Classical Lutheran homiletics: Does the preacher matter?
It’s a commonplace of rhetoric that the speaker’s person and personality form a part of his success or failure to move, to delight, or whatever his purpose is. A man skilled in oratory but evil in heart will do enormous damage, as Quintilian said, “Nature herself will have proved not a mother, but a stepmother with regard to what we deem her greatest gift to man, the gift that distinguishes us from other living things, if she devised the power of speech to be the accomplice of crime, the foe to innocency and the enemy of truth. For it had been better for men to be born dumb and devoid of reason than to turn the gifts of providence to their mutual destruction” (Institutes of Oratory XII.1.2).
An incompetent man with good intentions will also do an injustice to his material if his delivery or what Cicero called his “physical eloquence” do not express the fiery nature of his subject, “All emotional appeals will inevitably fall flat, unless they are given the fire that voice, look, and the whole carriage of the body can give them,” (Institutes of Oratory XI.3.2). The speaker’s whole self should be used in the delivery of what he has to say, not only his mind or his emotions or his gestures. The whole man delivers an entire message that should align with his words. When the man’s emotion or gestures or abilities don’t align with his message, more than one message will be communicated, with the verbal message being just a part of the whole thing.
These rhetorical commonplaces were known to our fathers. Their understanding of preaching always included discussion of the preacher himself along with hermeneutics, logical divisions, and the fivefold use of Scripture in applying the Word to God’s people. Reinhold Pieper’s discussion of the preacher’s personal qualities (Eigenschaften) begins with the assertion that
The noblest qualities that a preacher must possess to carry out the demand made on him in the sermon are competence and faithfulness. (Ev-luth. Homiletik, 456).
The preacher’s personal qualities are important to the fulfillment of “the demand made on him in the sermon,” but they are not chiefly how he dresses or what his voice sounds like. Dress, gesture, and tone are all handled in turn by Pieper, and we will handle them too here in time. But we will begin our series on classical Lutheran homiletics where Pieper does—with competence.
Competence may be natural or supernatural. Natural competence consists in those gifts of body and mind, intellectual accomplishment, and some gift for teaching whose absence would entirely disqualify an otherwise pious man from the preaching office (Predigtamt), early Missouri’s most common term for the office of the holy ministry. Pieper’s clearest account of natural competence is “a good understanding, keen judgment, and a good memory.” Other naturally accomplished intellectual tasks such as the knowledge of theological languages and philosophy are necessary along with a secure grasp of what is pure doctrine and what is false doctrine. Added to a sound body, a clear voice, and a gift for teaching, a man may be very naturally competent to preach.
Yet with all those gifts, he may still lack one thing. Supernatural competency is Pieper’s way of explaining how God gives a man His Holy Spirit to fit him for the ministry (2 Cor. 3:5). Without that supernatural competency by God’s grace, an unregenerate man cannot carry out the work of the ministry rightly or fruitfully (Homiletik, 467). With God’s Holy Spirit the preacher, however naturally gifted, is enlightened and sanctified for God’s work. He is given “divine light and divine wisdom in understanding…a denial of self-love and an upright love for God and neighbor in will…with these gifts of understanding and will is included a living experience of spiritual things,” (Homiletik, 465). God makes him competent by this combination of natural and supernatural gifts for the work of preaching.
Of course the preacher matters. Pagan and Christian authors knew this. We are not robots and never were. Our hearers are not robots and do not want to listen to robots. God uses those gifts of body, voice, mind, and heart He has naturally given to some men and sanctifies those gifts and those men to His purposes through the gift of the Spirit that brings us into a “living experience of spiritual things” for the sake of the preaching of His gospel. The preacher matters because God chooses to have His Word proclaimed by men who have hearts, minds, souls, and strengths that should be entirely given over to His purposes. If our natural competencies of body or mind or gesture or whatever else could be better, let’s work on what we can to better ourselves so that our teaching may be better understood. If we lack anything, we may ask our Father, Who gives liberally to His children, even His preachers.