Читать книгу Luminescence, Volume 3 - C. K. Barrett - Страница 4

This volume is different from the previous two in this series in several respects. In the first place, Penelope and I must thank Jordan Stanley, one of Asbury’s doctoral students, for his help with the transcribing of the one hundred sermons in this volume which show that Fred Barrett was prepared to preach throughout the canon of both the Old Testament and the New Testament.1 I am responsible for the final editing and annotations of this volume, as with the previous two, but as you will notice in what follows, Penelope Barrett Hyslop has provided a fine introduction to this volume, giving us a sense of the relationship between Kingsley and his father, and the influence of the latter on the former, not least in regard to preaching.

My task in what follows in this preface, and in the footnotes, is to present these sermons in clear English, annotate them where references can be found, and provide the occasional comparative comment in light of the previous two volumes in this series. We can say at the outset that the geographical scope of Fred Barrett’s ministry may have been more narrow than Kingsley’s (he did not, I think, travel abroad and minister in foreign countries), and he may have preached in fewer places in England than did Kingsley (e.g., he did not preach in universities and cathedrals as Kingsley not infrequently did), but we should not underestimate the impact Fred Barrett had in his various pastoral tenures at Katherine Road Methodist Church, or at Spring Head Mission, or at Bishop St., and elsewhere, including in many open-air services and revivals. The sheer list of chapels preached in does not tell the whole tale of the depth and impact of a person’s ministry.

In terms of homiletical form, Kingsley follows rather closely the practice of his father. Sermons usually have three points, quotes from hymns are regularly cited, and the sentence that ends one section of the sermon leads to the next heading for the next point. In other words, the sermons are carefully crafted. But that is not all.

Kingsley uses some of the same illustrations as his father, perhaps because he heard his father use them, or perhaps because he read the same sources, but probably it involves some of both. For example, the illustration Fred Barrett cites from Harold Begbie’s book in the sermon entitled “The Reconsecrations of Life” is also cited, more than once in Kingsley’s sermons. Or again, in the sermon entitled “Mount Moriah, the Hill of Testing,” Fred tells a bit of the story of the missionary Sam Pollard, who went to China, or alternately the story of David Livingstone in Africa. Kingsley also uses the same stories several times.

Kingsley, it will be remembered, said of his father that he was one of the greatest preachers he had ever heard. Now it might be possible to take that as the natural utterance of a loving son who was proud of his father, except that when you read these sermons you realize they are often powerful and not infrequently eloquent. Fred Barrett had a way with words, and though he may not have been the scholar his son was, he was also no country preacher. This is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that he had no formal education beyond the age of thirteen or fourteen. He was nonetheless thoughtful, with a good grasp of theology and ethics, not to mention a very considerable knowledge and understanding of the Bible. And one notable difference from his son’s preaching style is that Fred not merely loved poetry, and quoted it frequently, he had a penchant for looking for the poetic or “mystical” phrase in the text to preach on, and this sometimes led to something that bordered on allegory. Consider for example his exposition on dawn in his sermon on Matthew 28, entitled “Darkness and Dawn.” Kingsley does not go down that road.

Fred gives a clue about how he went about composing his sermons in the sermon on 2 Peter 1:5, called “The Additions of Grace.” He says he has one Bible for his devotions, but uses a different Bible to compose his sermons. He adds, “It is very, very seldom that I use my personal devotional reading for sermonic purposes. Long ago I learned from Dr. Jowett the value of a preacher having literally a Bible never used for homiletical purposes, but reserved for the culture of his own soul.” This is not to say that his sermons don’t have devotional aspects and value to them. They do. But they focus on proclamation not devotional practices such as lectio divina.

One of the significant differences in the preaching of Kingsley and Fred, as revealed in these sermons, is that while time and again Kingsley focuses on “Christ and him crucified” in his preaching, both during the Easter season and at other times, Fred wants to place at least equal if not more emphasis on the resurrection of Christ. It must be remembered that Kingsley owed much to the German theological tradition which indeed, from Luther right through to the twentieth century with scholars like Bultmann and Kasemann, focused on “Christ and him crucified” and saw this as the heart of the gospel. It would be hard to imagine Kingsley placing the same emphasis where his father does, in what we hear Fred Barrett say in his sermon “Christ Crucified and Risen” (Rom 8:34):

“One asks if there is not a real point in Michelangelo’s indignant protest to his fellow painters, “Why do you keep filling gallery after gallery with endless pictures of the one ever reiterated theme, of Christ in weakness, Christ dying, most of all of Christ hanging dead?” The symbol of our faith is not a crucifix, and certainly not one with a dead man on it. Paul’s Christ, cried Michelangelo, is not dead but risen. Paint him as the conqueror of death! Paint him as the Lord of life! Paint him as what he is, the irresistible Victor, who, tested to the uttermost, has proved himself in very deed mighty to save.

There is a real danger in our failure to remember that Easter follows Good Friday and in making the crucifix our symbol. Gazing at the cross alone and too long tends to kindle a queer inferiority complex in our minds that often leads to shrinking from the powers that are arrayed against us as against him, and that breeds a cowardice in which we lose heart and fling away our weapons. Bring in the upper thought that he conquered in death and we gain courage and become sure of the triumph of the good and true.

