The difference between a poet and a prophet: Dialectical rhetoric and the role of the Spirit in preaching,with reference to Karl Barth and D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Abstract

Do preachers really preach? Aiming for the relative safety of the ‘both/and’, many preachers slip into sermonizations of the Word of God, neglecting the activity of the Spirit. Barth’s early preaching (especially the infamous ‘Titanic sermon’) often flaunts rhetoric and ‘paradox’ rather than heraldic proclamation. Famous preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones was well known for his criticisms of Barth’s dialectical theology. Though rarely considered as feasible interlocutors, Lloyd-Jones’s call for prophetic ‘unction’ in preaching reveals a remarkably similar homiletic to the later Barth. Preaching as ‘prophecy’ emphasizes the active expectation of the preacher to be impacted by the power of the Spirit.

Keywords

Karl Barth content dialectic form Holy Spirit homily Martyn Lloyd-Jones poetic preaching proclamation prophetic rhetoric sermon unction

What is the point of preaching? Sunday after Sunday ministers, pastors, vicars, priests, bishops and lay people ascend the steps to a pulpit or a platform and speak from anywhere between seven and seventy minutes (depending upon whether you are a Catholic or a Pentecostal) in a strange ritual in which the ‘Word of God’ is, in theory, declared before our very ears. In theory, that is. The Greek word kērýssō (connoting the ‘heralding’ or ‘proclamation’ on behalf of a king) is usually given as the standard-bearer in most definitions of preaching.¹ One thinks of Jeremiah at the Temple Courts, Elijah at Mount Carmel, Stephen before the Sanhedrin, or Paul in the Areopagus; these speakers have an urgent message from the throne of God to be proclaimed in the midst of the hearers, there and then. Do many of today’s polished sermons and homilies reflect this imperative for preaching?

The ‘English homily’ is a pre-written discourse often written to be read as much as spoken, as was the case particularly in the nineteenth century, of reading sermons on a Sunday afternoon before the fire or at bedtime.² Admirers of Pride and Prejudice will recall Mr Collins’s absurd suggestion to read from a copy of ‘Fordyce’s sermons’ as a kind of after-dinner entertainment in the drawing-room (much to Lydia’s disdain).³ Historically, British preachers of various persuasions, from Wesley to Newman to Spurgeon, have published their sermons in such tidy collections. Certainly in more biblically literate generations (if one can use such a phrase) these written sermons had considerable impact beyond the preached moment itself. Yet the legacy of this overtly ‘written’ style for preaching today can result in sermons as well-rounded literary art forms rather than heraldic proclamations.⁴ Although this is not always the case, such homilies are often ‘well rounded’ because they seek, above all, to be balanced. This is both the help and the hindrance of dialectical thinking: ensuring that both sides of the proverbial coin are given their due. After all, nobody wants to sound like a nutter! A well-crafted piece of uncontroversial, ‘theologically robust’ rhetoric will at least ensure that you don’t get stoned to death in the pulpit, for another week at least.

But will this satisfy the third member of the Trinity? Preaching, after all, has never – in the history of the Church – been understood as a solely human activity. As Spurgeon taught his students, in all sermon preparation, ‘We tarry at Jerusalem till power is given.’⁵ Preaching, in the sense of kērýssō proclamation, is a prophetic act in the power of the Spirit. It is thus dependent more upon its divine source than its human form. Kierkegaard called this ‘The Difference between a Genius and an Apostle’ in which he argues that we do not listen to the Apostle Paul because of his brilliance of rhetoric or even his clarity of argument; we listen because, paradoxically, this man says he brings words from God. Kierkegaard says:

[I]s there not a difference … between a royal command and the words of a poet or a thinker? And what is the difference but this, that the royal command has authority … The poet, the thinker, on the other hand, does not have any authority … his utterance is evaluated purely aesthetically or philosophically by evaluating the content and form.⁶

With due caution, we might also apply this argument to the authority of the preacher.⁷ If preaching is recognized as an event which takes place in the power of the Spirit – not just in a nominal sense (what preacher would say they are speaking without the Spirit in some sense?) but with an active expectation that the Spirit of the living God will speak – this expectation ought to shape not only the preacher but also the form and delivery of their sermon. This article will attempt to highlight the importance of the prophetic dimension of preaching. First, we will look at Barth’s wrestling with dialectic and rhetoric in the pulpit in his early preaching at Safenwil, before contrasting this with Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s articulation of the ‘unction’ or ‘spiritual anointing’ which may accompany the preacher in the midst of proclamation.

