“That is something the conscientious Christian preacher needs to learn, but the place to learn it is in the schools. On the other hand, the art of public speaking is a talent; some people have a natural inclination for it and some do not. Augustine quotes a saying of Cicero’s that people learn rhetoric quickly …
Education for the Pulpit
“On the authority of Augustine the liberal arts education would be revived by the universities of the High Middle Ages. When the preaching orders, notably the Franciscans and Dominicans, began to think about how preachers were to be trained, they carefully studied Augustine’s De doctrina christiana and tried to give their young friars exactly this …
A Sacramental Raw Foods Movement
” . . . an approach that will make the celebration of the rites more important than the preaching. Preaching will be understood as mystagogy. More and more preaching will be thought of as the explanation of the rites; more and more it will be imagined that it is the rites themselves which communicate; and …
Rigorism As Temptation, Not as Goal
“Religion has its own temptations, and these temptations are particularly strong for those who area put in positions of church leadership. Serious theological error is a strong temptation for the devout. The irreligious hardly consider such things. The truly chaste are tempted to condemn marriage. Rigorism is a constant temptation to celibate Christians” (Hughes Oliphant …
High Dogma
“All the art of the poet is used to make the cadences of the language appropriate to the high seriousness of the thoughts expressed. That high dogma can be poetry is inconceivable to some, but there are plenty of examples–T.S. Eliot’s introduction to The Wasteland, for one” (Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of …
Solemn Remembrance
“Worship is a memorial or remembrace of the saving acts of God on which the covenant relationship is based” (Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures, Vol. II, p. 232).
Something Very Different
“Antiochene exegesis rejected allegory, but it did not reject typology because it recognized that something very different is at work in typology. The Antiochene School was well aware that the New Testament itself used typology and therefore had no problem using it when it clearly was already in the text” (Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reaching …
Forgetting the Point By Decorating It
“When the liturgy becomes so complicated that it demands the sort of highly conventionized sermons . . . the original purpose of preaching begins to fall from sight. Instead of explaining the Scriptures, the sermon explains the liturgy” (Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures, Vol. II, p. 165).
And Will Be Again
“Our day and age, still under the shadow of the Enlightenment, naively imagines that the doctrinal sermon is boring and that sermons like these must have been tedious. A less beclouded day will probably recognize this prejudice as a rather peculiar form of pietistic agnosticism. The history of preaching is filled with examples of great …
Treasury of Tropes
“Far from being mere word tricks, the tropes of classical rhetoric are the inevitable consequence of a creation endowed by its creator with meaning . . . Creation itself is metaphoric and parabolic. Things seen speak of things unseen” (Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures, Vol. II, p. 59).