Preaching and Adjectives by David Buttrick

 
Years back, I heard a sermon that was loaded with adjectives; the adjectives were something like “sermon bling.”  Afterwards, an old-school elder came up to me and said something like this: “Too many adjectives in a sermon is a sin.”  Then he walked away.  (I’ll never forget it!)  That was his way of saying what Buttrick says here.

“Orally, he weakest word we use is an adjective.  If you could tape-record a day’s conversation, you would discover that you converse in verbs and nouns and that you employ few adjectives.  You will use adjectives only when you must use them; you will almost never use them for effect.  The rule holds for preaching: unnecessary adjectives will cloy language, while an occasional necessary or ‘right’ adjective will help.  …If we use adjectives, they must be either necessary (to define or distinguish) or well chosen.  For the most part, however, we will speak without adjectives.  Many preachers add too many adjectives which do little but cloy. …Emotional force in preaching is produced by syntax and metaphor, but seldom by adjectival elaboration.”

“So, the rule can be stated: If you must use an adjective, find the right one, otherwise avoid adjectives in public address.  Verbs and nouns are strong; adverbs have some power; but orally, adjectives are weak words.”

David Buttrick, Homiletic, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 218-19.  I may have mentioned it here before, but serious “homileticians” really should read this book, even if they don’t fully agree with all that Buttrick says.  It is a serious and well-written book for preachers. 

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Conversations with Barth on Preaching

“Preaching is utterly dependent upon a God who raises the dead and who calls some people to tell about it.  If there is no God to make the preacher’s sermon ‘work,’ then the preacher is the greatest of fools.  The messenger is disposable by, dispensable to, and derivative of the message.  We have this treasure in earthen vessels.  The treasure is more interesting and powerful than the vessel.  Today’s preachers find themselves in a vulnerable, dangerous situation when a pleasing personality is more important to a congregation than a truthful one, when charm and wit, warmth and ‘love’ become more valued in a preacher than being a person who is willing to stand up and speak the truth as God has given it.  The truth that is communicated through personality (Phillips Brooks’s definition of preaching) is so much more important than the personality.”  [William Willimon, Conversations with Barth on Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006), 243-4.]

Amen.  It is a “dangerous situation” for the preacher and his congregation: he may be tempted to preach what they want to hear and they may be tempted to judge him according to his personality rather than the message he brings.  Willimon knocks it out: the vessel is a bunch of dirty clay compared to the treasure that comes from his mouth.  Mess this up and the gospel gets shoved off to the side.

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Reading, Literature, and Preaching

I recently finished T. D. Gordon’s fine little booklet, Why Johnny Can’t Preach (which I’ll blog on as soon as I’m out of my deep homiletic depression!) and found myself reading Leland Ryken’s chapter in Preach the Word: Essays on Expository Preaching In Honor of R. Kent Hughes ed. Ryken & Wilson (Wheaton: Crossway, 2007).  Ryken’s chapter is on – as you may have guessed – the literary aspect of the Bible.  The title of the chapter is “The Bible as Literature and Expository Preaching;” it opened with this awesome Luther quote.

“I am persuaded that without knowledge of literature pure theology cannot at all endure, just as heretofore, when letters [literature] have declined and lain prostrate, theology too, has wretchedly fallen and lain prostrate; nay, I see that there has never been a great revelation of the Word of God unless he has first prepared the way by the rise and prosperity of languages and letters, as though they were John the Baptists….  Certainly it is my desire that  there shall be as many poets and rhetoricians as possible, because I see that by these studies, as by no other means, people are wonderfully fitted for the grasping of sacred truth and for handling it skillfully and happily” (p. 38).

Certainly T. D. Gordon would say a strong Yes! Amen! to that quote (as Gordon well laments that so many preachers are “literarily” illiterate, so to speak – but again, more on that later).  Ryken goes on in this chapter to explain the literary basics of the Bible and how they relate to preaching Scripture.  He exhorts the preacher not to skip over the narrative (characters, tension, foils, story-line, climax, etc) to get to the doctrine, for the Bible is not simply divinely deposited propositional dogma.  Even the “literary forms of the Bible have been inspired by God and need to be granted an importance congruent with that inspiration” (p. 53).  Of course there are doctrinal truths in Scripture, but sometimes they are conveyed in story form, so the stories can’t be shucked to find the “kernel” of doctrine.  Both are inspired and should be preached!

I’ll say more on this some other day, but first, a note on the book, Preach the Word.  I’m only half way through it, but so far so good.  Other contributors include Paul House, J. I. Packer, Philip Ryken, Don Carson, along with other pastors and scholars.  The topics range from interpretation, homiletical methods, biblical/historical paradigms, contemporary challenges, and homiletical training.  This would be a good gift for a graduating seminarian – or, of course, your pastor.  We pastors need ongoing training in homiletics!

