Reading for Preaching

The Preacher in Conversation with Storytellers, Biographers, Poets, and Journalists

Cornelius Plantinga

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781467439169
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christlicher Dienst

In Reading for Preaching Cornelius Plantinga makes a striking claim: preachers who read widely will most likely become better preachers.Plantinga -- himself a master preacher -- shows how a wide reading program can benefit preachers. First, he says, good reading generates delight, and the preacher who enters the world of delight goes with God. Good reading can also help tune the preacher's ear for language -- his or her primary tool. General reading can enlarge the preacher's sympathies for people and situations that she or he had previously known nothing about. And, above all, the preacher who reads widely has the chance to become wise.This beautifully written book will benefit not just preachers but anyone interested in the wisdom to be derived from reading.Works that Plantinga interacts with in the book include

• The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
• Enrique's Journey, by Sonia Nazario
• Silence, by Shusaku Endo
• "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" by Leo Tolstoy
• "Narcissus Leaves the Pool" by Joseph Epstein
• Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo

... and many more!

Chapter 1

Introduction to the Conversation

Let’s say that preaching is the presentation of God’s Word at a particular time to particular people by someone the church authorizes to do it. God’s Word in a sermon addresses people at many different levels and in many different times and seasons. But in every season Christian preaching centers where Christians think the Bible centers, namely on the reconciling work of Jesus Christ our Lord, especially through his death and resurrection.

Important questions cluster here including a central one: Does a Christian minister preach a text or preach the gospel? Suppose a text he’s considering doesn’t seem initially to have much gospel in it. It’s a warning about what God will do to the wicked. Or it’s a genealogy that seemingly ends in a historical cul-­de-­sac. It’s a zoological tour in Job or it’s a ripe old piece of wisdom: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” That is the KJV of Proverbs 22:6 and for many generations of English-­speaking believers it was a charter for parental discipline.

Preach a text or preach the gospel? Preach a sermon that could as easily have been preached in a synagogue? Or find the gospel somewhere in Proverbs 22:6, even though it doesn’t seem to be there? Or skip Proverbs 22:6? Or convert to Marcionism and skip the Old Testament altogether? Or what?

Here, of course, is where the Revised Common Lectionary can help the preacher in lots of instances, though in the case of Proverbs 22:6 the Lectionary detours right around it, listing only verses 1-2 and 8-9 for Proper 18 in Year B. So the preacher who wants to address this famous text might have to find his own gospel and epistle pairings for it. And he might end up pondering with his congregation that kindness and laughter in a home are generationally as contagious as abuse, and that they provide acoustics in which the gospel of grace will sound plausible and resonant, even to the children of preachers.

Preach a text or preach the gospel? Either way, I’m assuming that preachers are addressed by God’s Word just as much as the rest of us and that the power of a good sermon derives in part from its authenticity in this way. The preacher is not just a speaker of God’s Word, but also a hearer, and a hearer before he is a speaker. That’s why we can sometimes detect a sense of anticipation in our preacher as he reads Scripture in preparation for the morning sermon. He has a good idea of what God might be about to say.

Authentic preaching is personally committed preaching. The church’s pulpit is never disinterested because the preacher, like the rest of us, has a stake in the truth of the gospel. In fact, the sermon’s message ultimately comes only through, and not from, the preacher and it centers on the same God who sends it. “For we do not proclaim ourselves,” as St. Paul put it; “we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord” (2 Cor. 4:5).

Jesus Christ is the center, but there are lots of routes to the center in a good program of preaching, and they depend naturally on the text of the day and especially on what the text does.

Doing and Saying

Classically speaking, to preach a text is to do in other words what the text does. So, depending on the text, the preacher might inform people one Sunday and challenge them the next. He might praise, or lament, or reassure, and if he preaches the gospel he often reassures. If he has hold of a wise text he might counsel us from the pulpit. A faithful preacher will sometimes provoke us if his text is provocative enough. If his text is in the interrogative mood, maybe our preacher will follow suit by turning a big part of the sermon into a repeated question. “Who proved to be neighbor to this man?” “Lord, why are you so far away?” “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

In any case, the preacher’s job is not just to repeat a text, but also to outfit it for the hearing of a congregation. The preacher not only does in other words what the text does. He also says in other words what the text says, dressing it up or down, shaping and coloring and amplifying it in such a way that when people hear the preached text they hear God’s word to them.

Here the preacher’s use of illustrative material comes into play and here is the most obvious place where a congregation meets the preacher’s conquests in the field of reading. ­Whether the preacher quotes writers, paraphrases them, summarizes them, or merely alludes to them, this is how Flannery O’Conner shows up in a Sunday sermon, or William Manchester, the great biographer of Winston Churchill, or Jane Kenyon, a poet of heartbreaking poignancy, or a Pulitzer Prize–winning newspaper series by Clifford J. Levy and Ellen Barry on the impenetrable corruption of Russian public life and the violent suppression of journalists who report it.8

Pretty Sermons?

