by Robert Smith Jr.

The phrase ad fontes – “to the sources” – antedates the Reformation. To Erasmus and the scholars it meant back to classical and Christian antiquity; back to the Renaissance. To the Reformers it meant back to the early church fathers and ultimately to the early church. Back to the five solas – sola christos, sola fide, sola gratia, sola scriptura and soli deo gloria. The church is rooted in scripture for the Reformation has been done according to the Word of God. 

However, the Reformation is a process and the church is still in need of being reformed. Ecclesia semper reformata – “the church reformed.” This is a finished act – reformation has been accomplished. Ecclesia semper reformanda – “the church reformed and still in need of reforming.” Both are necessary and must remain in an inextricable relationship like Reformational preaching that is rooted in the Word of God, but not restricted in terms of its approaches and methodologies of presenting the Word of God. However, Reformational preaching faces a problem. It is in a state of stuck-ness.

On October 14, 1987 18-month-old Jessica McClure fell 22 feet below ground through an eight-inch hole and was stuck in an abandoned well shaft for 58 hours – 2.5 days. A rescue team was launched immediately to rescue her from her stuck-ness. As the rescue mission neared the two-and-a-half day mark, the medical team above received the most up-to-date vital sign report from rescue mission members below. When the medical team above read the vital signs, they gave this dire and desperate statement, “She does not have more time. Pull hard! You may have to break her to save her.”

Robert O’Donnell, a member of the rescue mission team below, pulled hard. There was breakage. Baby Jessica would undergo plastic surgery on her face and would experience amputation of a couple of her toes. She was broken. However, she was saved and dislodged from the 22-foot prison that had awkwardly held her in a stuck position for 2.5 days.

Is this the position in which contemporary preaching in America finds itself? Does preaching need to be broken in order to be saved? Paul Scherer, in his book The Word God Sent, has a moving chapter on “Preaching as a Radical Transaction.” In it he provides an accurate prescription for the seriously dire preaching crisis. He asserted the sermon has to deeply affect the congregation in order to have a lasting effect on it: “Nothing will do them any good unless it disturbs them and nothing will have a lasting effect unless it disturbs them deeply… Jesus constantly addressed those needs that lie at the root of a man’s sense of bewilderment, alienation and anxiety. He was forever going farther in and deeper down.”

That is never likely to be painless. Reformational preaching needs to be admitted into God’s General Hospital for redemptive observation and radical surgery for it is sick and cannot minister to a critically-ill world. 

Reformational Preaching Must Engage Real Issues

Reformational schools must adopt what Oswald Spenglersaid of Luther and fight the church, not because it demands too much but because it demands too little. Preaching ought to produce uncomfortable-ness and squirming in the pew. The antecedent must precede the consequent in preaching. The attitude must precede the action in preaching.​​ The root must precede the fruit in preaching.

John Calvin of Geneva had a proclamation of engagement and not one of escapism or avoidance. From the pulpit and out of the context of the gospel, he addressed the subject of usury when sellers unjustly charged exorbitant prices to buyers; marriage and family life; and civic responsibilities that each Christian had to his or her community.

Huldrych Zwingli departed from the customary commitment to lectionary preaching and began to preach chapter-by-chapter exposition. Like Calvin’s, his was a proclamation of engagement and not escapism or avoidance. From the pulpit and in the context of the gospel he addressed such matters as the abuses of capitalism and the lavishing of care and attention on images of wood and stone instead of caring for the needs of those made in the image of God. The Reformers elevated preaching to meet the needs of their contemporary society. This was a break with tradition.

The Patristic period was the Golden Age of preaching. The early church fathers preached expositionally in a verse-by-verse manner through the books of the Bible. This was called lectio continua. During the Middle Ages or the Medieval period preaching was moved from the mainline to the sideline. The Mass took center stage in the worship service and preaching was on the sideline. Preaching existed but for the most part was done in the fields as wandering preachers would come during holy festivals and holy convocations. Thousands upon thousands of persons would come to the field to hear these great wandering preachers.

It was not until the Reformation period that preaching would transcend the Mass and become central. Preaching moved from the open field into the church building. Preaching moved from the pavement to the pulpit and from the street to the sanctuary. In 20th century America, lectio continua was the method that brought old expository preaching back to the forefront. Preachers like John MacArthur, James Montgomery Boice, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones and African American preachers like E. K. Bailey, A. Louis Patterson, Jr. and present day H. B. Charles, Jr. focused on verse-by-verse preaching of the books of the Bible which could take a year or more to complete.

