Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Hughes Oliphant Old (1933-2016) was John H. Leith Professor of Reformed Theology and Dean of the Institute for Reformed Worship, Erskine Theological Seminary, Columbia, South Carolina.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

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 College, Juilliard, and, above all, Union Theological Seminary, which from the thirties through the seventies was the center of liberal Christian thought. It eventually spawned under its shadow the Interchurch Center, which became headquarters of a number of the country's leading denominations. Riverside Church, founded by Harry Emerson Fosdick and John D. Rockefeller, was the cathedral of the Protestant establishment. Basically Riverside Church is a Baptist church, but at the high tide of ecumenical good feeling it affiliated itself with the United Church of Christ while still maintaining its Baptist connections. Several of its pastors have been Presbyterian. In fact, the church demonstrates how close Baptists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians really are. Memories of the great Harry Emerson Fosdick and the war against fundamentalism were still alive at Riverside Church even if things had mellowed a bit in the fifties. Having spent two semesters as a student assistant in that august institution, I have to admit to a certain affection for the place, even if it is with an undeniable ambiguity. Surely to be called as pastor of that church amounts to nothing less than being recognized as the standard-bearer of mainline Protestantism.

The Courage to Love, published in 1982, is a collection containing ten sermons presumably preached in Riverside Church. They are a good selection of the sort of thing Coffin preached in that famous pulpit during the early eighties, but they also, as any reader of the Christian Century will recognize, give us a good clue as to what avant-garde preachers were saying all over America during that same period. They are beautifully written sermons.

The first sermon, "The Courage to Love," is a good introduction to the collection. It sounds the theme of Christian existentialism, as anyone familiar with the literature of twentieth-century existentialism will recognize. The title immediately calls to mind that famous primer of existentialism, Paul Tillich's The Courage to Be. A few brief remarks introduce the reading of the text. The preacher tells how as a boy he loved to gaze at puddles. Going from one puddle to another, he was amazed at how much of the heavens could be reflected in such little puddles. It is the same way, he tells us, with some of the short anecdotes of Scripture. They are so short and yet they relate a whole world of truth. With that masterful analogy he begins to read the story of the paralytic let down through the roof to receive the healing of Jesus (Mark 2:1-12).

Our preacher makes a few exegetical notes. It is not clear exactly what is wrong with the man, but whatever it is, it seems to have been brought about by feelings of guilt. Today we know that many people are paralyzed by fear. Mental hospitals are filled with them. In biblical times it was naively thought that people were struck with illness as punishment for sin, although some parts of Scripture, such as the book of Job, are skeptical of this simplistic explanation. Nevertheless, there does seem to be some mysterious connection between physical health and the maladies of the spirit. The man in the story may well have been suffering from what today we call a psychosomatic illness.

When we look at Jesus, what we as Christians find is the incarnation, "God's love in person on earth." This, too, is a mystery. Here our preacher briefly contrasts the divine love represented by Jesus with the romantic understanding of love represented by the figure of Cupid. The difference between the two is that God's love is not seeking something of value, but rather it creates value. Putting his doctrine of grace succinctly, Coffin says, "Christians recognize their value as a gift rather than an achievement: it is not because we have value that we are loved, but because we are loved that we have value." How beautifully our preacher has put it! The visionary love of Jesus sees the need for spiritual healing. This kind of "creative love restores the man's worth by cleansing his heart of the fearful thoughts paralyzing his will."

Having made these brief, incisive, exegetical remarks, Coffin begins to apply the story to problems of Christians today. As he sees it, the paralytic stands for Christians who are afraid to venture out into life and leave behind the securities of friends and family, social status, and financial support. These things paralyze us and therefore we need to be converted. We need to leave these things behind and explore the fullness of life. Here, of course, is a typical theme of existentialism, yet our preacher supports it from the most orthodox of Church Fathers, Irenaeus. The quotation is a gem: "The glory of God is a human being fully alive." As he develops his theme, Coffin follows another existentialist line of thought: the responsibility involved in being free is frightening, and that explains why people settle for their private securities, even if they are paralyzing. People are afraid to be free. They would rather punish themselves by listening to boring sermons and stick with a moralistic religion. Instead of being free and loving, they would rather be "mean little Puritans, bluenosed busybodies passing judgment on others."

