical. The modern communications industry verses the traditional order of homiletical achievement. Classical preaching had arisen out of the substance of what is proclaimed, the Christian message and the pattern and form of preaching out of the substance. The powerfulness of the message in in determining the form was dramatically illustrated in the Puritan style and use of language. Today, increasingly, form and style take precedence over substance. Reinhold Niebuhr, in that remarkable diary, Leaves of Notebook, a team cynic tells how he gave up the attempt to become a pretty preacher. Well, there’s been so little pretty preaching in some places you had to take to criticize it, but there’s a certain incongruity between pretty preaching and Calvinist theology.

There is an incongruity between the gospel and a pretty sermon. This is especially true in the Reformed tradition. There must be, in this tradition it seems to me, something finally rough-hewn about the sermon. For Reformed preaching, the message is in a real sense a medium, and the worst heresy in preaching is for the medium to become the message. Hence, the development of the communications industry as well as the entertainment industry jeopardizes good preaching by attempting persons to practices which may be humanly effective but which are theologically destructive. Great preaching depends upon the integrity of the human heart and mind on the part of both the preacher and the congregation. It is not through the practice of magic or even of the communication arts, but the integrity of the proclamation itself which under God creates the Christian community.

And secondly, preaching is threatened today by the breakdown of a coherent understanding of the human reality of life in the world. This breakdown is occurred in church and in society. Until quite recently, a basically Christian construction of reality was implicit in the life of society. And while society may have given only lip service to this structure, to this vision of reality, it at least had its nominal allegiance. The Christian vision lived for many years in very attenuated forms, but nevertheless it lived. The constructive coherent vision of reality which was implicit in our society greatly strengthened the church in its proclamation. There was a time in American life when evangelism was little more in many cases than bringing persons who were basically Christian in their interpretation of reality into the organized life of the church.

Today our society less and less has any legitimating understanding of what it is to be a human being and a place of human beings in the world. There is no general agreement about the origin of human life or the destiny of human life or the meaning of human life between birth and death. This means that increasingly the preacher can no longer depend upon a knowledge of the history of Israel or even a general theistic consensus. The situation is far more radical than that which faced Peter or that which faced Paul at Mars Hill. For the first time, we live in a really secular society without either the history of Israel or a natural theology. This breakdown of the overarching coherent view of human reality in the world is not only true of the society, but also of the church.

And it seems to me here, let me say summarize in one word a good bit of material, that in the church, one of our tasks, as I’ll speak to tonight, is to give people a vision of the Christian reality. And the task of the preacher is to communicate the Christian tradition, not his own idiosyncratic theology or beliefs at that particular moment. This is also a problem of theological seminaries. I sometimes think that the bottom members of a theological class today may be more competent than the bottom members of theological class when I finished in 1943. But I doubt if the bottom members of a class today would be more effective pastors than the bottom members of the class in 1943. And part of the problem is precisely here. In 1943, in every Presbyterian seminary I know, You had one textbook in theology.

This textbook was the inheritor of the Puritans who tried to write theology in a framework that could be easily memorized. Whether you used Hodge from Princeton or Strong from the Baptist tradition or Burkhoff from the Dutch reform, it didn’t really matter too much. It was all the same theology influenced by the American evangelical or revivalistic tradition, especially in the case of Hodge. Here in one textbook, you had a structured outline of Christian theology. And in one book, you could have an answer to almost any theological question. A student recently spoke to me about an older minister whom he did not think of as a theological scholar, but said he was amazed at how this minister could discuss any theological doctrine with him. And I said the answer is very simple.

He at one time in his life mastered one theological textbook, which could be somewhat easily memorized. Now, I owe that partly part to my family. My father and mother had a great passion for some reason that I should recite short of catechism before I was 10 years of age. And on the afternoon before I should be 10, I sat down and recited the catechism to the superintendent of my Sunday school, not because of any virtue in me, but because of the persistence of my father and my mother. And I think that when I went to the seminary, by proper use of the shorter catechism, I could have answered almost any question that could have been raised. You might not have accepted the answer, but at least was a legitimate answer to the question. Today’s situations are very different.

Even the best students in theological seminaries leave having read a few pages of Niebuhr, a few pages of Barth, a few pages of Tillich, maybe a few pages of Ron or someone else without a grasp of any one coherent, comprehensive theology. And that, I think, is a great loss. And actually, it’s beyond human capacity to bring all of these theologies together in one coherent way. We ought not to deceive ourselves about what is possible. You cannot learn all of contemporary theology. You can learn one contemporary theologian. You can learn one system of theology, but you can’t learn them all. And more than that, you can’t put them together. Well, that, it seems to me, is one of the problems behind preaching, the breakdown of a framework of theology in which preaching takes place.

