“He was full of bankrupt enthusiasms,” said Carlyle of Thomas De Quincy.
The disparagement of the sermon—what it does or what it can do—has brought the contemporary Protestant pulpit to so low an estate that preaching might almost be called one of its “bankrupt enthusiasms.” Conrad Massa, writing in The Pulpit, says grimly: “In the history of the church preaching has been neglected, ignored, debased, even almost totally forgotten, but never has its place been as seriously questioned by those who are genuinely concerned with the vitality of the church’s witness as has been done repeatedly in this century.”
Not single but multiple are the reasons for this unhappy state. Let us here fix on only one: the quality of preaching always declines when the conception of preaching is removed from primacy to some stage—be it second or twenty-second—of inferiority. If the ordained man places the crown of primacy on any other head in the cabinet of his interests—visitation, group therapy, counseling, liturgy, administration, or whatever—it will be reflected in what he does in his study, with his Bible, on his knees, and in his pulpit.
Strong and effective preachers, though they differ widely in mold and manner, have this in common: they believe greatly in preaching.
Take the late W. E. Sangster, of London, as a case in point. True, the criteria we use for establishing pulpit greatness will vary from person to person. Yet I doubt if there is one knowledgeable judge of the homiletical arena who would be willing to omit Sangster’s name from any list of the twelve most distinguished preachers of the English-speaking world in the 1950’s.
With what sort of eyes, we may ask, did “Sangster of Westminster” look upon the excellence of his calling and the exactions of his craft? Those who have read his Power In Preaching will remember the lean, Anglo-Saxon pithiness with which he lays out the chapter titles: “Believe In It” … “Work At It” … “Make It Plain” … “Glow Over It,” and so on.
Not accidental, we may be sure, is the caption he writes over the first chapter: “Believe In It.” “You believe in preaching?” he asks, and immediately follows with, “How much do you believe in it?”
This query is sharpened and shaped by one chisel-stroke after another:
“No pulpit has power if it lacks deep faith in the message itself and in preaching as God’s supreme method in making his message known” (italics mine).
… “The termites of unbelief may be working at our faith in the gospel or at our faith in preaching. A bit of faith in both may survive in a man who goes on with a certain dutifulness in his work—yet only a bit. Haunted by the memory of the man who put his hand to the plow and looked back, he keeps in the furrow though he plows neither deep nor straight … An awful impoverishment falls upon the whole Church if the preachers … lose faith in preaching.”
These well-muscled Sangsterian sentences came vigorously from the heart of a man whose faith in preaching, as a never effete ordination of God, held him and thrilled him to the day of his lamented death. A “moratorium on preaching,” as seriously proposed by some capitulating clergy of recent times! Sangster would have replied, “You might as well call for a moratorium on the grace of God! For, after all, “it was God’s good pleasure through the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe” (1 Cor. 1:21).
The vices of too many sermons heard today—shallowness, frivolousness, dullness, biblically unanchored topicality and theologically unhinged moralism—will never be overcome, cast aside, except we rise to worthier views of the nature and function of preaching.
Preaching is neither “essaying” nor “rhetoricizing.” While it makes use of the rules and principles of homiletical discourse, and is therefore in a sense a craft, it is incomparably more.
Preaching is more than heralding an action of God, even though the action announced is the Incarnation, the saving Cross, the Resurrection. Preaching is action—God’s action in his called man for the sake of his Son, the Church which he has redeemed, and the world over which he yearns.
Preaching is not a performance. Preaching is an event. It is that event in which the preacher, armed with the authority of Scripture, enabled by the Holy Spirit, upheld by the believing community, brings God and man face to face.
