Marks of Great Evangelical Preaching

“The Romance of Preaching”! Under this title C. Silvester Horne delivered one of the most brilliant and inspiring series of all the Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale. Speaking in 1914, a few months before the outbreak of World War I, with irrepressible optimism the British divine looked back at certain pulpit giants of other days. In every case he dealt with a man who belonged in what we know as the evangelical tradition: Moses and later prophets; John the Baptist and later apostles; Athanasius and Chrysostom; Savonarola, Calvin, and Knox; John Robinson and the Pilgrim Fathers; John Wesley and George Whitefield.

Risks In Contemporary Evaluation

Any lover of church history can make a longer list of pulpit giants, every man of them strongly evangelical. If a student were disposed to deal with a positive subject negatively, he could try to compile a list of non-evangelical pulpit giants. Whatever the procedure, a prudent compiler would follow Horne in not singling out any contemporary preacher. Among living pulpiteers often counted great, or nearly great, how many will be so regarded after the lapse of forty years? Not many, I judge. I am thinking of my own experience as a lifelong lover of sermons. If I were to name the preachers whom many ministers counted great in 1914, my younger readers would not recognize most of the names. For example, think of Charles Wagner in Paris, William Dawson in London, and Newell Dwight Hillis in Brooklyn. Time has a way of deflating many of our biggest balloons.

In the realm of preaching, what then does it mean for a man to be “great”? Personally, I seldom use the word great about anyone but God, but here I am serving as a reporter of what others have found. According to Barrett Wendell at Harvard, greatness in writing consists in power and influence that continue after the conditions that produced the writing have passed away. Accepting this working principle, let us ask about marks of excellence in the preaching of certain masters in other days, whom many students of church history unite in calling both evangelical and great.

At first glance any such list of evangelical “greats” would impress a student with its variety. For instance, look at the following, and ask what they had in common with each other: Amos and Hosea; James and John; Peter and Paul; Augustine and Chrysostom; Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis of Assisi; Luther and Calvin; John Bunyan and John Donne; John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards; Canon H. P. Liddon and Charles H. Spurgeon; Dwight L. Moody and John Henry Jowett. Any two of those pulpit masters differed from each other as much as any two stars in the sky at midnight. And yet, being stars, any two of those men were alike in certain respects, all of them important. These likenesses all belong together. As a whole, and one by one, they should help to make clear the meaning and the spirit of evangelical preaching at its best.

Evangelical Philosophy Of Preaching

Preaching here means God’s way of meeting the needs of sinful men through the proclamation of His revealed truth, by one of His chosen messengers. Not as a scientific definition, but as a working description, this account shows why those evangelical preachers looked on their calling as second to no other on earth, and on their preaching as a privilege that angels might covet. Preaching as the proclamation of God’s revealed truth means that the man in the pulpit makes known to others what he has received from God, mainly through the written Word, and there through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, in response to the prayer of faith.

Preaching as the proclamation of God’s revealed truth differs from certain ideas now current about the work of a pulpit master. The herald now in view seeks not to discover, to invent, or to change the message that has come from his King. The messenger wishes rather to understand, to accept, and to present in a winsome fashion what he has received from above for the hearers at church. In 2 Corinthians 1–7 Paul most fully enunciates his practical philosophy of preaching. There he refers to himself as an ambassador of Christ as King. An ambassador does not originate his message, by using his reason, or in any other way. He employs his reason, and all his other God-given powers, in understanding the will of his Ruler, and in making that will known to the hearer, or hearers, with clarity, with interest, and with persuasive effectiveness. So it becomes clear that like John Bunyan every would-be ambassador of King Jesus must plan to dwell and toil in “the house of the interpreter.”

Preaching From The Bible

Every pulpit master at whom we have glanced has thought of himself as the Lord’s messenger in explaining and applying the written Word of God, as it relates to the interests and the needs of men and women in his day. Certain pulpit masters have left us expository sermons; others have not. Some have relied largely on a textual method; others equally devoted to the Scriptures have dealt with them topically. Spurgeon did so in his best-known sermon, “Songs in the Night,” and often elsewhere. Still others have preached allegorically, not having learned a more excellent way of dealing with the Bible. “From” the first two chapters of the Canticles, Bernard of Clairvaux preached eighty-five sermons about Christ. From the first verse of the next chapter he “drew” still another message full of Christian truth, which did not come from the Song of Solomon, a beautiful book of poetry with a far different purpose.

Especially since the Reformation, holy men called of God to preach have striven to deal with each Bible passage in the light of its original purpose and meaning. Thus the Reformers went back to the noblest traditions and ideals of the early Church. For example, Home says about Chrysostom: “He is a man of the Word and a man of the World … Chrysostom himself is saturated with the Scriptures, and is determined that his audience shall be taught to base their lives upon the principles of Holy Writ” (op. cit., p. 134). So with our other exemplars: when in the pulpit, every one of them regarded himself as a man behind the Book, and as standing there to use the Book in meeting the needs of the men to whom he preached.

