For preaching of the
gospel is one of God's plough-works, and the preacher is one of God's ploughmen
Hugh
Latimer
If there be
discounting or slackening of Preaching, there is the danger of losing Christ.
John Donne
Though Bishop Hugh Latimer (1492-1555)
once protested -
How
then hath it happened that we have had so many hundred years so many
unpreaching prelates, lording loiterers, and idle ministers?
- there certainly was preaching in
the English church before the Reformation. There was even something of a
revival of the practice under the influence of humanist intellectuals like
Erasmus of Rotterdam and master preachers like Bishop John Fisher. But the
Reformation represented a theological shift that involved an entirely different
way of thinking about the Word of God. Famously, of course, this led to the
creation of the English Bible and a liturgy that commanded that it be read
aloud in church. In turn, this also meant that preaching and the preacher would
come to have an entirely new – and central – significance for Reformation
Anglicanism.
As in so many other literary
endeavours, the sixteenth century represented the high-water mark of
sermon-making in the English church. However, it mightn’t be unfair to say that,
in many places, there is just such a “discounting or slackening” as John Donne
warned against. In places, the sermon has been shriveled to a perfunctory few
minutes and has become, instead of a proclamation of the Word of God, a mere
moral rumination or a piece of self-help or the ponderous giving of the
preacher’s opinion, a kind of Sunday oral version of Saturday’s newspaper
column. Perhaps it is for the best: if you haven’t got anything to say, then
you are probably better off not saying it, or saying it very briefly. Sad to
say, Anglican preaching has become a standing object of derision – one thinks
of the comedian Peter Cook’s famous lampoon, or of Rowan Atkinson in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
The task for this post
is to account for the centrality of reading and preaching Scripture in the
Reformation Anglican conception of Christian worship, both corporate and
individual. The task is not merely historical, though. The Reformation Anglican
insistence on the centrality of the vernacular Scripture and its exposition by
qualified preachers remains vital to the health of churches in the contemporary
world. We will begin in conversation with a sermon on preaching by the English
Reformation’s most renowned preacher, Bishop Hugh Latimer’s Sermon of the Plough; turn from there to
show how Cranmer cemented the new doctrine of Scripture in the architecture of
the church’s corporate worship; and finally, show how this doctrine of
Scripture bore fruit in the ministry of one of the twentieth century’s greatest
Anglican pastor-preachers, John Stott. His ministry was a great model of the
Reformation Anglican theology of Scripture transposed into another era, which
in turn is a great model for the present day.
I
Hugh Latimer was, with Thomas Bilney and Robert Barnes, part of the
inclandestine group of Reformers that gathered at the White Horse Tavern in
Cambridge in the 1520s. By 1535 he had been elevated to the see of Worcester
and there began preaching an uncompromising programme of reform. He was not
able to stay out of trouble, however, and found himself imprisoned at the Tower
of London in 1539 for his opposition to Henry’s Six Articles. Once Edward VI
had ascended to the throne, he became court preacher, and his evangelical views
could find their full expression in his preaching to the court and to the
parliament.
The Sermon of the Plough of 1548,[1]
on a text from Romans 15:4 (‘All things which are written, are written for our
erudition and knowledge’), was
delivered ‘in the shrouds’ at St Paul’s, which was an apparently sheltered area
in the square outside the cathedral. The customary sermons at St Paul’s Cross
were shifted to the shrouds in unfriendly weather conditions – which must have
prevailed on the January day on which this sermon was preached. It was apparently
part of series of which this is the only extant sermon. In it, Latimer outlines
his vision for the preaching ministry in the newly evangelical Church of
England by means of the strikingly everyday image of the plough. As he says ‘I
shall tell you who be the ploughers’.
The chief image that Latimer
deploys in the sermon is of course that of ‘the plough’. As he says: ‘preaching
the gospel is one of God’s plough works, and the preacher is one of God’s ploughmen’.
He sources this agricultural metaphor in the parable of the sower – the seed
being, in Jesus’ story, ‘the Word’. The congregation is God’s field, in which
the ploughman/preacher is set to work – not (and Latimer makes a point of this)
the monk in his cloister. It is the diligent preaching of the word of God by
the preacher in the congregation that he takes as his theme.
It is a vivid and earthy image –
and deliberately so. Latimer feels compelled to draw attention to the
possibility of this giving offence to some on account of its banality; but by
the same token, is quite proud of its ordinariness. It is a metaphor drawn from
the everyday world of his hearers, matching the directness and plainness of his
language, and reflecting as well his theology of the Word of God – that it is
in the words of ordinary language that God is pleased to speak.