Barth and the pulpit: dialectic, rhetoric, Spirit

The early Barth was as much a dialectician as he was a preacher: ‘“My friend,”’ he says, ‘“you must understand that if you ask about God and if I am really to tell about him, dialectic is all that can be expected from me.”’⁸ The extent to which Barth engaged in different forms of ‘dialectical’ thought is complex and well documented.⁹ When we speak of ‘dialectic’ in the context of preaching, we mean the overt attentiveness to the condition of seemingly contradictory antitheses of theological truth.¹⁰ Chalamet notes Barth’s perpetual awareness of ‘the brokenness of our human thinking, which cannot reconcile but only articulate contradictory statements’.¹¹ For Barth, there can only be a continuous, uncertain navigation between the two poles, the Yes and the No. Barth is especially concerned that God’s Word be kept free from imprisonment in human speech or system. This gives preaching an enormously high position in his theology; so high that it is – in one sense – impossible: ‘There can be no such thing as a minister. Who dares, who can, preach, knowing what preaching is?’¹² With such overt awareness of our limitations then, one can see how easily the notion of prophetic proclamation à la Jeremiah or Paul could be supplanted by this back-and-forth rhetorical navigation between conflicting polarities which characterized much of Barth’s earlier theology and preaching. For example, in this sermon of January 1913:

God’s judgement is eternal and final. But this holy and just God is also infinite love … Therefore his love is also eternal and final. The two contradict each other, do they not? Yes, but only in our thought. We wish quietly to let this contradiction stand. Jesus’ life and Jesus’ cross proclaim both aspects to us: God’s holiness and God’s love, both with the same height and strength and power, and both in the deepest unity.¹³

Here we see an explicit reference to contradiction itself. What he is saying is true; these two contrasting aspects of God’s relation to mankind are both present in revelation; but what has such a comment done for the proclamation of the Gospel at that moment? What has been declared through this discussion of the dialectical situation? It could be said that, here, Barth is not preaching the ‘Word of God’ per se to that present situation but, rather, he is presenting ‘the dialectic’ about the Word of God. He is communicating neither God’s judgement nor his mercy; the incessancy of the both/and paradigm has actually become – not something dynamic or dialectical but, ironically – static and blunted.

Prophetic proclamation can be hindered not only by the direct evocation of dialectical thought but also by an overemphasis on rhetoric itself – as though the sermon were merely a means to exhibit one’s literary flair. Little over nine months earlier, Barth had preached his infamous ‘Titanic sermon’ (21 April 1912), one week after perhaps the most devastating sea disaster of all time. The young Barth is so enraptured with the tragic romance of the news story that he is carried away into flourishes of rhetoric that have little to do with his given text; nor, in fact, the Gospel. It is rather, an exercise in poetry or storytelling. He recounts, with the prose of a documentary script, copious particularized details about the ship’s prestige, its social expectations, its crew, its cargo, its measurements, its horsepower, the depth of the Atlantic Ocean, the number of lifeboats – the narrative detail is incessant. He weaves these details together quite masterfully like a grand epic, with the crescendo of the ship’s ironic demise.¹⁴ As Barth tells this fine tale, God himself appears a distant onlooker. Of course, most preachers may say (with some relief) that the Holy Spirit can speak through any sermon, however terrible. That granted, here, the notion of prophetic proclamation seems absent for Barth – the ‘Titanic sermon’ is thoroughly rooted in human rhetoric and, as Willimon describes it: ‘mired in the merely contemporary’.¹⁵ In the direct sense, God seems to have nothing to say; the newspaper seems far more interesting than the Bible.

