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The study of the history of preaching is informative, though not necessarily always practical. Preaching is a skill that might not be enhanced by an understanding of it’s past. This is because preaching is about the effective communication of God’s Word into present contexts. The manner of preaching is less important than its content, so long as the sermon is compelling to its intended audience. I’m interested in the preaching of John Chrysostom and Charles Haddon Spurgeon, not because I want to emulate them, but because they represent the history of my craft. I believe my audiences would respond well to Chrysostom today, not because he would preach like he did during his time, but because he was a great preacher, meaning that he would figure out how to communicate effectively in the current time. This is to say that it is the values of the men that matter (and they were almost always men). Great preachers value the Scripture. They value the audience. Such things do not change across time.
O.C. Edwards, A History of Preaching is valuable in helping us understand where preaching comes from and how it has been practiced. The book is thoroughly researched and presented in a way that is accessible and readable. Where previous works like E. C. Dargan’s three-volume history focuses largely on the preachers, Edwards’ emphasis is upon the preaching, helpfully describing the nature of the preaching in its various periods with a strong eye to the historical context. “There is no activity more characteristic of the church than preaching,” Edwards writes. ”...No other religion gives preaching quite the central role that it has in Christianity (3).”
Particularly helpful is the opening chapters of the book which describe the earliest Christian preaching and its relationship both to the synagogue sermons of the time as well as the ancient Greco-Roman rhetorical influences. The first sermon text available to us for study is the Paschal Homily of Melito of Sardis (circa 165 a.d.). While Christian preaching had already existed for more than a century and a quarter, “Already it had begun to show two of the main characteristics that would characterize it throughout the patristic period: (1) it would be based on the continuous exposition of a biblical text, and (2) it would utilize the techniques of Greco-Roman rhetoric (20-21).”
Less helpful are the latter sections of the book, describing recent homiletic history. I say less helpful, not because of a lack of scholarship in these sections, but simply because they appear to be incomplete, particularly from an evangelical perspective. The book does do justice to African-American preaching and to the preaching of women, which is welcome. But despite a few pages on Bill Hybels and the megachurch, no mention is made of Haddon Robinson or any other evangelical homiletician of the late twentieth century. Perhaps this is because evangelical homiletics has not embraced the more historically interesting approaches of the new homiletic and other such innovations.
Still, this book must be considered by anyone wanting to understand the nature and roots of the task of Christian preaching. While contemporary innovators might feel justified in changing the form of preaching, they ought, at least, to appreciate the historical implications of their adaptations.