Review: Reading for Preaching
Cornelius Platinga, Reading for Preaching: The Preacher in Conversation with Storytellers, Biographers, Poets, and Journalists. Eerdmans, 2013.
One of my missionary supervisors once told me that the first step towards connecting with the secular Europeans with whom we wanted to share the Gospel was simply to “be an interesting person.” Cornelius Platinga’s book, Reading for Preaching, has just such a goal in mind. It offers no quick fix for this Sunday’s sermon, but it does speak to the long-term quality of your preaching. It is not about merely writing better sermons, but being a better preacher.
Toward this end, Platinga advocates a program of general reading. By “general reading” he does not mean the typical preacher fare of systematic theologies, commentaries, and books on pastoral ministry and leadership. He believes, with John Calvin, that “the Holy Spirit sows truth promiscuously, and the searching preacher is likely to find it in some unlikely places.” Neither is he suggesting merely that the preacher should rummage through a variety of sources in search of clever sermonic material. On the contrary, he says, “Good reading generates delight, and the preacher should enjoy it without guilt. Delight is a part of God’s shalom and the preacher who enters the world of delight goes with God.”
While we read for delight, however, we also read with purpose. We have the task of presenting the word of God to contemporary hearers in a way that makes it “urgently alive.” Good writers can help us in this endeavor on several counts. They “know the road to the human heart and, once at their destination, know how to move our hearts.” They are masters of language. They skillfully craft a beginning, a middle and an end in their communication, and offer excellent examples of narrative tension and flow. To read great writing is to enrich our minds and sharpen our craft, equipping us to communicate the truth of the Gospel more effectively to the lives of our hearers.
Platinga explores three major ways a program of general reading can contribute to our preaching. The first, predictably, is for illustration, even though “reading general literature just for illustrations is slightly perverse.” Our primary reason for reading is to be deepened, to have more substance to bring to the Christian life and to our preaching task. However, in the process, we will find stories, phrases, insights that will serve the sermon more directly. The chapter on illustration is valuable in its own right as a discussion of the the attentiveness and ability required to bring to truth alive to our hearers. Whether in our reading or in our observation of life, he says, a good preacher will not miss much, because we recognize that our skill in reading life is as important as our skill in reading Scripture.
Great writing also helps by “tuning the preacher’s ear,” Platinga’s way of describing the process of developing good oral style. We don’t seek to improve our style merely to impress, but to fulfill God’s call to love our neighbor (our hearers) by obeying three key commandments: “don’t frustrate, don’t waste people’s time, do delight them once in a while.” Here Cornelius discusses topics such as clarity, transparency, economy, and diction, which amounts essentially to good word choice. He encourages preachers to strive for a “rhetorical register” that is neither “tuxedo formal” nor “tank top casual,” but “upscale colloquial.” Reading great literature can help us grow in all of these areas because “the preacher’s ear is tuned by absorbing excellent language, even if unconsciously.”
Finally, Platinga shows us that a program of reading can help us gain wisdom, or the reality-based ability to “know human life and how to live it faithfully.” General literature can help us with this because it “abounds in incidents, characters, images, and observations that illumine everything under the sun, including most of the topics on which the preacher has to become at least a middleweight sage.” He stresses two major kinds of wisdom we can glean: wisdom on the variousness of life, and wisdom on sin and grace.
I heartily recommend this book for any preacher for several reasons. First, because it is such a delightful read. Platinga’s own writing is an example of the benefits of all that he advocates, in style and as well as substance. Every page shines with the art and craft of excellent verbal expression, and with a seemingly endless stream of illustrations to clarify and exemplify each point. His insights on the preaching task ring true for any preacher who has been at it for any length of time, and reflect a lifetime of wrestling with our task.
Platinga also remains grounded and focused in his approach. While pointing to a diversity of sources for enriching our preaching, he consistently returns to the Scriptures as the bedrock, the Spirit as the power, and the Gospel as the purpose for all of our preaching. Consider these quotes:
The preacher is someone the church sends to the Bible week by week to dig up part of its treasure and bring it to us in the Sunday sermon. The preacher is, first, an absorbed reader of the Bible and a champion of it among us. (p. 9)
For one thing, excellent craft can be used in the service of preaching baloney, including pernicious baloney. For another, the preacher may set sail of a Sunday morning with a sermon that is honestly built, but nothing much is going to happen unless the Holy Spirit blows the sermon home. (p. 42-43)
The preacher is called not just to linguistic craft but to faithful proclamation of reconciling grace in Jesus Christ. The power and glory may happen, but not so much because the preacher wanted them to. They happen because of the mighty and mysterious work of the Holy Spirit. (p. 63)
Scriptural wisdom upsets a lot of the conventional wisdom of the world. (p. 78)
Christ, the wisdom of God, is the standard. The preacher measures her reading against the standard. This is a matter of simple but stubborn faith in Jesus Christ, including his program of dying and rising. (p. 79)
In short, Cornelius Platinga makes me want to read more — for effective communication as well as for pure delight. He even helps me in his appendix with a lengthy bibliography to get started. He is realistic about his thesis, acknowledging that reading widely doesn’t guarantee we will be a great preacher, and that not every great preacher is a wide reader. But he does make a compelling case that every preacher can benefit from cultivating his mind, expanding his heart and tuning his ear with the breadth and depth of a program of general reading.
