John A. Broadus

The Preaching of John Wesley (1703–1791) and George Whitefield (1714–1770)

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In the mid-eighteenth century, John Wesley and George Whitefield became famous through their revivalistic preaching. Although based on a Scripture, it differed from Reformed preaching in that it was not exegetical and did not place as much emphasis on correct grammatical, historical, and theological contexts. Instead, Wesley and Whitefield developed topics and presented applications for their listeners. Sin, grace, and reconciliation with God were their favorite themes. Wesley united this message with a zeal for sanctification. This style of preaching was directed particularly toward the poor, resulting in a tremendous movement for social and political justice.

Toward the middle of the eighteenth century, two men became known who have made illustrious the English preaching of their day. Whitefield and Wesley were both Oxford men and used their cultivation in that preaching to the masses that had been the glory of the Puritan period. Whitefield and Wesley began to preach to the human conscience, and thus felt no need of confining their discourse to the cultivated and refined. This preaching to the conscience must be seen as the reaction to an age of skepticism.

The Men behind the Preaching

The biographies of Whitefield are full of instruction. The sermons we have were mere preparations, which in free delivery were so filled out with the thoughts suggested in the course of living speech, and so transfigured and glorified by enkindled imagination, as to be utterly different from the dull, cold thing that here lies before us.

The sermons of Wesley require study and will reward it. As printed, they were commonly written out after frequent delivery. They are too condensed to have been spoken, in this form, to the colliers and the servant girls at five o’clock in the morning. But they must be in substance the same that he habitually preached, and they present a problem. Wesley had nothing of Whitefield’s impassioned oratory. He spoke with simple earnestness and remained quiet while his hearers grew wild with excitement.

What was the secret? Where the hidden power? We can only say that it was undoubting faith and extraordinary force of character, together with a peculiarity seen also in some generals on the field of battle, that their most intense excitement makes little outward noise or show, yet subtly communicates itself to others. No one can repeatedly make others feel deeply who does not feel deeply; it is only a difference in the way of showing it. Of course, this subtle electricity resides in the soul of the speaker much more than in the recorded discourse. But read carefully these condensed and calm-looking sermons, and see if you do not feel the power of the man and find yourself sometimes strangely moved.

The Preaching of the Reformers: Martin Luther (1483–1546) and John Calvin (1509–1564)

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Martin Luther, like John Wycliffe, John Huss, and Girolamo Savonarola before him, may be classified as a preacher of “prophetic personality.” For these preachers, preaching was an act of spiritual warfare. Luther’s sermons are polemics against the abuses within the Roman church and the hard-heartedness of many of its priests. Luther also began the tradition of preaching an additional pedagogical sermon. In these catechistic sermons he taught the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and doctrines of the Reformation. The tradition of featuring both catechetical and homiletical sermons in services became common in some Lutheran (and Reformed) churches, and this practice still continues in some churches today.

John Calvin did not preach in the popular style that Luther did. However, he influenced Reformed preaching more than Luther’s style influenced Lutheran preaching. Calvin regarded the sermon as the central point of the liturgy; in fact, the liturgy itself was but the framework for the sermon. Dropping the readings of the liturgical calendar, he often chose to preach a series of sermons through a book of the Bible. To Calvin, a sermon was an exposition. Following the historical, theological, and grammatical approach, he eschewed all allegorizing and mystical interpretations in favor of a traditional exegesis that sought to reveal the actual meaning of Scripture.

Calvin and Luther

It would be difficult to find so marked a contrast between any two celebrated contemporaries in all the history of preaching as that between Luther and Calvin. Luther (1483-1546) was a broad-shouldered, broad-faced, burly German, overflowing with physical strength; Calvin (1509-1564) a feeble-looking little Frenchman, with shrunken cheeks and slender frame, and bowed with study and weakness. Luther had a powerful intellect but was also rich in sensibility, imagination, and swelling passion—a man juicy with humor, delighting in music, in children, in animals, in poetic sympathy with nature. In the disputation at Leipzig he stood up to speak with a bouquet in his hand. Every constituent of his character was rich to overflowing. With all this accords his prodigious and seemingly reckless extravagance, and even an occasional coarseness of language when excited.