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Barth: Shut Up, Preacher!

Warning: more furniture is about to be thrown around!

“Preaching that is in conformity with scripture will be modest.  Scripture itself enjoins us to be modest, and preachers ought to behave modestly and not to push themselves into the limelight with their more or less good qualities.  …The [preacher] must step back with any personal views or spirituality.  Much might be made of strength of of the power of speech or thought.  ….But these things are not the gospel.  The gospel is not in our thoughts or hearts; it is in scripture.”  [I take Barth there - in the context of this book and others - to mean this: "Our warm, fuzzy, cute little sentiments about life by which we try to 'connect' with people on the pulpit are not good news."]

“The dearest habits and best insights that I have – I must give them all up before listening.  I must not use them to protect myself against the breakthrough of a knowledge that derives from Scripture.  Again and again I must let myself be contradicted.  I must let myself be loosened up.  I must be able to surrender everything.”

In other words, if I may add, the preacher can quickly get in the way of the text when he studies and preaches.  In Luther’s terms, the preacher cannot master the text; the text masters him.  This is the war that happens in the pastor’s study!  Barth says in the above context: “Even after the most arduous study, we still do not really know what to say.”

Perhaps we’re running right into one of those quaking barthian paradoxes: sometimes preachers just have to shut up and preach – when they’re preaching!

Quotes taken from Karl Barth, Homiletics, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991), 77-8.

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Willimon on Barth II

This should be in the library of everyone interested in homiletics, Willimon, or Barth: William Willimon, Conversations with Barth on Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006).  Even if you’re not a Barthian, this book will “get” you; I’m not, and it did.  Or, as Flannery O’ Conner put it, “I like old Barth: he throws the furniture around.”  This book will throw your furniture around!

Here are two of Willimon’s points that summarize Barth’s theological preaching:

“Preaching is the proclamation of the Word of God.  It is neither moral exhortation (the gospel is demeaned and our human situation is denied by reducing preaching to moral exhortation), nor a heartfelt expression of the preacher’s personal piety (who cares?).  Preaching is not a skillful representation of God’s word (the task of theology).  Preaching is not, despite the history of rhetoric, primarily a matter of persuasive speaking.  Persuasive speaking is God’s problem, not ours.  A sower goes out to sow and, without careful preparation or planning, just begins slinging seed.  Of course, in such effusive sowing, there is much waste, for this sower seems determined to overwhelm the world with words.  In fact, most of the seed falls onto infertile ground.  It is up to God to give the growth, not us preachers.”

“The hearing of God’s word is not an example of democracy in action, with the hearers making savvy choices in what they will accept or reject.  Preaching is dramatic, effusive presentation of God’s word, so that God’s word is heard through it, if God wills.  ‘Proclamation is human speech in and by which God himself speaks like a king through the mouth of his herald’ (CD, I.1 p 52).  Whether God speaks through preaching is God’s free choice: ‘When and where it pleases God, it is God’s own Word,’ but preaching is nevertheless that dangerous, confident adventure of letting God be God in the church” (Ibid., 72).

Another point Willimon deduces from Barth’s theological homiletics is “that to be a Christian communicator is to be engaged in a struggle, a conflict, a kind of war.”  We are not preaching to a Christian culture.  “Every Sunday we are issuing a declaration of war against some of the most cherished idols of our culture.  The world in which we live is adamantly set against the gospel – and always has been.”  “The Bible is full of violence and war, for there was something about Jesus that brought out the worst in the world” (Willimon, p. 111-112).

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Willimon On Barth

Here’s a unique and wonderfully interesting mix: Willimon writing a homiletics book with a purposeful Barthian bent.  If you’re a preacher, you’ll love this book but also probably hate it.  One page you’ll be underlining or highlighting whole paragraphs, the next you’ll probably write question marks beside every line.

Let me just throw out a few quotes.

“Barth cautioned that the Bible has little interest in most of the questions that people bring to their study of the Bible.  People have been conditioned to think that it is their task to approach the Bible with the pressing questions of the day, there seeking moral guidance.  Scripture, however, has the much greater calling of announcing the new world of God’s reign.  In various ways, and in many voices, scripture is about God’s glory and sovereignty.  The Bible is not about how we might climb up to God, Barth explained; scripture is always about how God has miraculously, triumphantly descended to us.  [Writing against Schleiermacher, Barth said] ‘And our fathers were right when they guarded warily against being drawn out upon the shaky scaffolding of religious self-expression.’”

