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The question might come up, “Why would a reader in the early twenty-first century be interested in sermons preached in 1967 and 1968?” The answer is that the 1960s were a period of unusual cultural ferment in North America, a ferment that included changes taking place in churches and in preaching, and we find ourselves in a similar situation as the 2020s unfold. Indeed, as I write in the spring of 2020, the United States is in the grip of the Covid-19 pandemic with its attendant social crises. The publication of the sermons in Talking About God When People Are Afraid opens a window into an important chapter in the history of preaching by demonstrating how preachers in the 1960s perceived and spoke about many of the existential issues and feelings facing people in the United States (especially in the Eurocentric, educated middle class). This window also prompts preachers more than fifty years later to consider how we might perceive and speak about culturally challenging issues today.

These sermons demonstrate how one group of preachers sought to help a congregation make theological sense of the force fields in the culture and the church and to imagine appropriate responses both as individuals and as a community of faith. Many sermons of the period of the late 1960s reflect similar emphases to the messages in this volume, but, in my view, the sermons here exemplify the best of that tradition in ways that surpass many other existing examples.

Not only does the book open a window on the past, but it points towards some practices for preaching that can benefit the contemporary pulpit and church. Today’s ministers cannot simply repeat what these preachers did a half-century ago, but we can draw inspiration for being as theologically responsible, pastorally sensitive, and sermonically creative as were the four preachers involved in these dialogues.

During the 1960s several great cultural forces swirled around one another in generating perceptions and feelings that were often in tension. On the one hand, these forces included the flourishing of science and technology which seemed to promise an ever-increasing good quality of life. The economy appeared to provide steady wages and benefits for many for both the present and the long-term future. There was a great emphasis on the “new”—new school buildings to accommodate growing enrollment, new church buildings to house congregations that had grown like wildfire in the previous decade, new shopping centers, new hospitals, even new and improved laundry detergents. General Electric used the slogan, “Progress is Our Most Important Product.” There was a certain experimental feeling in the air as many people were open to doing things new ways.

On the other hand, the Cold War created anxiety that rubbed against this optimistic spirit. Many high school and college students and others responded to the Vietnam War by taking to the streets. Generational conflict was common especially between the World War II generation and their Boomer children. Hippies rejected many of the values and practices of corporate culture. Many young people who did not actually become hippies still looked upon aspects of the dominant culture with suspicion. The nation became freshly aware of the extent and depth of poverty. Anti-war protests in behalf of peace were sometimes accompanied by violence. Indeed, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, and Robert F. Kennedy just two months later on June 5, 1968. Among people of color as well as among many Eurocentric people in solidarity with them, the Civil Rights Movement promised a better society even as that movement unnerved many Eurocentric communities.

People in the 1960s were often simultaneously optimistic and anxious. It was a period of great creativity while also a time of contradiction and conflict. Preaching always partakes of the culture in which it is spoken, but the sermons in this volume especially do so. The preachers seek to help listeners make theological sense of the full range of the experience of the period from the standpoint of clear and cogent Christian vision. The sermons seek to interpret the interior experience of the individual as well as the more social dynamics of congregation and culture.

The sermons go back and forth between preaching that offers serious exposition of a biblical text in the traditional sermonic sense and those that are more topical in nature. In both cases, I am struck by the depth and precision of the preachers’ understandings of the people and the culture of the time as well as the acuity of the preachers’ theological analyses. These are points at which these sermons provide case studies for sermons today. To be candid, while many preachers today seek to interpret contemporary culture in theological perspective, the efforts seldom approach the substance of the sermons in Talking About God When People Are Afraid. I am further struck by the breadth and depth of learning that the preachers bring to the sermons. In addition to their own keen insights, the preachers draw on biblical scholarship, church history, systematic theology, ethics, ecumenical dialogue, philosophy, and psychology to extents that are rarely reached in preaching today. In these regards, the early twenty-first-century pulpit could take clues from these sermons.

