Philip Arthur Bence PhD Thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

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4. the "existential reception of the content."1°
Note particularly that last factor. For preaching to be
the Word of God, it must be received as such. Finite man
cannot speak of revelation objectively. He can speak
only of what he receives as revelation.
The church remembers Harry Emerson Fosdick as a
preacher. From the pulpit (and through published
sermons), he influenced thousands in an obvious, public
manner. In his own evaluation of his work, he gave
priority to private counselling. He wrote,
I am commonly thought of as a preacher, but I
should not put preaching central. Personal
counseling has been central. My preaching at
its best has itself been personal counseling on
a group scale. Of all the results of my work I
prize nothing so much as the remembrance of
miracles I have witnessed as the result of
Christian truth brought to bear privately on
individuals.1
Fosdick gave preaching (as opposed to other forms of
interpersonal communication) no significant inherent
value; he saw it as little more than private conversation
in a public forum. Admittedly, when questioned by an
interviewer, Fosdick stated, "It fa sermon] is no good if
it isn't revelation and if it isn't a mediation of the
revelation of God in Christ." 2° Yet, in order to
correlate that statement with Fosdick's writing on
preaching, one must assume that he 'demythologized' the
word "revelation." He wrote of "the essential nature of
a sermon as an intimate, conversational message from soul
to soul." 21 Similarly, he stated, "The total effect
[of preaching] ought to be one of talk, plain,