Craddock on the Craft of Preaching

Fred B Craddock

• Editorial: Chalice Press
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780827205543
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Christian Ministry

No one has had more impact and influence on the craft of preaching in the last several decades than Fred Craddock. After his retirement from a distinguished teaching career, he became free to share his wisdom with a wider audience without the burdens of academic responsibilities. The lectures and workshops show an ever-expanding scholarship beyond that of his published books. This book has gathered the "best of the best" of these lectures/workshops and offers them to preachers and students of preaching for critical reflection and increased effectiveness.

1

Between the Ear and the Mouth

I have had the privilege of hearing the first quivering sermons of many students. Some people who don’t understand what that is like will sometimes say to me, “Poor Fred, you had to listen to all of those beginning sermons.” In my teaching career first at Phillips Graduate Seminary and then at Candler School of Theology, I listened to thousands of first sermons in “introduction to preaching” class. I want the persons who have been my students to know that I had the best job on the faculty.

In the beginning of my teaching career, I taught mostly New Testament and a little preaching. Over the years, I shifted to teaching mostly preaching and some New Testament. When I moved to teaching mostly preaching, I worried that my ear would be bombarded and I would grow homiletically deaf. I feared that I would get to a point where I was not really listening to the student up there quivering through that first sermon—that my mind would be wandering and I would be groaning (to myself), “Here we go again.”

Not through any discipline of mine, nor through any activity or exercise of my own, God saw fit to grace me with a listening ear through all of those sermons. For reasons I don’t quite understand, each one of those first sermons was also a “first sermon” to me as the listener. Some of those first sermons were as rough as a corncob. But every once in a while a student would preach that first sermon and it would move me to the point where I found it difficult to start the discussion because I wanted us to just sing the doxology and leave. But I felt I owed it to the students to make comments, just to give them their money’s worth in tuition.

As a starting point to this project, I have decided, wisely or unwisely, to go back to the material in the folder that is marked “P301: Introduction to Preaching.” Gail O’Day and I taught the course at Candler. We assigned adjuncts and helpers in other classes. But we were very careful about that course—we did not let anybody else teach P301. If there were visiting faculty members who could teach preaching, we would let them teach an advanced elective, but we taught P301. That was the important course in the field because that’s where the students were introduced to the importance of the ear and the mouth: to learn how to listen.

The Bible takes listening very seriously. The Bible’s term for “listening” is translated most often as “obey.” But the Bible doesn’t know the difference between “listen” and “obey.” Listening is a fundamental word, but it is so hard to do. We all have marvelous mechanisms for not listening. The Bible recognizes this. Recall that marvelous passage about the suffering servant in Isaiah 50:4b–5, “Morning by morning he wakens—wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught. The Lord God opened my ear, and I was not rebellious.” The wording literally is “God dug out my ear.”

You don’t just listen—it takes an act of God to really listen. And in order to serve, the servant said, “I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting” (Isa. 50:6).

So we start with the introduction of the ear because it is the person who can hear the gospel who can preach the gospel. Preaching is like singing. If you don’t have the ear, then you don’t have the voice. We start with listening—it’s so extremely important.

P301 also deals, of course, with the mouth. Speaking. Because our culture tends to minimize speaking, “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me”—all of that is false. It’s false. Unless students begin with a profound respect for words and what happens when they say something to somebody, they will not understand that speaking is the fundamental human sacrament. You can mow the yard with the extremities of your body. You can paint the basement of the church with the extremities of your body. But if you witness for Jesus Christ, you get a lump in your throat because that’s so hard to do. And anybody who says “words, words, words” or “anybody can talk” has never tried to bring up an important subject with anybody.

Preaching is a matter of drawing the breath in pain to tell the Story. This is why it is so difficult to preach: to stand up in a room and see strangers there and yet share with them matters that are more intimate than those in your family—more important than life—to folk that might have been just passing by or stopping in.

The ear and the mouth are connected. Isaiah 50:4 says, “The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Morning by morning he wakens—wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught.” You don’t just go hear lectures on preaching and then prepare a sermon. It’s not that easy—it’s not that smooth. One doesn’t just hear preaching, or hear a little about preaching, and then go preach. There’s a lot of distance between the ear and the mouth: ear, brain, heart, soul, and out the mouth.

What I want to do is review P301. This may not be wise, and if you don’t think it’s wise or if you feel insulted, don’t tell me about it. I’m a fragile human being. It may have been a long time since you took P301, so this will be a “refresher” for you. For others, this will be a preview. In P301 we didn’t start immediately on exegesis of the text—to get something to say so that we could design a sermon and fashion a way to say it. We don’t start there. We start with comments prior to that.

