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LUMINESCENCE
The Sermons of C. K. and Fred Barrett
—Volume One—
Edited by Ben Witherington, III
Foreword by Penelope Barrett Hyslop
LUMINESCENCE
The Sermons of C. K. and Fred Barrett
Volume One
Copyright © 2017 Ben Witherington. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Cascade Books
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-9958-9
hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-9960-2
ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-9959-6
Cataloging-in-Publication data:
Names: Barrett, C. K. (Charles Kingsley) | Barrett, Fred | Witherington, Ben, III (editor)
Title: Luminescence : the sermons of C.K. and Fred Barrett, volume one / edited by Ben Witherington III.
Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books, 2017 | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-4982-9958-9 (paperback) | ISBN 978-1-4982-9960-2 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-1-4982-9959-6 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Barrett, C. K. (Charles Kingsley), 1917-2011 | Barrett, Fred. | Sermons, English—20th century.
Classification: LCC BS491.5 B5 2017 (print) | LCC BS491.5 (ebook)
Manufactured in the U.S.A. 03/13/17
MEMENTO MORI
I was at the end of the queue. By that I mean I was part of the last group of doctoral students C. K. Barrett (May 4, 1917 to August 26, 2011) was to have before retirement. It was 1977 and Professor Barrett wrote me a note in the spring of that year saying he liked my diversity of languages and my proposed thesis topic (“Women in the New Testament”), and I resolved to go to Durham, not the one I was familiar with in my home state of North Carolina. Barrett was, after all, the foremost Methodist New Testament scholar in the world. Being a fellow Methodist and desiring to be a New Testament scholar, I turned down the opportunity to go to Oxford and headed to a town I had never visited and had no mental image of—Durham, England. My life was never to be the same again. I had just graduated from seminary, and Ann and I had gotten married during the summer. We shipped off steamer trunk after steamer trunk of books and belongings to England from the Boston Harbor, and got on a plane bound for London. Little did we know how much this journey would change our lives, and how much the Barretts—Kingsley and Margaret—would have to do with it.
In a “what goes around comes around” set of circumstances, C. K. Barrett’s books, dozens of boxes of them, have just arrived at Asbury via ship and truck from England, thanks to the very gracious gift of Kingsley’s only daughter, Penelope, who will share some things in the Foreword that follows. I believe Kingsley would have been very pleased with this outcome, as he and Margaret enjoyed their times here at Asbury Seminary, a Methodist school. In fact, Kingsley preached not only at Asbury but at the nearby Methodist Church as well in 1988 and again ten years later. He loved the opportunity to preach wherever he went.
When you go to study with a Methodist, they put you right to work. Almost as soon as I arrived in Durham in September 1977, Kingsley put me in touch with Mrs. Guy and the district superintendents in the Durham and Darlington circuits and soon I was preaching. All that seminary training in homiletics was not going to waste after all. Everywhere I went the name Professor Barrett was spoken of with the sort of respect and reverence few preachers ever achieve. He had been there before me, and not just once or twice, but many times all over the Northeast. Like his Durham forebear and fellow NT scholar, J. B. Lightfoot, he had spread the Good News to the miners and their kin in pit village after pit village. I quickly learned that Kingsley cast a long shadow, and his name always brought a smile to the parishoners’ faces. But I was an unknown quantity to the peoples of these various chapels.
I remember an Easter Sunday when I got off the bus from Durham to a small village and the Methodist chapel steward ran down the hill to meet me. Almost out of breath, he said: “Sir, I must ask you something before we go to the chapel, if you don’t mind.” I told him to go ahead. He said “you do believe in the resurrection don’t you?” Apparently the previous Easter some visiting preacher had showed up that didn’t, and didn’t really share an Easter message. I reassured the man I most certainly did believe in the resurrection, but he had a right to ask because most of these little chapels faced musical chairs in the pulpit—a different preacher most every week, based on the circuit rota or “plan.” The relief on his face was evident—“That’s alright then,” he said, knowing that I was a student of Kingsley Barrett and trusting his judgment. I hope you will trust my judgment when I say this volume, and the subsequent volumes, are full of insight and light, for there is a sort of luminescence to good preaching, and the Barretts certainly knew how to deliver God’s Word in effective fashion.
What follows in this particular volume and in volume two of this series unveils an entirely different side of C. K. Barrett, a side one might never have known about if all you know is his famous commentaries and monographs on the New Testament. Herein can be found a goodly selection of Kingsley’s sermons preached largely in small and medium sized Methodist churches in the Northeast of England, though often elsewhere in England and in some cases around the world. Here the exegesis bursts into flame and illumines the Word, the man, and the congregation. This first volume presents one hundred sermons of CKB (as he was fondly called, and as at times he even dubbed himself in these sermons) on the Gospels and Acts.
I was fortunate enough to hear a few of these sermons both in Durham England and in the United States, and I can tell you they are powerful and still have life, even on the printed page. But that is not all. Kingsley Barrett was the child of a Methodist preacher, who was a well-known evangelist and revival preacher in his day. Fred Barrett was not the scholar his son was, but on close inspection, you can most definitely see the impact of the father on the son when it came to preaching. In one of the sermons in this volume you will find that Kingsley called his father “one of the greatest preachers I have ever heard.” This is high praise from someone who both heard and preached many remarkable sermons. But there is a further reason to include as many Barrett sermons from both these men as we can in this series. One thing that is sorely lacking in Methodist preaching these days, especially in the United States, is in-depth engagement with both the biblical text and the Wesleyan tradition and theology. You will find that these sermons demonstrate what such preaching can look like.
The typical Methodist service in England was called the hymn sandwich—a hymn and a prayer, a hymn and a lesson,
