Christianity is a preaching religion. Proclamation is inherent in it. The God of the Christian faith, its gospel, the redeemed life, and Christian compassion demand proclamation. P. T. Forsythe, emphasizing the sacramental nature of preaching has said, “With preaching Christianity stands or falls, because it is a declaration of a gospel. Nay more, far more, it is the Gospel prolonging and declaring itself.”^[1]P. T. Forsythe, Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind (New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 1907), p. 5. “The Barthian emphasis has helped us to understand that preaching cannot be eliminated from Christianity without Christianity’s losing its essential quality and its true nature.”^[2]Gerald Kennedy, His Word Through Preaching (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947), p. 5. It is not necessary to accept a sacramental or Barthian view of preaching to believe that preaching is a dynamic imperative in Christianity and essential to its very nature.

Christianity swept through the first century world and by the turn of the century significant centers of Christian influence had sprung up within the Roman Empire and possibly beyond. In the words of Scripture followers of Christ had gone everywhere “preaching the word.” Confronted by a decadent pagan society and often bitterly persecuted, Christianity survived to make its meaningful impact upon the world of the first century.

What explains such a dynamic phenomenon? It is an insufficient answer to say that Christ commissioned his disciples to preach the gospel in all the world, to disciple the nations. No doubt this command of Christ greatly influenced the disciples. Yet this is not the entire answer. It is possible that Christianity would have moved out into the world to witness and disciple, even if there had been no command. Christianity is inherently a missionary and witnessing religion. There are dynamic inner imperatives that make it a preaching or proclaiming faith.

The imperative of proclamation rests in the basic facts of the Christian faith. The God of the Christian faith is a communicating God. He has sought to communicate himself in the person and work of his Son Jesus Christ. The gospel is the story of this communication; it is a kerygma to be proclaimed. The redeemed heart is moved to proclaim and responds com­ passionately to the needs of its world. The unredeemed man finds in the gospel the satisfaction of the deepest needs of his soul.

“It is not the gift of native eloquence that makes a man significant as he speaks to other men, whether in the world at large or in the pulpit. It is the fact that he has got hold of something—or something has got hold of him-so interesting, so important that he can hardly keep still about it. One day he finds himself saying it out, perhaps to a crowd, because that is the instinctive and inevitable thing to do.”^[3]Walter R. Bowie, Preaching (New York: Abingdon Press, 1954), p. 13.

The Communicating God

Proclamation is imperative because the God of the Christian faith seeks to communicate himself to man.

The God of the Christian faith is one who seeks to communicate himself to man. The creation of man was for fellowship. Prior to man’s fall into sin God gave himself in fullness of fellowship to man. After the fall God has sought to make himself known to his fallen creature and to bring him back into fellowship with himself. The long history of Israel is the story of God’s effort to give himself to man. God is present and acting in the great redemptive events in her history. God’s purpose to communicate himself to man is culminated in the redemptive event in Christ. God incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ took upon himself man’s estate, accepted in himself man’s sin and judgment. Thus he made it possible for man to know him and to have fellowship with him. This long history of redemptive activity, climaxing in the redemptive event in Christ testifies to the seeking heart of God; to his desire for fellowship with his creature.

Thus, God has always sought to give himself to man. He has not been primarily concerned to communicate truth or truths about himself. He has primarily sought to make himself known. God’s revelation of himself has always been carried on in personal terms and expresses itself in personal relationships.

Such personal communication is always best achieved through persons and in personal relationships. Preaching—a man proclaiming truths about God—is a personal agent for communicating the knowledge of the seeking God to men. If God’s revelation to man were primarily truth or truths about himself, other methods of communication would be adequate. Truths about God could be written on stones, or in the pages of a book, and preserved in rites and ceremonies. Thus an adequate knowledge of truths about God could be passed on to the world. But because the revelation is personal, a personal agent alone will adequately communicate God. This is one rea­ son why the incarnation is necessary. And only the personal proclamation of the Word of God as redemptive event is adequate to communicate God to men. Only as men or a man voices God’s revelation of himself in Christ can God break through to men as he seeks to do so.

The God of the Christian is a God of love, seeking fellowship with his fallen children. As long as there is the knowledge of such a God in the hearts of men, there will be those who will stand up to proclaim him. It is not altogether an arbitrary decision on God’s part to commit the revelation of himself to human proclamation. This is the only appropriate and adequate medium of such a communication.

