Preaching and Preachers

The Form of the Sermonare clear, and are recognised, and can be described; and yet a symphonyis a whole. You can divide it into parts, and yet you alwaysrealise that they are parts of a whole, and that the whole is more thanthe mere summation or aggregate of the parts. One should alwaysthink of a sermon as a construction, a work which is in that way comparableto a symphony. In other words a sermon is not a mere meanderingthrough a number of verses; it is not a mere collection orseries of excellent and true statements and remarks. All those shouldbe found in the sermon, but they do not constitute a sermon. Whatmakes a sermon a sermon is that it has this particular 'form' whichdifferentiates it from everything else.I have to turn aside for a moment here to raise a question, or to dealwith a position; and I frankly confess that I have often been verytroubled by what I am about to say. Edwin Hatch in his HibbertLectures in 1888-1 have quoted from them already-makes a greatpoint of the fact that the earliest Christian preaching was entirelyprophetic. He says that Christian men received messages through theHoly Spirit and got up and delivered them without premeditation,thought, or preparation. They had no form, no sermonic form, aboutthem, but were isolated statements. 'Men spoke as they were movedby the Holy Spirit,' a message suddenly came to them and they gaveutterance. to it. There are indications of this in 1 Corinthians 14 andin other places. Hatch goes so far as to suggest not only that that wasthe original Christian preaching, but, further, that our idea of preaching,and in particular, this idea of a sermon which I am putting forwardis something that is foreign to the New Testament. He arguesthat it came into the Christian Church and her preaching as the resultof Greek influence upon the early Church, and especially during thesecond century. The Greeks, of course, were interested in form, theywere interested in form in everything-the human body, buildings,etc-so they had become interested in the form of their addresses orspeeches. They laid great emphasis upon this. A man did not just get73