Final Words on Preaching
Early in my writing career (1988) I wrote an article for Touchstone titled “The Crisis of Evangelical Preaching,” in which I concluded that in the Evangelical world the decline of preaching into the tiresome and predictable under the guise of biblical exposition came from the loss of the infectious certitude typical of an earlier generation of preachers. The Evangelical preacher did not present himself confidently as the anointed bearer and interpreter of the inerrant word of God, as his fundamentalist predecessor could be expected to do, and indeed, as many Protestant ministers had for generations. The confidence, if not audacity, of a Henry Ward Beecher or a Charles Finney —or indeed, of many of the Church Fathers —leaves modern readers of their sermons struggling for breath.
I must add now, near the end of my life, after listening for decades to bad preaching from numerous pulpits, that Evangelicals have no corner on this market. Each denomination seems infected by its native strain of bad preaching —the Anglicans by preciousness, the Lutherans by formula, the Catholics by laziness and biblical illiteracy, the Baptists by great volume to no great end. Although from time to time excellent preachers can be found among them all, I simply deal here with those I know best.
An Excessively Thin Man
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S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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