Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Hughes Oliphant Old (1933 - 2016) was an American theologian and academic. Until his retirement in 2014 he was the John H. Leith Professor of Reformed Theology and Worship at Erskine Theological Seminary. Previously he had taught at Princeton Theological Seminary.

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The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Preface.....................................................................................xviiCHAPTER I The End of the Mainline...........................................................1CHAPTER II Billy Graham (1918-).............................................................61CHAPTER III A "New Breed" of Presbyterians..................................................87CHAPTER IV Protestant Preaching in Black Africa.............................................173CHAPTER V Liberation Theology in Latin America..............................................237CHAPTER VI Vatican II and American Catholic Preaching.......................................297CHAPTER VII The Romanian Revolution and the Preaching of Joan Alexandru.....................347CHAPTER IX The Charismatics.................................................................393CHAPTER X A New Age in Britain..............................................................447CHAPTER XI The Megachurch...................................................................493CHAPTER XII The Young Churches of East Asia.................................................565Conclusion..................................................................................667Bibliography................................................................................669Acknowledgments.............................................................................700Index.......................................................................................703

Chapter One

When I first began planning this long study of the history of preaching, I started asking some of my colleagues at the Center for Theological Inquiry whom they considered the leading preachers of our day. There was usually quite a bit of hand-wringing and even a few agonized moans. Sometimes a few names were suggested very tentatively, but most often there was some sort of admission that there just weren't any great preachers today. We don't have any more George Buttricks, or Ralph Sockmans, or Henry Emerson Fosdicks. There was a time when America could boast a host of great preachers, but they seem to have all gone. There seemed to be, at least at Princeton, a consensus that the great age of American preaching had come to an end.

We devoted a chapter in a previous volume to that great age of the American pulpit. It has its beginning and, as all the great ages of preaching, it has its end. Usually we wouldn't devote a chapter to the end of a school, but in this case it seems called for because this end is occurring in our own time, and this last volume of our study is dedicated to a study of preaching in our own time. Two preachers stand out as marking the end of this school of preaching. They are the two preachers my colleagues most often mentioned — when they mentioned any at all, that is — when I asked whom they considered the outstanding preachers of our day. They are Billy Graham and William Sloane Coffin. Rarely did anyone mention both names. They either suggested Billy Graham or they suggested William Sloane Coffin. When I pressed my question outside of Princeton, I got some very different answers. Of that we will speak a bit further on. Even in Princeton Billy Graham was thought of as something of a classic, and we will devote an entire chapter to him. He is not really the sort of preacher the typical Princeton theologian is apt to get enthusiastic about, however, but he is recognized as doing a very good job of continuing a long and honored tradition of the American pulpit. William Sloane Coffin, on the other hand, the academic theologians of Princeton could get enthusiastic about. To be sure, he was not anything like the great preacher his uncle, Henry Sloane Coffin, was. He was, in fact, quite different from his uncle. Some found him a bit far out, and others thought he was right on, but all in all he was about the best most of my colleagues could think of.

The interesting thing is that these two preachers represent the two most important emphases of what we have called the Great American School, the evangelistic emphasis and the prophetic emphasis. Charles Finney started out the American school by calling for conversion, temperance, and the abolition of slavery. As time went on, the prophets went one way and the evangelists went another. By the time the school came to an end, the prophets and the evangelists were pretty much irreconcilable. Maybe that is one of the reasons the school came to an end. The prophetic emphasis and the evangelistic emphasis lost contact with each other. We will see how someone like Toyohiko Kagawa was able to keep the two closely related, but that was in Japan. The dichotomy between the prophets and the evangelists seems to be one of the salient features of the Great American School, and in these two men, Coffin and Graham, we see a good example of this. Rightly or wrongly, let us begin with Coffin.

I. William Sloane Coffin, Jr. (1924-2006)

By birth a member of the intellectual aristocracy, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., was the pastor of Riverside Church from 1977 to 1987. This church was regarded by many as America's most prestigious pulpit. The Sloane family was prominent in the banking circles of New York, while the Coffins had been prominent New England ministers for generations.

As a boy, Coffin was sent off to Phillips Andover Academy, one of America's great prep schools. His education, however, was interrupted by the Second World War, during which he did service as an infantry officer. Returning to his studies after the war, he graduated from Yale University in 1949, having majored in political science. For a while he worked for the CIA, but more and more he developed an interest in theology. He began to take courses at Union Theological Seminary in New York City where his uncle was president. Finally he returned to Yale, and in 1956 received his bachelor of divinity. Being ordained to the ministry of the Presbyterian church, he was appointed chaplain to Yale University, where he served for almost twenty years.

A. Preaching to the Freedom Riders

The years as chaplain at Yale made Coffin a national figure, as he dramatically staked out the position of "liberal Christianity" on the popular sociopolitical issues of the day. In the early sixties he took his preaching to the road, taking part with the "Freedom Riders." During the Vietnam War he was arrested for encouraging students to refuse military service. He even was among those who went to North Vietnam to demonstrate opposition to American foreign policy. Again he embarrassed the foreign policy of the government by taking part in a peace mission to Iran during the Iranian hostage crisis.

In 1977 Riverside Church called Coffin to its distinguished pulpit. No doubt they did so with the hope that their new pastor would continue to offer the quality of leadership for which he had already become famous.

B. Sermons at Riverside Church

For most of the twentieth century New York's Riverside Church provided the most prestigious pulpit in America. A neo-Gothic skyscraper, it commands the skyline of Morningside Heights, which proudly calls itself the American Acropolis. Around it are gathered Columbia University, Barnard...