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One of the things that, as it turned out, most attracted me to studying with C.K. Barrett was that there was a Methodist pastoral side to him. Indeed, he had been on the circuit for many years before he was called to teach at Durham in 1945, and it is very interesting to hear what he says about that in his sermon on 1 Cor 7.29–31 which is included in this volume. He says this: “When I came to Durham twenty-eight years ago, I did not feel committed to university life. Certainly, it attracted me, but I did not wish to turn my back on circuit work. I would have a change, perhaps after a few years go back to a circuit. But here I am.1 You only live once. You cannot have two careers. You can only do one worthwhile job at a time and most worthwhile jobs take a lifetime to learn.” Until he retired from fulltime academic life in 1982, he was known around the world for some thirty-seven years as a scholar. Indeed, that is the only way I actually knew about him on this side of the Atlantic until I went to Durham in 1977. Understandably so. I knew him from his books. For the whole period of my life between birth in 1951 and 1977 CKB had been a full time academic.

But as it turns out, this was a minority of his ministry. He had been pastoring and preaching up until he was called to Durham in the mid-40s, and he continued to preach a lot during his academic years at Durham, and for almost thirty years after he finished teaching full time he was continually involved in preaching and circuit work. Yes, he continued to write scholarly books, and yes he continued to lecture hither and yon all over the world, but you can tell that his heart had been and always was in preaching. It was his first love, and he never gave it up, never turned his back on it. In fact, to judge from the content of these many sermons, Kingsley was the preacher of choice for many of these chapels during the high holy days of the Christian year— Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Pentecost. There are so many, many sermons from those seasons in the Church calendar, and for special days too like Trinity Sunday or Reformation Sunday. This love for preaching, and great appreciation of Kingsley’s preaching led to some interesting choices.

In a tribute to Professor Barrett, her mentor as well, Morna Hooker said this in 2011 when he passed away—“Kingsley Barrett was a remarkable man. He was the last of a great line of notable British biblical scholars. And like others among them, he combined great scholarship with modesty. Very few—if any—members of the congregations of those Durham village chapels where he faithfully preached over so many years would have realized that they were listening to the foremost New Testament scholar in the country. Nevertheless, they knew that they were listening to the gospel, and gained great benefit from his exposition.”2 And just how faithful was he? The 126 sermons in this volume were preached an amazing 2,262 times over his more than six-decade preaching career!3

One of the questions one asks when one has read Kingsley’s scholarly books, as well as now these many, many sermons, is—when in the world did he have time to do all this, especially when he was a fulltime professor at Durham between 1945 and 1982? One clue is found in the obituary written by Robert Morgan published in the Guardian in 2011—“Each night, the hours from 10pm to 2am were set aside for research. The lectureship at Durham in 1945, and chair in 1958, allowed him to settle into a more reasonable 14-hour day, which he carried into retirement.”4

When I became the senior editor of the New Cambridge Bible Commentary series in the early 1990s, I wrote Kingsley about contributing the volume on Galatians for the series. It was after all the one Pauline epistle from the so-called Hauptbriefe, the main indisputably Pauline letters, that he had long considered writing a commentary on. After a long silence, he finally wrote me back and said that though he was tempted, he had not kept up with the scholarship on Galatians as would be required to take on such a task, and besides, he needed to finish his work on Acts for the ICC series. What he did not say, but could have said was “and besides I’m still out on the circuit almost every single week and still writing a myriad of new sermons.” You will find many of those later sermons, as well as many earlier ones, in this collection focusing on his sermons on the Epistles, Revelation, and on the Old Testament as well.

Kingsley’s preaching is thematic in character and he is always talking about “digging” things out of the text—facts, theological ideas, ethical ideas, consequences of all these things. He clearly believes that if you just preach what is on the surface of the text you will be truly skimming, it will be superficial at best. Detailed study of the text first is required before preaching the text. He is often drawn to puzzles in the Biblical texts, hard sayings, problematic pronouncements, not because he delights in pointing out problems in the Bible, but because he assumes these texts make some good sense, and he wants to “dig” out what that sense may be. He is also drawn to texts that challenge him personally, though some like Isaiah 53 he mostly shied away from until near the end of his preaching career, because, as he says in the sermon on Isa 53.4, it has such depth and scope that one could not do justice to it in a single sermon. It is as if he needed to preach the text to himself first, before proclaiming it to others. In this he is unmistakably following Wesley who did the same thing. What you will find in this volume is that he is just as able a preacher of the Old Testament as he is of the New Testament.

