'The Reading And Preaching Of The Scriptures In The Worship Of The Christian Church: Vol 4, The Age Of The Reformation' Review
The Reading And Preaching Of The Scriptures In The Worship Of The Christian Church: Vol 4, The Age Of The Reformation Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002. Paper. 556 pages, $45.00. ISBN 0-80284775-7. By: Hughes Oliphant Old
Anyone giving a life-time to preaching needs at least a basic grasp of the shape of the discipline over the centuries. As categories under Church History generally, the history of doctrine, the history of liturgics and the history of preaching have obvious relevance to our tasks in the church. Dargan's classic work from the early twentieth century (even as updated by Turnbull in an additional volume) tended to be descriptive but not very analytic. F.R. Webber's multi-volume work focused only on Britain and America and innumerable monographs often of high quality all made the need for more contemporary address in a comprehensive history all the more commanding.
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Three major efforts to address the lacuna were virtually simultaneous. My own 900 page The Company of the Preachers, A History of Preaching from the Old Testament to the Modern Era (Kregel, 1998) was one such contribution. Ronald E. Osborn's first volume of a projected four, Folly of God: The Rise of Christian Preaching (Chalice, 1999) was impressive in many respects although hewing to the Jesus Seminar line. After the initial volume the project has been dealt a heavy blow by the death of its author. The most massive and truly magnificent address to the gap has been the multi-volume series by Hughes Oliphant Old, veteran Presbyterian pastor and specialist in the history of liturgy. Old has been located in recent years at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey, where he has also been teaching homiletics at Princeton Seminary.
Old's contribution is monumental and stellar. The books are an aesthetic delight to handle and read, although their cost makes the average pastor's investment in the whole series unlikely. The extensive footnoting in much German and French resourcing is a scholar's delight but an immense irrelevance to the parish pastor. Seeing preaching in its liturgical and ecclesiological context is most helpful. The reader milks two disciplines for the price of one. Reveling in and loving Scripture as a good Barthian always does moves us but evangelicals will be a little put off by his higher critical sympathies (as in his celebration of deutero-Isaiah, I, 69). His insistence that worship is evangelism and his disparagement of "decisional regeneration" (I, 283) are disappointing. This is especially so since he tends to be so positive about everything and everybody, including Origen's hermeneutic, Schleiermacher, von Harnack and Fosdick. Still there is enrichment on every lucidly and beautifully written page. His third volume on the Medieval Church was peerless and ran to 647 pages.