Preaching Bible Doctrine

The master evangelical preachers have accepted the doctrines of Holy Scripture. They have differed about such matters as Predestination and Sinless Perfection, but they have been strangely alike in adhering to the “faith of our fathers.” This term here means loyalty to the body of revealed truth that appears fully in the Holy Scriptures, especially in the New Testament, and echoes repeatedly from every church hymnal, with its Bible truths set to music. From varying points of view the preaching masters of the Church would have agreed with President Nathan M. Pusey, of Harvard, that “the world is seeking for a creed to follow, and for a song to sing.” They would have agreed, also, in looking to Holy Scripture for that creed, and to Christian hymnody for that song.

Preaching The Doctrine Of God

Of late there has been a widespread “theological renaissance,” especially in our seminaries, and in books about religion, but not as yet in most Protestant pulpits. In some respects the doctrines of this Renaissance differ from those of the Reformation. For instance, the Reformers had a way of putting God first, God in Christ, through the Holy Spirit. Modern teachers and writers tend to stress truth about man, and to put that truth first. For all the return to theology we ought to give thanks, but as for the emphasis, surely we should follow Paul and the other apostles in giving the primacy to the Triune God! It would be a pity if we ignored or minimized the Christian truth about the soul and the body of every man born with the image of God. In all these respects we ought to follow the preaching masters of other days, who agreed with the Apostles and the Reformers in putting the first truth first. In the pulpit, and everywhere else, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God.”

Preaching The Doctrine Of Redemption

In recent times New Testament scholars have rediscovered the core of redemptive truth now known as the kerygma. Popularly this means the preaching of God’s revealed truth as it centers in Christ, the Son of God, and the Redeemer from sin. While some of my “preaching fathers” would not have used the word kerygma, they all held to the redemptive facts enshrined in this term borrowed from Holy Writ. In the pulpit those men ranged widely over the known areas of Christian thought and action. All the while they looked on themselves, primarily, as chosen messengers of God’s grace in setting men free from sin, making them strong to serve, and filling them with hope for the Advent of their Lord, with the triumph of His Kingdom.

In all their preaching, the masters took for granted two other basic truths, which have recently come again to the fore. First, the fact of divine revelation. Apart from God’s written revelation, which portion of the kerygma could mortal men ever have discovered or stated? Second, the fact of our human response. From John 3:16, and from the Bible as a whole, as from their own experiences of redeeming grace, the pulpit masters of other days knew that the preaching of God’s revealed truth called for faith on the part of the hearer. That doctrine of redeeming grace they found supremely in God’s revelation through the Death and Resurrection of His Son. So they could have taken as a preaching motto the key verse of the Fourth Gospel, which I paraphrase, reverently:

These words of God’s kerygma are spoken that as hearers of the Gospel you may believe, and that through believing you may be saved from your sins, and set free to serve in the power of eternal life.

Preaching To The Unsaved

The master preachers of other days delivered two sorts of messages: to the unsaved, or the unchurched; and to active followers of Christ. While the proportion between the two kinds of sermons varied, often the ratio seems to have been about fifty-fifty. Among the published messages of preachers as different as Spurgeon, Moody, and Brooks, this proportion holds as a working standard. Search their volumes of sermons and see, as I have done with amazement, the practical uniformity of the findings.

Take Phillips Brooks, for example, in his preaching ministry at Boston (1869–91). Read the three-volume life by A. V. G. Allen, and the Yale Lectures on Preaching (1877). Then study the ten volumes of Sermons (1910), to figure out the purpose of each discourse. You will find that about half the time Brooks was trying to win the hearer who had not yet accepted Christ, and that the rest of the time Brooks was trying to strengthen the faith of the man who already believed. On the other hand, take Dwight L. Moody, whom Brooks admired and liked as much as Moody liked and admired Brooks. Starting from a point of view different from that of Brooks, as a full-time evangelist Moody spent about half of his preaching hours in addressing believers.

Preaching To Followers Of Christ

Almost without exception, the master preachers have dealt with the didache, as well as the kerygma. Like the Apostles, these later men in the same holy tradition strove from the pulpit to build up strong believers, thus preparing them for larger service, in this world and the next. If anyone today feels that the “cure of souls” from the pulpit has been a recent innovation, let him read the sermonic writings of Richard Baxter, or John Bunyan. Where else in print, for example, can anyone find such a heart-searching discussion of suicide as in an unexpurgated edition of Pilgrim’s Progress? On many another page, where Bunyan wrote about Giant Despair, Doubting Castle, or the Hill Difficulty, he was using Bedford Jail as a pulpit to set forth God’s ways of healing every disorder in a man’s soul. So with other evangelical pulpit masters, such as Thomas Chalmers and Alexander Whyte: no one of them ever dreamed of ignoring the heart needs of men and women after they had once been born from above.

