Category: The Church

“Calvin is saying . . . that God is gracious, that Jesus Christ has made the satisfaction for our sin. But when this message is preached, its reality is present and (how could it therefore be otherwise?) effective . . . The reality was present, however, not through vivid imagination or power of language, but by the working of the Holy Spirit.”

Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, p. 29

“The pulpit is ‘the throne of God, from where he wills to govern our souls.’”

Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, p. 26

“Calvin is not telling the people that must remind themselves that God has spoken in Scripture but that, while listening to a sermon, they must ask themselves whether they are listening to God or a man. If the teaching is faithful to Scripture, then it is God who is speaking.”

Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, p. 24

“It is the humble position of preaching as derivative and subordinate that is precisely its glory.”

Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, p 23

“Those who cannot bear to be reproved had better look for another school-master than God. There are many who will not stand it: ‘What! is this the way to teach? Ho! we want to be won by sweetness.’ ‘You do? Then go and teach God his lessons!’”

Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, p. 14

“Teaching on its own is not sufficient, for we are cold and indifferent to God’s truth We need to be pierced. The preacher has to use vehemence, so that we may know that this is not a game.”

Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, p. 12

“The watchwords for preachers must be submission and obedience . . . he shows by what he does that he is not intruding himself at his own will and that he is not mixing in anything of his own dreams, but that he has and holds the pure truth of God” (Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, p. 11)

“But, Cochlaeus asks, how can we be convinced that Scripture ‘flows from God’ unless we have recourse to the Church’s decree saying that this is so? Calvin brushes this aside as the typical academic question of a man without experience of faith. You might as well ask how one learns to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from sour.”

Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, p. 3

“In recommending a program of general reading for preachers, I will not be asking for a recrudescence of what Reinhold Niebuhr called ‘pretty sermons.’ Niebuhr appears to have had in mind not just poetry-laden sermons, or florid sermons, but any sermons of highly refined rhetoric. Niebuhr said he wanted to keep his sermons ‘rough,’ instead, ‘just to escape the temptation of degenerating into an elocutionist.’”

Plantinga, Reading for Preaching, p. 5