Preaching is the oral communication of the written word of God to men. This article shows the need for such revelation of God, and discusses how the preacher stands in relation to that word.

Source: Diakonia, 1995. 4 pages.

The Genius of Preaching

1. Introduction: Definition of Terms Employed🔗

It may not be amiss at the outset to define the terms of the subject at hand. Let us put the subject in propositional form. It then reads: The genius of preaching is pastoral.

"Genius" in the sense herein employed is: The distinguishing character, bent, tendency, the peculiar character, or constitution of something; for in­stance, of an institution, a movement, a nation, a race, or a religion. The "genius of preaching," then is the essential principle, the dominant feature of that New Testament ecclesiastical institution.

2. The Distinguishing Character of Preaching must be Understood🔗

It is manifest that to understand and practice preach­ing at all, we must know its genius. If we miscon­strue preaching that is, conceive of it other than it is, we shall most certainly not preach aright and hence not exercise this function to the glory of God and the best interest of His Church. The genius (that is, the typical character of preaching) is its essence as dis­tinct from its form. For example, the essence of man is his soul but man's body is a form in terms of matter that the soul assumes; or we may say that the essence of the soul is the person possessing the soul and the general psychic structure is the form of the distinc­tive feature of the soul that we call personality or the ego. We preachers are in danger of being so occupied with the body and form of preaching that the soul or essence of preaching escapes us. A course in homi­letics is likely to go no further than the body of preaching. More philosophically, the genius of preaching is the divine idea which at first is tran­scendent as dwelling in the infinite mind of God from everlasting, and which then crystallizes into fact historically and becomes immanent in creation.

It is the genius of preaching, particularly, with which we are dealing in this subject. Every distinc­tive thing has its own genius. But this genius is the center, the core, of a complex. So preaching too is a combination of several features. In defining preach­ing we take account of its totality. What is preaching viewed thus?

3. Preaching is Divine Revelation Mediated Orally by man from God's written Word🔗

Preaching is the oral publication by the Church of the written Word of God to the saved for their edifica­tion and to the lost for their salvation (covenantal and missionary preaching). Such preaching, as a communication of truth from God to man through the instrumentality of the Church, proceeds upon a series of assumptions. It assumes that God, whose Word is proclaimed, is a personal being after a Trinitarian pattern; one of the three persons being, and hence called, the Logos. God engages in self-conscious thought. God not only thinks in and for Himself (meditation, as it were), but He communi­cates His thought to creatures whom He has made capable of receiving His word. This we call "revela­tion." This extraneous revelation of God is based upon His intraneous revelation. Being three persons and not one, and the three persons being distinct none the less for being one in essence and substance, God is self-communicative; not merely as man who in self-consciousness is himself the object upon which he fixes his mind in his capacity of subject, but in the sense of distinct persons exercising communion among themselves.

God, who reveals Himself to man, has made man in His image. Two facts follow from this cardi­nal fact. Man is a self-conscious creature who can not only receive God's revelation, but can relate it to himself as an object of contemplation. Being God's affinity as His likeness, man can understand God and can assimilate God's Word to the content of his own mind apperceptively. God and man move, rela­tively, in the same universe of discourse.

As in the case of God absolutely, so in the case of man relatively, essence crystallizes its existence, and existence takes on the form of life, and life functions fundamentally as light and light precipitates into knowledge, and knowledge is blessedness. Note what John 17:3 and Scripture in general have to say on the knowledge of God as man's greatest treasure. Now God is self-sufficient in the realm of all these several categories — essence, existence, life, light, knowledge, blessedness (Ps. 36:9; Acts 17:25; Rom. 11:35). But man as the creature of God is absolutely dependent in all of them. He would not exist and be what he is if it were not for creation and providence, as a continuation of the creature. Neither would he dwell in the light and so attain unto blessedness if it were not for revelation. "In thy light we see light" (Ps. 36:9), and "Because of thy will they were, and were created" (Rev. 4:11).

