Calvin's Preaching

I noted here before that I try to read at least one book on preaching a year. This year I've not only viewed the Craddock preaching tapes I wrote about earlier, I've also read Calvin's Preaching by T.H.L. Parker. Although several thousand of Calvin's sermons exist in manuscript (transcribed from shorthand notes made by various listeners) not that many have been published and even fewer translated into English. Parker had the advantage of access to the manuscripts and gives us the benefit into his research into Calvin's theology of preaching, his style, and his approach to the sermon.

One thing that struck me was Parker's insistence that Calvin's preaching was primarily positive in tone. He nearly always preaches to encourage his listeners. The subjects of his sermons, Parker says,

..are things that have been said in every century; the quiet, persistent call to frame our lives according to the teaching of Holy Scripture...There is no threshing himself into a fever of impatience or frustration, no holier-than-thou rebuking of the people, no beggin them in terms of hyperbole to give some physical sign that the message has been accepted. It is simply one man, concious of his sins, aware how little progress he makes and how hard it is to be a doer of the Word, sympathetically passing on to his people (whom he knows to have the same sort of problems as himself) what God has said to them and to him. We even notice that in the examples given...there is not one direct imperative in the second person. He is content to pass on the message, to declare how unwilling "we" are to accept it and how weak "we" are in general, how slack and rebellious, and then to use the firm but gentle first person plural imperative, "let us..." (pp.118-119)

We can't preach in the 21st century the way a 16th-century preacher would preach. But we can learn from him.