For example, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones started preaching through the book of Romans and never completed it even after thirteen years. Tim Keller believes verse-by-verse expositional preaching is the best way to shape and grow a congregation. However, he also knows it is possible to adopt this format and actually expose the congregation to less of the Bible because of one’s total concentration on one book of the Bible. In all fairness, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones did his verse-by-verse expositional preaching of the books of the Bible on Friday nights. On Sunday nights he changed his approach and shaped his messages to be evangelistic because members of his church were inviting friends and co-workers from across the city to attend Sunday evening services.

I think it is important to preach the whole Bible in each sermon so that the congregation does not have a great knowledge of one book of the Bible and is ignorant of the other 65. I suggest that every sermon provide an exposé of the whole counsel of God as Paul puts it in Acts 20:27. I define the whole counsel of God as that broad and overarching concept which unites and ties together every passage of scripture so that it relates to the overall plan and comprehensive purpose of God revealed in the scriptures by the Holy Spirit in order to magnify Jesus Christ. This definition is Trinitarian – it provides the overall plan and comprehensive purpose of God; it is revealed in scripture by the Holy Spirit; and it exists in order to magnify Jesus Christ. It is important to magnify heilsgeschichte – salvation history – in every sermon.

When Reformational preaching arrived on the shores of America and populated the schools, churches, seminaries and colleges it did not go far enough. It is appalling to know the two highest points in the American religious experience – namely the First and Second Great Awakening – transcended slavery instead of exterminating it.

In a sense Reformational preaching did not go far enough to unite significant divergences. There was a sterile separation between ethics and ecclesiology. Ethics and ecclesiology were not divorced, but neither were they in a close marital relationship. In a way without an annulment or abandonment they were together geographically but relationally apart.

Bryan Loritts edited a volume in commemoration of the fifty-year-old “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.” His volume is titled, Letters to a Birmingham Jail: A Response to the Words and Dreams of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In his essay he remembered the time he and his friend were riding on the New York subway having an engaging conversation. He noticed every time the train stopped to let people off and others on, his friend would close his eyes and only reopen them when the train started again. He noticed his friend doing this several times. It distracted him so he asked his friend for the reason for his behavior.

His friend said his mother taught him to always give up his seat if he saw a lady standing and in need of one. His friend was tired and he closed his eyes in order to keep from seeing a woman standing which would cause his conscience to move him to give up his seat. Since he was tired he closed his eyes to ignore reality.

Loritts asks, “Who hasn’t found themselves doing something similar? I know I have. Some have closed their eyes to the poor, others to the educational injustice and economic disparities that continue to plague our country. And, yes, some continue to close their eyes, not wanting to do the hard work of going to the other part of town getting to know someone who doesn’t think like, act like, look like, or vote like me. Far too many of us know the temptation to close our eyes.”

Is this what is happening in Reformational pulpits and Reformational schools when preachers and professors fail to relate the gospel to social inequities and injustice?

Walter Rauschenbusch was an architect and proponent for the social gospel movement. By social gospel he did not mean that he was jettisoning the one true gospel in favor of a social gospel. The social gospel movement was a response to the church’s pulpit preaching which had sequestered the gospel only for the religious ghetto instead of exposing the gospel to all ghettos and communities.

He was like Manuel Lee Scott, Sr. who said, “You never want to have a gospel that you could only preach on one side of town.” By that he meant that his gospel would be preached on both sides of town addressing the issues that effected all of humanity. Preachers must not be willing to close their eyes and spare the church from her social responsibility. They must love the church enough to confront her.

William Sloane Coffin who pastored the Riverside Church wrote a book titled Credo, “I Believe.” Coffin identified three patriots – two bad and one good. There is the loveless critic: the one who does not love the government but liberally and regularly criticizes it. The other bad patriot is the uncritical lover: one who loves the country so much and will not criticize it in any degree – “My country right or wrong.” The one good patriot is involved in a lover’s quarrel. This patriot decides to quarrel with a nation he or she loves until that nation returns to a place of rectitude. Reformational preachers must not be uncritical lovers nor loveless critics towards the church still in the process of being reformed. Instead they are called to be involved in a lover’s quarrel striving to align the church with the will of God on the basis of the Word of God.

What are the components of Reformational preaching? They can be found in the definition of two outstanding expository preachers. The first one is E. K. Bailey, who pastored the Concord Missionary Baptist Church of Dallas, TX and was the founder of the E. K. Bailey International Conference on Expository Preaching. Bailey defined expository preaching as “A message that focuses on a portion of scripture so as to clearly establish the precise meaning of the text, and to poignantly motivate the hearers to actions or attitudes dictated by that text in the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Second is Haddon Robinson who defined biblical preaching (used interchangeably with expository preaching) as “The communication of a biblical concept transmitted through a historical, grammatical, and literary study of a passage in its context, which the Holy Spirit first applies to the personality and experience of the preacher, then through him to his hearers.”