Almost from the start you might wonder whether we want preachers to be in conversation with the likes of poets and storytellers. Won’t this make preachers sound too lush for ordinary people? Preachers start conversing with poets and maybe lose their common touch. Their sermons start filling with allusions to literature in the manner, let’s say, of some of the American pulpit giants of the 1930s and 1940s. One of them, the New York preacher Paul Scherer would begin a sermon like this: “Synge once said, with cutting cynicism, that Life is a table-­d’hote in a rather dirty restaurant, with Time changing the plates before you have had enough to eat.”9

But who is Synge? Scherer assumed people knew the Irish playwright and poet John Millington Synge and that it was enough to refer to Synge by last name alone. In the same sermon Scherer refers to “Mr. Dreiser and Mr. Mencken and Mr. Shaw,” assuming that these, too, are household names.

If preachers converse with storytellers and poets won’t we get literary sermons that assume congregational knowledge of such literary types as Irish poets and playwrights? And once our preacher starts conversing with poets, what stops him from quoting them? What if our preacher quotes from the The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam?

Ah Love! Could you and I with fate conspire
To grasp this sorry state of things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits — and then
Remould it nearer to the heart’s desire.10

Before he started conversing with Khayyam, our plain-­spoken preacher would say to us, “Wouldn’t you like to make life go the way you want?” Now he says, “Ah Love! Could you and I with fate conspire. . . .” Once upon a time our preacher would say that the women came to Jesus’ tomb early in the morning. But now he says that the women came to the tomb just as “the dawn was blushing pink behind the hills of Moab.” He’s been reading poetry and the sermons of Peter Marshall and they have taken him out where the rest of us do not go.

I believe our enthusiasm for his journey would be mild.

So let me say at the outset that in recommending a program of general reading for preachers I will not be asking for a recrudescence of what Reinhold Niebuhr called “pretty sermons.” Niebuhr appears to have had in mind not just poetry-­laden sermons, or florid sermons, but any sermons of highly refined rhetoric. Niebuhr said he wanted to keep his sermons “rough,” instead, “just to escape the temptation of degenerating into an elocutionist.”11 Writing in his diary in Detroit, Niebuhr recorded some of the hard edges of the labor and racial issues he saw every day. No wonder he had little use for high rhetorical art in the pulpit. It must have seemed to him wholly irrelevant to his context.

I take Niebuhr’s point and am grateful for it. This should not, in my judgment, silence preachers who sometimes quote fiction or who can turn phrases of their own when necessary. Everything depends on whether the quotations and phrases serve to make the gospel of grace sound more urgently alive or whether they serve merely to make the sermon more aesthetically pleasing. When the sermon is over, does the preacher want hearers to say “Thanks be to God!” or “How lovely that was, really”?

In recommending reading for preaching, my interest is not particularly aesthetic. I am as blessed as anyone by listening to a lovely sermon once in a while, especially when it is an expansion of a lovely text such as Psalm 103. But my agenda here lies elsewhere. I am convinced that the preacher whose work is supported by wide exposure to great writing will be significantly improved by it, including in the ways I mentioned in the Preface. Here I will add two more ways. The reading preacher will discover that great writers know the road to the human heart and, once at their destination, know how to move our hearts. To the preacher, knowledge of what stirs human hearts is golden and not at all because heart stirring is a good project all by itself. After all, some hearts can be stirred by masochistic sex or sentimental dreck. No, the preacher wants his heart stirred because he will then have some idea how the power and beauty of the gospel might be presented so that the hearts of his brothers and sisters may also be moved.

Bridging the Gap

Further, writers know their way around the world. They may enlarge the preacher’s sympathies for people and situations he had previously known nothing about. If I am a parochial West Michigan Calvinist (Calvinists in cloudy West Michigan basically know how to experience gloom and how to cause it) I want authors to take me away. As citizens of the Kingdom of God that embraces people of “every nation . . . all tribes and peoples and languages” (Rev. 7:9), preachers want their reading to help bridge the circumstantial gap between themselves and people whose lives may otherwise be unfamiliar. As Adrian Piper writes in a discerning essay, if you say as a man that you cannot imagine what it would be like for a woman to be raped, or that as a white person in a majority white culture you cannot imagine what it’s like to be racially taunted, then maybe you are humble and realistic. Maybe you know the presumption expressed by anything in the neighborhood of “I know just how you feel.”

On the other hand, maybe your ignorance is due only to a cool lack of interest. Maybe you do not care to read literature, view paintings, listen to requiems, or partake of any other “literary and artistic products designed precisely to instruct us” about the exigencies of lives other than our own. Ignorance of the literary and fine arts is thus a serious sin of omission.12 If so, perhaps purgatory, in a fine blending of judgment and grace, will include massive remedial instruction in the arts. The point is that identification with others may be partly instinctive, but it is also partly deliberate — and thus dependent upon an educated attempt to stretch our sympathies across circumstantial distance.

Think in this connection of a novel like Shusaku Endo’s Silence,13 which asks whether, under the pressure of sin, love can take unthinkable forms — ones that look a lot lik...