Preaching and the Word of God (Part 2)
This article is printed in the current issue of Gottesdienst (Trinity 2025). In the previous issue I began an expansion of a small section entitled “The Sermon” (82–88) in my book The New Testament in His Blood, published by Gottesdienst in 2010. What follows is a continuation of that treatment.
Attention to the Task of Preaching
Building on the concept that preaching is fundamentally a New Testament task arising from the realization that the Scriptures have reached their fulfillment and goal in the person and work of Jesus Christ, I wish to turn now to the application of that concept in the preparation and delivery of the sermon. Since we are now at the time of fulfillment, we begin with the awareness that the Gospel “in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men, as it is now revealed unto [Christ’s] holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit” (Eph 3:5).[1] Jesus’ command to His preachers to preach the gospel to every creature (Mark 16:15) compels us toward the inescapable conclusion that preaching is by His own design the primary instrument for the transmission of His Word. Preaching is the Holy Spirit’s central activity in the world today by which He makes known the fulfillment of the Scriptures in Christ.
The Spirit did this activity first through the Apostles, whose words recorded in the New Testament are recorded for us by direct inspiration. The inerrancy of the Bible is absolute and non-negotiable, which makes it the bulwark and divine hedge against heresy and falsehood. It also makes it a trustworthy guide for the man who wants to learn how to preach. If we can learn preaching method from reading the sermons of the Church’s great preachers, how much more can we learn it from the writings of the Apostles? They transformed the Old Testament by making its fulfillment in Christ known in words largely drawn from the word bank that the Old Testament is. Since the New Testament Epistles are essentially already commentaries on the life of Christ, applied to various churches and individuals, the preacher does well who realizes that this is the very same thing he is doing when he preaches to his own people. As I indicated in Part 1, the only difference between the Apostolic Epistles and the sermon is that an Epistle is the Word of God by virtue of its apostolicity as well as by its content, whereas a sermon is rightly called the Word of God if its content is consistent with the written revelation of God.
But the creative activity by which the sermon is composed is the very same kind of creative activity that must have taken place in the minds of the Apostles, the only difference being the Spirit’s guarantee that their mental processes would turn out infallibly. As far as we can tell, the Apostles were not recipients of direct revelation, as Moses or the Old Testament prophets were. The Spirit of God did not whisper in their ears, as it were. The process by which the selection of a replacement for Judas took place demonstrates as much. When Peter stood up in the midst of the disciples to lay out the need for Judas’ replacement, he laid out the necessary qualifications for a successor. First, he must be a male: “Of these men (ανδρων)” (Acts 1:21), and second, he must be someone who has “companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John, unto that same day that he was taken up from us” (Acts 1:21–22). The term “witness” is also used here in a very technical sense: “to be a witness with us of his resurrection” (Acts 1:22). That is, the selection will make this man an official “witness,” even though the second qualification is already that he be a witness in the primary sense of the term. This is what the Apostles were: divinely designated witnesses. We can ascertain that their words are their eyewitness testimonies of what they had seen and heard from Jesus, which in turn means that these testimonies will be the result of their remembering of those things. The agency of the Spirit in this is the guarantee that their remembering will be accurate and according to the will of God.
Preachers today are, of course, removed from having the memory banks that were in the minds of these witnesses, but they do have the words they wrote. Hence the preacher’s guarantee is different; it is dependent on these words of the witnesses. And by considering the Apostles’ words, we can glean something about their process of remembering. They did not simply recollect what they saw in Jesus and heard from Him; they used those recollections in their interpretation of what the Old Testament revelation gave them. Their words were theological; they were the result of their realization that the Old Testament’s fulfillment had been before their eyes. And here is where today’s preachers can enter the process. The preacher must also realize that the Old Testament is fulfilled in Christ and that he is now tasked with producing theological words just as the Apostles did, with the caveat that the preacher’s words are dependent on those Apostles’ recollections and words as their own guarantees.
Hence, for example, a Christological way of looking at Genesis 1 is requisite. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Gen 1:1). How did the Apostle John treat this? Christologically: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God” (John 1:1). How, we might ask, did John come up with that theological interpretation of Genesis 1:1? His mind was saturated with the reality that Christ, on whose very breast he had leaned, was the Incarnate God. His recollection of that reality was foremost in his thought process, and it informed his interpretation of Genesis 1:1. The Spirit guaranteed that this interpretation was accurate and divinely directed. So also, the preacher must strive to gain the same mental saturation as he looks at the same thing and even ventures to elaborate on it. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. St. John considers the meaning of “beginning” and elaborates according to what he sees in Christ. And this is precisely how the preacher must think as he considers the material on which he is to preach.
The language of faith
The very words the preacher uses to consider his material are also best drawn from the words and phrases of Scripture. This task comes more easily in direct proportion to how well he knows those words and phrases. How well does the preacher know the Scriptures? How familiar is he with the very words and phrases of them? The level of saturation in which his mind operates will be directly influential upon the words and phrases he uses to compose his own sentences and utterances.