Calvin, on the other hand, was practically destitute of imagination and humor, seeming in his public life and works to have been all intellect and will, though his letters show that he was not only a good hater but also a warm friend. And yet, while so widely different, both of these men were great preachers. What had they in common to make them great preachers? Along with intellect, they had the force of character, an energetic nature, and will. A great preacher is not a mere artist and not a feeble suppliant; he is a conquering soul, a monarch, a born ruler of humankind. Calvin was far less winning than Luther, but he was even more than Luther an autocrat. Each of them had unbounded self-reliance, too, and yet at the same time, each was full of humble reliance on God. This combination, self-confidence, such that if it existed alone, would vitiate character, yet checked and upborne by simple, humble, childlike faith in God, this makes a Christian hero, for word or for work. The statement could be easily misunderstood, but as meant it is true and important, that one must both believe in oneself and believe in God if one is to make a powerful impression on others.

This force of character in both Luther and Calvin gave great force to their utterances. Everybody repeats the saying about Luther that “his words were half battles.” But of Calvin too it was said, and said by Beza who knew him so well, Tot verba, tot pondera, “Every word weighed a pound”—a phrase also used of Daniel Webster. It should be noticed too that both Luther and Calvin were drawn into much connection with practical affairs, and this tended to give them greater firmness and positiveness of character, to render their preaching more vigorous, as well as better suited to the common mind. Here is another valuable combination of what are commonly reckoned incongruous qualities—to be a thinker and student, and at the same time a person of practical sense and practical experience. Such were the great Reformers, and such a man was the apostle Paul.

Calvin: Theologian and Church-Builder, Expositor and Preacher

The vast reputation of Calvin as theologian and church-builder has overshadowed his great merits as an expositor and preacher. With the possible exception of Chrysostom, I think there is no commentator before our century whose exegesis is so generally satisfactory and so uniformly profitable as that of Calvin. His Latin, so clear and smooth and agreeable, is probably unsurpassed in literary excellence since the early centuries. All his extemporized sermons taken down in shorthand, as well as his writings, show not so much great copiousness as true command of the language, his expression being, as a rule, singularly direct, simple, and forcible.

The extent of his preaching looks to us wonderful. While lecturing at Geneva to many hundreds of students (sometimes eight hundred), while practically a ruler of Geneva, and constant adviser of the Reformed in all Switzerland, France, and the Netherlands, England, and Scotland, and while composing his extensive and elaborate works, he would often preach every day. For example, the two hundred sermons on Deuteronomy, which are dated, were all delivered on weekdays in the course of little more than a year, and sometimes on four or five days in succession. It was so with the other great Reformers. In fact, Luther accuses one preacher of leading an “idle life; for he preaches but twice a week, and has a salary of two hundred dollars a year.” Luther himself, with all his lecturing, immense correspondence, and voluminous authorship, often preached every day for a week, and on fast days two or three times.

Luther’s Preaching

Luther had less sustained intensity than Calvin, but he had at times an overwhelming force, and his preaching possessed the rhetorical advantage of being everywhere pervaded by one idea, that of justification by faith, round which he reorganized all existing Christian thought and which gave a certain unity to all the overflowing variety of his illustration, sentiment, and expression.

Luther showed great realness, both in his personal grasp of Christian truth and in his modes of presenting it. The conventional decorums he smashes, and with strong, rude, and sometimes even coarse expressions, with illustrations from almost every conceivable source, and with familiar address to the individual hearer he brings the truth very close to home. He gloried in being a preacher to the people. Thus, he says: “A true, pious and faithful preacher shall look to the children and servants, and to the poor, simple masses, who need instruction.” “If one preaches to the coarse, hard populace, he must paint it for them, pound it, chew it, try all sorts of ways to soften them ever so little.” He blamed Zwingli for interlarding his sermons with Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, and praised those who preached so that the average person could understand.

