Word: sermons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...problems are compounded when the clergyman is a liberal in theology, which may mean that he is uncertain about the importance and accuracy of the Bible or even about the urgent need for biblical teaching. Seminary instruction in homiletics (the techniques of sermon preparation) is generally good. But to conservative critics this work is often undermined by Bible faculties. "Seminarians are not sure God is speaking in the Bible," says James Boice of Philadelphia's Tenth Presbyterian Church. "The professors think of the Bible as a collection of human documents. Centuries ago, even the heretics believed the Bible...
Princeton Theological Seminary, considered among the best Protestant seminaries in training preachers, requires three courses on the subject. One covers enunciation, pace, voice production, posture and similar techniques, and is taught by a layman trained in speech. A second analyzes the construction of model sermons from the past. The student learns to mine Bible commentaries, boil his message down to a single sentence, then write out a well-organized sermon. In the final course, students in groups of twelve deliver sermons and criticize one another's-performances...
...most famous sermon ever preached in America was Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," which compared the sinner's plight to "a spider or loathesome insect" held over a fire. When Edwards preached, all New England shook in its boots. But the so-called Golden Age of Preaching did not come until the 19th century, with stemwinders like Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn and Phillips Brooks of Boston. Clyde Fant of the First Baptist Church in Richardson, Texas, a former homiletics teacher, notes that even then folks found fault with the state...
...typical Read sermon may begin with a quote from Humpty-Dumpty to Alice and turn on some apt lines from Samuel Johnson or Shakespeare as it wrestles with a timeless (but contemporary) problem using the perspectives of the Bible. "Scholarly content is terribly important," Read says, "but it shouldn't intrude." Read's material is solid enough to make him one of the few preachers whose collected sermons can be read as literature-and at the same time enjoy a respectable sale in book form...
Gardner C. Taylor, 60, Concord Baptist Church of Christ, Brooklyn, N.Y. "He has a voice that sounds like God," an admiring fellow preacher says of Taylor. To anyone who has listened to a Taylor sermon, the judgment does not seem far off target. Taylor's voice is deep and apparently inexhaustible. Working variations on a biblical theme ("Create in me a clean heart, O God"), he artfully circles around his subject, now lulling the listeners into serenity, now rising to majestic sincerity in stately cadences that overwhelm as much with their sound as with their meaning. Taylor says that...