There are, of course, positive things to be said about the sermon, too, even if Barth would later come to disown it.¹⁶ The story Barth retells truly is captivating. There is a certain intrigue that he builds; a spellbinding use of words to draw the listener towards his theme; this reflects something of the power of story itself. These are not things that proclamation should cast aside. Yet, in this case, it seemed that the rhetorical element had superseded the very purpose of preaching. If the sermon becomes over-laden with eloquence at the expense of the primary proclamation then the human element of preaching has taken preference over the divine and the Spirit’s work in preaching has been muted by the rhetoric itself. It does not lead the congregation towards the glory of God, nor does it bring them something from God; its genre is more akin to that of the after-dinner speech or the theatrical monologue. One might quote the mature Barth to reprimand the younger Barth: ‘The congregation is waiting to be illumined by the light of God, and not be offered high-sounding speeches.’¹⁷

Barth’s later sermons, of course, altered drastically from his earlier emphases. He would come not only to downplay the use of rhetoric and to elevate the biblical text but also to articulate a dialectic in which proclamation was possible precisely because it came not in the form of a both/and, but a ‘one-sidedness’.¹⁸ He would also emphasize the ‘prophetic function’ of preaching as comparable – in some sense – to that of the New Testament apostles.¹⁹ The role of the Spirit in Barth’s later understanding of preaching is crucial; the emphasis is not on the preacher’s text but on the almost-mystical, sacramental event of proclamation: ‘When God’s Word is heard and proclaimed, something takes place that for all our hermeneutical skill cannot be brought about by hermeneutical skill.’²⁰ As Rosato states, the dependency upon the activity of the Spirit ‘is for Barth the last word in preaching and theology’.²¹

Barth and Lloyd-Jones: friends or foes?

Much of Barth’s later homiletics shared common ground with Martyn Lloyd-Jones. This may come as a surprise to those who are aware of Lloyd-Jones’s trenchant criticisms of Barth (for which many Barthians are yet to forgive him!). Strivens, in a fairly recent and by no means insignificant article on the controversy, offers a robust defence of Lloyd-Jones’s critical stance. He claims that Lloyd-Jones’s interest in Barth began from around 1929 and continued throughout his life.²² It was far from an ignorant or second-hand engagement but a serious theological critique; even if it was ‘at the level of the concerned pastor rather than of the academic theologian’.²³ There is also new evidence of Lloyd-Jones’s thorough readings of English translations of Barth’s Christ and Adam (Rom. 5), The Word of God and the Word of Man, Church Dogmatics I/1 and I/2, and Credo.²⁴ These primary readings, then, came long before Van Til’s influential (and, to many, controversial) critiques in The New Modernism: An Appraisal of the Theology of Barth and Brunner (1946) and Christianity and Barthianism (1962), often thought of as providing Lloyd-Jones’s second-hand engagement with Barth.

When one actually compares the preaching of Barth and Lloyd-Jones, there may have been ample room for agreement. Take, for example, the following statement:

Christian preaching … does not start with man. There are too many of us starting with men today. We are all so subjective. We start with ourselves, our needs, and then we always want something to satisfy us. Christianity never starts with man. It always starts with God.²⁵

This is from a Lloyd-Jones sermon, but one could just as easily imagine it coming from Barth, especially the critique of anthropocentrism and the centrality of the transcendent God. Both Barth and Lloyd-Jones also despised the overuse of rhetoric and preacherly personality in the pulpit,²⁶ despite also both lamenting how a true preacher could never be boring when they have the content of the Bible before them.²⁷ Both, thus, espoused the need for the centrality of the biblical text in the body of the sermon,²⁸ as well as the need to relate it to current affairs without those current affairs taking precedence over the proclamation itself.²⁹ There was, indeed, much common ground between them, homiletically. Alongside this homiletical agreement, a more significant similiarity is that they both affirmed the sacramental reverence of the ‘bringing’ of the Word of God by the power of the Spirit.³⁰ Barth believed this to be the last remnant of true sacramentology left in Protestantism.³¹ In theory then, Lloyd-Jones might have considered Barth a great theological and homiletical compatriot. In practice and in legacy, however, the two figures differed greatly.