As Latimer explains, the ploughman
image is effective because the ploughman is in demand for his labour in all
seasons of the year. The preacher of the Word has different tasks to attend to,
if he is to be diligent: he has to plant the Word and then cultivate it in his
hearers:
He
hath first a busy work to bring his parishioners to a right faith… and not a
swerving faith; but to a faith that embraceth Christ, and trusteth to his
merits; a lively faith, a justifying faith; a faith that maketh a man
righteous, without respect of works…
In this we find the nexus between
the Reformation doctrine of Scripture and the Reformation doctrine of
justification. If a person is to be justified by faith, then the preaching of
the Word of God is necessary, since ‘faith comes by hearing’; and this faith,
by God’s grace in Christ, is what completes the justification of sinful human
beings. That favourite Reformation phrase, ‘a lively faith’, is used: the faith
that the preacher seeks to cultivate in his hears is the faith that enlivens by
the power of the Spirit as it draws the believer to the risen Christ.
Secondly, the people of God need to
be confirmed in that right faith: to be disciplined by the law and comforted by
the gospel, to be exhorted and rebuked. Changing his image, Latimer speaks of
the preaching as ‘meat’, namely, that which is in constant need for a solid
diet. Therefore, the preacher ought to be diligent in all seasons.
The key role that preaching has in
the soteriological system of the evangelical Reformers means that the preacher
has a particular and extraordinary calling, and a responsibility to match. For
too long, in Latimer’s view, England had been subject to ‘unpreaching
prelates’. Furthermore, like an unploughed land, the land of England is
spiritually unprepared for the seed, not yet ‘ripe to be ploughed’. In
particular, Latimer contrasts the ‘lording’ of the clergy in pre-Reformation
times with the new calling that they have, to preach. Plough work is not for
those who would lord it over others: ‘lords will ill go to plough’. Instead,
those whose duty it was to feed the people have given themselves to all kinds
of recreations, even though without the provision of the preached Word of God
the people will be lacking in spiritual sustenance (just as a ploughman’s
dedication to his task is necessary for the people to be fed): ‘…For as the
body wasteth and consumeth away for lack of bodily meat, so doth the soul pine
away for the default of ghostly meat.’ The priestly calling is to preach, and
not to do some other thing, however noble, such as be ‘comptroller of the
mint’. The importance of this, for Latimer, is underscored by the ignorance of
the young nobleman of England who should rather be ‘so brought up in knowledge
of God, and in learning, that they may be able to execute offices in the
commonweal’…For this to occur, those with a priestly calling and office need to
attend to it without compromise, rather than busy themselves with matters of
state. The priestly office, of which preaching is the chief task, requires the
full attention of a person.
The stakes are, for Latimer,
extraordinarily high; for the most diligent bishop and prelate in England is
unfortunately the devil himself. He is not inattentive to his task, or absent
from his diocese: ‘Oh that our prelates would be as diligent to sow the corn of
good doctrine, as Satan is to sow cockle and darnel!’ The devil’s mission is
‘to evacuate the cross of Christ’ by adding the Mass to it as an extra
sacrificial act. That is: the Reformation focus on the cross as the single
centre of a theology sola gratia is
the gospel that needs diligent defence from its threatened dilution.
There’s an interesting chain of
reasoning in play here. The preaching-priest needs to be busy in affirming the
gospel of the cross of Christ alone as the sacrifice for human sins against the
alternate theology of the Mass and the view of the priesthood that attends it.
There is no other bloody sacrifice, and that sacrifice is perpetual: ‘he is as
fresh hanging on the cross now, to them that believe and trust in him, as he
was fifteen hundred years ago, when he was crucified’. The view that the Mass
is a sacrifice, and that the priest is its sacrificer, is for Latimer, a piece
of devilish idolatry. The channel of grace is not, then, the objects consumed
in the Mass, nor is it the communion vessels or the other accoutrements; it is
the Word of God, the gospel, preached by preachers and believed in by those who
listen and receive it.
In sum, we can observe two
features of the Reformation description of preaching surfacing in this example
of the preacher’s art. The first is that for Latimer the doctrine of justification by grace through faith alone is the basis
for the new emphasis placed on preaching. Grace is mediated, but not
through the sacraments nor through the church as an institution. It is mediated
to the believer by God himself speaking in his Word. The only way to receive
this Word is by means of the ears, by faith. ‘Faith comes from hearing’. Thus,
the Word must be preached if it is to be heard. That is to say: the material
and the formal principles at work in preaching are closely bound to one another
– the place of preaching is a factor of what is to be preached. Sermons were
needed for the edification of God’s people, but they were more urgently needed for
the purpose of leading people to salvation.