I opened the third drawer down in my filing cabinet. In that drawer was a folder, and there was one sheet in that folder for each semester I taught in which I condensed years of lectures on preaching and wrote their essence into the following statements. These few statements were what I told students before they ever started working on sermons. These are for preachers who never had me in P301—and for those who did but were not listening at the time. Most of what I said in that opening session was the same every time. I changed it a little bit to make the dean think I was continuing to create and all that, but basically it was the same.

I boiled it down to fourteen statements. If you recognize them, good. I would be keenly disappointed if there was nothing in these fourteen statements that you have not already embraced and lived out in your ministry.

1. We have all heard good preachers, but no one preaches well enough to be imitated. Find your own voice and prepare your own sermons. Your favorite preacher may be a violin and you may discover that you’re a trumpet.
2. The key to consistently effective preaching is the discipline of daily work. I’m sorry that the daily work is very often not exciting. But remember there is more to walking than dancing. You have the right to label the simplest tasks “Mickey Mouse” only after you have mastered them.
3. The surest way to stop growing is to stop reading. The surest way to rest, satisfied with your achievements, is to stop reading. So to read thoroughly and to master one good book will enable you to read all other books with greater speed, with greater ease, and with greater profit.
4. Carry through on every impulse to its conclusion before other new and fresh impulses smother the preceding one. A preacher cannot live very long on impulses unattended.
5. Even the most careful professional attention to the sins of others does not release you from struggles with your own. When attending to your own soul, select resource material that makes a demand on you, because many devotional books weaken rather than strengthen character. Be aware that there are sins of the spirit as well as sins of the flesh. Be on guard when an answer to prayer leaves you feeling smug, superior, or exempt.
6. Learn to live with the fact that there are few, if any, clues to your effectiveness as a preacher. Both popularity and unpopularity are absolutely worthless as tests of the value of your preaching.
7. Do not expect everything you preach to be confirmed by your pulse. Not all sermons will have visceral support. How you feel about a matter may not be a true register of its importance or its merit. Some things are true even while we’re asleep.
8. You are not obliged to be everywhere and to say everything. Leave some things unsaid and some meetings unattended. Choose your times and your places carefully, so that your words will proceed out of silence and your presence will proceed out of absence.
9. Do not be seduced by the fact that much of your seminary education is designed to prepare you to handle crises. Most likely it will not be the crises so much as the routine demands of ministry that will really test your mettle.
10. Major tasks do not simply consume energy—they generate energy. Put both of your hands to a significant assignment and you will discover miraculously that you have even two more hands to take care of your other duties. The minister who burns little energy has little energy.
11. Seriousness of purpose does not require heaviness of manner. In other words, it doesn’t mean you have to look like a sad dork. Remaining light on your feet does not contradict but honors the importance of your work. And being pleasant, cheerful, and full of good humor will serve your listeners as a sure sign of the presence of God’s grace.
12. Remember that preaching is not simply talking about Christian subjects but is itself a Christian act. What this means, at its very minimum, is that the preacher respects all listeners as centers of value, of meaning, of decision, of thought, of feeling, and of action. Every listener must be given room to say “no” to your sermon. Otherwise, their “yes” will be meaningless.
13. There will be times when what you want to do and what you have to do exactly coincide. Thank God for those occasions because they will be rare. There will be many times—many occasions—when what you want to do stands at some distance from what as minister of the gospel you have to do.
14. You very likely, while in seminary and beyond, will experience lapses of your own personal faith. Do not panic. In the interim between the lapse of faith and the return of faith, I suggest you do two things. First, let the church believe for you until your own faith returns. And second, remember that even when you are experiencing distance from God and feeling all alone, it is still better to be true than false, to be brave than cowardly, to be generous than selfish, and to be kind than cruel.

2

New Testament Theology as a Pastoral Task

The question, “can theology be practical?” is often translated into the more popular question: “will it preach?” Through the years I have grown to hate the idea of “will it preach?” That question assumes the minister is a “consumer,” running around with a notebook, attending conferences to steal ideas, combing through books, and hearing, receiving, and sharing only that which is really for “retail.” The preacher who operates with a “will it preach?” paradigm has no appreciation for the reservoir but instead stands desperately at the faucet for a cupful for next Sunday. So I don’t like that expression, and that is not my task in this chapter.

