by Cornelius Plantinga
Wm. B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Mich. 133 pages
Reviewed by ROY W. HOWARD
I’ve been a pastor for over 25 years and reading books for many more. This book combines the demands of preaching and the joys of reading with brilliant skill. Plantinga knows preachers and he knows the demands of preaching sermons that “get to the heart” without bypassing the mind.
One of the many delights of this book is the chapter devoted to authors who know how to get to the heart from whom preachers can learn. Commenting on John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” he says, “Preachers follow Ma Joad’s family to California because they know a simple fact: their preaching is meant by God to move human hearts and they have no hope of success in this mission unless they are vulnerable to being moved themselves.”
Plantinga knows the necessity of deep wisdom that will help the pastor create sermons that speak much more than any one person can ever know. But he has not stuffed a sack full of anecdotes for the preacher to find endless illustrations. “Reading general literature just for illustrations is slightly perverse.” That is for Saturday night anxious Internet browsers. Rather, Plantinga writes about the apt illustration that is true in every sense of the word. “If the preacher is a persistent reader,” he argues, “she will discover illustrations that may turn out to be more than mere embellishments. If well chosen and well placed, illustrations can become serious business within a sermon.” He then proceeds to give examples from a wide range: Garrison Keillor (humorist), Seth McFarlane (cartoonist), Thorton Wilder (author). There is a chapter on diction in which the sermons of Barbara Brown Taylor are analyzed for her uncanny ability to get the diction perfectly pitched for her listeners. It is her diction that gives her sermon movement in the ear of the listeners and proceeds directly to the heart. Lest the reader think preaching is only about rhetoric, Plantinga is quick to say “none of this matters if the Holy Spirit isn’t blowing, but if the sermon has been intelligently designed to catch the Spirit’s breath, and if the Spirit actually blows, the result is what we mean when we say that preaching in the church is eventful.”
In this book are found riches from novels, short stories, poems and essays that will enrich any preacher’s art. That is one of the many delights of this book. One is treated to insightful commentary on a delightfully wide range of reading that demonstrates how the great skill of the authors can be learned by preachers who are seeking to announce the presence of God and move the human heart.
There is more! Historian Robert Caro, novelists Flannery O’Connor, Somerset Maugham, Marilynne Robison, Anne Tyler and essayists William Maxwell and Joseph Epstein. “The preacher wants his program of reading to complicate some of his fixed ideas, to impress him with some of the mysteries of life, with its variousness, with its surprises, with the pushes and pulls within it.” The author is a fine writer who knows the joy of a pithy zinger into the mind’s heart. After all these years, I have again found a source for deepening my own reading that may in turn deepen my preaching
ROY W. HOWARD is the Outlook book editor and the pastor of Saint Mark Presbyterian Church in North Bethesda, Maryland.