In January 1969, a month after Barth’s death, Lloyd-Jones wrote a theological appraisal of Barth for the Evangelical Times. He hailed him as a great theologian, noting his courage in speaking out against Nazism and in critiquing liberalism, but that ultimately his theology would not bring any great revival to the Church.³² Further, he claimed that Barth’s dialectical legacy had bred a generation of ‘philosophical’ preachers who had forsaken genuine proclamation: ‘men who preach about the Word rather than preach the Word’.³³ He had concluded that Barth’s theology – despite its homiletical force – discouraged prophetic preaching: ‘There are men who think that they are preaching the Gospel when actually in fact they are simply saying things about the Gospel. I have always felt that this is the particular characteristic, and indeed the snare, of the Barthians.’³⁴ Lloyd-Jones, of course, was not critiquing Barth’s sermons (he would probably not have had access to them) but Barth’s theological emphases; and in particular his impact upon other preachers. As Strivens notes: ‘For Lloyd-Jones, Barthian preaching was, in the last analysis, an intellectual and philosophical exercise, rather than the truly spiritual experience which Lloyd-Jones believed fervently should lie at the heart of all true Christian preaching.’³⁵

Lloyd-Jones and the pulpit: preaching, sermons, unction

Precisely what was it that Lloyd-Jones saw as this ‘truly spiritual experience’ in preaching? He says, of the ministry of the reformers: ‘It was prophetic preaching, not priestly preaching. What we have today is what I would call priestly. Very nice, very quiet, very ornate, sentences turned beautifully, prepared carefully. That is not prophetic preaching!’³⁶ By ‘prophetic preaching’ Lloyd-Jones meant that it went beyond the script of the sermon itself, becoming actualized divine proclamation in the power of the Spirit, as if God himself were speaking his Word afresh. Sargent observes Lloyd-Jones’s distinction between ‘the sermon’ and the ‘preaching’; he says: ‘The former might be well prepared and laced with good material but that does not guarantee an effective and powerful delivery.’³⁷ This is not a homiletical ‘technique’ that can be honed; it is the conscious decision of the preacher to invite the Spirit to engulf the act of preaching. If needs be, this might involve speaking beyond the preconceived parameters of the written sermon itself, but not simply in some extemporaneous ‘style’ (which may naturally suit certain preachers anyway); it is rather an overt willingness to listen and be influenced by the prophetic.

Lloyd-Jones saw the act of expectation of the Spirit (mirroring that of Spurgeon’s call to ‘tarry at Jerusalem’) as the mark of such prophetic preaching; he says:

Seek him! Seek him always. But go beyond seeking Him; expect Him. Do you expect anything to happen to you when you get up to preach in a pulpit? … Seek this power, expect this power, yearn for this power; and when this power comes, yield to Him. Do not resist. Forget all about your sermon if necessary. Let him loose you, let Him manifest His power in you and through you.³⁸

It is not that preachers will always experience this power in the same way when they preach, but Lloyd-Jones is keen to emphasize that preachers should prepare and preach with expectant faith that something beyond the manuscript will occur. This could be paralleled with Barth’s sacramental view of preaching, which he refers to as ‘God’s making Himself present’ as we experience the power of his Word in its becoming.³⁹ Where, for Barth, the event of the Spirit’s manifest presence has nothing to do with the preacher at all (grounded in the freedom of God), Lloyd-Jones seems to emphasize that an attitude of openness and expectancy towards the Spirit’s promptings is an important (though he stresses, not an essential) aspect.