Preaching A Message Of Hope

Contrary to a common impression, evangelical preachers as a rule have delivered messages full of assurance and hope. With William Sanday, New Testament scholar at Oxford, many an evangelical pulpit giant would have agreed that “the center of our Lord’s ministry and mission … lay beyond the grave” (The Life of Christ in Recent Research, p. 121). Hence the evangelical pulpit in other times gave a commanding place to messages about “this life and the next.” For worthy examples turn to the university sermons of Canon H. P. Liddon. Note his repeated stress on the Resurrection. Study also the best-known discourse from John Wesley, “The Great Assize,” by which he meant the Day of Judgment. In dealing with any such heart-searching doctrine, the masters as a rule have spoken with what Jowett loved to term “apostolic optimism.” Why not, when the man in the pulpit believed what his mother had taught him to sing: “My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness”?

Preaching To Common People

“The common people heard him gladly.” These words, first written about the Ideal Preacher, would apply to almost every one of His messengers at whom we have looked. Instead of referring to them as “great princes of the pulpit,” He would prefer to bless them as “good and faithful servants.” Whatever the designation, the most Christlike preachers in history have known how to make the truths of God seem real and interesting to ordinary people. Not to do so would have meant to misrepresent the Heavenly Father. In the Bible He everywhere appears as the most interesting and appealing Person of all history. At the same time He appears veiled in mystery and splendor, so that we mortals can not look upon His undimmed glory. Still the pulpit masters were able to preach about Him so that any hearer with the mentality of a twelve-year-old boy could understand the truth of God embodied in any sermon. Accepting that truth, the childlike hearer could bow down to worship, feeling “lost in wonder, love, and praise.”

In terms of our day, such a preacher might have looked on himself as a “transformer.” With transforming truth coming from the mountains of God, through the utterances of prophets and apostles, as illuminated by the writings of scholars and saints, many a preacher of the Gospel to common people has been able to “step it down.” Without changing, weakening, or impairing the mighty truths of revelation, the messenger to God’s common people has been able to present in every sermon an important part of what He has revealed. On the human level the messenger has felt chiefly concerned about the spiritual needs of his hearers. For this reason Martin Luther addressed his sermons to common people, not to Philipp Melanchthon, the scholar. So did Jowett deliberately prepare messages so simple that his critics spoke of them as “thin.” According to one of his many learned admirers, Jowett had mastered the fine art of “making a little go a long way.” This kind of pulpit excellence springs from a Christlike sense of humility.

Preaching With Authority

Every evangelical master preacher has spoken with authority, and that not his own. Herein lies the heart of the evangelical tradition: “Thus saith the Lord.” A man called of God to preach receives from Him a message in keeping with the present needs of the hearers. During long hours of preparation, the man in the study “waits on the Lord.” While waiting he also works, until at length he feels sure about what the Lord wishes him to say. In the latter stages of preparation, the messenger keeps on waiting and working until at last he sees how the Lord wishes him to speak. When he goes into the pulpit, without apology he presents every truth, and discusses every duty in light that has come to him from God.

This kind of pulpit work calls for Christlike humility, and for Christlike courage, as well as common sense. Not by bellowing about his authority, not by claiming supernatural powers, but by living close to God and close to people, the minister takes for granted that he speaks to them for God. So do the hearers know and feel that this man has a message from the King, a message that suits the heart needs of the hearers. Alas, who can understand or explain the spirit and the ways of the minister who speaks with authority? On the other hand, who can fail to sense in the pulpit the presence of such authority, or else the absence?

Divine Constraint In Preaching

Authority in preaching does not depend on anything human. In a sense, a metropolitan minister with a vast church “plant,” a large endowment, a massive choir, and a reputation for magnetic powers of speech can speak with more effectiveness than if the, same man displayed his gifts and graces in Cream Ridge or Honeysuckle Valley. But what about a young minister on the threshold of his career, and aware that he has no dazzling brilliancy (Ezek. 33:30–33)? In Alexander Maclaren’s early ministry at Southampton, as with Jowett’s beginnings at Newcastle upon Tyne, the Lord delighted to speak with authority through a young man who still had much to learn about what to preach and how to do it well. At twenty years of age, without any learning of the schools, and with all sorts of crudity, Spurgeon preached with authority as real as thirty years later, when he had become world famous. At every stage of his ministry such a man feels that he has a mission from God and a message from God. O for a rising generation of evangelical ministers, every one of them loving to preach with authority from God!

Looking back we can see ten marks of evangelical preaching before World War I. These marks begin with pulpit work as the proclamation of God’s revealed truth. They end with the seal of God’s approval on the man preaching with His authority. Who follows in this train?

Andrew W. Blackwood, D.D., is professor of preaching at Temple University School of Theology and author of Doctrinal Preaching for Today and seventeen other books.

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