The year 1877 was a memorable one for Phillips Brooks, well-known rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Boston. On February 9, a new church edifice was consecrated, five years after the old structure had burned down (“She burned majestically,” Brooks wrote to a friend; “she died in dignity”). During the Lenten season Brooks participated in D. L. Moody’s meetings in Boston at the six-thousand-seat tabernacle. One night, when Brooks led in prayer, Moody introduced him as “Phillip Brook” and shocked the proper Bostonians. On another occasion Brooks filled in for the evangelist and delivered a stirring sermon from Acts 26:17. But the event of 1877 that excited Brooks most was the privilege of delivering the annual Yale lectures on preaching. His was the sixth in the series, but he was the fourth lecturer since Henry Ward Beecher had given the first three series. Phillips Brooks was forty-two years old and at the height of his ministry, exercising a powerful influence not only in America but also in Europe. Published as Lectures on Preaching, this series ranks with the finest homiletical literature ever produced by any preacher of any denomination. Subsequent Yale lecturers have quoted Brooks and Beecher more than any other men, and since Beecher had three opportunities to deliver the lectures, this puts Brooks at the head of the list.
Brooks had been preaching for twenty years when he delivered the lectures. He was born on December 13, 1835, “the consummate flower of nine generations of cultured Puritan stock.” (That was the opinion of Lewis O. Brastow, professor of practical theology at Yale at the turn of the century. His book, Representative Modern Preachers, is worth studying.) After graduating from the Boston Latin School at the age of sixteen, Brooks entered Harvard and graduated in 1855, thirteenth in a class of sixty-six. He returned to the Latin School to teach and, as long as he taught younger children, did quite well. But when he was given older pupils, he began to have discipline problems and the headmaster “released” him. This was a blow to the young man, and for nearly nine months he suffered, living under a cloud of defeat and discouragement. (“I have never known any man who fails in teaching to succeed in anything else,” the headmaster had told him!)
He then talked with the president of Harvard and the pastor of his family’s church, and both of them suggested he enter the ministry. Interestingly enough, the pastor, Dr. Vinton, told Brooks that conversion was a prerequisite to confirmation and the ministry—and Brooks confessed that he did not know what conversion was. The end result was entrance into the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia, and three years of study. The faculty at that time was weak, so Brooks invested much of his time in wide reading. After graduation in 1859, he began his ministry at the Church of the Advent in Philadelphia, remaining there almost three years. From 1861 to 1867 he pastored the Church of the Holy Trinity in that same city, and then in 1869 began his phenomenal ministry at historic Trinity Church in Boston. He remained there for twenty-two years, resigning in 1891 when he was elected bishop. His untimely death on January 23, 1893, caught Boston by surprise and silenced a powerful voice.
Brooks never married; he was married to his pulpit. He was a big man—six feet, four inches tall—and at one time weighed nearly three hundred pounds. (The Harvard students who served as pallbearers at his funeral practiced by carrying a heavy casket with three hundred pounds of metal in it. In spite of this, one of the young men fell into the grave when the casket was lowered!) He walked rapidly, ate rapidly, and loved to drive fast horses. He was fond of antique furniture, books (especially biographies), travel (his church sent him to Europe and once he sailed as far as Japan), sweets, and iced drinks. His cup of coffee began as a cup of sugar, then the coffee was poured in! In spite of his mother’s pleas, Brooks continued to smoke; his ideal vacation was made up of “plenty of books and time and tobacco.”
During his ministry Brooks published five volumes of sermons, and five more were published in the years following his death. They are often seen in used-book stores and, if the prices are not too high, they should be purchased. I suggest, however, that you first read the thirty-one sermons collected by William Scarlett, published in 1949 by E. P. Dutton under the title Phillips Brooks: Selected Sermons. This volume contains the best of Brooks’s preaching, including his two famous sermons “The Candle of the Lord” and “The Fire and the Calf.” If while reading these sermons you take a liking to Brooks, you can obtain the other volumes. Please do not expect expository sermons or messages vibrant with obvious evangelical doctrine and evangelistic warmth! Brooks considered himself evangelical and perhaps in some ways he was, but even in his own day his theology was suspect. The day he was consecrated bishop of Massachusetts, the procession into the church was delayed to allow two bishops to read a letter of protest! Of the fifty-two dioceses in the state, fifteen voted against him. Some of the furor was over his baptism: he had been baptized by a Unitarian and had refused to submit to the Episcopal rite. The brutal attacks in the religious press often kept him awake at night.