“‘The church comes into being because God’s word is spoken.  The church does not constitute the Word but is constituted by the Word.’  Hence, her subservience to the Word, and the Word alone, gives the church a marvelous freedom from all earthly sources of revelation, including Adolf Hitler.  For our purposes let us note that Barth’s chief opposition to Hitler, and Barth’s main motivation in writing, was his insistence that the church must be free to preach what the church is told by God to preach.  Barth’s objections to the Nazis were first of all a matter of homiletics.”

Here’s Willimon doing a bit of a side bar on story/history: Barth criticized Strauss (reconstructing the life of the ‘real’ Jesus): Strauss “gave us a Jesus reduced in stature and hammered into shape, perhaps, a Jesus who is perhaps a trifle groomed, domesticated, and made practicable when compared with all the strange things which are said of him in the texts. …Though some of the Jesus Seminar think of themselves as ‘progressive Christians,’ they are really reactionary in their rendition of the new California, upper-middle-class accommodationist Jesus.”

I’ll probably return to this book from time to time here on our blog, but for now let me just say that though I certainly disagree with some major aspects of Barth’s theology, I deeply appreciate this and other similar books.  Read it!

Quotes taken from William Willimon, Conversations with Barth on Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon, 2006), 15, 21, and 37.

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Vos: Pressing Home the Gospel

I’m aware of the discussions and disagreements on preaching and application.  While application can be moralistic and law-heavy, true application in a sermon reflects gratitude and piety that is gospel centered.  Geerhardus Vos’ chapel sermons, Grace and Glory, are perfect examples.  I’m thinking of all of them, but especially the one which Machen called “one of the finest expository sermons I’ve ever heard,” Vos’ sermon on John 20.16 titled “Rabboni.”

The context of John 20 is Jesus’ resurrection – the empty tomb and Peter, John, and Mary Magadalene going there to see.  Peter and John come and go, but Mary lingers, convinced someone has taken Jesus’ body – so she sobs and cries with a deeply broken faith and heart.  Here are some excerpts that reflect true application of this gospel passage.

“Mary’s soul [is] the mirror of saving faith pure and simple.  And because she was animated by this fundamental spiritual impulse, drawing her to the Savior more irresistibly than affection or sorrow could have done, therefore she could not but continue seeking him, even though unable for the moment to do anything else than weep near his empty tomb.”

“In vain does Calvary proclaim that the Lord is dead, in vain does the tomb declare that he has been buried, in vain does the absent stone suggest that they have taken him away-this threefold witness will not convince Mary that he has gone out of her life forever.  And why?  Because in the depth of her being there was an even more emphatic witness which would not be silenced but continue to protest that she must receive him back, since he is her Savior.  Contact, communion with Christ had become to her the vital breath of her spiritual life; to admit that the conditions rendering this possible had ceased to exist would have meant for her to deny salvation itself.”

“Once given the intimate bond of faith between a sinner and his Savior, there can be no death to such a relationship.  …To her [Mary's] faith he was the Conqueror over death long before he issued from the grave.”

“Ultimately, stripped of all accidentals, the question resolves itself into this: What does Christ mean for us?  For what do we need him?  If we have learned to know ourselves guilty sinners, destitute of all hope and life in ourselves, and if we have experienced that from him came to us pardon, peace and strength, will it not sound like mockery in our ears if somebody tells us that it does not matter whether Jesus rose from the dead on the third day?”

“If only we will take the courage to fix our gaze deliberately upon the stern countenance of grief, and enter unafraid into the darkest recesses of our trouble, we shall find the terror gone, because the Lord has been there [in the grave] before us, and, coming out again, has left the place transfigured, making out of it by the grace of his resurrection a house of life, the very gate of heaven.”

“It happened all in a moment, and by a simple word, and yet in this one moment Mary’s world was changed for her. …[Jesus' speech] is speech the force of which can only be felt.  And it will be felt by us in proportion as we clearly remember some occasion when the Lord spake a similar word to us and drew from us a similar cry of recognition.”

I could go on, but I trust you get the sense of clear gospel application to the Christian soul.  Go on and read this sermon for yourself!

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Preachers & Teachers: Do Not Master the Text

Hopefully that title gets some attention! What I mean by it is that we preachers and Bible teachers should never have the idea or give the impression that we’ve mastered the text we are studying/preaching. We should never act as if we’ve completely exhausted the meaning out of the text, as if it is an orange for juice.

Barth can say it better: “We should not try to master the text. The Bible will become more and more mysterious to real exegetes. They will see all the depths and distances. They will constantly run up against the mystery before which theology is like trying to drain the ocean with a spoon. The true exegete will face the text like an astonished child in a wonderful garden, not like an advocate of God who has seen all his files” (Homiletics, p.128).

