What Is Preaching?: The Pulpit and Our World

Modern preaching is being most severely attacked these days, not by the people who hear it, but by preachers and theologians themselves. “Clergymen are numerous, but prophets are few,” states Dr. Kyle Haselden, editor of The Pulpit, adding that this “is a just and accurate indictment of current preaching. With one incisive stroke it uncovers the radical defect, the weakness underlying the decadence of the American pulpit.” He refers to the need for preachers “who with conviction and passion and in truth speak hopefully for God, whose pulpits remind men, not of the lecturer’s dais or the forum or a cozy experiment in group dynamics, but of Sinai, Calvary and the Areopagus.”

Dr. John R. Bodo, professor of practical theology at San Francisco Theological Seminary (Presbyterian), concurs: “We may hold, with complete biblical and historic legitimacy, that preaching is our main duty as well as the original normative medium for the proclamation of the Gospel. But our people … may no longer be greatly affected by our preaching or by any kind of preaching.… So we go on, from Sunday to Sunday, deluded into thinking that just because we have said something, something has actually happened, while people know (and we ourselves know it in sober moments) that the day of the ‘preacher’ is done.”

Dr. George C. Stuart, professor of preaching at Christian Theological Seminary (Christian Church), attacks the way preaching is taught in our seminaries. “Sometime ago I listened to a graduate of a well-recognized theological school announce to his fellow ministers that he had spent the first four or five years of his initial parish experience forgetting all that he had learned at seminary in order, as he put it, ‘to preach to the people in my church.’ Where was that student’s professor of homiletics during those crucial years? At a time when both biblical studies and theology are working systematically to build the act of preaching into the tissue of the Body of Christ, when most theologians today believe that preaching alone creates the real future of the church, homiletics is weak both as a science and an art.”

Charles Clayton Morrison, former editor of The Christian Century, recently remarked: “For a number of years I have been a modern Diogenes going about with my homiletical lantern in search of a preacher.… The pulpit, which is the throne of Protestantism, seemed to have become the footstool of a new ruler—the Cult of Consultation. The sermon has lost its character as an Event, either for the preacher or the congregation. It has become hardly more than a space-filling homily in a highly liturgical or folksy impromptu exercise preparatory to the coffee break.”

Now these are very dim views of the modern pulpit, and they are quite representative of the opinions of Protestant leaders generally. However, here is one more severe indictment of the modern pulpit which has something very constructive to offer.

Dr. Conrad H. Massa, assistant professor of homiletics at Princeton Theological Seminary, says: “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.… All of this points to one inevitable conclusion: the Protestant minister today does not have an adequate theological understanding of the nature and purpose of preaching.… Doctrinal theology has given us exhaustive inquiries into the ‘doctrine of the Word of God.’ It has never given us a ‘doctrine of proclamation’.… It is time that theologians faced the unpleasant and rather startling realization that in the whole history of homiletical literature from Augustine to Blackwood, with only certain exceptions, the specific working aims of this activity of preaching were not taken from theologians but from pagan rhetoric! The aims of Christian preaching enunciated by Augustine, in Book IV of his On Christian Doctrine, were the aims of Ciceronian rhetoric, ‘to teach, to please, and to persuade.’ These aims have been picked up, repeated, and sanctioned by homileticians ever since.… The basic aims of public speaking cannot be applied to the gospel … because in the only sense in which ‘persuasion’ and ‘edification’ are theologically meaningful, they are the work of the Holy Spirit.…”

Exposition Of God’S Word

The sermon must be an exposition of the Word of God, not the word of man; it must come from the soul of the preacher to the soul of the hearer, as divine revelation by the power of the Spirit of God; it must confront sinners in the total context of their lives with the sovereign redemptive claims of God’s Word in the person of his Son. Therefore it cannot be judged in terms of results according to human standards. It does not “sell” something: it does not merely seek to please people, nor persuade them, nor even teach them or get decisions and conversions. Rather it tries simply to let the Word of God speak, knowing that in the last analysis only God can produce the results.

If our preaching is to have the note of divine authority, if it is to be authentic, it must strike men as being something much more than the word of the preacher. In other words, it must be theologically oriented homiletics; it must have a doctrine of divine proclamation behind it. The preacher may not be the greatest and the most popular, but he should have been taught a theory of preaching which comes, not out of mere pagan rhetoric, but out of the Word of God itself. This should be the heart of homiletics in the seminary.

Everybody can see that while the modern Church is growing, the modern pulpit is not—which raises a few very serious questions about the kind of growth which the Church is experiencing in these days of widespread religiosity. The distinctive feature which must fill the vacuum left by the modern pulpit is, as it has always been, that which the liberals themselves find wanting in their pulpits, and which the fundamentalists have not yet admitted is wanting in theirs—namely a theological doctrine of preaching the Word of God. A great opportunity lies before us, but it may be lost.

First, we can lose our opportunity by imitating others around us and sacrificing our distinctiveness in preaching, either because we would like to get the kind of dubious results others are getting, or because we yield to those voices in the church that don’t like anything too expressly biblical. Where the Word of God is preached in the power of the Holy Spirit, informed, faithful Christians can produce flourishing churches, filled with worshipers every Sunday, including the youth who profess their faith and take their fathers’ places. True, informed, Spirit-led Christians will support worldwide missions, home evangelism programs, international broadcasts, fine Christian schools, distinctive youth organizations, splendid institutions of mercy, journals and publications—but these do not result from the kind of preaching which is heard in so many modern pulpits. They can be found in churches that sound the authentic note of the inspired and infallible Bible.

