A History of Preaching Volume 1

by O.C. Edwards JR.

Overview

A History of Preaching brings together narrative history and primary sources to provide the most comprehensive guide available to the story of the church's ministry of proclamation.

Bringing together an impressive array of familiar and lesser-known figures, Edwards paints a detailed, compelling picture of what it has meant to preach the gospel. Pastors, scholars, and students of homiletics will find here many opportunities to enrich their understanding and practice of preaching.

Volume 1 contains Edwards's magisterial retelling of the story of Christian preaching's development from its Hellenistic and Jewish roots in the New Testament, through the late-twentieth century's discontent with outdated forms and emphasis on new modes of preaching such as narrative. Along the way the author introduces us to the complexities and contributions of preachers, both with whom we are already acquainted, and to whom we will be introduced here for the first time. Origen, Chrysostom, Augustine, Bernard, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Edwards, Rauschenbusch, Barth; all of their distinctive contributions receive careful attention. Yet lesser-known figures and developments also appear, from the ninth-century reform of preaching championed by Hrabanus Maurus, to the reference books developed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by the mendicant orders to assist their members' preaching, to Howell Harris and Daniel Rowlands, preachers of the eighteenth-century Welsh revival, to Helen Kenyon, speaking as a layperson at the 1950 Yale Beecher lectures about the view of preaching from the pew.

Volume 2, available separately as 9781501833786, contains primary source material on preaching drawn from the entire scope of the church's twenty centuries. The author has written an introduction to each selection, placing it in its historical context and pointing to its particular contribution. Each chapter in Volume 2 is geared to its companion chapter in Volume 1's narrative history.

Ecumenical in scope, fair-minded in presentation, appreciative of the contributions that all the branches of the church have made to the story of what it means to develop, deliver, and listen to a sermon, A History of Preaching will be the definitive resource for anyone who wishes to preach or to understand preaching's role in living out the gospel.

"...'This work is expected to be the standard text on preaching for the next 30 years,' says Ann K. Riggs, who staffs the NCC's Faith and Order Commission. Author Edwards, former professor of preaching at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, is co-moderator of the commission, which studies church-uniting and church-dividing issues.

'A History of Preaching is ecumenical in scope and will be relevant in all our churches; we all participate in this field,' says Riggs...." from EcuLink, Number 65, Winter 2004-2005 published by the National Council of Churches

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501834035
Publisher:	Abingdon Press
Publication date:	04/25/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

O. C. Edwards is an historian and Professor Emeritus of Preaching at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. He also served as President and Dean of that school. He is an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church.

Read an Excerpt

A History of Preaching: Volume 1

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By O. C. Edwards Jr.

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2004 Abingdon Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5018-3403-5

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CHAPTER 1

The Earliest Christian Preaching

There is no activity more characteristic of the church than preaching. Along with the sacraments, most Christian bodies consider the proclamation of the Word of God to be the constitutive act of the church. No other major religion gives preaching quite the central role that it has in Christianity. Most major religions authorize persons to ritualize and storify their integrating myths; to preserve, interpret, and teach the current relevance of their sacred writings; to connect the past with the present and the future; and, in most cases, to win converts to the faith. But in the Christian religion, "the preacher, by and large, plays a more central role." Judaism and Islam are the two other great monotheistic faiths in which homiletical activity approximating that of Christianity is most common.

The material included within or excluded from this account of the history of preaching was shaped and/or determined by the following basic definition of a "sermon":

a speech delivered in a Christian assembly for worship by an authorized person that applies some point of doctrine, usually drawn from a biblical passage, to the lives of the members of the congregation with the purpose of moving them by the use of narrative analogy and other rhetorical devices to accept that application and to act on the basis of it

The overwhelming majority of Christian sermons have been delivered at regular worship services, especially those conducted on Sundays. Even most of the efforts to convert non-Christians through preaching have occurred at regular meetings of the Christian assembly. While there have been exceptions, such as open-air preaching, even that has often been accompanied by Scripture reading, prayer, and hymn singing, which turn the event into a service of worship. In addition to sermons in the ordered round of worship and those preached in missionary or evangelistic contexts, the other main category has aimed at instruction in the faith. Not all catechesis has been preaching within the definition given above, but at least the instructions in preparation for Christian initiation given by such early church fathers as Ambrose, Cyril of Jerusalem, and John Chrysostom fit within the genre of sermon. The subject of this investigation, then, is Christian preaching at the regular liturgy and in missionary/evangelistic and catechetical situations that falls within the definition of a sermon.