St. Augustine was famous for this. His words were virtually dripping with the language of Scripture:
Do indeed the very heaven and the earth, which Thou hast made, and in which Thou hast made me, contain Thee? Or, as nothing could exist without Thee, doth whatever exists contain Thee? Why, then, do I ask Thee to come unto me, since I indeed exist, and could not exist if Thou wert not in me? Because I am not yet in hell, though Thou art even there; for ‘if I go down into hell Thou art there.’ I could not therefore exist, could not exist at all, O my God, unless thou wert in me.[2]
Here, Augustine’s prayer includes the creation narrative as well as parts of the 139th Psalm. The weaving of biblical references into the threads of his own writing—characteristic of all Augustine’s writing—seems effortless, due no doubt to his intimate familiarity with those references.
I stumbled onto this way of crafting sermons when I learned, during my doctoral studies at Marquette University, that it was common for bishops in the Middle Ages and prior to have the entire Psalter committed to memory, whereupon I took it upon myself to see if I could do this. I began personally praying a repertoire of psalms I knew and adding little by little to that repertoire, assigning tones to the psalms as an aid to memorization, until I had all 150 psalms completed. I would keep the psalms I knew in my weekly or bi-weekly routine so as not to forget any of what I had learned, usually reciting while engaged in other activities that didn’t require much brain power, like cleaning, getting ready in the morning, mowing the lawn, driving, etc. It took me ten years. What I soon began to realize, long before my repertoire was even very long, was that having psalms in mind so often during the day began to affect the way I thought. Soon after that, the language of preaching began to change for me as well, almost effortlessly. My personal study of the Scriptures continued, so that as the years drew on, my knowledge of the Scriptures expanded, and I began to realize that this kind of immersion in the Scriptures is a much more fruitful way to prepare for preaching than simply dedicating so many hours of each week to exegetical studies of one pericope or another. Sermon preparation involves knowing the whole Bible, and that is a lifelong enterprise. I hasten to add that I consider what I began to learn just a small fraction of what the Church’s Fathers had accomplished.
The learning of this enterprise must be guided by respect for the divine author of Scripture. The text of Scripture is not merely the transmitter of meaning, as though the meaning is to be sought behind it; rather, the text is where the divine is. Every aspect of the text is significant. The better one has familiarity with particular biblical phrases, the better he can be as a preacher. The preacher should avoid levity because Scripture does; he should use good grammar because Scripture does, and he should not mumble or stammer because Scripture doesn’t. In using and weaving biblical phrases and rhetorical devices into his own speech, there is no need to cite the biblical reference. Rather, the preacher should own it. The preacher is the one delivering the message; he is the herald. He should feel free to quote from the Bible as though it were his own phrase. The preacher must learn to plagiarize Scripture.
Preaching without written manuscript or notes
Among the several legitimate approaches to sermon preparation there is the kind that leads to the extemporaneous sermon, the sermon prepared without manuscript or notes. I realize this method is uncommon, but that doesn’t make it inferior. In fact, I believe it needs more consideration, for the benefits it provides. Preaching without a manuscript is manifestly an activity in which the mind is actively engaged in communicating while in the pulpit. While preaching written sermons is also a form of communication, it’s less direct. Simply put, he who preaches from a manuscript is reading something he has written already, while he who preaches without one is telling the people what he is thinking at that moment, and that benefit, I believe, is not missed on the hearers.
My customary way of preaching is to have nothing in the pulpit except perhaps a Bible. I developed this manner of preaching over the years of my career, beginning with the realization that this way of preaching seems to have been much more common, even in some areas standard, for hundreds of years of the Church’s existence. When I first learned that St. Augustine preached with no notes or manuscript, I was led to believe that there must be something about the method to commend itself. It’s one thing to have some evidence of preachers who prepared no notes; it’s quite another to be able to point to someone preaching this way who is regarded as one of the greatest preachers in all the history of Christendom. To my knowledge Martin Luther did not preach from a manuscript either. A great many of his sermons are available in written form, but that’s either because we find them in his postil, which he wrote for others to read in preparation for their preaching—which reading of his postils I have often done myself—or because they have been written by others who heard him preach. I came to the realization that the use of a manuscript is more of a recent phenomenon, historically speaking.
I was not really ready to preach with no manuscript until I was well into the discipline of employing the language of faith with which I had begun to saturate my memory, however. I used manuscripts for fully the first twelve or thirteen years of my ministry. I might not have needed that long, had I learned about extemporaneous preaching earlier in my career. So it’s prudent to offer a caution to the younger preacher who’d like to learn this: he should take his time and use a manuscript as long as he needs to.
Whether the preacher uses a manuscript or not, his delivery of the Word of God to his people ought to be the result of his theological training in that Word. As much as he learns to love the Word of God and become immersed in it, so much will he be in the practice note only of holding the Word sacred and gladly hearing and learning it, but also faithfully preaching it.
Simply put, the sermon is not preaching about the Word of God but preaching of the Word of God. That makes it a more daunting enterprise, and the preacher will do well to understand it that way. What the people of God are to hold sacred and gladly hear and learn are the very words that come from the preacher’s lips, and therefore it is imperative that he attend to the task with some trepidation, and with the same level of respect that the Third Commandment demands of the hearers. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, after all.
1 Scripture quotations in this essay are from the King James Version.
2 Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine (New York: Heritage Press, 1963), 2.