A few words about Kingsley’s modus operandi when dealing with the OT are in order. In one of the sermons you will find towards the end of this collection he says this—“The Christian Church is Israel’s heir. We have entered into the privileges and responsibilities of Zion. We have this explicitly in the fifteenth chapter of John. Christ himself is the vine, we are the branches.” He is following the lead of New Testament writers, and some would call this super-cessionism. You will notice however that he is careful to speak of the Church being Israel’s heir, not her replacement. The language is familial. An heir follows the parent, and may inherit their legacy and property, but an heir is not a replacement of the parent any more than an heir is a duplicate of the parent. This is a crucial point. And of course parents can have more than one heir.

But what this hermeneutical move does is it gives CKB permission to read the Old Testament in light of the New Testament, and to see it as a book suitable for use in preaching to Christians, just as 2 Tim 3.16 suggested and insisted. When you read these sermons on the Old Testament, note how rapidly Kingsley extrapolates things and connects them with the Gospel, and with an application to Christians. He does not read the New Testament back into the Old Testament5, he reads the former as the continuation and fulfillment of the latter. He allows the Old Testament to have its say, but he never leaves it there, without connecting it in some way to Christian thought and application. It would be fascinating to know how Kingsley would have preached one of these Old Testament texts if given the opportunity to preach in a synagogue. Alas, we have no such sermons from his hand, only sermons delivered in Christian Churches or University and other school settings.

Another prominent feature of all these sermons is their practical bent. Kingsley is always keen, some would say at times too keen, to get quickly to the practical application of the text. This sometimes leads to what may appear to some to be imbalance— not enough exposition of the text, and too quick an application of this phrase or idea to some modern context. For example, read through the one sermon from Nehemiah in this collection and you will see why this might be said at times. This imbalance happens only rarely, and it would be well to remember that many of the audiences CKB addressed were far more Biblically literate than our current audiences, and so there was less need to rehearse or belabor the content of the Biblical text.

These sermons are however at their best when there is that excellent mix of detailed and incisive interaction with the substance of the Biblical text, and the bringing in of the Wesleyan heritage by way of quoting hymns or Wesley’s Journal and other works, as well as good illustrations of this point or that, and direct application of all the above to one audience or another. In the later sermons, one notices much less quoting from the hymns in the Methodist hymn book. I suspect this is partly because Kingsley knew that many, if not most, of his audiences in the chapels at that point were younger than he was, were unfamiliar with the old hymns, and would not have instantly resonated with or been able to recognize such hymn quotations which are not identified.

Another feature of these sermons comes to light when you have read the vast majority of them as I have done. Of the older Protestant Reformers, it is clear that Kingsley had a specially affinity for Luther. He comes up again and again in these sermons, by way of quotation or illustration, but there is also evidence of theological influence too. For instance, in the discussion of Romans 7, CKB follows Luther in affirming the idea that the Christian is simul justus et peccator, still dealing with the bondage of sin even after conversion. This idea Wesley clearly repudiated. His stock phrase about the Christian life was “while sin remains it no longer reigns.” There are times as well where the theme of legalism, so much emphasized by Luther but not by Calvin, is found in these sermons as well.6 Notable by its absence however are mentions of or quotations from Calvin.7 Of the more popular Christian theological writers of his own generation, we find regular citations from G. K. Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers.

Of the more modern biblical scholars, there is repeated reference to several famous German scholars of the twentieth century— Schweitzer (mostly for his medical missionary work in Africa), Bultmann (called probably the greatest of the NT scholars of the twentieth century, whom Barrett visited while on sabbatical in the early 1960s) and E. Kasemann, who became a good personal friend. I and other doctoral students were the beneficiaries of that friendship when the Barretts hosted us in their home. We sat around the dining room table discussing profound theological matters whilst munching on lebkuchen—“Kasemann’s cookies.”

It may prove helpful to consider briefly the rhetoric in these sermons here. By this I mean the ways CKB tries to persuade his audience. To start with, the style of these sermons is conversational. One of the things that comes through again and again is how solicitous he is of the audience. He is constantly concerned about how they are taking his words. One of the very most frequent phrases he uses, numbering in the hundreds of uses, is “don’t misunderstand me” and then he will give a further or plainer elucidation of what he means. He asks rhetorical questions of the audience to keep them engaged. He uses a dialogical approach, sometimes talking directly to the audience, sometimes dialoguing with an imaginary dialogue partner, like Paul’s use of the ancient diatribe style, sometimes putting himself into the shoes of a character in the biblical narrative and imagining what he was thinking, or why he was acting in this way or that.