Many will undoubtedly wonder why anyone would wish to bother writing or reading a history of preaching. Certainly the reputation of the activity in some quarters is such as to cause curiosity about it to appear perverse. Thus the third definition of preach in the first edition of the Oxford American Dictionary is "to give moral advice in an obtrusive way." Nor is it a compliment to call any discourse "preachy." The early-nineteenth-century wit Sydney Smith, himself a priest and even a canon of St. Paul's, said that

preaching has become a by-word for long and dull conversation of any kind; and whoever wishes to imply, in any piece of writing, the absence of every thing agreeable and inviting, calls it a sermon.

Even the most committed Christian has to acknowledge that there is more justice to such complaints than one wishes were the case. In spite of all that may be said against preaching, however, its history has proved to be of enormous interest to many scholars who have no personal bias in favor of the church. Indeed, most of the monographs in the field, those that make up so much of the bibliography of the present study, are the work of scholars whose field is not church history or homiletics. Many have been historians in other fields, whether political, social, or literary. Folklorists have studied African American preaching, scholars of Middle English have searched manuscripts for sermon illustrations that furnished the plot for early secular writings in the vernacular, and students of the American Revolution have read sermons to see how the decision to take up arms against the Crown was formed. Those interested in the evolution of public speaking have found secular rhetoric influencing homiletical theory, and styles in preaching shaping the work of those who engaged in other forms of public address. Nor has preaching been studied only for the light it could cast on something else; literary critics have found the styles of preachers in various periods to be worthy of attention in their own right. Thus many who have made no personal religious commitment have found some Christian preaching, at any rate, worthy of all the attention they could give it.

The attitudes toward preaching of "those who profess and call themselves Christians," however, are of a wholly different order. The most extreme claims have been made for the value of the activity. Paul, for instance, said:

"Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved." But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? As it is written, "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!" (Rom. 10:13-15)

Thus he can say: "God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe" (1 Cor. 1:21) and say of himself: "Woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel!" (1 Cor. 9:16). The interpretation of the early church fathers that was collected into the most authoritative biblical commentary of the Middle Ages, the Glossa Ordinaria, found preaching represented allegorically on almost every page of the sacred text. The two greatest of the Reformers, Luther and Calvin, both assumed that the ordinary medium by which election to salvation is effected was preaching. Finally, the Decree on the Ministry of Priests of the Second Vatican Council says that "the primary duty of priests is the proclamation of the Gospel of God to all." Thus there are many, believers and nonbelievers alike, for whom investigating the development over time of Christian preaching is a worthy effort.

PREACHING IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

The obvious place to begin a history of Christian preaching would seem to be the New Testament, but when one investigates the matter closely, it becomes clear that there is little in the New Testament that fits the definition given above for Christian preaching. It is true, of course, that there is a larger sense in which everything in the New Testament is preaching. This has been recognized since at least 1918, when Martin Dibelius wrote:

At the beginning of all early Christian creativity there stands the sermon: missionary and hortatory preaching, narrative and parenesis, prophecy and the interpretation of scripture.

Norman Perrin has summarized the point of view by characterizing the New Testament literature as fundamentally proclamation (kerygma) and exhortation (parenesis), admitting at the same time that within these two major categories there are many subdivisions. The proclamation involves both the preaching of the kingdom of God by Jesus and the early church's message that Jesus is the one through whom God acted decisively for the salvation of human beings, and the parenesis is exhortation that grows out of the proclamation. Hence the indicative declares the history of the Christ event, and the imperative spells out the implications of that event for living.

There is a sense, therefore, in which everything in the New Testament is preaching. And yet, paradoxically, there is another sense in which none of it is. In the strict terms of the definition above, there are probably no sermons as such in the New Testament, no texts that had been delivered orally to an assembly for evangelization, instruction, or worship.