To further make his point he reminds us of the story of the rich young ruler. As our preacher sees it, we American Christians are just like him; we put security above everything. The trouble is, "this deliberate retreat from the mysterious to the manageable" is rather boring. On the other hand, finding our security in God, we could go out beyond these other securities and find all kinds of things we never expected. When Jesus healed that man and told him to get up and walk, we have no idea where he went. Jesus healed him with no strings attached. We can imagine, however, that the man responded to God's love with the same kind of love, and so we don't have to worry about what he did.

This is a stirring sermon. From a literary standpoint it is an exquisite piece of writing. The biblical imagery is handled magnificently. What one notices with particular interest is that this imagery has been used to present the existentialist gospel. The cardinal themes of existentialism are prominent: courage, the fearful responsibility of freedom, the oppressiveness of the law, the demand that we leave the fetters of law and piety behind.

The existentialist twist at the end is amazing. Jesus healed the man without any strings attached. This apparently means that Jesus made no demands on the man. There is no admonition to go and sin no more. He was not asked to live by any kind of moral principle or keep any kind of law. This is certainly true to the existentialist view of salvation, but whether it is true to the Christian understanding of salvation is another matter.

The next sermon we want to look at is on homosexuality. What is most interesting about this sermon is its interpretation of some of the passages of Scripture usually thought of as forbidding homosexual behavior. According to Coffin, Scripture does not really condemn homosexual behavior. The prohibitions of Leviticus are in a class with the dietary laws of the Old Testament. The Jerry Falwells of the world quote a text from Leviticus that says you shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. What the fundamentalists don't tell you is that the Hebrew word for "abomination" merely refers to something that is ritually rather than morally evil.

There is something else the Jerry Falwells of this world don't tell you: the ancient Israelites had an abhorrence of idolatry and wanted to separate their worship from the rites of the fertility cults so popular in that day, rites that included both male and female prostitutes. In the same way, they rejected the common practice of those times of making prisoners captured in war submit to anal rape. Here, too, the point was not that homosexuality was wrong but that dishonoring other human beings was wrong.

The Bible, claims Coffin, says nothing against loving and lasting homosexual relationships such as many gays of our day experience. The restrictions of Leviticus are understandable in terms of the times, but Christians are under no obligation to keep them. The sin of Sodom was not sodomy at all but failure to take care of the poor and violation of the laws of hospitality. Ironically, Christians who can't love homosexuals and treat them with respect are those who really are guilty of the sin of Sodom. As Coffin, and many like him, see it, "'the homosexual problem' is really the homophobia of many heterosexuals."

Having argued that homosexual practice is not contrary to the law of God, Coffin now argues that it is not contrary to the law of nature, either. He quotes a number of authorities to the effect that a homosexual orientation is neither an illness nor an arrested development but simply the way some people are made. This, again, is an argument congenial to the philosophy of existentialism. This philosophy argues that the appropriate behavior is that which expresses what one is. If one is by nature homosexual, then one should be free to express that nature.

The sermon concludes with a stirring peroration. Away, then, with these fixed certainties! "If what we think is right and wrong divides still further the human family, there must be something wrong with what we think is right." How appealing these lines are to all of us who were brought up on an existentialist disenchantment with the law. Coffin goes on, "Enough of this cruelty and hatred, this punitive legislation toward gay people on the part of straight Christians. Claiming to be full of principles, these Christians are proving to be full of prejudice."

If we are not worried about being cubbyholed with Jerry Falwell, we might raise some questions about this sermon. Does one really have to be a fundamentalist to find Coffin's interpretation of Scripture misleading? Coffin's interpretation is not original, to be sure. He is simply quoting the standard proof texts of the gay liberation movement. A simple reading of the story of Sodom as found in the book of Genesis should make it fairly clear that this supposedly scholarly interpretation is more than a bit contrived.

As for regarding the prohibitions against homosexual behavior as no more than ceremonial taboos to be regarded in the same way as the Old Testament dietary laws, one only has to read the first chapter of Romans where Paul registers his disgust at the homosexual behavior of supposedly enlightened pagans (Rom. 1:27). To overlook this passage in Romans is a glaring omission. Again, anyone who reads very far into the Bible will recognize that the New Testament condemns homosexual perversion on the same level as idolatry or murder or adultery, for example, in 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10. Few Americans sitting in the pews of mainline Protestant churches have found the biblical interpretation of the gay liberation movement convincing; moreover, plenty of competent biblical scholars find it simply dishonest.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Churchby Hughes Oliphant Old Copyright © 2010 by Hughes Oliphant Old. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.