Preaching Matters: The Matters That Matter

The sophists of Paul’s day were renowned for their practical handbooks on effective speech. Critics might claim that the only difference between those men and today’s homileticians is the advent of moveable type.

I am not such a critic. I believe that flexibility, adaptability and a cultivated sensitivity to what connects with a contemporary audience are biblical and right.

If Paul’s letters in any way reflect his homiletic, they demonstrate that he respected the techniques for communication common to his day. His epistle to Philemon, for example, bears the marks of a judicial speech. In it he does more than appeal to Philemon’s sense of honor and desire for advantage. He advances a rhetorical argument.¹⁰

In conclusion, I believe that preaching still matters, particularly as to its message, medium and methods, despite its postmodern detractors. I know that Paul thought preaching mattered in his day despite the skeptics, cynics and sophists who dotted his premodern audiences.

William Pitt was Great Britain’s youngest prime minister; he enjoyed a lifelong friendship with famed abolitionist William Wilberforce. When young Wilberforce was torn over whether to serve the Lord as a minister or to continue with his political career, Pitt, as depicted in the movie Amazing Grace, asked, “Do you intend to use your beautiful voice to praise the Lord or change the world?”¹¹ What Pitt failed then to see—as so many of preaching’s critics today fail to see—is that preaching can do both. It must do both.

1. Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, second edition (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998), 160-161.

2. See, Michael H. Briggs, Handbook of Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959); Paul Oliver, 101 Key Ideas: Philosophy (Chicag McGraw-Hill, 2000); and Dagobert D. Runes, Dictionary of Philosophy (New York: Bonanza Books, 1960).

3. John C. Miller, The First Frontier: Life in Colonial America (New York: Dell, 1966), 54.

4. James F. Engel, What’s Gone Wrong with the Harvest? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1975).

5. Andre Resner, Preacher and Cross: Person and Message in Theology and Rhetoric (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 17-37.

6. Jeff Greenfield, interviewer, “CBS News Sunday Morning,” Jan. 20, 2008.

7. Greenfield.

8. Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1989), 25.

9. Haddon W. Robinson, Biblical Preaching: The Development and Delivery of Expository Messages (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980), 20.

10. F. Forrester Church, “Rhetorical Structure and Design in Paul’s Letter to Philemon,” Harvard Theological Review 71 (1978), 25.

11. Michael Apted, director, Amazing Grace (motion picture, 2006).