Lloyd-Jones uses the term ‘unction’ to refer to the act of anointing upon the preacher when the Spirit takes the sermon beyond a natural speech-act. He says, ‘To a preacher there is nothing so wonderful as to feel the unction of the Holy Spirit whilst preaching.’⁴⁰ Unction is not something that can be ‘worked up’ by pious fervour or dramatic oration; it occurs at the Spirit’s will. There appears to be an element of mystery about how and when this happens; as Peter Lewis, a fellow preacher, said of the unction that accompanied Lloyd-Jones’s preaching: ‘[It was] that scarcely definable accompaniment of solemn, sacred, searching truth as proceeding from the eternal presence of God, that breath of the still small voice which somehow goes beyond words … so that the form of truth yields up its divine power.’⁴¹

Unction may well carry various facets of natural preaching, such as an increased liveliness, extemporaneity or a particular sense of application which was unbeknownst to the preacher. But its ‘mysterious’ element should not be misconstrued as ‘vague’. There is something ineffable yet clearly discernible about such prophetic anointing. Though, as mentioned, it may carry natural characteristics of speech, it is something beyond this:

[A preacher] can preach without the Holy Spirit, I can expound the word with intelligence, but that is not enough. We need the demonstration of the Spirit and of power … What a [preacher] can never do is what God does. The Holy Ghost sent down from heaven, the descent of power, this uniqueness, this special manifestation of the presence and of the power of God.⁴²

Barth might well nod approvingly here, that the anointing of the Spirit cannot exist within humanity; it is located entirely within the freedom and will of God. Yet there is more going on here than a typical expression of divine sovereignty. Lloyd-Jones is, here, calling for a posturing of the preacher to expect this unique anointing in which the people feel a tangibility of God’s presence through the preaching. This transcends the merely cerebral realm of conveying doctrinal truth (though Lloyd-Jones would hasten to add that the Spirit’s work is inseparable from doctrine).

This ‘special manifestation’ of which Lloyd-Jones speaks is also referred to as a kind of ‘possession’ of the preacher by the Spirit. He describes the experience:

I am speaking, but I am really a spectator … I am looking on in utter astonishment, for I am not doing it. It is true preaching when I am conscious that I am being used; in a sense I am as much a spectator as the people who are listening to me. There is this consciousness that is outside me, and yet I am involved in it; I am merely the instrument and the vehicle and the channel of [it].⁴³

The prophetic element of such preaching, of course, does not carry any kind of formula. It cannot be decided upon in advance, though a preacher might ‘tarry’, ‘seek’ and ‘expect’ it. The stress Lloyd-Jones placed upon unction serves, in part, as a much-needed corrective to the overdependence on eloquence in the pulpit homilies which often render preaching too comfortable in the rhetorical and lacking in prophetic expectancy. For Lloyd-Jones, the expectation of unction, even if it did not ‘arrive’, ensured against an overreliance upon rhetoric; a preacher might preach as though God were actually going to speak, whether they knew it beforehand or not.

A heraldic conclusion

Lloyd-Jones’s expectation of the anointing of the Spirit in preaching not only subordinates rhetoric (in a helpful sense) but also allows for dialectical thinking to be present without forsaking authoritative proclamation. A sense of anointing or ‘unction’ in preaching guards against the overreliance not only on the human realm in terms of rhetoric but also in terms of content in the face of dialectical constructs, such as God’s mercy and God’s judgement, Law and Gospel, and so forth. Lloyd-Jones, though renowned as a typically ‘dogmatic’ preacher, actually showed a latent sense of dialectical awareness in both his homiletics and his theology. In his writing and preaching there is a regular sense of the necessary tension of theological positions, such as that of the radical freedom of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility. We can see this already in the way in which he calls preachers to posture themselves to continually seek the anointing of the Spirit. Holding dialectical theological truths in tension is also an enduring hallmark of Barth’s theology. But, as we have seen, the early Barth struggled to communicate dialectically as well as authoritatively. Notably it was said of Barth’s infamous first edition of the Römerbrief that ‘Barth is able to do something very few people can do: to express the Gospel, and to express it directly, simply, without paradox, without any tension between the Yes and the No.’⁴⁴ There is indeed something about being able to hold and also withhold dialectical speech in order to herald the Word of God in its contextual particularity, where its teeth may be freed to bite at their sharpest. In the pulpit, this can only come through the Spirit breathing life into the Word.