Second, the ministry’s chief responsibility is the preaching of the Word and
not something else. Since the preached Word is the divinely chosen means
for the conversion and growth of his people, then the servant of God must
preach! Preaching is, however, a task that takes hard work, courage and
persistence. This new function for the ministers of the church is noteworthy
because it was at one level contrary to one of the tenets of the evangelical
Reformation – the priesthood of all believers. Why was there a need for a teaching
office, if in fact the Holy Spirit could walk directly in the lives of those who
read the Word for themselves? Did they not hold the Scripture to be clear, or ‘perspicacious’?
Yet Cranmer and the later English Reformers took the lead from their
continental colleagues in emphasizing the need for an educated and trained
preaching ministry. As Calvin wrote in the Institutes:
We
see that God, who might perfect his people in a moment, chooses not to bring
them to manhood in any other way than by the education of the Church. We see
the mode of doing it expressed; the preaching of celestial doctrine is
committed to pastors. We see that all without exception are brought into the
same order, that they may with meek and docile spirit allow themselves to be
governed by teachers appointed for this purpose… Hence it follows, that all who
reject the spiritual food of the soul divinely offered to them by the hands of
the Church, deserve to perish of hunger and famine. God inspires us with faith,
but it is by the instrumentality of his gospel, as Paul reminds us, “Faith
cometh by hearing” (Rom. 10:17). God reserves to himself the power of maintaining
it, but it is by the preaching of the gospel, as Paul also declares, that he brings
it forth and unfolds it.[2]
Even though the Scriptures were the
instrument of God by means of the Spirit for the softening of people’s hearts,
it was still the case that they had to know and understand. The cognitive
aspect of faith, though not faith in itself, is not bypassed by lively,
justifying faith. On the contrary: having the Scriptures in the vernacular
indicated that there was a new emphasis on understanding, and thus an educated –
and diligent! - teaching ministry was to be an essential component of the
evangelical Church of England. As Susan Wabuda writes:
the
evangelical reformers retained the ancient ideal that preachers formed a
special tier inside the greater body of Christendom, as administrators of the
Word, to provide guidance in the correct interpretation of scripture. Godly
ministers read the sacred page, and better: they taught, they explained, and
they applied the text with more expertise and a great measure of authority than
any lay man or woman might be able to wield in the common assembly. Although no
longer a mediator who sacrificed on behalf of the congregation, the preacher
retained his position as the exemplar of sanctity. He was an intermediary still
in the teaching of the Word. The preaching minister was a member of an elite
who had self-consciously laid aside the popish affectations that had long
obscured God’s purpose. If permitting the laity to read the Bible in English
was one of the greatest innovations of the Reformation, then it was balanced by
the public teaching capacity which now became the greatest mandate of the
clergy.[3]
II
The Emergence of the Evangelical Doctrine of Preaching
I have noted already that, prior to
the Reformation, preaching was not in the abeyance suggested by Latimer’s
forceful rhetoric about ‘unpreaching prelates’. The late medieval church had in
fact made significant provisions for regular preaching; and as part of their
duties it was expected that priests would be preachers. The building of new pulpits
in the fifteenth century surely indicates that at least some sermons were to
expected in church. Sermons were occasionally published; and preaching manuals
circulated.[4]
The coming of European humanism to
England heralded some new emphases in preaching,
but built on the existing practices of preaching. Humanists like Erasmus of
Rotterdam pre-empted some of what was to come in the Reformation itself in that
they were strong critics of church practices and wanted a return to a more
biblical spirituality. Christianity, for Erasmus, was not a matter of the
subtle distinctions of the medieval schoolmen, but was a matter of attending to
the plain teaching of the New Testament.[5]
Neither was the essence of the faith to be found in the elaborate rituals of
the church, since these were simply a matter of outward conduct. What humanism
brought to the table instead was an interest in the human heart and its reformation.
As Ashley Null writes, for Erasmus
…the
heart of Christianity was a pragmatic programme of love in action which sprang
from a scriptural understanding of the human condition and the virtues and
vices pertaining to it.[6]
For the Bible to have this role in the
Christian life, it needed to be read and read well. And Erasmus was at the
forefront of a movement for a new kind of exegesis of the text emphasizing philology
and history rather than conformity to the systems of scholasticism.
For Erasmus, and other humanist
preachers like John Colet and John Fisher, preaching was vital since it was a
means by which to motivate people to live the virtuous life. Preaching was a
means to move the affections of a person by showing them the great love of God.