Both of these definitions expose the work of the Holy Spirit in preaching. Both of these definitions insist that a passage or pericope is to be the preaching text and not simply a verse. Expository preaching is not a form – it is the principle of exposing what is in the text. Expository preaching can be demonstrated by preaching the form given by the biblical genre of the passage (the passage provides a form whether it is history, apocalyptic, gospel, prophetic, etc.)

To illustrate: two preachers had the same problem with their respective kings. The problem was adultery. Each preacher addressed the same problem with a difference sermonic approach. John the Baptist addressed the problem to King Herod Antipas deductively. Nathan addressed the problem to King David inductively. Both were true to the Word of God in Exodus 20:14.

John Calvin believed in the internal witness of the Spirit. For him this meant that the Spirit takes the rightly divided and interpreted Word of God from the lips of the preacher and then prepares the heart of the hearers to receive that truth. It is a three-way conversation between the preacher, the hearer and the Word all revolving around the work of the Holy Spirit. The reformers really believed Luke 10:16 – when they rightly divided the Word of God, Christ was actually speaking. The written Word (Bible) was delivered through the spoken Word (gospel) in order to magnify the revealed Word (Christ).

Reformational preaching must always be done in the present tense with the purpose of relevance, so the hearers are presented with the answer to the what question (information), the so what question (identification) and the now what question (motivation or action). Reformational preaching must always be done with the imperative following the indicative. The sequence is extremely significant for the imperative is based upon the Indicative. The indicative expresses what God has done and declared. The imperative announces what believers are to do in response to what God has done. This is not works righteousness. It is a case of righteousness that is accompanied by works.

Reformational preaching must always see revelation and relevance as being inextricable necessities. Karl Barth is often credited with the statement that preachers should preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other hand. This relationship is one of revelation and relevance. The Bible addresses the newspaper in the context of scripture and not the newspaper shaping and twisting the text in an attempt to make the text relevant to the happening of the day. We gospelize the social; we do not socialize the gospel.

In Ezekiel 3:15 the prophet Ezekiel received a divine summons to sit with the Jewish exiles for seven days by the river Kebar. He was to sit silently and to lay ears on the Jewish exiles. He needed to identify with their struggles and empathize with their pain. In chapter 3:22, God called Ezekiel to the plain to speak to him. Ezekiel has heard what the people had to say but had no message for the people because God had not spoken to him and given him one. From 3:22 to 11:25 God gives Ezekiel his message for the people without any verbal input from Ezekiel. Ezekiel has listened for seven days to the Jewish exiles and is now listening to God for eight chapters. Now that he has listened to the people for identification and to God for revelation he returns to the exiles and in 11:25 tells the Jewish exiles what he has heard God say concerning them. This was for proclamation. No wonder Solomon requested that God would give him wisdom in order to lead God’s people. Solomon was actually asking God to give him a “listening heart.”

Reformational preaching must revisit rhetoric. Rhetoric as defined by Aristotle in his book Rhetoric “is the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.” Rhetoric is not inherently good or bad. It is good or bad based upon how it is used and why it is used. It is noteworthy to know the greatest preachers of the Patristic Period were rhetoricians before they were preachers: Ambrose, Augustine and Chrysostom.

Reformational schools should consider having a course on rhetoric for preaching. Augustine wrote the first homiletics textbook in church history. It is called De Doctrina Christiana (On Christian Doctrine or Teaching Christianity). There are four books or chapters within this volume. The first three chapters address the subject of hermeneutics – the interpretation of the text. It treats content and substance. The last book addresses homiletics – the art of delivering a sermon. It treats style and presentation.

The frame of this book would suggest that hermeneutics is the foundational platform for preaching because it deals with the content of biblical theology (exegesis) while homiletics is needed in order to effectively communicate the scriptures.

Reformational schools must not avoid rhetoric because of its fear of moving from persuading by the scriptures to manipulating the scriptures to say what they were never intended to say (eisegesis).

Reformational Preaching Must Engage Heads and Hearts 

The German cities of Ravensburg and Stuttgart were formative for the pastoral development of the German theologian/preacher Helmut Thielicke. It was there Thielicke learned how to preach and develop his theology because of his pastoral commitment to the people he served. He knew what it was like to preach in bombed-out churches and buildings and to slumber with his congregation in air raid shelters. When he preached to his congregation the people knew that Thielicke identified with them and was thinking through their crises with them.