Preaching must be understood – even before the idea of writing a sermon – as a prophetic act. It is not merely human but primarily divine address; this must differentiate it in kind from any other genre of rhetorical oration. Preaching is prophetic because it seeks to speak on behalf of God – in the sense of a kērýssō herald. It is also prophetic because this heralding is an impossible act without the power of the Holy Spirit. Whether this is understood via Barth’s notion of the becoming of the Word of God, or with Lloyd-Jones’s articulation of the anointing upon the preacher as they deliver their message, the understanding of preaching as prophecy is crucial. Upon this foundation, preaching may also make necessary allowance for the poetic dimension of preaching. The Old Testament proclamations contain as much eloquence and as many poetic flourishes as any modern-day homily; so too do the sermons of the New Testament and of many of Church history’s greatest ‘proclaimers’. George Whitefield’s sermons, for example, were renowned for being as poetic and ‘theatrical’ as they were prophetic and Spirit-anointed.⁴⁵

An either/or distinction between rhetoric and the prophetic is unnecessary, though a corrective is certainly required. This corrective should take the form of a right ordering of the poetic and the prophetic. Clearly, prophecy almost always arrives in the vehicle of rhetoric in some form or another. But literary speech can only convey its content if it is necessarily subordinated to the centrality of prophecy. If the form of the sermon (however profound) is not seen as the vehicle and servant to its prophetic content, it ceases to be proclamation. We might say that poetic rhetoric can itself be prophetic. God is not averse to poetry, by any means. He inspired enough of it to leave us free to embrace rhetoric as a valid form of prophetic speech.⁴⁶ But as Lloyd-Jones (and the later Barth) argued, the preacherly propensity to indulge in the titillation of rhetoric at the expense of the prophetic content is a far graver concern, and one which borders on the idolatrous. Such sermons may be admired as eloquent ‘discourses’, but they will not change the hearts of those who admire them. For this, an earnest seeking of the Holy Spirit is essential. This is not a technique or formula that can be mastered, but is itself nothing more than a rigorous pursuit of the God who promises that he will speak through his Word. If preaching is to be understood as prophetic, as I have argued, then the preacher ought always to seek the prophetic dimension of the sermon as the primary concern. This does not extinguish the role of rhetoric but rather it casts it in a different light. We might say, perhaps, that just as Barth had labelled philosophy as the ‘handmaiden’ to theology, we might see rhetoric as the handmaiden to prophecy. It can be essential, but it need not be.

Preachers ought to be looking for God to speak, and for themselves to be nothing more than his mouthpieces. For the task of proclamation (should God so desire it) a fisherman’s clumsy koine Greek will do as good a job as the finest classical rhetoric. This, after all, is the ‘foolishness’ of preaching (1 Cor. 1.20–25), distinctly lacking in ‘eloquence or human wisdom’ (2.1). In the way both Barth and Lloyd-Jones understood preaching, if preachers are to truly preach they may at times need to sacrifice both their rhetoric and their dialectics for the sake of whatever it is that God wants to be said that Sunday. For this to happen there must not only be a faithfulness to the biblical text, which should not go understated,⁴⁷ but also an openness to the directing (and perhaps even ‘possession’!) by the Holy Spirit in both the shaping and delivery of the sermon. The poetical flourishes may come and go, and will be of service when they are called upon; but the prophetic proclamation of the word of God – the message of the king himself – will always remain the fundamental goal of the pulpit: ‘This “unction”, this “anointing”, is the supreme thing. Seek it until you have it; be content with nothing less.’⁴⁸ The preacher is a wordsmith only in relation to the conveying of their divinely decreed message. The preacher, as Barth says, is ‘“sent in advance,” sent ahead of something that will come later. It is the task of preaching to point to this coming … the coming of the king whom he precedes.’⁴⁹ In this sense, then, perhaps the difference between a poet and a prophet is that one speaks for people and the other speaks to them.

Footnotes

Notes

Aaron Edwards, having completed a BA in English Literature and two Masters degrees in Creative Writing and Theology at the University of Chester, is now researching a PhD in Dialectic and Preaching at the University of Aberdeen, School of Divinity.