In some cases, and with some types of piety, continued meditation on the cross has led only to the luxury of grief, to vapid, lachrymose sentimentalism. By all means remember that he died for you and that will bring you to your knees in grief and gratitude. Remember that he rose again and is abroad in the world, then you will get up from your knees and follow his footsteps as he goes forth to seek and save. You will keep coming back to the cross for inspiration, but you will not “seek the living among the dead.”

In his following sermon, Fred adds that the phrase “Christ and him crucified” should not be seen as a limitation but rather a concentration for good preaching, but he emphasizes that the word Christ means “the risen Christ.” The death and resurrection must both be emphasized, but since life rather than death has the last word in the gospel, perhaps the resurrection should have preeminence.

As with Kingsley’s sermons there are various literary allusions in Fred’s sermons (e.g., a reference to Milton’s “Samson Agonistes,” and to Tennyson’s “Sir Galahad” in the “Samson” sermon), but what we seldom find is allusions or quotes from twentieth-century theologians or biblical scholars (there is a reference to George Adam Smith or F. J. Foakes-Jackson and a few others occasionally), or for that matter early Reformers such as Luther, both of which things occur quite regularly in Kingsley’s sermons.2 Fred does not go down that road.

Two other things stand out. Fred references many nineteenth-century hymns, often revival hymns, and somewhat less frequently refers to the hymns of Charles Wesley or Isaac Watts, unlike his son. And then there is this surprise—he overwhelmingly chooses lines from hymns by nineteenth-century female hymn writers such as Fanny Crosby or Elizabeth Clephane, and many others. Indeed, I can find only two references to any hymns written in the twentieth century, even though Fred ministered into the middle of the twentieth century. He stuck to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century hymns that populated the Methodist and Revivalist hymnbooks. Further, his sermons often read more like revival sermons “preaching for a verdict” in a hurry to get to the application and get the audience to change their lives, or increase their devotion, or fully live out the faith. That is to say, Fred’s sermons have more of a regular ethical focus or thrust, whereas the sermons of Kingsley are often more theological and even philosophical in character.

For example, Fred Barrett’s preaching of the Old Testament mostly focused on its ethical content, and indeed, he does more justice to the ethics of the Old Testament than his son, not only because he focused more on it, but also because he plumbed its depths to a greater degree. For example, consider these remarks about some of the Mosaic Law in Exodus:

Here is a pretty problem in ethics for you. Is a man morally responsible, not only for what he does, but for what results from his action? Must he be held accountable for consequences he did not intend resulting from his conduct? In my judgment, there are consequences of our actions, or of our failure to act, at a given moment which are altogether unexpected; by no knowledge accessible to us could we foresee them. For these consequences, it seems to me, we are not guilty. But there are cases in which we might have known that certain results would follow our action or our neglect. In such cases, we are not guiltless though there was no ill intent in our minds. We might have known that evil would follow a certain course of conduct and we ought to have found out. The text [Exod 22:6, about a fire which damages a neighbor’s property] presents the case of a man who did not intend to cause damage. The law held him guilty because he was careless of consequences and did not take necessary precautions.

These sermons were preached from 1922 to 1952, and interestingly one of them was preached at both the first and the last of these dates. Fred, however, dates his ministry from 1906 according to the sermon “The Full-Orbed Gospel.” This means that the sermons in this volume do not reflect his earliest efforts but come from during the time he was already an experienced pastor and evangelist. Like his son, Fred Barrett recycled his sermons, and some he preached as many as thirty times. But there is no evidence he preached as many times over as long a period as Kingsley. And it is to be noted that while Kingsley seems to have been often the especially chosen preacher for the high holy days in the calendar (and so there are many more Christmas and Easter and Watchnight and Pentecost sermons from him than from his father), one is hard pressed to find a lot of “high holy day” sermons from the pen of Fred Barrett, though there are some. I attribute this to Fred being a parish minister primarily throughout his ministry, while Kingsley was often a special days preacher, as well as a regular circuit preacher during his academic tenure between 1945 and the early 1980s.

Two tendencies also characterize the preaching of both father and son. Neither did expository preaching, going verse by verse through a text. Both would take a key idea, or a memorable phrase or thought and milk it for all it was worth. And both had a penchant for finishing a sermon with a line or lines from a favorite hymn. They knew their Methodist audiences would know the source of most of those quotes or allusions. It is, however, right to ask the question how many of these sermons Kingsley actually heard, since the bulk of them seem to have been preached in the 1930s and ’40s, when he also was on the Methodist circuit, and not sitting in a congregation listening to his father. As for the sermons from the ’20s, he likely heard many of those before he went off to school at Shebbear. In any case, Fred Barrett was a remarkable preacher, and I trust you will find his sermons interesting, challenging, and edifying and not infrequently eloquent and even poetical.

1. It is interesting that he did not share the reluctance of his son to deal with either the apocalyptic in the book of Revelation, or purple passages like Isaiah 53.

2. Luther is cited once in these sermons, and none of the old catechisms are cited, unlike in some of his son’s sermons.