Third reason why preaching is at risk is that it’s being challenged today by alien faiths. One of these is paganism. W.A. Visser ‘t Hooft in the last pamphlet track which he wrote said there were three forces battling for the soul of Europe, Christian faith, paganism, and secular humanism. By paganism, he meant a view of life that emphasizes its vitalities and energies and that finds the meaning of life in the intensification of the vitalities and energies of life. It defined life primarily in terms of physical realities. A modern paganism does not necessarily endow these vitalities and energies within a divine power, but simply affirms that in the ecstasy and intoxication that comes from the intensification of these energies, the meaning of life is found or have a short live that meaning may be.

The second faith, which battles for the soul of human beings in Europe, and particularly in American society, is secular humanism. In many ways, secular humanism is the product of Christian faith. There has been no finer statement of secular humanism than that which was produced by John Dewey, who had influenced American education as much as anyone else, who was a former theological student, studied theology under a great Reformed theologian of the 19th century, H. B. Smith of Union Seminary New York. Dewey wanted to have religious values without religion, without theology. Christians may argue that secular humanism is only possible in a society which is still living off of the theological capital of Christian faith, which invested human life with significance and which, on the basis of God’s work in creation and redemption, affirmed that human life has abiding significance over against the overwhelming evidence in the world that it does not.

Secular humanism is especially an enticing faith as long as it can assume the qualities of life which have historically been rooted, not in secular humanism, but in the faith of the Christian church. And fourth, preaching can no longer assume a Christian society or a natural theology. But the greatest threat to preaching, it seems to me, is pluralism, the implicit assumption that there are many roads which lead to God. The unified communities of the past are now gone. Calvin could not have imagined denominations, much less a secular society in which pluralism includes any conceivable human community, almost. Pluralism is not a totally new phenomenon. The church in the second century, for example, lived in the midst of a highly pluralistic society.

And on a human level, it might have become lost in that society. But today, pluralism confronts us in at least three ways. It confronts us practically. We have to live in the actual historical fact of pluralism. Secondly, it confronts us socially in the customs of niceness and politeness. Religion and politics are topics which are no longer appropriate for polite conversation. It is no longer proper to ask a person about his or her religion. The old notion that Christians should marry in the Lord has been held in abeyance, and it has also been regarded as an improper question aesthetically and culturally to even raise. Pluralism also confronts us most significantly in theology. Historians of religion are increasingly insisting that the theology of the future must be a theology of world religions.

The new theology of pluralism is being expressed with as much dogmatism, with as much intolerance, and with as many pejorative representations of opposing views as any Christian orthodoxy had ever been expressed. This is an issue with which the church has to deal. One of the clearest statements of religious diversity and Christian theology has been given with clarity and with vigor by Professor Gordon Kaufman of Harvard. He writes in The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, an essay that is parallel to many other recent essays. From our modern historical vantage point, however, looking back at many great and diverse cultural and religious traditions that have appeared in human history, all these diverse conceptions and pictures seem best understood as the product of human imaginative creativity in the face of the great mystery that life is to all of us.

Out of and on the basis of such traditions of meaning, value, and truth, all men and women live. Christian theology would understand itself in essentially the same terms that it understands other religious activity and reflection, namely as human imaginative responses to the necessity to find orientation for life in a particular historical situation. It would thus keep itself open to the insights, criticisms, and corrections from other points of view, to acknowledge forthrightly and regularly that our theological statements and claims are simply ours, that they are the products of our own human study and reflection, and of the spontaneity and creativity of our human powers, imaginatively, to envision a world and our human place within that world is to set us free from all these too easy but false moves toward authoritarianism, which has characterized Christian theology in the past.

Kaufman’s view would undercut any basis for preaching. In place of preaching, there could be theological lectures or conversations which have equal validity with other theological lectures and conversation. If theology is just conversation, conversation about a reality which may not even be out there, conversation about a reality which may not even be out there, just the imaginative construct of human creativity, as Calvin suggests, or as philosophers such as Richard Rorty conclude about philosophy, that it is one voice in the great conversation. Then there is very little to preach. This also has a practical impact. if one has absorbed this thinking into one’s system, one cannot practically preach authoritatively and with power. But congregations gather to hear a preacher who is entailed by the conviction that the Bible is the word of God and that Jesus Christ is God incarnate.