As the title of the volume implies, one of the most distinctive aspects of the sermons is their dialogical character. After World War II, the biblical scholar Hans Conzelmann commented that the impetus for Redaction Criticism to Form Criticism as a primary approach to interpreting the Bible was just “in the air.” Something of the same is true for the notion of dialogue in the 1960s, symbolized, perhaps, by the 1963 publication of Reuel L. Howe, The Miracle of Dialogue. Howe—an Episcopal priest, former faculty member at a theological seminary, and founder of the Institute for Advanced Pastoral Studies in Bloomfield, Michigan—symbolized the wider presence of dialogue as a force-field in the culture while he also contributed to that presence by reinforcing the notion that dialogue is central to developing authentic relationships and community.1

In the 1960s, Christian education increasingly moved away from top-down, information-based approaches and more towards discussion and dialogue. This emphasis appeared in other forms of ecclesial life but was slow to come to the pulpit. Dialogues on the Incarnation is a pioneering effort to bring the spirit of dialogue to the pulpit. Most of the sermons feature interchanges between Robert A. Thomas, Senior Minister of the congregation, and a second person—Associate Minister Eugene Kidder, Campus Minister Thomas R. McCormick, or Keith Watkins, a member of the faculty of Christian Theological Seminary who was Visiting Minister Theologian for the academic year 1967–68. Thomas preaches in a solo voice in the first sermons in the series for Advent and Lent and also in the last sermon of each series. His solo-voice sermons are not singular, isolated messages but are intended to introduce the dialogue that takes place not only in the individual sermons but in the messages interacting with one another for the whole of each season. His solo voice at the end is a kind of wrap-up or summary.

Most of the time, the interaction between Thomas and the other preacher for the day has the character of real dialogue, that is, give-and-take, question and response, question prompting question, or affirmation prompting expansion. Listeners have a sense of the sermon moving in the same way that conversations move. At some other times, to be honest, the content of the sermon, while expressed in two voices, is a single line of thought that could be spoken by a single voice without loss of meaning. This slight inconsistency does not detract from the innovative quality of the dialogical approach.

Between the 1960s and today, scholarship in preaching has given almost no attention to the possibility of genuine give-and-take between two voices (or among more voices) in the sermon.2 I am aware of only a few isolated instances of such preaching, often on the part of clergy couples.

However, the early twenty-first century is an ideal time in which to reclaim the kind of multiple-voice preaching demonstrated in Talking About God When People Are Afraid. We are at a cultural moment in which many Eurocentric peoples are rediscovering community. Congregations with multiple ministers—on the staff or containing ministers who are simply members—can easily take advantage of the multiple ministerial presence for dialogical preaching.

Going further, one of the important themes in the emerging postmodern culture in both the wider world and in theology and the church is boundary-crossing, or transgression. While the expert is still respected, there is a growing sense that experts often have limited perspectives, and that people outside of expert status often have important things to contribute to discussion. From this point of view, ministers should no longer think of themselves as the sources of theological insight for preaching. Indeed, increasing numbers of clergy are making use of sermon feed-forward groups in which ministers meet with lay people as part of sermon preparation.3 It is a short small step from clergy and laity thinking together about the sermon in the study to clergy and laity speaking with one another in the pulpit.

To be sure, everything in this volume should not be a spark for preaching in the present. Most of these sermons lasted about half an hour—one or two perhaps as long as forty minutes. Few congregations in the historic denominations today are prepared to make this kind of investment in the sermon. Moreover, the sermons are written in a style that is as much literary as oral-aural. Indeed, some of the sermons are almost essay-like style in a way that would sound stilted in the pulpit today. While the sermons are exceptional in theological penetration, the preachers seldom address listeners directly, in the way that would be typical of active dialogue today. Indeed, I am struck by how often the sermons are almost third-person in their rhetorical orientation.

Moreover, the preachers do not make use of many stories to help the sermons come alive and to help listeners connect the big ideas of their sermon. The preacher today wants to make greater use of narrative. To make an obvious point: these observations reinforce the value of the volume as a resource for the study of the history of preaching. While we can learn things to do from these messages, we can also note qualities that are better adapted. In both cases, Talking About God When People Are Afraid is an excellent resource for the preacher today.

Ronald J. Allen

Professor of Preaching, and Gospels and Letters, Emeritus

Christian Theological Seminary