My task here is to deal with the question, “is it possible that New Testament theology be practical?” Now that is a big task, of course, because it assumes the existence of New Testament theology. And it assumes that we can just go from that and jump into the question of whether or not it is practical. Actually, the subject of New Testament theology is itself a nest full of briars and confusion. If you go to the seminary library and look through titles under New Testament theology, you will notice that most of the titles end in question marks. For example, when I came to Candler School of Theology, my colleague Henry Boers had just published a very important book on New Testament theology, and the title is What Is New Testament Theology?

Is there any such thing as New Testament theology? If by theology one means a systematic and coherent focus of thought around the concept of God, then there is no such thing as New Testament theology. The New Testament provides the raw material for theology, but it is not a theology itself.

The problem began, or at least came to full expression, with the Protestant Reformation. Most of us who are Protestants like to relish the thought that the Reformation gave the Bible back to the church. While there is some truth in that, there is the darker side that the Reformation took the Bible away from the church. It was believed at that time the church owned, possessed, controlled, and used the Bible as a proof text to authorize doctrines, practices, moral instruction, and ritual. And with the Reformation the Bible was taken away, and some distance was put between the Bible and the church so that the Bible could do its proper work: to stand over and against the church, to call the church into question, and to bring the church under the judgment of God. With that distance, however, unintended consequences began to emerge. One important unintended consequence was that the Bible came to be studied at a distance from the church, outside the church, outside the community of faith.

Methods of scholarship were devised for studying the Bible with the assumption that faith is a disadvantage when you are studying this book. The emerging scholarship assumed faith blurs your vision, makes you sentimental, and makes you protective. You should be clear-eyed, level gazed, and totally objective. We must engage in “values-free” research according to this viewpoint.

A whole body of approaches arose that we generally classify as the “historical critical” study of the Bible. We are much indebted to the historical-critical approach. We know things about the Bible, about its text, its literary structure, and historical sources that we would have never known without it. And we could never go back to the era prior to the historical critical study, even if we wanted to.

We are much in debt to the historical critical study of the Bible. But with that came the growing concern that with this distance between the church and Bible, how can we get the Bible back to the church? How can the distance be bridged? How can the gulf be crossed? How can the Bible be given back to the community from which it came and to which it speaks?

One approach was the development of what is called New Testament theology to get at the meaning of the text, the theological insight, the thrust of the text, what the text says to the human spirit. On March 30, 1787, a professor joined the theological faculty of the University of Altdorf in Switzerland. Professor Johann Philipp Gabler, for his inaugural lecture as a new member of that faculty, took for himself the task of distinguishing between dogmatic theology and biblical theology, drawing their lines of purpose, their definitions of direction, and their methods.

And many New Testament scholars believe that was the beginning of what is called New Testament theology. The issues raised in that marvelous address more than two hundred years ago are still the issues pursued in New Testament study—in New Testament theology in particular. How does one get at the meaning if there is a truth for all time, caught in the historical relativities and circumstances of the New Testament? How does one extricate the message without leaving behind the historical reality in which the church lives, did live, and in which we live? How can this book, caught in time and place, be normative for every time and place? How can I draw up its message and its meaning for the church? Shall I go by the theology of the authors: Paul, John, or Luke? Or shall I affirm the unity of the New Testament and just develop some topics: reign of God, eschatology, God, Christology, salvation, or redemption?

Do I decide what is the heart and soul of the New Testament—the so-called canon within the canon—and let that be the magnet that I pass over all the material? And whatever is attracted to the “magnet” is good and whatever is not is no good?

How does one “do” New Testament theology? Well, while that will continue to be debated and discussed, wherever it has been given a chance, the Bible has continued to make its impact in the lives of people: triggering new insight, new revelation; giving new...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Message from Fred B. Craddock
• Introduction
• 1 Between the Ear and the Mouth
• 2 New Testament Theology as a Pastoral Task
• 3 Preaching as Storytelling
• 4 Preaching as Storytelling
• 5 Preaching as Storytelling
• 6 Preaching as Storytelling
• 7 The Sermon as a Twice-Told Tale
• 8 The Sermon as a Twice-Told Tale
• 9 The Sermon as a Twice-Told Tale
• 10 The Sermon as a Twice-Told Tale
• 11 The Sermon as a Twice-Told Tale
• 12 Preaching and the Nod of Recognition
• 13 Preaching and the Shock of Recognition
• 14 Preaching the Same Sermon Every Week
• 15 Wanting Out
• 16 Thirteen Ways to End a Sermon
• 17 The Habit of the Sermon
• 18 Once More with Feeling
• Notes