Second, we can also lose our contemporary opportunity even though we maintain the high standard of distinctively biblical preaching if we fail to make our pulpits relevant to the context of modern life, if they speak only out of the past and not to the present and the future. We cannot live on an island in our culture, especially not with a truly theologically oriented homiletical theory. We have something theological to say, and we have theological pulpits with which to say it. Our sermons must not only be truly biblical, but they must also be biblically pertinent to the problems of the day in which we are living.

A Problem Of Communication

One of those problems, perhaps the very first one, is communication itself—how to get through to modern man. We are not preaching to yesterday, when words were relatively scarce and public speakers were few, when there was not so much fierce competition for the attention of men. The change in fifty years is almost incredible. Someone has said that today people are being talked into a coma. “Our entire way of life is being so governed,” says Dr. Bodo, “by selling and the mentality of selling that people automatically distrust anyone who tries to persuade them. Thus, when even hidden persuaders find it increasingly difficult to overcome the apathy and skepticism of the public, open persuaders like preachers dare not indulge in any illusions.”

This means that our pulpits must speak distinctively (without compromise of our basic theological and homiletical principles) to man as he is today, not as he was yesterday—whether we see him in our pews or somewhere else. In either case he is the same man. His life span is longer, but his listening span is shorter. He is always on the move, even mentally when he is in church, for he lives in a highly mobile world. So we shall have to talk to him in shorter sentences and shorter sermons. (Most of ours are at least ten minutes too long.) Anything we say after thirty minutes had better be outstandingly good, so good that it will stop the clock.

Through movies and magazines, through radio and television, modern man has been conditioned to communicate by pictures, not by words. He reads that way, he hears that way. He lives in a picture-dominated culture, and he doesn’t change when he goes to church. So, if we reach him it will be in the word and thought forms with which he is familiar; we must cast our homiletical theory into word-pictures. If that seems beneath our dignity, let us recall how Jesus talked in pictures to people who had not been conditioned by our modern means of communication. And isn’t the entire Bible in a sense God’s word-picture of his sovereign grace for a lost world?

Finally, we can also lose our opportunity by refusing to pay attention to the so-called details of great preaching which demand so much hard work in preparation and practice. Preachers who follow careful preparation of exegesis and neat outlines by merely standing up and talking are not doing justice to the demands of the modern pulpit. Those who write out their sermons, and then rewrite them again and again and perhaps again, are going to be the most worthy exponents of biblical preaching. To use the style of the spoken word rather than the written word; to think of how it will sound instead of how it will read; to preach in carefully chosen terms that are concrete, not abstract—these are marks of the worthy preacher. Can one who ignores these points really do justice to his calling as communicator of the Word of God, or succeed in coming to grips with the man of today in the world of today—within the church or without?

In that connection it is interesting and disturbing to observe that until very recently pre-seminary courses in most colleges required many hours of foreign-language study but only a few hours of speech. Indeed, young preachers must know these languages, but is it not equally important for them to know the language of their contemporaries to whom they must preach? Can they communicate to modern man if they cannot speak effectively to him—if they do not know how he speaks and hears?

I think it is fair to say that we have not paid proper attention to matters of style and diction, idiom and delivery. Too many of us are preaching in the language of the King James Bible, and also in the oratorical tones of that day—except that we are not as polished and grammatical. If we think that the common people will still hear us gladly, we have underestimated them. They will judge the Word of God by the words we use to preach it, even though they may not be too literate themselves. Protestant preaching ought to be the best in terms of content, biblically and theologically and homiletically. It ought to be the best in terms of communication: language and delivery, projection and pertinence, directness and rapport. Proclamation of the Gospel is dishonored when syntax and style and spelling insult the Holy Spirit. He is concerned not only in the larger issues of divine truth, but also in these so-called details.

Let us not forget that every sermon we preach leaves its mark upon those who hear it, for better or for worse. After hearing it they are never the same again. If they turn away, by showing this very definite reaction they prove the point. No, it is not presumptuous for a preacher to state this conclusion, for true preaching is the most powerful form of communication in all the world. This is not because of the preacher, nor because of the sermon, but because the voice of the Spirit is in every real sermon, no matter what the cynics of our day think of it. Even cynics can be and have been affected and converted by such a sermon.

Jesus told his disciples to preach the Gospel. When the Holy Spirit came to the Church on Pentecost, he did not begin his mighty work in this world by setting up an organization, by launching a new social enterprise, by establishing a counseling service, by joining a community crusade, or by drafting a set of resolutions, but rather by preaching the Gospel. He set up a pulpit and preached a sermon. On the Day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit was first of all a preacher.

And so throughout its history, the Christian pulpit has always occupied the primary place in the true Church. There have been times when it was neglected. Then the Church lost its spiritual power. But each time the restoration of the pulpit was essential in bringing the reformation of the Church.

Such a time is upon us today, judging by the criticism of the modern pulpit directed by those who, in so doing, are also judging themselves. Christian homiletics, I believe, can produce the kind of pulpits needed today. It can bring a real doctrine of preaching the Word of God. But we had better be careful, for we could easily miss our opportunity to make that contribution. We could miss it by losing both our identity and our principles of preaching. We could miss it with pulpits that have no relevance to our day, that have no rapport with our culture, that are too isolated and too antiquated to be understood by modern man or to have any significance for the modern scene. We could miss it by refusing to learn the hard lessons and the fine arts of pulpit speech, by preaching the Word of God in words which the Holy Spirit cannot use, and which our hearers cannot tolerate.

END

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.