Effective Preaching

By far the most effective ingredient of good preaching is the personal piety of the preacher himself. How little must the presence of God be felt in that place, where the high functions of the pulpit are degraded into a stipulated exchange of entertainment, on the one side, and of admiration, on the other! and surely it were a sight to make angels weep when a weak and vapouring mortal, surrounded by his fellow-sinners, and hastening to the grave and the judgement along with them, finds it a dearer object to his bosom to regale his hearers by the exhibition of himself, that to do, in plain earnest, the work of his Master.

- Thomas Chalmers (March 17, 1780 - May 31, 1847), Scottish mathematician, minister of the gospel, leader and first moderator of the Free Church of Scotland in the Disruption of 1843; born at Anstruther in Fife.

On the Administration of the Lord's Table, Kirk of Scotland (1560)

In 1560, the kirk sent forth its creedal testimony in the Scottish Confession, which was written by six ministers: John Knox, John Douglas, John Row, John Spottiswoode, John Willock, and John Winram. These ministers were also commissioned to draft "in a volume the policy and discipline of the kirk." The latter became the First Book of Discipline of the Scottish Church.

From the First Book of Discipline (1560) of the Kirk of Scotland, giving directions for the administration fo the Lord’s Supper (The Ninth Head); note their advice regarding frequency:

Four times in the year we think sufficient to the administration of the Lord's Table, which we desire to be distinct, that the superstition of times may be avoided so far as may be. Your honours are not ignorant how superstitiously the people run to that action at Pasche, even as [if] the time gave virtue to the sacrament; and how the rest of the whole year they are careless and negligent, as that it appertains not unto them but at that time only. We think therefore most expedient, that the first Sunday of March be appointed for one [time]; the first Sunday of June for another; the first Sunday of September for the third; and the first Sunday of December for the fourth. We do not deny but that any several church, for reasonable causes, may change the time, and may minister ofter; but we study to suppress superstition. All ministers must be admonished to be more careful to instruct the ignorant than ready to satisfy their appetites; and more sharp in examination than indulgent, in admitting to that great mystery such as are ignorant of the use and virtue of the same. And therefore we think that the administration of the Table ought never to be without that examination pass before, especially of those whose knowledge is suspect. We think that none are apt to be admitted to that mystery who cannot formally say the Lord's Prayer, the articles of the belief, and declare the sum of the law.

Idolatry and the Constitution

In my preaching through First Kings, I came across the following from Peter Leithart’s Brazos Theological Commentary on 1 &2 Kings (Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, 2006), where he begins his comment on 1 Kings 21, pp. 152-3:

Americans, if they believe in idolatry at all, believe it is a victimless sin. Though it is debatable that the framers of the American Constitution envisioned a secular state, the First Amendment has come to be understood as a protection of all religious belief, though not a protection of religious behavior (e.g. polygamy is not a protected religious behavior). According to contemporary interpretations of the First Amendment, it makes no social and political difference what people believe. They can worship a thousand gods or none; they can worship Allah or Jesus; and it has absolutely no public consequences. All can live in harmony and peace despite our religious differences, because the sacred canopy overarching all our particular religious commitments is a commitment to the American system. Particular religions are subordinated to the American civil religion, a religion to which all Americans adhere. Whatever we are ethically or religiously, we are all hyphenated Americans: Christian-Americans or Buddhist-Americans or Muslim-Americans or atheist-Americans, but always Americans. This is what O’Donovan had in mind when he suggests, shockingly to many American Christians, that the First Amendment “can usefully be taken as the symbolic end of Christendom,” since, whatever the intentions of the framers, it “ended up promoting a concept of the state’s role from which Christology was excluded, that of a state freed from all responsibility to recognize God’s self-disclosure in history” (1996, 244-45).

Indifference to idolatry has its roots in the early modern period. According to a common telling of the story, Europeans discovered that theology was bloodily divisive and concluded that the only way to restore comparative harmony was to expunge theology from the public square, forcing theological decision and debate into the recesses of the conscience or, at best safely behind the walls of the church (Pannenberg 1989, 12-15). William Cavanagh vigorously and persuasively challenges this account of secularization arguing that the wars of religion did not move religion into private space but instead invented the modern concept of religion (2000, 15-42). Besides, all efforts to establish social harmony on the foundation of theologically neutral concepts of nature and human nature are doomed to failure. To found a constitution on the premise that human beings are something other than the image of God is not to found a constitution on neutrality. It is, so Christians must testify, to found a constitution on falsehood.

Scripture does not treat idolatry as morally or politically indifferent. What and how we worship shapes the kind fo persons we become. After describing false gods as speechless, blind, deaf, immobile, and powerless, Psalm 115, says that “those who make them will become like them, / everyone who trusts in them” (115:8). Idolaters are as dumb, blind, deaf, and impotent as the gods they worship. On the other hand, as the Gospels demonstrate, those who turn to Jesus in faith are healed of all such diseases. Worshipers of the living God live.

Calvin on the Duties of the Civil Magistrate

The duty of magistrates, its nature, as described by the word of God, and the things in which it consists, I will here indicate in passing. That it extends to both tables of the law, did Scripture not teach, we might learn from profane writers, for no man has discoursed of the duty of magistrates, the enacting of laws, and the common weal, without beginning with religion and divine worship. Thus all have confessed that no polity can be successfully established unless piety be its first care, and that those laws are absurd which disregard the rights of God, and consult only for men.

[continued]

John Calvin, Institutes, IV:20:9