Basically, Brooks was a Christian humanist. He emphasized Christ’s incarnation, not his death and atonement for sin. He felt that all men are children of God and that, once told this good news, their lives will change. He preached that all men are naturally religious and only need God’s grace to reach their fulfillment in God. Yet, strange to say, the most moving of his Yale lectures is the last one, “The Value of the Human Soul.” “If we could see how precious the human soul is as Christ saw it, our ministry would approach the effectiveness of Christ’s,” he stated. He then described the effects of “a concern for souls” on a man’s ministry. He closed by saying: “May the souls of men always be more precious to you as you come always nearer to Christ and see them more perfectly as He does. I can ask no better blessing on your ministry than that.”
His ministry attracted and helped people from all levels of society, and even some ardent evangelicals appreciated his work. On December 3, 1879, a pastor in Garrettsville, Ohio, wrote Brooks: “I would like here to acknowledge the debt I owe you for inspiration in my individual religious experience and in my public work. . . . Give us other works still.” That pastor was R. A. Torrey, who later became president of Moody Bible Institute. One reason for this wide attraction, I think, is that Brooks did not deal with specifics. He preached on timeless themes and loved to use abstract words like truth, goodness, humanity, and (his favorite) sympathy. In fact he himself admitted to a pastor friend: “When I am interesting I am vague; when I am definite I am dull.” The pastor who expounds the Scriptures or who explains a text finds it necessary to be specific— but this does not mean he has to be dull!
Phillips Brooks is an interesting man who (in spite of his bachelorhood) led an interesting life. If you wish to learn more about him, read the official biography by Alexander V. G. Allen. Avoid the original two-volume edition of 1900 and get the one-volume abridgement published in 1907. The book is as big as the man—nearly seven hundred pages of biography and extracts from his many letters. If you do not feel up to that much reading, locate Focus on Infinity by Raymond W. Albright, published in 1961. This book is as scholarly as Allen’s massive work, and it has the added advantage of the perspective of time. (For some reason, each book has an interesting typographical error. Allen wrote about “D. S. Moody” and Albright about “Charles W. Spurgeon.”)
Now for Brooks’s Lectures on Preaching, a book every preacher ought to read once a year for five years, and then once every other year for the rest of his life. What makes these lectures so valuable is that they deal with basic principles, not with transient methods. The preacher who is looking for shortcuts will not find them here.
In the first lecture Brooks defined preaching as the communication of divine truth through human personality. The divine truth never changes, but the human personality does. This explains why two preachers can take the same text and develop two different sermons, or why the same preacher can preach often from the same Scripture passage and always discover something fresh. “The truth must come really through the person,” said Brooks, “not merely over his lips, not merely into his understanding and out through his pen. It must come through his character, his affections, his whole intellectual and moral being.”1 This means, of course, that the preparation for the ministry “is nothing less than the making of the man.” The preacher of truth must be a man open to truth—all truth, no matter where it is found, because truth can come only from God. In his lectures on “The Influence of Jesus,” Brooks described “the man of truth” as “a man into all whose life the truth has been pressed till he is full of it, till he has been given to it, and it has been given to him, he being always the complete being whose unity is in that total of moral, intellectual and spiritual life which makes what we call character.”2 This leaves out in the cold the “busy preacher” who dives into his books for an outline or illustration, or, worse yet, who depends on “preachers’ helps” for his messages week by week. It is not enough to write a sermon, said Brooks; we must have a message, “a message which we cannot transmit until it has entered into our own experience, and we can give our own testimony of its spiritual power.”
The second lecture discusses “The Preacher Himself” and answers the question, “What sort of man may be a minister?” God uses different kinds of men because each man’s experience helps to interpret the truths of the Bible. But let each man be open to truth. Brooks abhorred narrow-minded bigotry that prevents a man confronting truth from many sources. He also emphasized the importance of contact with humanity. “No man preaches well,” he stated, “who has not a strong and deep appreciation of humanity.” He advised us to “find the human side of every truth, the point at which every speculation touches humanity.” He had some wise warnings in this lecture against some “dangers in the ministry.”
