Jeremiah's Scribes

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Meredith Marie Neuman. Jeremiah's Scribes

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Jeremiah’s Scribes

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This type of “doctrine-use” structure of sermons, while typical of nonconformist preaching, was widely used by the early seventeenth century.30 Perkins’s rather ubiquitously cited directives are, in essence, a concise summary of trends in preaching, the roots of which go back to Calvin, if not Origen,31 and whose practical rhetorical evolution begins with Erasmus’s turn away from thematic preaching toward a more humanist model of classical oratory and Melancthon’s subsequent repudiation of varieties of classical oratory in favor of doctrinal and use-oriented preaching.32 No manual or theory of preaching, however, could instruct the would-be minister how to be an inspired instrument for the Holy Ghost but only how to explicate according to human ability. The best a minister might hope for, “if he have the gift,” is to offer application in persuasive but “simple and plaine” speech. Scholars have called the resulting sermons “formulaic” and “tedious.”33

One of the most immediately apparent features of this plain-style preaching was the rhetorical structure of Ramist branching—in which each point of explication might be subdivided into a multitude of subsequent numbered branching points for further explication.34 Ramist structure seems also to account for the remarkable fluency that auditors exhibited in recording, whether at the meetinghouse or at home after the sermon. Even more fundamentally, the method of Ramist logic is at the heart of sermon explication itself. Explanations of Ramist reaction to scholastic logic have suggested ways in which such rote configurations of prophesying might constitute innovative rhetorical change, yet such intellectual history approaches have failed to explain the exhilarating highs and lows of pulpit eloquence, especially for the auditor. Subsequent interventions into sermon literature scholarship—most notably, by Teresa Toulouse and Lisa Gordis—have tried to rescue sermon literature from its own apparent eye-glazing dictates by suggesting that the insufficiency of the guidelines requires fluidity and experimentation. Gordis, in particular, reframes the rhetorical problem as an exegetical issue, revealing not only how individual ministers interpreted preemptory directives such as Perkins’s but also how auditors took and adapted what ministers, with their virtuosity, rendered apparently straightforward.35

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