A Communicative Gospel

Preaching is imperative because there is a gospel that demands proclamation. The central message of Christianity is a gospel-a kerygma, a message to be proclaimed. The essential truths or truth of this kerygma are such that they are inherently dynamic and demand proclamation. C. H. Dodd in his book The Apostolic Preaching and Its Development, published first in 1936, has defined the primitive gospel message in such way that almost all subsequent writers have followed him. The kerygma, he points out, is made up of basic truths about Jesus Christ. The basic outline of the message is as follows:

The kerygma briefly summarized has three major facets. (1) There is a claim that Jesus was the Messiah who fulfilled the Old Testament Scriptures. (2) There is an historical presentation of the life, death, resurrection and exaltation of Christ. (3) And there is the call to hearers to repent and accept the forgiveness of sins which Jesus has made available through his death-resurrection.

This message is a kerygma, a thing heralded, preached, proclaimed. Paul says that “it was God’s good pleasure through the foolishness of preaching [kerygma] to save them that believe” (1 Cor. 1:21, ASV). The word for “preaching” or “kerygma” is derived from kerusso which means to be a herald, to officiate as a herald, and to proclaim after the manner of a herald. The word as used in the New Testament means to publish, proclaim openly, specifically of the public proclamation of the gospel and matters pertaining to it. Kerygma is that which is promulgated by a herald, a proclamation of a herald, thus in the New Testament the message or proclamation by the heralds of God or Christ.

An unproclaimed or unpreached kerygma would cease to be kerygma. The kerygmatic message is written in the New Testament, but there is a sense in which it loses its essential integrity apart from proclamation. To have a kerygma there must be preaching. In fact, the kerygma is such a dynamic message that as long as it exists in fact it will demand and inspire proclamation.

The early Christian message was thus a message about Christ- the redemptive event in him. It was the message from a Person through a Person, designed for persons. The only satisfactory communication of such a message would be through the means of personal communication of the proclaimed word.

The message of the New Testament is also described as a gospel (euangelion). A gospel is “good tidings or glad tidings.” Good or glad tidings must be announced. The angelic messenger who first proclaimed it spoke of it as “good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people” (Luke 2:10). The very gladness inherent in the message demands its announcement. It begs to be told, to be proclaimed. In fact, untold it loses its quality of gladness and ceases to be gospel.

If Christ had never given a great commission (Matt. 28: 18-20), men who knew the gospel as glad tidings and as a message to be proclaimed would have preached it to the world. Perhaps this is why the great commission is more literally translated, “As ye go, make disciples.” Christ may not have commanded his disciples to go, but rather assumed that they would go. This is a great assumption as well as great commission. Men who possessed such a message could not stifle its claims to proclamation. It is a kerygma to be proclaimed. It is a gospel (glad tidings) to be announced. It will be.

The Redeemed Heart

Preaching is imperative because the redeemed heart must witness. Men who have found the seeking God in Christ and have experienced redemption in him are men so inspired that they want to communicate the experience to others. The impulse of the redeemed heart is to share. This is the instinctive response of the heart. Perhaps more broadly than this it is the instinct of any heart that has been vitally in touch with God.

This was the experience of Jeremiah. When tempted to be silent and to speak no more in the name of his God, he is impelled by the burning fire in his soul. “And if I say, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name, then there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with forbearing, and I cannot contain (Jer. 20:9, ASV). This was the experience of the young Isaiah who when he had seen God and his lips had been purged and he heard the voice saying “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” he instinctively replied, “Here am I, send me.” He might well have added, “I can do no other, God helping me.” This was the experience of the herdsman of Tekoa “The lion hath roared; who will not fear? The Lord Jehovah hath spoken; who can but prophesy?” (Amos 3:8, ASV). “The prophets thought, and believed, and preached, under the immediate influence of their view that they had been selected and commissioned for their work by a Power outside themselves.”^[5]Otto Baab, Prophetic Preaching A New Approach (New York: Abingdon Press, 1958), pp. 17, 18. True, but they also felt this as a power within, the dynamic of the experience with God himself.

This dynamic inner urge to proclamation is underscored in the New Testament. Consistently men who came to know Christ went away to tell others of him. The Gadarene demoniac was instructed, “Go to thy house unto thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and how he had mercy on thee” (Mark 5:19, ASV). With such a commission he turned away to tell of the wonderful experience that he had had with Christ. And as he went throughout the area with his message, “all men marveled” (Mark 5:20, ASV).

The disciples illustrate the dynamic inherent urgency of the redemptive experience. Peter and John were arrested, carried before the Sanhedrin, threatened and commanded “not to speak at all nor teach in the name of Jesus” (Acts 4: 18, ASV). To this they replied “Whether it is right in the sight of God to hearken unto you rather than unto God, judge ye: for we cannot but speak the things which we saw and heard” (Acts 4: 19, 20, ASV). They had seen the kerygma enacted before their eyes. They had heard its basic truths explained. Having seen and having heard such things, there was nothing else that they could do but proclaim them.

