A History of Preaching (review)

Chapter 1 defines the call to preach as containing two aspects, inward and outward, and identifies a gender gap or difference in how men and women can claim their call to preach. By identifying the central problem of gender inequality, this chapter establishes the fundamental concern of this book as a significant issue of patriarchy and ecclesiastical authority. Next, the chapter reviews relevant scholarship in homiletics and history of preaching to contextualize this issue. Drawing on social theorists, obstacles are identified and defined that have formed and maintained the dominant narrative limiting women preachers and their voice and agency. Utilizing feminist hermeneutics, this chapter argues that the historical women preachers of this work and their power of resistance still hold valuable lessons for people struggling to claim their call to preach today.

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A History of Preaching - By O. C. Edwards Jr. Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon, 2004. xviii + 882 pp. CD-ROM with second volume of primary sources. pp. $65.00 cloth.

Church History ◽

10.1017/s0009640700501000 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 76 (3) ◽

pp. 681-682

Author(s):

Ronald J. Stansbury

Keyword(s):

Primary Sources ◽

Cd Rom ◽

History Of Preaching ◽

History Of

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Sources of Christian Homiletics

Before Jonathan Edwards ◽

10.1093/oso/9780199372621.003.0003 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 69-105

Author(s):

Adriaan C. Neele

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Full Range ◽

Early Modern Period ◽

Christian Tradition ◽

Modern Period ◽

History Of Preaching ◽

History Of ◽

Literary Devices ◽

Puritan Preaching ◽

Continuity And Discontinuity

That Edwards assumed a Puritan style of homiletics is questioned in view of the Christian tradition of preaching. The chapter argues that if the homiletic labors of the preacher of Northampton are “statements on the full range of his thought,” one must situate Edwards’s sermons, both in form and structure, in terms of continuity and discontinuity with Christian preaching. The caricatures and commendations of Puritan preaching must be set aside, so that a broader context of long-standing trajectories of Christian homiletics throughout the ages can be discerned and brought into view. Although Edwards resided on the outskirts of the colonial world, his intellectual endeavors in framing his homiletic discourses resonated strongly with the trajectories of Christian homiletics of earlier centuries—though mediated through the early modern period. Edwards’s sermons, then, as literary devices or discourses with their rhetorical particularities, must be situated in the history of preaching.

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