A Brief History Of Preaching
Preaching has always been a significant moment in the church's worship. During the Middle Ages, preaching became almost completely irrelevant to the people as the consecration of the eucharistic elements became the sole focus of the liturgy. Fewer and fewer people could understand the Latin of the service. The mendicant preachers of the late Middle Ages began to restore preaching to the people, but the Reformation brought a new focus on preaching, often to the exclusion of the Eucharist. The current consensus views preaching as an essential part of the Service of the Word, which is balanced and completed by the Service of the Table. The following entries seek to provide resources for preaching while making no presumption of being exhaustive. The sections on styles and approaches in preaching delineate the essential methods of preaching while attempting to offer a glimpse into other more recent and creative trends in preaching. The history of preaching follows the natural divisions of O…
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Chapters & Articles in A Brief History Of Preaching (17)
The sermon has its unique roots in Jewish tradition and was carried on and explored in the Christian tradition, as …
The sermon in synagogue worship was always in the context of prayers, benedictions, psalms, hymns, and the reading …
Preaching in the Jewish synagogue instructed members in faith and practice but also could be intended for indoctrin…
In the account of the sermon Jesus delivered in his hometown, three necessary elements of preaching are evident. Fi…
The kerygma (preaching) is a summary of the preaching themes of the early church, based on the study of the sermons…
There appears to be a distinction in early Christian worship between the Jewish tradition (fixed forms, with a some…
Evidence collected about the early church suggests that most of the preaching in hamlets, villages, and rural areas…
Formerly it was thought that Christian rhetoric did not begin until the fourth and fifth centuries. The discovery, …
Origen was one of the earliest and most influential of the Greek preachers. He intertwined exegesis and preaching a…
Christianity changed considerably in the fourth century with the conversion of Constantine, who made Christianity l…
John Chrysostom, known as the "golden orator," was a master communicator, certainly one of the two or three greates…
Augustine represents the preaching of the Latin church, a style that may be traced from Tertullian through Cyprian …
The renewal of preaching in the medieval era is traced to the rise of the crusades, the monasteries, and the schola…
An influence on preaching that originated from both the monasteries and the scholastic theology of the universities…
In the late medieval era, a renewed concern for the inner life emerged. This new kind of mysticism affected the med…
Martin Luther, like John Wycliffe, John Huss, and Girolamo Savonarola before him, may be classified as a preacher o…
In the mid-eighteenth century, John Wesley and George Whitefield became famous through their revivalistic preaching…