“God gives his word to man in his historical predicament. So clear, so compelling, so uncompromising is this word of God that man must declare it.”^[6]T. Wayne Reiman, “The Nature and Nurture of the Word of God,” Brethren Life and Thought, VI: 4 (Autumn, 1961), 13. “…God simply speaks to his [man’s] faith faculty giving him inescapable conviction, so clear, compelling and uncompromising, that he must utter it even though it cost his life.”^[7]Ibid., p. 16.

Saul of Tarsus was an example of this. Hating the Christian movement, breathing threatenings and slaughter against it, he met the risen Christ on the Damascus road. Thereafter life was never the same. Convinced of the kerygmatic facts, he thereafter gave his life to their proclamation to the ends of the earth. His commitment to this mission is one of inherent necessity. Of his experience he said, “I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision.” Of its force in his life he said, “Necessity is laid upon me; for woe is unto me if I preach not the gospel (1 Cor. 9:16, ASV). This necessity is not an external one but the dynamic of an experience with the living Christ and the understanding of the facts of redemptive history.

There is in the redeemed man an experience that responds to the call and the commission. The inner experience and the commission leap toward each other like electric charges. A man with such an experience must preach. He will preach even though his pulpit be prison or the arena of death. If all preachers of our generation were wiped out by disaster or persecution, a new generation would spring up to take their place. Given such men with such experience with God in Christ, proclamation is a dynamic inevitability.

The Receptive Heart

Preaching is imperative because of the gospel’s answer to man s needs. Man was made for fellowship with God. He will forever be restless and unsatisfied until he finds in God the answer to his longings. Augustine said it long ago. “. . . Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.”^[8]Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. J. G. Pilkington (New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 1943), p. 1. Man is incurably religious. In spite of his sinfulness he looks up to find God. No civilization however primitive, has ever been discovered where there’ were no evidences of religion. There are temples, altars and shrines. Such pagan institutions and rites of worship speak of man’s groping outreach for God.

The gospel preached finds a waiting congregation, people who find in its message the answers to the deepest questions of then souls. The message speaks of God, his love and his outreach to redeem man. It answers man’s questions about God, about eternity—the life beyond this life, about the meaning of existence, and the hope of escape from despair.

“Contemporary man, in common with man in every age, has three basic urges to which the Gospel today must appeal: the urge to do (activity), the urge to belong (community), and the urge to be (authenticity).”^[9]Jess Jai McNeil, The Preacher Prophet in Mass Society (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company), p. 56. Perhaps these three basic urges adequately describe contemporary man, if by them the author mean what he later describes man to be “Contemporary man experiences estrangement, emptiness, anxiety, doubt, guilt and awareness of ‘a living to do’.”^[10]Ibid., p. 57.

It is exactly to this kind of man that the gospel speaks. When man hears it in his better moments he recognizes it as the answer to the almost unconscious quest of his soul. The gospel and despairing man too are like charges of electricity that leap toward each other. And this strangely complex despairing contemporary man finds the satisfaction of his soul in the gospel.

It is in an atmosphere such as this that God has placed his messenger with the satisfying gospel. The sensitive messenger kindles to the situation and finds that in the midst of it he must speak. He cannot hold his peace. Given such a situation, the Word of God becomes such a living force within him reaching out to touch and purge questing hearts that he would have to stand up to preach to be himself under God.

Phillips Brooks speaks of this kind of man standing in such situation and describes the quality in him that makes of him the preacher. “It is the quality that kindles at the sight of men, that feels a keen joy at the meeting of truth and the human mind, and recognizes how God made them for each other.”^[11]Phillips Brooks, Lectures on Preaching (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1877), p. 41.

Given the God of the Christian faith, a redeemed man, a despairing humanity, and the gospel’s answer in Christ, then preaching will be inevitable. Nothing can take its place. “No multiplication of books can ever supersede the human voice. No newly opened channel or approach to man’s mind and heart can ever do away with man’s readiness to receive impressions through his fellow men . . . . 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.”^[12]Ibid., p. 11.

Declare a moratorium on preaching. Eliminate the sermon from Christian worship. These have been seriously proposed. Perhaps it is just as well not to debate with such people. Why not say, “Why don’t you try it?” The world would soon find out. There are men who must preach and who will preach. They have seen and heard glorious things. Of these they must speak.