Jesus' preaching could be thought to provide an exception, but it fails to do so on at least two counts. First, since its content was the breaking in of the reign of God and it refers only by implication to its proclaimer's role in that incursion, it is not, strictly speaking, Christian preaching. Second, while the Gospels contain long speeches that are placed on the lips of Jesus, scholars doubt that any of them reflect the content of a discourse he gave on any single public occasion. The Q material presented in Matthew and Luke as continuous speeches of Jesus is, on closer inspection, obviously made up of what seem a series of "one-liners" rather than a developed presentation of thought. Indeed, each verse could be a distillation of an entire sermon. By the same token, the discourses in the Fourth Gospel, which do sound like consecutive speeches, could have grown out of the evangelist's meditation over the years on a single statement of Jesus such as one of the synoptic verses. Thus, while it is certain that preaching was the main form of communication employed by the founder of Christianity, none of his actual sermons are available to be studied for insight into the nature of Christian preaching.

Nor is it likely that any of Paul's sermons as such have survived. Paul makes it very clear that he had a strong sense of vocation to preach to the Gentiles the gospel of Christ crucified and risen, and he nowhere gives any indication of a similar sense of vocation to write letters to distant congregations. Yet the letters are what remain and not his missionary, catechetical, and presumably liturgical sermons. Many questions that have plagued New Testament scholars could be answered if we knew how Paul persuaded his Gentile converts to accept Christianity. Certainly there could be a more balanced understanding of his theology if we knew the content of the instruction he gave those converts in preparation for baptism. All that can be reconstructed, however, is what is implied in his letters. While a certain amount of overlap might be expected between the contents of the two kinds of communication, and it can be assumed that what was written later was consistent with what had been said earlier, it cannot be assumed that what he delivered orally was the same as what he wrote. To repeat, none of Paul's sermons have been preserved in a form in which they can be identified as such and analyzed as specimens of his preaching.

An exception to this conclusion is thought to be found in the Acts of the Apostles. A considerable portion of Acts, after all, is taken up with speeches of one sort or another, many of them claiming to be the missionary sermons of Paul — or Peter or some other representative of the primitive church. All of these missionary sermons, however, have the same outline: they begin with what is taken to be a prophecy from the Hebrew Bible, go on to claim that the prophecy was fulfilled in and by Jesus, document that claim by saying that the apostles were witnesses of its fulfillment, and call upon members of their audience to repent and believe the gospel. The unlikelihood that all of these preachers always followed the same outline means that the reports in Acts cannot be taken as transcripts of actual sermons. Indeed, since in a few short verses they present discourses that could have taken hours to deliver, their evidential value is further diminished. Their sounding so much like real speeches is evidence not of their historicity but of Luke's extraordinary literary skill in creating such convincing scenes. Thus, if the sermons in Acts convey any information at all about preaching in the early church, the most that can be assumed is that they tell what Luke thought the missionary preaching of his own day should be like.

Some scholars do believe that at least two New Testament books contain material that originated in oral proclamation: 1 Peter and the Epistle to the Hebrews. Even if those claims are justified, however, there seems to be little reason to think that the shape of Christian preaching in the New Testament period can be reconstructed — which is to say that, while true Christian preaching began much earlier, the history of Christian preaching cannot be traced back earlier than the middle of the second century.

While Christian preaching itself cannot be traced earlier, however, there are two pre-Christian movements, Jewish synagogue preaching and Greco-Roman rhetoric, that must be studied before we can understand the way Christian preaching developed.

SYNAGOGUE SERMONS

The New Testament suggests that the first Christian congregations did not understand themselves as part of a new religion, but rather as Jewish synagogues differing from their co-religionists only in claiming that Jesus was the Messiah. Thus it can be expected that their organization and worship would develop along the lines that were already established, making, at first, only the adaptations required by their devotion to Christ, such as initiation by baptism and celebration of the Eucharist. Since other synagogues were accustomed to sermons, it was only natural that churches should have them too. Passages from holy Scripture read at worship assemblies were interpreted and applied to the lives of the people. This knowledge, however, does not contribute as much to clearing away the mist that hovers over the origins of Christian homiletics as might be hoped, because little trace has been left of either the beginnings of the synagogue as an institution or the earliest kinds of preaching done in synagogues.