Luther’s Personality

Luther is a notable example of intense personality in preaching. His was indeed an imperial personality, of rich endowments (in talent), varied sympathies, and manifold experiences. Those who heard him were not only listening to truth, but they experienced the man. Those who merely read his writings, in other lands and languages, experienced the man, were drawn to him, and thus drawn to the gospel.

With all his boldness, Luther often trembled at the responsibility of preaching. He says in one of his sermons, As soon as I learned from the Holy Scriptures how terror-filled and perilous a matter it was to preach publicly in the church of God … there was nothing I so much desired as silence.… Nor am I now kept in the ministry of the Word, but by an overruled obedience to a will above my own, that is the divine will; for as to my own will, it always shrank from it, nor is it fully reconciled unto it to this hour.

What Luther says of preaching must end with a paragraph from the Table Talk, which makes some good hits, though very oddly arranged.

A good preacher should have these properties and virtues: first, to teach systematically; secondly, he should have a ready wit; thirdly, he should be elegant; fourthly, he should have a good voice; fifthly, a good memory; sixthly, he should know when to make an end; seventhly, he should be sure of his doctrine; eighthly, he should venture and engage body and blood, wealth and honor, in the Word; ninthly, he should suffer himself to be mocked and jeered of every one.

The expression, “he should know when to make an end,” recalls a statement I have sometimes made to students, that public speaking may be summed up in these three things: First, have something to say; secondly, say it; third and lastly, quit.

The Preaching of John Tauler (d. 1361)

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In the late medieval era, a renewed concern for the inner life emerged. This new kind of mysticism affected the medieval sermon. Mystic John Tauler did not completely abandon the scholastic rules for preaching, but he did alter them freely. It may be said that he practiced a devotional style of preaching.

The content of his preaching reflected his contemplative strivings in the Christian faith, namely, union with God through various mystical stages, to complete absorption with God where all distinctions of reality cease to exist. His preaching was full of power, a glowing fire of God’s love and drawing grace. The influence of Tauler’s sermons can be seen in Thomas á Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. This mystical style emerges frequently in church history, particularly in those times when people have grown weary of an intellectualized preaching.

A Mystic Preaching Spiritual Renewal

Of the great mystics John Tauler, doubtless, is the foremost of his class in that age. Tauler lived on the Rhine in the fourteenth century, having been educated at the University of Paris, then the greatest of all seats of learning. In a time of great political and social evils, of protracted civil war, followed by a terrible struggle between the pope and the emperor, a time of frightful pestilence, a time of dissolute morals even among priests and monks and nuns, Tauler labored as a faithful priest.

After years thus spent, he was, at the age of fifty, lifted to what some call a higher life through the influence of a young layman, the head of a secret society that was trying to reform religion without leaving the church. It was after this renewal period that Tauler preached the sermons that were taken down by hearers and remain with us to this day.

We ought to study these mystical writings. They represent one side of human nature and minister to men and women in every age. Our age is intensely practical. Yet, many persons readily accept the idea of higher spirituality. Do not most of us so neglect this aspect of Christianity in our studies and our preaching as to leave the natural thirst for it in some hearers ungratified, and thus prepare them to catch at, and delight in, such ideas and sentiments when presented in an extravagant and enthusiastic form? If we do not neglect the scriptural mysticism—as found in the writings of John and also of Paul—we shall see less readiness among people to accept a mysticism that is unscriptural.

Tauler did not, however, preach mere mystical raptures. He searchingly applied the religious principle to the regulation of the inner and the outer life and urged that ordinary duties be performed in a religious spirit.

The Preaching of Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274)

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An influence on preaching that originated from both the monasteries and the scholastic theology of the universities was the logic of Aristotle. As a result, sermon writers placed greater emphasis on coherence and clarity. This scholarly approach to preaching was developed in the great universities of the medieval period such as Paris and Oxford and spread to the Dominicans (Bernard), the Franciscans, and the Augustinian Anchorites. Consequently, a great many new handbooks on preaching were published along with collections of illustrations and outlines for sermons.

These works urged preachers to first find a theme and then allow the sermon to grow organically from that theme. The sermon was to be characterized by natural and logical divisions and subdivisions. Likewise, material was to be carefully grouped into supporting texts from the Bible, the writings of the Fathers, and illustrations. Readers could also find suggestions for appropriate gestures and humor.

