The Call to Preach

Chapter 1 defines the call to preach as containing two aspects, inward and outward, and identifies a gender gap or difference in how men and women can claim their call to preach. By identifying the central problem of gender inequality, this chapter establishes the fundamental concern of this book as a significant issue of patriarchy and ecclesiastical authority. Next, the chapter reviews relevant scholarship in homiletics and history of preaching to contextualize this issue. Drawing on social theorists, obstacles are identified and defined that have formed and maintained the dominant narrative limiting women preachers and their voice and agency. Utilizing feminist hermeneutics, this chapter argues that the historical women preachers of this work and their power of resistance still hold valuable lessons for people struggling to claim their call to preach today.

Sources of Christian Homiletics

That Edwards assumed a Puritan style of homiletics is questioned in view of the Christian tradition of preaching. The chapter argues that if the homiletic labors of the preacher of Northampton are “statements on the full range of his thought,” one must situate Edwards’s sermons, both in form and structure, in terms of continuity and discontinuity with Christian preaching. The caricatures and commendations of Puritan preaching must be set aside, so that a broader context of long-standing trajectories of Christian homiletics throughout the ages can be discerned and brought into view. Although Edwards resided on the outskirts of the colonial world, his intellectual endeavors in framing his homiletic discourses resonated strongly with the trajectories of Christian homiletics of earlier centuries—though mediated through the early modern period. Edwards’s sermons, then, as literary devices or discourses with their rhetorical particularities, must be situated in the history of preaching.

Preaching and Confessional Culture in Early Modern Germany. Catholic Sermons between 1650 and 1800

With the Council of Trent, Catholicism defined itself for the first time as a confession with distinct identifying features. In order not only to create but also to maintain such a Catholic Confessionalised identity, Catholic preachers needed to react to contemporary settings and currents as well as to fixed points of reference, as represented by the decrees of Trent. The scope provided by the Trent decree on preaching, “super lectione et praedicatione,” was so wide that, based upon it, individual ideas could be constructed about what constituted a “good” sermon. This can be seen in the various hermeneutics of the Council that developed up to the 18th century, and the associated post-Tridentine practices of piety, which are commonly grouped under the terms “Baroque” and “Enlightenment.” This article, which analyses sermons from the perspective of aesthetics of production and reception, is nonetheless able to show that along with Baroque and Enlightened piety, Jansenist influences also coexisted, something which has hardly been appreciated so far in research. At the same time, the preachers and the audiences do not seem to have understood the complex network of variously coded elements of Catholic confessional culture as a contradiction: the pastoral strategies of Catholics from the years 1650 to 1800 seem rather not to have been characterised by wave-like motion, with specific extensions on the ritual-sensual or rational-iconoclastic levels, as has been assumed in research. Such asynchrony can also be recognised in textual samples drawn from the Russian Orthodox history of preaching.

William Perkins’sThe Arte of Prophecying:A Literary Manifesto

William Perkins, the late sixteenth-century Cambridge theologian and one of the best-selling authors of his time, wrote the first major English book on preaching. During his ministry in Cambridge, as a fellow of Christ’s College and lecturer at Great St Andrew’s Church, he also preached a large number of sermons, which illustrated the art he taught. Historians of preaching have generally seen him as the chief proponent of the puritan ‘plain style’, a way of preaching sometimes contrasted with the learned, elaborate, ‘metaphysical’ style of preaching fashionable in the Established Church during the early seventeenth century. Recently it has been argued that preachers like Perkins were so insistent on the moral demands of the Scriptures, particularly those of the Old Testament, that they became increasingly unpopular in the English Church. According to Christopher Haigh, preaching of the kind favoured by Perkins and like-minded ministers - morally demanding, hortatory and focused on predestination - was deeply resented and strongly resisted by many English parishioners, who helped to fashion what he describes as a more relaxed, ‘anglicised’ Protestantism that they found more congenial. Peter Iver Kaufman has written that Perkins, like other members of what he calls ‘the Protestant opposition to Elizabethan religious reform’, aimed to shame his hearers, and that ‘at Cambridge, [he] taught the next generation of dissident preachers to shame and thus save their parishioners’. Some parishioners were no doubt made uncomfortable by Perkins and preachers influenced by him. But these recent assessments of Perkins and his place in the history of preaching are misleading and inadequate. They underestimate the character and extent of his influence on preaching. Moreover, many commentators have failed to recognize the effect of Perkins’s views on the development of English prose. This essay will show what Perkins taught in his treatise on preaching, and argue for its lasting significance for modern prose style.