That is the reason the congregation gathers. This has been true from the first century to the 20th century. These two views about the authority of Scripture and about the universal significance of Jesus Christ are now open in challenge, sometimes with rhetoric, but sometimes, as in the case of Professor Kaufman, with late priority, and by many who claim to be theologians in the church. The advocates of a theology of where religions speak very vigorously against triumphalism, against the arrogance of the Christian claim of uniqueness, and even call the traditional view of the church idolatry. This criticism has to be taken seriously. How can we, on the one hand, assert the authority of the Bible as the word of God, the universal significance of Jesus Christ as God incarnate without arrogance, without triumphalism, without idolatry?

It is no doubt true that many Christian theologians have been guilty of all these charges, though I know of no reason to believe that they have been any more guilty than are the advocates of a theology of world religions in their own proposals. arrogance, triumphalism, idolatry, are universal human problems. Modern secular universities, Harvard, for example, illustrate the human problem of arrogance and even the ruthless and even violent intolerance of dissenting opinions quite as much as the church. The only difference is the orthodoxy has changed. I would assume that one can speak in any secular university about any view of God or any view of a non-existent God without being challenged. But if you touch the orthodoxy, the response is valid.

The solution which pluralism offers are all at the expense of the integrity of Christian faith. From the pluralist perspective, the claim that the word became flesh, that Jesus Christ is of universal significance, is always foolishness or scandal. Only within the community of faith Jesus Christ, the power and the wisdom of God. The constructive facing of this problem is first of all a matter of stance, of method. One may move from the Christian faith to pluralism and say something constructive about pluralism, but one cannot move from general revelation, one cannot move from pluralism, one cannot move from the history of religions to what Christians have believed happened in Jesus Christ. John Knox, who for a long time was professor of New Testament and Union Theological Seminary, has put this very well, writing in the 1960s. If Christian inquiry embraces every aspect of human life and indeed of the cosmos, but the base from which the inquiry proceeds is the church’s existence, oh no, correct, I didn’t say it, the Christian inquiry embraces every aspect of human life, But the base from which the inquiry proceeds is the Church’s existence in its concrete reality and the recognition that certain truths about God and man are expressed in that existence.

The Church will vigorously encourage this inquiry in order not to identify these truths clearly and surely and thus inform, confirm, and enrich the Christian experience of its members. but also to be in a position to interpret them as far as possible in terms which those outside the church can understand. On the other hand, Knox says, I do not see that the church has any obligation or that it belongs to its nature to encourage theological inquiry, which does not begin with what I have called this existential a priori. I do not mean that it will forbid or impede inquiry conducted on the basis of other presuppositions, Nor do I mean that the church’s own thinking may not be corrected in large and quickened by the challenge of such thinking of others, but I cannot see that the church itself could appropriately carry on such inquiry without denying itself.

In a word, the church’s theological inquiry will be its own, just that any individual’s theological inquiry will be his own, proceeding from premises established within its own life. If we begin with pluralism, in the quote, but if we begin with pluralism, there is no possibility of maintaining historical Christian faith. If we begin with our deepest Christian convictions about Jesus Christ, there are at least five affirmations we can make which will help us to deal constructively with the fact of pluralism. The first is prudential and practical. The acceptance of the fact of the pluralistic character of our society and the pragmatic working out of ways to live together. The second response is humility. Humility is implicit in the Christian doctrine of creation, which affirms that we are preachers of a particular time and space and of limited intellectual powers.

The very fact that we are preachers means that our perspective, even the perspective of university professors is very parochial. Furthermore, Christian theology affirms that all human beings are sinners. As Niebuhr liked to insist, it is impossible for us not to affirm that our truth is the truth, to realize it’s impossible for us to realize that we both have and do not have the truth. Humility is a Christian virtue. Third, we can respond with respect for human dignity. It is our Christian conviction that God created every human being as a self who must be responsible for himself or herself in the presence of God. There are depths of the human self which have to be respected. And no state and no society has the right to invade the privacy that encompasses the self.

Christians above all ought to insist not only on the right, but the responsibility of every human being to assume the dignity of a child of God and to answer for himself or herself in the presence of God. Fourth, we can respond to the coming of Jesus Christ an American grunt with the coming itself. The birth of Jesus’s toe was stark simplicity. Mary was humble, handmade to her lord, and Joseph a carton to the birthplace was a stable. Jesus was not born among the powerful and rich, but among the plain, genuine human beings who waited for the lord. The distinctive character has survived, even the temptation of artists and writers to portray it otherwise. The word came into our midst without the trappings of power. It did not seek to overwhelm us.