All this is but the broad and general background of preaching. We must now take up the particularities of preaching as such. Reference should be made to two matters at least. Preaching is divine revelation mediated by man after a definite fashion. Before sin, God communicated with man immediately. We have reason to believe that if sin had not intervened, God's dealings with all men alike would always have been only direct (Jer. 31:34). Now that sin has come and redemption is possible only through Christ, the incarnate Son of God, salvation as inclusive of all good things will be forever mediated by Christ (John 14:6). But even so, Christ, though Himself also man, is as to His person the second person of the Trinity. But in the history of special (that is, redemptive revelation), we observe that the institution of proph­ecy soon arose, and that increasingly God spoke to but few men, and through these few men, to the multitudes. Exodus 20:19 and Hebrews 1:1 are ex­tremely interesting in this connection. We note that for a while God spoke only through His Son; but soon after, God resumed the mediate way of speak­ing through men. He has continued to do so to this day; and He will continue to do so till the end of time. For the apostles and prophets were organs of revela­tion; and after their demise as well as before, God engaged and still engages uninspired men to pro­claim His written revelation. The intermediary of the pulpit, then, is due to sin, and is a part of the machinery of redemption. And this redemptive con­notation of preaching is the index of the institution to such an extent, that preaching, as it is, fits in the picture only of a world in which sin and grace are the factors of history. The genius of preaching cannot fail to be governed by this fundamental fact.

Again, preaching is not only man's, instead of God's, speaking the divine Word, but it is the proc­lamation by word of mouth of God's written instead of His spoken Word. The Old Testament and the New Testament organs of revelation came forward, saying: "Thus saith the Lord." The Lord had spoken to thee, be it in diverse manners and by diverse persons. But the New Testament preacher must say, if he would speak strictly: "Thus has the Lord writ­ten." It will be well to keep this distinction in mind and to impress upon all who hear us speak to them that the source of our message is in actual fact the Book of the Lord. Compare Isaiah 34:16: "Seek ye out of the book of the Lord and read." Isaiah 8:20: "And there was delivered unto him (Jesus) the book of the prophet Isaiah … And he opened the book, (read from it) and closed it and gave it back to the attendant…"

4. The Word of God is the Special Revelation necessary because of Sin🔗

Now, the Book of the Lord is the special revelation of God which sin made necessary and grace brought into existence, and which is static in the literary deposit of the Scriptures. The reason why the dy­namic revelation of God unto salvation has crystal­lized into a static book, is closely related to a fact well known, but perhaps not recognized sufficiently. The fact is this: If sin had not come into the world and the Cross would not have become necessary, there would have been no creative acts in the course of time. The favor of God, spiritual life, the blessings of the cov­enant (of works) would have been on deposit, so to say, with God from the outset and would have steadily flowed from heaven to earth, out of the eternal into the temporal world, like a stream having its headwaters in the mountains. But after the fall, either death and all its woes would issue from the judgment-seat of God in an endless stream, or salva­tion would have to be wrought (created, so to say) by extra-historical acts at one time or another. These redemptive acts are historical indeed in the sense that they are integrated organically in the processes of history (contrary to the idealistic philosophy of Barth's supra-historism). But they are not historical in the sense in which all other facts that transpire are historical. These latter facts, one and all, were further developments of principles and powers already resi­dent in history. But the facts of history to which the salvation of God's people is due, take their rise from factors that are introduced abruptly and supernatu­rally from without, from above, from eternity in heaven.

This will be immediately apparent if we call to mind that these redemptive acts center in the person and work of Christ on earth; particularly so, if we remember that Christ, as the Son of God, came into the world from the realm of glory, and that it is this divine person become man, whose incarnation, aton­ing death, justifying resurrection, royal ascent, and outpouring of His spirit, constitute the creative fac­tors to which salvation is due.

It is these facts which are central, not only to the history of the kingdom of God's grace, but manifestly, also to the Holy Scriptures as the literary record of that kingdom and its progress through the earth and the ages of time. That record is the subject matter of preaching. That is what Paul means in 1 Corinthians 2:2, and what Scripture means by "To Euaggelion." It is the fulfillment in Christ of God's Old Testament promises to His people (Rom. 1:1, 2).

