“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
Though It Didn’t
“So he tried his first line again. ‘Christ is the Lord of the nations in a spiritual sense,’ he said. A number of pony tails in the front rows bobbed because they saw that this was intended to make sense.”
Not Friendly at All
“He felt like a quarterback who had just been ear-holed by a linebacker with poor manners and a bad attitude.”
No Admixture
You Don’t Need a Priest to Tell You the Sun Is Up
“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
Or Grass Grow
“The apostle Paul lived one of the most thrilling lives ever lived, and yet the good professor seemed to have the ability to present the second missionary journey as something at the same level as watching paint dry.”
No Pretty Sermons
“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
The Butterfly’s Nicest Pair
“He had once heard his grandfather say, in reference to his grandmother, that she was the butterfly’s boots, and this was a sentiment that Trevor now thought he understood the deeper meaning of. He had fallen for her voice—that voice!—the day of the rally out in front of the college, and then, when he had actually met her, he had decided within minutes that it would be criminal negligence on his part not to be in hot pursuit. Of course, he must not look as though he was in hot pursuit. Some girls don’t go for that. He ought to look like he was sauntering. Sauntering purposively.”
A Good Contagion
“He might end up pondering with his congregation that kindness and laughter in a home are generationally as contagious as abuse, and that they provide acoustics in which the gospel of grace will sound plausible and resonant, even to the children of preachers.”
Plantinga, Reading for Preaching, p. 2
A Healthy Drill for Young Men
“It was the kind of family where the young men were expected to go off to school and then to make their own way in the world of great adventures—five years or so was respectable—before coming back and joining the firm in some useful and productive capacity. They were always expected to come back with a dragon head or two, and it was never looked down on if they came back with a beautiful and exotic woman from Ecuador or something. Trevor’s uncle had done that.”