While most scholars still think the synagogue originated during the Exile in Babylon (sixth century B.C.E.) to provide the people of God with a way to "sing the Lord's song in a strange land" (Ps. 137:4 KJV), no evidence exists to prove that is so. Indeed, the earliest traces of the institution go back only as far as the Hellenistic period. The word synagogue itself is Greek (synagoge), which has a root sense of gathering or assembly. The other early term is proseuche, a Greek word meaning either "prayer" or "a place of prayer." The first appearance in this connection of proseuche, the older of these terms, is in the third century B.C.E. The oldest synagogue building to have been identified was built on the island of Delos during the second century B.C.E. In Israel itself, the oldest synagogue remains are on the Golan Heights at Gamla; they date from just before or after the beginning of the Common Era. The next oldest are in two fortresses erected by Herod the Great, Masada and the Herodium (built on a hilltop near Bethlehem), but the religious use of these buildings may date only to their occupation during the revolt against Rome, 66–70 C.E. Yet by the first century of the Common Era, synagogues were very common both within Israel and throughout the Diaspora, as literary references in the New Testament, from Josephus, and elsewhere attest. It has been estimated, for instance, that there were 365 synagogues within Jerusalem itself by that time.

Our knowledge of the worship conducted in synagogues at the time of Christian beginnings is very slim, yet the little that is known of the patterns developed after the destruction of the Temple suggests that "a Jew of the first century would find himself at home in a synagogue of the twentieth century." The Sabbath morning service was dominated by readings from the Torah and the Prophets (the latter called the haftarah), a homily, weekly hymns, and the fixed prayers that "constituted but a small, though significant part of the day's liturgy."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from A History of Preaching: Volume 1 by O. C. Edwards Jr.. Copyright © 2004 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface,
List of Abbreviations,
Part I: Homiletical Origins,
Chapter 1: The Earliest Christian Preaching,
Chapter 2: The Homily Takes Shape,
Chapter 3: Eloquence in Cappadocia,
Chapter 4: Homiletics and Catechetics: Chrysostom and Others,
Chapter 5: Augustine: The Sign Reader,
Part II: The Middle Ages,
Chapter 6: The Trek to the Middle Ages,
Chapter 7: The Early Medieval Period,
Chapter 8: The Renaissance of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,
Chapter 9: The Explosion of Preaching in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,
Chapter 10: A Homiletic Miscellany,
Part III: From the Renaissance and Reformation to the Enlightenment,
Chapter 11: Erasmus and the Humanists,
Chapter 12: The Reformation Preaching of Luther and Melanchthon,
Chapter 13: Calvin and the Reform Tradition,
Chapter 14: The Preaching of Catholic Reform,
Chapter 15: Upheaval in Britain,
Part IV: The Modern Era: From the Restoration to World War I,
Chapter 16: The Dawn of Modernity (A): The Restoration and the Age of Reason,
Chapter 17: The Dawn of Modernity (B): The Recovery of Feeling,
Chapter 18: American Reveille,
Chapter 19: The Second Call,
Chapter 20: "The Fruits of Fervor" (A): Among African Americans,
Chapter 21: "The Fruits of Fervor" (B): "Your Daughters Shall Prophesy",
Chapter 22: The Preaching of Romanticism in Britain,
Chapter 23: Transatlantic Romanticism,
Chapter 24: The Triumph of Romanticism,
Part V: The Century of Change,
Chapter 25: Pastoral Counseling through Preaching,
Chapter 26: The Resurgence of Orthodoxy,
Chapter 27: Preaching as an Element of Worship,
Chapter 28: A Homiletical Epiphany: The Emergence of African American Preaching in Majority Consciousness,
Chapter 29: Mainstream Prophecy,
Chapter 30: A Great Company of Women,
Chapter 31: Evangelism in an Electronic Age,
Chapter 32: A Crisis in Communication,
Conclusion,
Appendix on Pietism,
Scripture Index,
Subject Index,