And always he loves to paint a picture for the audience of the ancient context or larger story involved, and his descriptive powers are of such a caliber that you can picture yourself there in the scene in the text watching it happen.

To take but one example, consider Kingsley’s description of the scene described in Heb 12.1–4—“There are 20,000 perhaps 30,000 spectators gathered in the circus. The buzz of their voices becomes a rising roar in excitement. The heat of the southern sun rises from the sand of the arena in wavy shimmering lines and plays with the bright clothes of the crowds until you would think a many-colored cloud had settled over the track; the bunting and the awning of the banners make bright strips of light. Yes, they are coming out now, the runners stripping for the race until now they are standing at their marks quite naked, nothing to impede their speed and exertion. They are off, and the runner has eyes for nothing but the track and the mark, unless his glance creeps up to the central box, where sits the patron of the games, perhaps the Emperor himself; Lord and Savior and God they call him. . . .The athlete looks up at the Emperor in the royal box. And as he looks the appearance of the monarch changes. He has lost his glorious clothes, he has lost his well-lived careless polish. He too is stripped for the contest, he too is panting, straining for his breath, fighting to the last ounce. Yes, this King has gone the same way. He endured the cross and despised the shame; he has won through now to glory, but not lost his wounds. Do not forget the rest of the crowd, but keep your eye there. He didn’t have to come down to the sweaty sand of the track, he did it for you. He is the beginning of faith and the end of it. He is the starter in the race and the judge.”

Here it may be useful to note that CKB preached a good deal less on the General Epistles and Revelation than he did on the other portions of the Bible included in this volume of sermon. Hebrews 11–13 is something of an exception to this rule, as are some texts from 1 John, but I had to search these notebooks thoroughly to find these sermons on the General Epistles and Revelation, as they were badly outnumbered by sermons on the Gospels, Paul, and the Old Testament. In particular, Kingsley seems to have inherited the reticence of the Reformers, Luther, Calvin, and Wesley in regard to preaching from the book of Revelation. Consider this revealing comment from Kingsley’s sermon on Rev 11.8: “I announce this text with a certain amount of diffidence and hesitation. You will, I think, bear me witness that on Good Fridays and on other days, I have kept on the whole to plain solid matter-of-fact things, and have not gone in for myths, mysteries, mysticism, for the visionary, and symbolic and imaginative. I take no credit for that, I am a pretty earthy sort of person, and I dare say I have erred on my side of the balance. And this text might prove to be an exception, coming as it does in a chapter so mysterious and obscure that I doubt whether it would be edifying to read it as the lesson.” “A revelation,” said Luther, “ought to be revealing.” While he was comfortable with a good deal of picture language and in using vivid description to fill out a context, he found apocalyptic somewhat daunting, as did Calvin, who wrote commentaries on everything in the New Testament except Revelation, and Luther, who had doubts about the book’s usefulness in the canon.

Wesley, who in the Preface to his notes on Revelation found in his Notes on the New Testament, (which Kingsley certainly knew and used), offered something of a disclaimer as follows: “It is scarce possible for any that either love or fear God not to feel their hearts extremely affected in seriously reading either the beginning or the latter part of the Revelation. These, it is evident, we cannot consider too much; but the intermediate parts I did not study at all for many years; as utterly despairing of understanding them, after the fruitless attempts of so many wise and good men: and perhaps I should have lived and died in this sentiment, had I not seen the works of the great Bengelius. But these revived my hopes of understanding even the prophecies of this book; at least many of them in some good degree: for perhaps some will not be opened but in eternity. Let us, however, bless God for the measure of light we may enjoy, and improve it to his glory. The following notes are mostly those of that excellent man; a few of which are taken from his Gnornon Novi Testamenti, but far more from his Ekklarte Offenbarung, which is a full and regular comment on the Revelation. Every part of this I do not undertake to defend. But none should condemn him without reading his proofs at large.”8 As I say, CKB was in good company in being somewhat puzzled by Revelation and due to his practical bent, not keen to deal with apocalyptic texts he found obscure.

A further feature of Kingsley’s preaching is his striving to be as crystal clear and plain in his speech as humanly possible, so that as many people as possible will catch his meaning. This, I would surmise, he got from reading a lot of John Wesley who was constantly talking about a “plain account” of this or that, or “plain speech” as opposed to the sometimes verbose and tedious speech used by Anglican preachers of the eighteenth century to show off their learning. Clearly, Kingsley doesn’t like preaching that reflects a person overcome with the exuberance of his own verbosity, too in love with his own words and the sound of his own voice. He also frequently mentions his own dislike of over-emoting not merely in the pulpit, but in the Christian life, stressing “faith seeking understanding” (Anselm) rather than pursuing certain sorts of peak religious experiences. In fact, at one juncture in these sermons, he candidly admits that emotive religious exuberance frightened him a bit,9 and here again he sounds like Wesley who finds it necessary to parse out “good enthusiasm” for the faith from mere sentimentality and emoting. Wesley it will be remembered talked about religious zeal tempered by “the spirit of a sound mind.”