Unfortunately, these academic sermons lost touch with people’s lives and failed to address their spiritual and moral needs in the way that the simpler sermons of the early church did. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest intellect of the thirteenth century, was an exception, for he had a way of presenting his vast learning with warmth and simplicity.

An Intelligent, Yet Practical Style

Thomas Aquinas, the Neapolitan count and Dominican friar, who died in 1274 at the age of fifty, is by common consent regarded as the greatest theologian of the Middle Ages and one of the greatest minds in the history of philosophy. It is surely an interesting fact that he was at the same time very popular as a preacher to the common people, being thus faithful to his Dominican vow.

Amid the immense and amazing mass of his works are many brief discourses, and treatises that were originally discourses, marked by clearness, simplicity, and practical point, and usually very short, many of them not requiring more than ten minutes, though these were doubtless expanded in preaching. He has also extended commentaries on perhaps half the books of Scripture, in which the method of exposition is strikingly like that of Matthew Henry’s commentaries, leading us to believe that the exposition was, for the most part, first presented in the form of expository sermons.

Aquinas is not highly imaginative nor flowing in expression; the sentences are short, and everything runs into division and subdivision, usually by threes. But while there is no ornament and no swelling passion, he uses many familiar and lively comparisons, for an explanation as well as for argument. It is pleasant to think of the fact that this great philosopher and author loved to preach, and that ordinary people loved to hear him. Like him, contemporary preachers would do well to combine philosophical and other profound studies with simple and practical preaching.

The Preaching of Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153)

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The renewal of preaching in the medieval era is traced to the rise of the crusades, the monasteries, and the scholastics. Bernard combined the enthusiasm of crusade rhetoric with the ascetic lifestyle of the monk and reflected a scholastic influence through his struggle with Abelard. His fiery eloquence was powerful enough to make an impression even on those who did not understand his language. Unusually gifted, he was a master of the art of public speaking.

Bernard’s Personality and Preaching Style

Bernard of Clairvaux commonly called St. Bernard, a devoted monk and a fervently pious man, lived from 1090 to 1153 in France. Pale, meagre, attenuated through much fasting, looking almost as insubstantial as a spirit, he made an impression the moment he was seen. He possessed extraordinary talents, and though he made light of human learning, he at least did so only after acquiring it.

His sermons and other writings do not indicate a profound metaphysical thinker, like Augustine or Aquinas, but they present treasures of devout sentiment—pure, deep, and delightful—mysticism at its best. His style has an elegant simplicity and sweetness that is charming, and while many of his expressions are as striking as those of Augustine, they seem perfectly easy and natural. His speech and gesture are described as impressive in the highest degree. His power of persuasion was felt by high and low to be irresistible. Even his letters swayed popes and sovereigns.

The Last of the Fathers

Bernard is often called “the last of the Fathers.” If we were asked who is the foremost preacher in the whole history of Latin Christianity, we should doubtless find the question narrowing itself to a choice between Augustine and Bernard. His sermons show more careful preparation than those of the early Latin Fathers. Anselm’s principal works appeared before Bernard was born, and Abelard was his senior by a dozen years. Therefore, he felt to some extent the systematizing tendencies of the scholastic thought and method, which one can see in the orderly arrangement of his sermons, though they do not show formal divisions.

He greatly loved to preach, and we are told that he preached oftener than the rules of his order appointed, both to the monks and to the people. He was accustomed to putting down thoughts and schemes of discourses as they occurred to him, and work them up as he had occasion to preach—a plan that many other preachers have found useful. His methods of sermonizing have considerable variety, and his manner of treatment is free. He was devoted to allegorizing, which was universal in that age.

Bernard wrote eighty-six sermons on the Song of Solomon. When the series was cut short by his death, he had just begun the third chapter. In his other sermons, he quotes the Song of Solomon as often as Chrysostom quotes Job. Bernard was warmly praised by Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin. I think that beyond any other medieval preacher, he will repay the student of the present day.