Theology That Bites Back
“The great procession of the year, sacred to our best human instincts with the accumulated reverence of ages—Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, Whitsunday—leads those who walk in it, at least once every year, past all the great Christian facts, and, however careless and selfish be the preacher, will not leave it in his power to keep them from his people”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 79
“These last times grow very frequent with some men, till you have the race of clerical visionaries who think vast, dim, vague thoughts, and do no work. It is a danger of all ardent minds. The only salvation, if one finds himself verging to it, is an unsparing rule that no idea, however abstract, shall be every counted as satisfactorily received and grasped till it has opened to us its practical side and helped us somehow in our work”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 77
“It seems to me that a large part of the troubles and mistakes of our pastoral life come from our having too high an estimate of men’s present condition and too low an estimate of their possibility”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 73
Ineffective pastoral care “tries to meet the misfortunes of life with comfort and not with inspiration . . . The truest help which one can render to a man who has any of the inevitable burdens of life to carry is not to take his burden off but to call out his best strength that he may be able to bear it”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 71
“The preacher needs to be pastor, that he may preach to real men. The pastor must be preacher, that he may keep the dignity of his work alive. The preacher, who is not a pastor, grows remote. The pastor, who is not a preacher, grows petty . . . Be both; for you cannot really be one unless you also are the other”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 70
“Preaching is the communication of truth through a man to men. The human element is essential in it, and not merely accidental”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 68
“The minister must grow. His true growth is not necessarily a change of views. It is a change of view”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 66
“That which ought to be the manliest of all professions has a tendency, practically, to make men unmanly. Men make appeals for sympathy that no true man should make. They take to themselves St. Paul’s pathos without St. Paul’s strength . . . Never appeal for sympathy. Let it find you out if it will. Count your manliness the soul of your ministry and resist all attacks upon it however sweetly they may come”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 65
“And so the first business of the preacher is to conquer the tyranny of his moods, and to be always ready for his work”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 63
“A man’s first wonder when he begins to preach is that people do not come to hear him. After a while, if he is good for anything, he begins to wonder that they do”
Phillips Brooks, The Joy of Preaching, p. 60
