From the Archives: Learning from Chrysostom: Indifference to Praise and Insults
The Kanzelaltar in St. Lamberti Kirche, Bergen, Lower Saxony, dating from the early 19th century. A statue of Moses stands to the right of the preacher, St. John the Baptist to his left, and a stained glass window of Christ in Majesty fills the wall behind him.
Hajotthu, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
The following essay is from Gottesdienst Volume XXII, No. 1, Passiontide and Easter 2014.
Learning from Chrysostom: Indifference to Praise and Insults
Chrysostom is one of the most accessible Fathers. His homilies should be standard and frequent reading for Lutheran preachers. His treatise On the Priesthood is also quite helpful. It was written as a dialogue between Chrysostom, the bishop, and his student Basil. Books 4 and 5 focus on preaching. The treatise, along with many of his other writings, is available in English for free at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (www.ccel.org).
The treatise, as a whole, suffers among us in two ways. First, the translation was written in 1889 and the English can be dense and difficult to parse. Secondly, Chrysostom does not write in a linear fashion as we are accustomed to. He writes, instead, in circles, rarely stating his thesis outright and then returning to earlier topics again and again. The style is reminiscent of the Revelation to an earlier St. John. Those things, however, can discourage modern readers.
I’d like to encourage our readers to read the treatise. In order to give some aid in that direction I am providing some notes and commentary on book 5. Book 5 seems to me to be the most interesting and applicable to our situation because there Chrysostom considers the preacher’s internal struggle and his competing desires both to be admired by the people and to please God (“Treatise Concerning the Christian Priesthood,” in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series: Saint Chrysostom: On the Priesthood, Ascetic Treatises, Select Homilies and Letters, Homilies on the Statues, vol. 9, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. W. R. W. Stephens (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1889). The treatise is on pp. 27–83. Book 5 is on pp. 70–74 [http:// www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf109.iv.vii.html]).
The outline provided at the beginning of book 5 is useful, but it might be improved. His thesis, which is never quite stated, is that the preacher must seek to be faithful to God in loving service to his hearers by being indifferent to both their praise and their insults. He supports this with three main ideas: the preacher must be (1) engaged in real and ongoing effort and study (chapter 1), (2) indifferent to praise and to insults (chapters 2, 4, 6–8), and (3) competent or eloquent (chapters 3, 5).
The preacher must be engaged in real and ongoing effort and study. We get a real sense of what Chrysostom is contending against in the first paragraph. He begins with an exclamation: “How great is the skill required for the teacher in contending earnestly for the truth!” (70). Yet, he continues, there are great dangers in the office. Where do they come from? From the majority of the hearers, for they do not listen to preaching as catechumens, but they come instead to be entertained. Thus they either praise or insult the preacher according to how well he entertains them. Chrysostom sees this reality as requiring a greater expenditure of labor on behalf of the preacher than would otherwise be the case. Since a majority of hearers are coming to be entertained, the preacher must work hard that he not be misled by them and acquiesce to their standards and expectation, but rather lead them to pure doctrine and the comfort of grace (chapter 1).
We should recognize the similarity of Chrysostom’s hearers and ours. His people had little else to entertain them. Thousands of people adored him and came to hear him preach even though many, according to him, came for the wrong reasons. We are not so prone to large crowds and praise, of course, but even as a lack of entertainment drove Chrysostom’s hearers to seek entertainment from his preaching, the opposite cause seems to have this result among us: a deluge of entertainment has left our people with no other standard. If it was serious work for him, we should be working twice as hard and for the same reason: that we might not be misled to scratch the itchy ears of our people, but that we might instead lead them to pure doctrine and the comfort of grace.
It is easy to become lazy in preaching. It is easy not only to skimp on the exegetical work, but also to become lazy in the craft. We should be carefully reading not only commentaries and dogmatic books, but also books
on homiletics, poetry, and writing. We should be reading collections of sermons as well. We should do this not to impress our hearers, but to become better at teaching God’s Word and applying it—not trusting either their praise or their insults but seeking to please God.
The preacher must be indifferent to praise and to insults. In many ways, indifference to praise is Chrysostom’s most obvious and easiest point. We resonate with calls to humility. Most insightful, and more applicable to our situation, however, is his call to likewise be indifferent to insults. As already stated, Chrysostom lived in a world unlike ours. In a way similar to Luther, Chrysostom was famous and popular. People hung on his words. This simply isn’t an issue for us, and rather than chafe under it we ought to rejoice. At the same time, we ought to heed well his warnings regarding insults and recognize the wisdom of his point that to chafe under insults is, in fact, to desire praise. He lays out the danger directly: “despondency and constant cares are mighty for destroying the powers of the mind, and for reducing it to extreme weakness” (71). Listening to insults and either becoming enraged by them or caving in to self-pity removes the preacher’s competence. He will lose his ability to distinguish between Law and Gospel because he will be turned inward.
