The Trouble with "Truth through Personality"

Phillips Brooks, Incarnation, and the Evangelical Boundaries of Preaching

Charles W. Fuller

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781608994038
  9781498256049
• eBook ISBN:
  9781498272551
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

In an era when the cult of personality has overtaken the task of preaching, Charles W. Fuller offers an engaging query into the necessary boundaries between the person of the preacher and the message preached. By thoroughly evaluating Phillips Brooks's classic "truth through personality" definition of preaching, Fuller brings to light a substantial error that remains in contemporary homiletics: namely, the tenuous correlation between Christ's incarnation and Christian preaching. Ultimately, Fuller asserts a sound evangelical framework for preaching on revelational, ontological, rhetorical, and teleological grounds. Preachers who desire to construct pulpit practice upon a robust evangelical foundation will benefit from Fuller's contribution.

1

“Truth through Personality”: Legacy and Problem

During his Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale University in 1877, Phillips Brooks stated:

Preaching is the communication of truth by man to man. It has in it two essential elements, truth and personality. Neither of those can it spare and still be preaching. . . . [P]reaching is the bringing of truth through personality.1

Brooks’s concept has been hailed as “perhaps the most famous definition of preaching found anywhere in American homiletical literature.”2 The enduring fame of Brooks’s definition flows largely from the equally lasting renown of his preaching. While he served as the pastor of Boston’s Trinity Church and later as bishop over the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, Brooks’s sermons left strong—almost mesmerizing—impressions on listeners. In 1874, John Tulloch, Principal of St. Mary’s College in Aberdeen, visited Boston. After interacting with local elites like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, he attended a worship service to hear Brooks preach. He immediately wrote to his wife:

I have just heard the most remarkable sermon I have ever heard in my life . . . from Mr. Phillips Brooks. . . . I have never heard preaching like it, and you know how slow I am to praise preachers. So much thought and so much life combined; such a reach of mind, such a depth and insight of soul. I was electrified. I could have got up and shouted.3

Tulloch’s sentiments represent the consensus response to Brooks of his contemporaries. Alexander V. G. Allen, Brooks’s most thorough biographer, contends that newspapers across the nation displayed a “singular unanimity of utterance” concerning the public’s high regard for Brooks, and suggests that a study of his impact on the public psyche would “in itself possess high value as a revelation of some reserved power in the Christian ministry, never so manifested before.”4 Allowing for Allen’s exaggerative language, the facts of Brooks’s ministry speak clearly enough. His preaching not only filled Trinity Church on Sundays, but throngs of Boston’s businessmen and intelligentsia packed the building to hear his lunchtime sermons on weekdays.5 When Brooks died in 1893, the city came to a standstill on the day of his funeral as thousands clogged the streets around Trinity Church, and nearly all businesses—including the stock exchange—suspended activities. Memorial services were held as far away as California and England. Within a week of his death, the effort to build a statue in his likeness brought in so much money that other memorial projects had to be started, and some donations were turned away.6 The Reverend Brooks was so revered that some even suggested he was, more than any other man, “Christ incarnate.”7 On January 23, 1903, at a ceremony marking the tenth anniversary of his passing, Brooks’s successor, William Lawrence, spoke no hyperbole by saying that the impact of Brooks

passed over all denominational boundaries. Thousands outside his own church looked to him as their religious interpreter and pastor. . . . No one church, therefore, can claim him as exclusively hers. He belonged to the Christian world of the nineteenth century.8

With their colossal and far-reaching influence, Brooks’s lectures at Yale were to many nothing less than the unveiling of a homiletical hero’s secrets of success. When Brooks received the invitation to deliver the Beecher lectures, he began pondering “the principles” by which he had “only half consciously been living and working for many years.”9 As the lectures came to pass, the secrets—or principles—became clear and could be summarized in one simple phrase: truth through personality. Expressed by a highly celebrated master of the pulpit, this grammatically economical, yet conceptually profound, definition of preaching moved quickly to the forefront of homiletics and was widely discussed throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century and beyond.10 Even after the passing of more than a century, in a preface to a 1989 reprint of the Lectures on Preaching, Warren Wiersbe makes the audacious claim that “everything useful written on homiletics in America . . . is in one way or another a footnote to Phillips Brooks.”11

“Truth through Personality” and Its Legacy among Evangelicals

Besides Brooks’s immense ministerial popularity, another significant contributor to the remarkable durability of his concept of preaching arises from a particular convenience that it provides to evangelicals in their attempts to define preaching. Christian preaching involves a complex multiplicity of interrelated theological facets, rendering the event notoriously difficult to classify. For its ground, God himself ordains preaching as an ecclesiological function entrusted to the elders (1 Tim 3:2; 5:17), thereby making preaching “a gracious creation of God and a central part of His revealed will for the church.”12 Certainly, “preach the Word” (2 Tim 4:2) is the inescapable imperative for every local church and a distinguishing mark of the true church.13 For its purpose, preaching plays an irreplaceable role in God’s redemptive plan to bring sinners to salvation and subsequently to lead saints into sanctification. “We proclaim Him,” writes the apostle Paul, “admonishing every man and teaching every man with all wisdom, so that we may present every man complete in Christ” (Col 1:28). Sidney Greidanus speaks for the majority when he says, “God uses . . . preaching to bring his salvation to people today, to build his church, to bring in his kingdom.”14 Moreover, few would argue against the maxim that

God uses preaching to present His saints complete in Christ. How are Christians going to grow? How are they going to be matured? How is the process of Holy Spirit-directed sanctification going to be seen in them? It is going to occur by the preaching of the Word.15

For its mode, preaching, while not itself revelation, falls in line with the form of special revelation in that God communicates his Word by means of human agency. John Calvin sums up the matter nicely in claiming that “because [God] does not dwell among us in visible presence, we have said that he uses the ministry of men to declare openly his will to us by mouth, as sort of delegated work, not by transferring to them his right and honor, but only that through their mouths he may do his own work—just as a workman uses a tool to do his work.”16 Preaching cannot, therefore, be replicated or characterized in purel...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: “Truth through Personality”: Legacy and Problem
• Chapter 2: The Rise of Romanticism
• Chapter 3: Incarnation and Preaching
• Chapter 4: Out of Bounds
• Chapter 5: “Truth through Personality”: An Axiom Reconstructed
• Chapter 6: Summary and Conclusion
• Bibliography