Perhaps one revealing anecdote will be worth repeating. I was there on the occasion of J. D. G. Dunn giving the Lightfoot lecture at Durham, and as it happened, the lecture was more on the manifestation of spiritual gifts in modernity (speaking in tongues, prophecy), which Professor Dunn did not dismiss, than on what the biblical text had to say on the matter. Walking away from the lecture with Professors Cranfield and Barrett I remember hearing them agreeing that they were a bit surprised that the lecture did not focus so much on the interpretation of the ancient use of such gifts (as manifested in 1 Corinthians 14 and elsewhere), and they found the endorsement of such gifts in modernity a bit worrying.

The tenor of these sermons reflects the character of the man, and clearly enough despite all his accomplishments, CKB was a humble person all too aware of his own limitations. This comes across over and over again in these sermons. Partly this is because he is imitating the example of Christ who humbled himself and served all, but partly it is just a reflection of who Kingsley was. Repeatedly he will refer to himself as “just a plain preacher” and much less frequently as a historian, and just occasionally as a “professional theologian.” This is how he sees himself, and I suspect that had he lived in the eighteenth century the Wesleys would have admired and enlisted him to do the very things he did do for seven decades in the Methodist circuits in the UK.

Though these sermons are clear, and in some ways plain, they are also by turns eloquent and it is interesting to see what literary sources he likes to quote, besides the numerous partial quotations of favorite hymns. There are numerous uses of Shakespeare quotes, not surprisingly, and perhaps second most is the use of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. There are quotations from novels he enjoyed reading, and often from the Times or the Guardian when the news was germane to the sermon. As for poetry, sometimes we get Kipling, but more often we get that World War I chaplain Studdert-Kennedy. Perhaps most effective are the personal anecdotes where his humor comes through, and the examples from the myriad of people he met and experiences he had in preaching all over the place and spending so much time in Methodist Chapels. But while the vast majority of these sermons were written for presentation in such chapels, I have also included a goodly number of his addresses in college chapels, or to whole universities, or even to public schools of various sort. Clearly, he was in demand as a speaker in all sorts of venues.

I will simply add this personal word of testimony. I’ve listened to preachers thousands of times over the course of my more than six decades of life, mostly to Methodist preachers, as I was a cradle Methodist, and someday I will be a grave one, and honestly I have never found or heard a better example and combination of biblical, Protestant (particularly Wesleyan), practical preaching than can be found in these sermons. I hope they will be as illuminating and enriching for you as they have been for me.

BW3—Christmas 2016

1. He wrote this in 1973.

2. This quotation is found in the homage on the Methodist Church in Britain webpage. See http://www.methodist.org.uk/news-and-events/news-archive-2011/remembering-c-k-barrett.

3. Editor’s Note: The 100 sermons in the first volume were preached 1732 times. That makes just a few less than 4,000 individual preaching engagements between these two volumes, and these are not all the sermons in these notebooks.

4. See https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/04/ck-barrett-obituary

5. Editor’s Note: For the most part. In his sermon on the proverb, “acknowledge God in all your ways . . .” He does insist to his Christian audience that for “God,” they should read “Christ,” even though the author of that proverb was surely thinking of Yahweh.

6. Editor’s Note: See for example the sermon on Hebrews 12.18–24.

7. Editor’s Note: This is especially interesting since the obituary in the Guardian mentions that Kingsley was raised in a “Primitive (Calvinistic) Methodist” home. CKB did however have a strong affinity for Barth, as is clear from his Romans commentary where he lauds Barth’s earlier Romerbrief as a great work.

8. Editor’s Note: The Jackson edition of Wesley’s works is in the public domain and available in various places online, including here—http://wesley.nnu.edu/john-wesley/john-wesleys-notes-on-the-bible/. Bengelius, is Jacob Bengel. I have added the emphasis to Wesley’s last sentence.

9. Editor’s Note: See the candid admission in the sermon on Romans 10 below where he says——“Probably I ought to say that to myself, for if there is anyone scared of emotion, it is I. I avoid it, I suppose, due to nature and training.” And yet he was often a warm-hearted and kind person, like Mr. Wesley.