5. The Preacher must be in Perfect Harmony with the Pastoral Word of God🔗

The term, "preaching," however, is not to be equated simply with "preachment." As observed above, preaching is the oral communication of that written Word of God to men. Surely, that written Word of God is pastoral through and through in its message, spirit, and purpose. Therefore the spoken proclama­tion of that pastoral Word calls for an agent who is himself in heart and mind in perfect harmony with the pastoral Scriptures which he must preach. He should not be a mere speaking tube or trumpet or phono­graph record, reproducing perfectly but mechani­cally the message of God's written Word. Before one can preach in the true sense of the term, he must have taken up in his heart the message that he must bring and not merely have lodged it in his mind and laid it upon his tongue. He must not merely transmit God's written Word; he must reproduce it in the pregnant sense of that term. Scripture must have so coalesced apperceptively with the mass of the intellectual de­posit of his mind that it has to all practical purposes identified itself with his own mental possessions. And since the Scriptures, as the self-revelation of God in Christ unto salvation, deal with the absolutely transcendent God, with His eternal verities, with His Holy purposes, with the eternal order of things in a word, with spiritualities as distinguished from temporalities — a man who would qualify as preacher must himself be initiated into the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven and thus not merely know them cognitively, but experience them spiritually.

The preacher worthy of the name, the preacher after God's heart, must proclaim the written Word of God indeed; but he must preach it — and that pre­cisely makes it preaching — as it has come to light in his own heart and mind. By the way, this is the point of Phillips Brooks' Lectures on Preaching, and the point is well taken. Or, to put it more biblically, that is the witnessing element of preaching. To be a witness of the Gospel, the preacher must not only have read in the Scriptures what he is going to say, but he must be able to say that the truth of the Scriptures has become a living part of his own per­sonal experience in a more or less direct sense ac­cording to the nature of the truth concerned. Let it never be forgotten — and least of all by preachers — that preaching belongs, essentially and fundamen­tally, to the category of revelation on the score of the relation of the matter revealed and the person revealing it. In the absolute (that is, divine) sense, God reveals to man the thoughts of His heart and by that token reveals Himself. He does not merely tell us certain things He knows. To reveal is not only to relate: it is to communicate one's own mind and heart and therein oneself. Christ as the mediator, particularly in His prophetic capacity, indeed speaks the words of His Father; but these words of His Father are His food and drink, he assimilates them, they become a piece and parcel of Himself. (Com­pare Ps. 40:8-10). As the Father's Son, He was Him­self God equal with the Father. In so far Christ revealed Himself when He revealed the Father. He too moves on an absolute plane.

When we come to the sub-messianic organs of revelation (the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament apostles and prophets), we have descended from the absolute, that is, the divine, to the relative, that is, the human level, it is true, but the general principles concerned hold; namely, that what these men declare and reveal has its proximate, though of course not its remote, source in their own inward realities. To put it in the symbolic fashion of Revelation 10:8-11, these men first ate the book con­taining God's revelation, and then they prophesied. Analogous to God's and Christ's speaking, they spoke the thought of their hearts. This assimilation of the thoughts of God's mind and heart to their own mental deposits explains why the several prophets and apostles, in spite of the virtual identity of their common message, were so highly diversified in respect to language, approach, emphasis, and use.

Now these prophets and apostles were organs of revelation such as we ministers of today are not. The difference between them and us is a twofold one. First, they received their message immediately from God. In some way he spoke to them so that they could say: "Thus saith the Lord." And second, to them God spoke things that had not been revealed before, at least not as they are now revealed. We ministers of the post-apostolic age do not hear God speak to us. We only read what God has caused to be written. And since Scripture is for us complete, nothing we can ever say is in the nature of an addition to the deposit of revelation.

But — and here it appears that even we present-day ministers are in the line of revelatory tradition — we can only preach properly if what God once spoke to prophets and apostles and has since made inscripturate, has first integrated itself organically through the work of the Holy Spirit in our minds and hearts. It must become a piece and parcel of our spiritual selves; so that, no matter to whom, when or wheresoever, we preach, the sermon comes, yea verily from the Scripture, but via our enlightened minds and believing hearts. Preaching, in this way, is looking forward, telling men what God has de­clared in His written Word; and it is looking back­ward, attesting or, as John 3:33 puts it, sealing that God is true when He speaks. As we shall have occasion to say later on, even God's people to whom we preach, do not merely hear and remember the Word of God which we preach, but eat and appro­priate it and thus lay it up (hide it) in their hearts (Ps. 119:11).

It is now clear that preaching, whose genius is pastoral, is a dual matter. It has reference to the sermon preached and to the person preaching it. It follows obviously that, if preaching be essentially a pastoral affair, not only the sermon must have a pastoral quality, but the preacher too must have a pastoral spirit; he must also be a pastoral man. Hire­lings and strangers may conceivably go through the routine of shepherding a flock, but shepherds they are not; and time and tests will tell the story.

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