“The Preacher in His Work” is the theme of the third lecture. “The powers of the pastor’s success are truth and sympathy together. ‘Speaking the truth in love’ is the golden text.” He emphasized the balance between preaching and pastoring, an emphasis sorely needed today. “The preacher needs to be pastor that he may preach to real men. The pastor must be preacher that he may keep the dignity of his work alive. The preacher who is not a pastor grows remote. The pastor who is not a preacher grows petty.” He called for manliness in the ministry and deplored “the absence of the heroic element” in the churches.
Lectures four and five are on “The Idea of the Sermon” and “The Making of the Sermon,” and they show how Brooks applied his philosophy of preaching to the practical problems of the work. “We hear a good deal about preaching over people’s heads,” he commented. “There is such a thing. But generally it is not the character of the ammunition, but the fault of the aim, that makes the missing shot.” While Brooks did not have too good a word for expository preaching, he did say a great deal about the making of a message that will help even the most experienced preacher. I especially appreciate his reminder that no sermon should be considered alone. We are ministering to people week after week, and one message fortifies another. The harvest is not the end of the meeting; it is the end of the age.
“The Congregation” is the theme of the sixth lecture; as you might expect, Brooks discussed the different kinds of hearers that attend church. He saw four: the “pillars of the church,” the skeptical, the habitual, and the sincere seekers after truth. I like the “three rules” that he gave early in the lecture: “First, have as few congregations as you can. Second, know your congregation as thoroughly as you can. Third, know your congregation so largely and deeply that in knowing it you shall know humanity.”
If you are tired of hearing the words relevant and contemporary, then the seventh lecture, “The Ministry of Our Age,” will do you good. Listen to Brooks:
The man who belongs to the world but not to his time grows abstract and vague, and lays no strong grasp upon men’s lives and the present causes of their actions. The man who belongs to his time but not to the world grows thin and superficial. . . . Truth and timeliness together make the full preacher.
The era he was discussing was in many ways different from our era, but in many ways it was similar, simply because human nature is the same. He discussed several classes of people that exist in every age—the critics, the people who accept everything science says, the frightened—and he showed how the gospel meets their needs. As he ended this seventh lecture, Brooks said: “I must not close without begging you not to be ashamed or afraid of the age you live in, and least of all to talk of it in a tone of weak despair.” It seems that every age has always been the worst and that every preacher has looked back and longed for “the good old days!”
I have already commented on the eighth lecture, “The Value of the Human Soul.” It is this concept that empowers the ministry. “Without this power, preaching is almost sure to become either a struggle of ambition or a burden of routine. With it, preaching is an ever fresh delight.” He then explained the effects in a man’s ministry of this supreme motivation: the doctrines of the faith become more meaningful, there is joy in seeing lives changed, there is a permanence to our ministry, and the preacher himself grows in courage and grace. “Go and try to save a soul and you will see how well it is worth saving, how capable it is of the most complete salvation. Not by pondering upon it, nor by talking of it, but by serving it you learn its preciousness.”
After you have read Lectures on Preaching—Baker Books published a paperback edition—look for a copy of Phillips Brooks’s Essays and Addresses, edited by his brother John. There is much that is good in this collection, but the most valuable piece is a lecture he delivered at the Yale Divinity School on February 28, 1878, one year after he gave the Yale lectures. The address is entitled “The Teaching of Religion,” and it ought to be included in all future editions of Brooks’s Lectures on Preaching. In it Brooks comes to grips with the question: how can we communicate spiritual truth to men today? If his Lectures on Preaching is dinner, then this address is the dessert! This address gave Brooks the opportunity to clarify and expand several of the important ideas in his original lectures, and for this reason it is important to the preacher who has benefited from that great series.
Permit me to close with a few quotations from Brooks that may help to whet your appetite:
If your ministry is to be good for anything, it must be your ministry, and not a feeble echo of another man’s.
Let a man be a true preacher, really uttering the truth through his own personality, and it is strange how men will gather to listen to him.
Fasten yourself to the center of your ministry, not to some point on its circumference.
This surely is a good rule: whenever you see a fault in any other man, or any other church, look for it in yourself and in your own church.
Let us rejoice with one another that in a world where there are a great many good and happy things for men to do, God has given us the best and happiest, and made us preachers of His Truth.3
Amen and Amen!