The reality was sufficient. Cuddihy, who has written on this subject rather extensively, speaks of the homely Protestant and the decorum of imperfection. There is the decorum of sinners saved by grace. Yet we must remember the unostentatious meek sinners of the New Testament dared to die for their faith and to witness for it before the rulers and the powerful of the earth. The fifth response must be theological. And I will have to forego that, though that was really the point at which I was coming. Once you assume the Christian perspective, faith is able to include all truth into that perspective. As Augustine said, we believe in order to understand. And he himself outlined the consequences of that theological rubric for a pluralistic society in this way.

The heavenly city, then, while it sojourns on earth, hauls citizens out of all nations, gathers them together in society of pilgrims of all languages, not scrupling about diversities in manners, laws, institutions, whereby earthly peace is secured and maintained, but recognizing that however various these are, they all tend to one in the same end of earthly peace. It therefore is so far from rescinding and abolishing these diversities that it even preserves and adapts them so long as no hindrance to the worship of the one supreme and true God is thus introduced. One can follow this up with Calvin. One can follow it up with Barth, with Brunner, and particularly Hendrik Kraemer. I was interested in working through this to note that the emphasis of many Thomas scholars on the fact that Thomas was really an Augustinian, that the arguments for the existence of God are written within the faith for the faithful, not simply to convert those outside.

I’ve put only one line here from Gilson, which I like very much. He said, Augustine said, love and do what you will. A disciple of Thomas can say, believe and think what you will. Like charity, faith is a liberator, which enables us to include all truth in the parameters. Now, for those who stand who are impressed by world religions, the position of Calvin, of Barth, of Brunner, or Kraemer, or even this exposition of Thomas is not convincing. But within the faith, one has to say, Brunner, Barth, Kraemer, theology is impeccable. It may not be persuasive, but one cannot say it is not good theology. My point is that the implicit notion in our society that there are many roads that lead to God undercuts preaching. Now let me conclude by saying what I think is necessary to recover great preaching in our time, the kind of preaching which I think our society needs.

The first is great preaching involves the renewal of faith. The origin of preaching is in the heart, not in the head, not in reason or argument, but in the patient and conviction of the human heart. Hence, preaching is finally a gift of the Holy Spirit for which we have to work and pray. And secondly, the recovery of great preaching calls for the revival of the Christian community as a disciplined, knowledgeable, worshiping community of people, the recovery of preaching and the recovery of community will have to take place together, because there can be no recovery of a vital Christian community well-informed without the recovery of great preaching. And on the other hand, a great congregation makes a great preacher. The two go together. The recovery of great preaching, thirdly, involves the recovery of the Bible, which has been assimilated into one’s thinking and the recovery of theological competence, which likewise has become part of the structure of one’s personal existence.

Ideally, the history of doctrine should be recapitulated in the life of the preacher as preparation for the task of preaching itself. Fourth, the recovery of great preaching depends upon the recovery of a framework of theological reality, which holds life together in a coherent way and in which we see our place in the church in the world. Preaching has to do with the ultimate issues of human origin and destiny, not with the occasional facts of politics or organization, et cetera. There, the recovery of great preaching requires the acquisition of a language which is precise and clear, which has a quality of reality which is appropriate to communicate the Christian gospel. As long as English is spoken, this must build upon the remarkable literary and theological achievement of the Puritans.

Language appropriate to the faith cannot be finally learned in academic communities, but only as those learned in the tradition engage a broad range of people, learned and unlearned in theological conversation. The scientific, technological, secular character of our culture makes the problem of language all the more important. As Calvin put the traditional theology in the language of ordinary discourse, so that is our task today. Preaching has always been powerful to move people, to shape personalities and communities in many times and places, and it is not likely that its powers diminish today. All people who would like to shape human personality, shape communities, all politicians, ideologues, advocates would give anything they have to possess what belongs to Christian people in the pulpit on Sunday morning.

We are impressed with the great crowds at college football games, But within a few miles radius of every college football stadium, many more people gathered to hear the word of God preached on Sunday morning. This gathering of the people is a phenomenon which cannot be duplicated in our society by politics, or by education, or by business, by anyone else. And it is a challenge, an opportunity, for all who are called to preach. Thank you. Thanks for watching!