Chrysostom immediately offers a most helpful remedy:
The Priest [should] behave towards those in his charge, as a father would behave to his very young children; and as such are not disturbed either by their insults or their blows, or their lamentations, nor even if they laugh and rejoice with us, do we take much account of it; so should we neither be puffed up by the promises of these persons nor cast down at their censure, when it comes from them unseasonably. (71)
This might sound condescending, but it isn’t. The preacher has a paternal and shepherding role. No mother on earth has been spared a child’s outrageous and vocal disgust at some healthy thing she prepared. What if she listened to the child and tried to prepare only food that he would embrace and love? The child would be destroyed. No preacher is free of his hearers’ occasional dislike of God’s Law and the fallen man’s constant desire to cheapen grace. Chrysostom reminds us that preachers are called to serve not to pander.
Consider this: Our Lord came not to save the righteous, but the unrighteous. Preachers have not been sent to catechize and absolve holy angels who never complain, but to the mess of the baptized who are God’s own children and at the same time sinners, often quite childish in their theological opinions or tastes. Their insults should not cause anger to rise in preachers, but pity, for they are still immature and do not know what is good for them. That being said, Chrysostom knows how hard it is not to be hurt by their remarks. He adds: “This is hard, my good friend; and perhaps, methinks, even impossible” (71). The preacher is also simul and in need of a father confessor.
It is also in this vein that he argues that the preacher, since he cannot fully trust either the praise or the complaints of his people, must be his own judge. There are certainly dangers in this, as our inborn vanity is prone to be pleased with our own work. Again, however, the danger can be alleviated to some degree by a father confessor. Ultimately the preacher must be a judge of his work. He must strive to a standard that the bulk of his hearers simply don’t know and he must return, again and again, to the standard of his confession and the substance of his vow, which for us, of course, is the Book of Concord.
The preacher must be competent or eloquent. If indifference to insult is the most applicable bit of the treatise for North American Lutheran pastors, Chrysostom’s insistence on competence is the most interesting, but also the most puzzling. What he introduces at the end of chapter 1 and describes in chapter 2 seems to be what we would call eloquence. To this end, he states that preaching must be “seasoned with salt.” He is quoting Colossians 4:6, “Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person” (ESV). While his nomenclature isn’t as developed as Luther’s, and he certainly does care about the right use of rhetoric and good speaking techniques, what he is really on about is what we think of as the proper distinction between Law and Gospel. The Colossians quote about how to answer each person means answering each person according to his need. This gets picked up by Chrysostom in chapter 3, where he insists upon the preacher’s competence both to “correct and to remit from correction” (71). Don’t get me wrong: this competence, for Chrysostom, is the ability to accurately explain a doctrine, to open the Scriptures, and to move men’s hearts with words. Our modern disdain of homiletics books and our small effort toward rhetoric and art in preaching would scandalize and anger him. He does not separate eloquence and intellectual ability from proper distinction between Law and Gospel. Yet this competence is also, and foundationally, correcting or rebuking and then remitting sins. It is giving the right answer to each person. He is emphatic that without this the preacher’s Law preaching will harden sinners rather than serve them. What is that except the proper distinction between Law and Gospel?
Conclusion
It is hard to imagine anyone not being blessed by reading this treatise in its entirety, even if he has read it multiple times before or is a layman. It is a sobering work, to be sure. Basil weeps in fear at the end as he considers how difficult and even impossible it is to serve in this office and not lose one’s own faith. There is clearly more Law than Gospel in the treatise, not just in book 5 but throughout. Chrysostom doesn’t have the benefit of the refining heresies that we have suffered and so he is not as worried about synergism or Pietism as we are. Nor does he think in terms of the proper distinction between Law and Gospel, even if the ideas are there. Yet he is also more aware of the devil and the weight of his duties. He gives us good advice and solid reasoning from the Scriptures. If it is a harsh burden that he lays upon us, it is still a very practical and realistic work. It well upholds the centrality and dignity of the office that Christ has instituted that men might obtain justifying faith (AC V). For all the dire warnings that he issues and his causing Basil to weep in fear, he ends the entire treatise with a very Lutheran-sounding promise. He says to Basil: “I believe . . . that through Christ who has called thee, and set thee over his own sheep, thou wilt obtain such assurance from this ministry as to receive me also, if I am in danger at the last day, into thine everlasting tabernacle” (83). He means to say that both he and Basil have hope in Christ. Christ has established the office in which they serve and He has set them in it. The sheep are His, not theirs, and ultimately they are His responsibility. There is hope and certainty even for those unfortunate souls who have been called to this office that they too would be received by grace. Ultimately this is the praise for which the preacher waits, not that of his hearers, but that of his Lord saying, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”