Erasmus outlined this theology of preaching in his 1535 publication Ecclesiastes, a preaching manual. His hermeneutical
principles were almost exactly those of the evangelical reformers. He advised
that scripture ought interpret scripture; and that scripture ought to be organized
according to ‘loci communes’ to make
this more possible.[7]
Luther’s disciple Philip
Melanchthon adopted much of Erasmus’ teaching in his work Loci Communes Theologici (1521). He outline scriptural teaching
under a series of headings, and he concurred that molding the affections of the
congregation to produce a deeper love for God was to be pursued by preachers.
However, there was a significant difference between the anthropologies of the
two authors. For Melanchthon, the affections of the human heart were held in
bondage to concupiscence. As a result, the will was not free and the capacity
for reason not allowed the possibility of moderating and redirecting human
behaviour. As John Donne put it almost a century later: ‘Reason your viceroy in
me, me should defend, But is captiv'd…’. The human individual was turned on
itself, incurvatus in se, twisted in
its affections towards pursuing its own ends without hope of breaking the
endemic pattern.
The only possibility for change was
from an external, and divine, action. The Holy Spirit was to be the only hope
for the moral life, if there was to be one at all. This meant not just that
preaching was needed, but that preaching of
a particular content: the gospel of Jesus Christ in whom are sinners freely
justified:
When
the good news of justification by faith was proclaimed, the Spirit assured
believers of their salvation by working supernaturally through the power of God’s
word. This new confidence in God’s gracious goodwill towards them reoriented
their affections, calming their turbulent hearts and inflaming in them a
grateful love in return.[8]
This was clearly not simply a piece
of theological nit-picking. It was intended to make an enormous pastoral and
existential difference to those who heard it.
When Cranmer came to organize the
homilies that would be read in the churches of England in the 1540s, he gave
them a distinctively evangelical shape in the light of the Melanchthonian doctrine.
This indicated a distinct shift from the Erasmian humanist position. The homilies
were designed to improve behaviour and produce moral and social reform. But
they did so as a consequence of the offer of the gospel of free grace in Christ
and not as a means to attaining it. His anthropology was certainly not Erasmian;
and so his theology of justification could not be either. And this meant a
distinct role for preaching and Scripture in church, since it was the chosen
instrument of God to work his spiritual change in the lives of believers.
This pastoral theology of Holy Scripture
is expounded in ‘A Fruitful Exhortation to the Reading and Knowledge of Holy
Scripture’, the first of the 1547 Book of
Homilies. The homily shows that striking relationship that we have already
noted between form and content – Scripture is not simply the container of the data
needed to know salvation, but is also its divinely-ordained instrument: ‘a
sure, constant and a perpetual instrument of salvation’. It is, naturally, the
place to look for moral guidance; but it is in the first place the means by
which we will come to a true knowledge of our desperate state before God:
In
these books we may learn to know ourselves, how vile and miserable we be; and
also to know God, how good he is of himself, and how he maketh us and all
creatures partakers of his goodness.[9]
The Bible is, for Cranmer, the
means by which the supernatural operations of God are effected to turn the
hearers to his will:
For
the Scripture of God is the heavenly meat of our souls: the hearing and keeping
of it maketh us blessed, sanctifieth us, and maketh us holy: it turneth our
souls: it is a light lantern to our feet: it is a sure, steadfast, and
everlasting instrument of salvation… They have power to turn through God’s
promise, and they be effectual through God’s assistance; and being received in
a faithful heart, they have ever an heavenly spiritual working in them.[10]
This is a significant step on from
the humanistic view of Scripture and of its preaching. Even as Cranmer urges
the activity of diligent reading on his hearers – something they are to do – he
is simultaneously describing the gracious initiative of God in the whole
process of turning the sinful heart about.
[2] Jean Calvin, Institutes of the
Christian Religion, ed. Henry Beveridge, trans., Henry Beveridge, [Rev. ed.
(Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2008), p. 913.
[3] Susan Wabuda, Preaching During the
English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 66.
[4] Lucy Wooding, "From Tudor Humanism to Reformation Preaching," in
The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern
Sermon, ed. Peter E. McCullough, Hugh Adlington, and Emma Rhatigan(Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 330-4.
[5] Ashley Null, Thomas Cranmer's
Doctrine of Repentance : Renewing the Power to Love (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), p. 86.
[6] Ibid., p. 86.
[7] Ashley Null, "Official Tudor Homilies," in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, ed. Peter E.
McCullough, Hugh Adlington, and Emma Rhatigan(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), p. 353.
[8] Ibid., p. 353.
[9] John Griffiths and Ian Robinson, The
Homilies : Appointed to Be Read in Churches (Bishopstone
Philadelphia: Brynmill
; Preservation Press, 2006), p. 10.
[10] Ibid., p. 9.
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