As D. A. Carson said, “To love to preach is one thing – to love those to whom you preach is quite another; there are gifted preachers who craft their sermons as artists, not as lovers. Listeners will forgive almost anything if they are convinced you love them – they will forgive almost nothing if they think you do not.”

Helmut Thielicke, in his little volume A Little Exercise for Young Theologians, was convinced that young seminarians who were undergoing “theological puberty” should not preach in a local church. In fact, he believed seminarians in their first year should not preach in class at all. Could Calvin have been correct in viewing seminaries as nurseries for pastors? In fact we must ask, “Is the title pastor contemporarily out of date or out-moded?” Ephesians 4:11 lists this office in the church as a gift given by God to equip the saints for service. Today the office of pastor is being redefined away from its original meaning and purpose. Many seminarians who are being trained are not considering the pastorate as an option for ministry. Some consider pastors as astute administrators and efficient executives, but not as shepherds who feed the people of God (Jer. 3:15).

There needs to be a remarriage of entities within Reformational preaching. The cranial and the cardiological (head and heart) need to be remarried. Didache and kerygma (teaching and preaching) need to be remarried. The epistemological and ontological (what is truth and what does it mean to be human) need to be remarried.  

Jaroslav Pelikan stated, “What the church of Jesus Christ believes, teaches and confesses on the basis of the Word of God, this is Christian doctrine.” The church fathers confessed their beliefs. Intermittently through centuries of church history following the Patristic Period, Christians believed the church fathers’ confessions. Today Christians simply confess the church fathers’ confessions. Pelikan also said, “Tradition is the living faith of a dead people to which we must add our chapter while we have the gift of life. Traditionalism is the dead faith of living people who fear if anything changes the whole enterprise will crumble.” In our preaching we must move from traditionalism to active traditionalists.

Reformational Preaching Must Engage Life Change

Reformational schools must improve upon preaching by helping preachers develop the application element in their sermon so we can add our chapter while we have the gift of life. John A. Broadus was convinced that a sermon without an application was only a pre-sermon. Bryan Chapell believed a sermon that did not have application could not be described as an expository sermon.

Christ preached his inaugural sermon in Nazareth of Galilee. He preached it from Isa. 61:1-2. He received no criticism or ire from the Jewish hearers at the synagogue until he applied the sermon to his audience. The hearers marched him up toward the edge of a cliff intending to push him over. Jesus, however, disappeared from their sight. They could not ignore the word they heard applied to their lives.

Our friend, Dr. James Earl Massey gave three purposes for the function of biblical preaching. 1. Proclamation – to initiate the unbeliever into the faith. (salvation) 2. Teaching – to instruct the new believer about the faith. (maturation) 3. Therapy – to inspire the growing believer to keep the faith. (sanctification). These purposes are under assault because there is a spirit of insipid intellectualism pervading the atmosphere of the church which serves as an antithesis to the freedom of expression in preaching. Reformational schools should aim to turn out preachers who can not only present a message full of content but also preach a message full of passion and power.

Reformational preaching must expose the heart of the hearer. Therefore delivery is critically important. “Whiteeld was requested, by his hearers, to furnish a copy of his sermon for publication. ‘I have no objection,’ said he, ‘if you will print the lightning, thunder, and rainbow with it.’”

This African-American preaching dictum could provide some assistance in sermon delivery for Reformational schools: start low (identification) – identify with your audience and do not preach over their heads. Go slow (clarification) – clarify and make clear your terms and contents. Rise (intensification) – passion should be allowed to build. Strike fire (application) – apply the text to the lives of the hearers. Retire (recapitulation) – review the sermonic journey. Sit down in the storm (motivation) – motivate and challenge the hearer to do through the power of the Holy Spirit what the text says do.

Gordon Yeager, 94, and his wife Norma, 90, who had been married for 72 years, left their small town of State Center, Iowa in October 2014 to go into town but never made it. A car accident sent the couple to the emergency room and Intensive Care Unit. The couple was moved to a room with beds together side by side so they could hold hands. Gordon died at 3:38p. The family was surprised by what the monitor showed. The nurse said Gordon did not have a heartbeat. He was dead. However his monitor showed a heartbeat indicating he was alive though he was dead. He was picking up his wife’s heartbeat through the holding of her hand. Norma’s heart was beating through him.

This is the gospel. We need the Spirit of Christ to empower us to preach it. Christ died and rose again for us and through his death, burial and resurrection we who are dead in trespasses and sin pick up his heartbeat and live even though we were dead.

Reformational schools must train preachers to powerfully and emphatically deliver this uncompromising message even if we must fight the church to do so. Here we stand. . . God help us.