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Where would a preacher go if he wanted to expose to view the powerlessness of words? If he were bold—with a dash of David, Amos, or Daniel in his genes—he would probably go to Harvard University, the citadel of words, where the most verbal of men and women pour out words in the classroom, dress parade them in their books, and, in exchange for tuition money, produce graduates who will build careers and try to master their lives through the mastery of words.

In the following collection of sermons, Arthur C. McGill chose a Harvard Convocation as the time and place to offer a disquisition on the powerlessness of words to tame and manage the powers that beset us. He recognized that an age which is “unbelievably verbal” has, in fact, lost confidence in the power of words. An uneasy resourcelessness underlies our talkativeness. We plunge ahead into the next sentence, because we recognize the vacuity of the last sentence. The world we live in reeks of turbulent powers that overmaster us and do not submit to the routines of shared discourse–the highway accident, a report on lethal lab values, love turned sour, or the devastations of war, so confounding that “Those conducting the war have shown no capacity to explain its purpose. Those who oppose the war are so filled with revulsion and horror that they, too, seem incapable of formulating a policy that makes practical sense” (Sermon 10, p. 90).

This distrust of speech drives preachers as much as other Wordmeisters. Pulpiteers press on ahead with yet one more paragraph, one more illustration, one more theatrical pause, because, in their heart of hearts, they know that they have not achieved a decisive breakthrough, a word that truly empowers, heals, and transforms in the midst of the unruly powers that beset them and their congregations.

McGill’s Harvard address, like so many sermons in this collection, approaches Scripture attentively in the hope that the Word of God will break through the terrible isolation of our impotent wordiness and conjoin God’s power with human speech. He asks us to attend to the text with him and to open ourselves up to the alterations in our sensibility which the Word may entail. Scripture doesn’t offer a rhetorical illustration of a universe already familiar to us but a realm that revises our understanding of both speech and power. Such speech is self-communicating; such power is self-expending love. Therewith speech and power conjoin.

Scripture brings before us speech that is not isolating, devoid of power, because we discover in Scripture the speaker who in full measure extends himself, opens himself, explains himself to others, puts himself at their disposal. In such speech, the word becomes deed; the self-communicating word is self-giving. The speaker did not come to chatter, but to die. Jesus Christ enables human speech itself to become the medium of God’s power, the power of self-expending love.

Thus the Harvard Convocation closes with a call “to recover speech with power . . . to take it out of the classroom and reroot it in the realm of painful deeds” (Sermon 10, p. 95).

Professor David Cain, a student of Arthur McGill’s at Princeton Univer-sity, has painstakingly assembled this convocation and collection of sermons out of penciled notes, written in the urgency of each occasion. One does not have the impression that preaching was an extra-curricular add-on for McGill, an exercise to which preaching has been reduced by many theologians in academic life. Rather preaching marks out a proving ground where one wrestles with the Word, with some hope for a hearing that blesses.

It is not accident, I think, that David Cain has taken on both Søren Kierkegaard and Arthur McGill in his own scholarly work. The stunning reversals of ordinary wisdom in McGill’s sermons remind one of the earlier prophet’s “Thoughts on the Present Age” and his “Attack upon Christendom.” Both men open up a very rough terrain. However, a huge difference distinguishes the two men. For Kierkegaard, the Incarnation, the Word made flesh, does not, in one sense, breach the gulf between the divine and the human. God in human form is still an incognito. God does not reduce to the prior categories of human knowledge. That God has crossed the gulf between the divine and the human requires a leap of faith into the unknown; and each person leaps across that gulf on his or her own. The earlier prophet mocks, goads, and prods each to make that leap, one by one.

McGill proceeds differently in all of these sermons, even on such polyglot an occasion as a University Convocation. He attends to the Word in the hope that God would cross the gulf in both the speaking and the hearing. A faithful hearing is not simply human knowledge, but it is a knowledge. In Jesus Christ, God’s power, God’s self-expending love, conjoins with human speech. “Is it not precisely the meaning of the grace of God in Jesus Christ that the fullness of power—God’s power—is shown to be compatible with human speech, with human community as a community of shared consciousness? . . . God’s power, when it enters into our existence, does not shatter what is human . . .” (Sermon 10, p. 93). So understood, a hearing does not summon each into a void. A hearing is a “convocation”; that is, a hearing together, which “implicates our concrete actual life in the life of others” (Sermon 10, p. 94).

David Cain’s introduction to this collection honors that element of hearing together. He does not, like many editors, treat McGill’s writings as a finished piece of work, placed in his hands, which he then proceeds in McGill’s absence to introduce to others. The introduction itself unfolds as a two-way conversation not only with possible readers but with McGill himself. No teacher could hope for more.

—William F. May