Luther says it better still: “We should allow Scripture to rule and master us, and we ourselves should not be the masters, according to our mad heads, setting ourselves above Scripture.”

This “astonished child mastered by Scripture” should be a homiletic attitude and shape our pulpit/lectern presence! The preacher/teacher is standing under Scripture, even in the pulpit.

shane lems

sunnyside, wa

Hebrew Grammar and Homiletics

You mean that my Hebrew grammar/syntax classes in seminary and assigned readings in it make a difference in my preaching? Of course! In the studies of biblical languages, the theoretical serves the practical, as with theology. Here’s one example.

In 2 Chronicles 21.11, when the story teller describes Jehoram’s wicked reign over Judah, he uses the hiphil twice (zanah – which means to commit harlotry – and nadach - which means turn aside from). The phrase with these verbs in it translates like this, loosely: “[Jehoram] made high places in the hills of Judah and caused those who lived in Jerusalem to commit harlotry and he caused Judah to turn aside [from Yahweh].”

Since these two verbs – commit harlotry and turn aside from – are in the hiphil, they have a causative meaning (“A” caused “B” to “C”). But, as Walkte and O’Conner point out in An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1990), the “Hiphil represents the subject as causing and object to participate indirectly as a second subject in the notion expressed by the verbal root” (435). In other words, the object of the above sentence (2 Chr 21.11) is Judah, those who dwell in Judah. The object of the sentence – Judah’s residents – are active participants in the action of the verbs (commit harlotry and turn aside from God). The hiphil helps get this idea across, along with context and other passages that clearly show Judah’s residents committing idolatry and turning from Yahweh.

In homiletics, then, this translates into an illustration/analogy: Jehoram led Judah into harlotry, as if he were holding their hands. Yet they didn’t resist; they participated, like those who follow the leader, like an older brother who coaches his younger brother to go write on the wall with permanent marker. Both are guilty, but especially the leader. So in Judah: both the king and his subjects are guilty for abandoning the Mosaic covenant/constitution, but especially the leader, king Jehoram.

shane lems

sunnyside wa

How To Listen To A Sermon

Christopher Love (d. 1651), a Welsh Presbyterian and pastor of a church in London, wrote a helpful little book of his sermons on mortification called The Mortified Christian (Morgan: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1998). The whole book is worth reading, but the last section is what I’ll note for now. The chapter is called “The Right Hearing of Sermons.” Here are seven practical directions for listening to the preaching of the gospel.

1) Take heed that you hear the Word of God preparedly. As the preacher must take care to find acceptable words, so the people should labor to bring acceptable affections to the work – when we come to the service of God we should hear with all attention and pray with affection.

2) Hear the Word attentively, as those did in Acts 8.6. Those who hear the Word with gazing eyes, wandering thoughts, and sleepy bodies cannot hear it attentively, but are to be reproved.

3) Hear the Word of God retentively. Labor to keep in your memory what you hear, that you may put it into practice for your life. Hearing is for practice’s sake. This also has to do with treasuring the Word, so it will have a continual impression upon your hearts.

4) Hear the Word understandingly. Christ called the multitude and bade them hear and understand. This is what the Bereans did.

5) Hear the Word applicatively. If a patient has never such excellent counsel given him, never so powerful a medicine prescribed, if he does not apply it, it will do him no more good than if he had never known it.

6) Hear the Word of God reverentially. Many people represent God to themselves in such familiar notions that they ultimately breed a contempt of God which we ought not to have. We must demean ourselves with a humble reverence in His presence.

7) Hear the Word of God obediently. Come…ready, prepared, and disposed to stoop and submit to all the instructions, corrections, and reproofs of the Word of God, like those spoken of in Acts 10.33.

What a contrast from how preaching/hearing “works” today! All of the advice Love gave assumed that we sit “under” the preaching of the Word, not over it. Raised pulpits, standing preachers, and sitting congregations reflect this biblical concept of being “under” the preached Word.

Preaching and hearing a sermon is not a democratic endeavor. If you’re into homiletics, this means that the thesis of Fred Craddock’s book from quite a few years back, As One Without Authority is wrong: the audience of a sermon does not determine the sermon’s theme, structure, or content. The congregation does not rule the preached word; the preached word “rules” them: they have a duty as they take their seats each Sunday: humble yourself, pay attention, and give heed!

Side note: Willimon gave a helpful critique of Craddock’s above mentioned book in Peculiar Speech, pages 47-52.

shane lems

sunnyside, wa