it was not born in song, was nonetheless carried along in song as the revival got going in the eighteenth century, and the hymns of Charles Wesley and Isaac Watts were the mainstays. They still are for much of Methodism. I mention this for the very good reason that it explains why the Barretts so frequently cite hymn verses in their sermons. Besides the Bible, hymns were the other well-known texts of the Methodist congregations who sang them over and over again, and knew them often by heart. Neither Barrett shied away from preaching the more theologically rich and complex portions of the Scriptures. In fact they were drawn to such texts. Indeed, I would say that what most characterizes these sermons is deep and practical reflection on major theological themes in these texts. It is the mark of a great preacher that he rises to the level of the text itself, and nowhere is CKB more profound, more insightful, more compelling than when he is preaching about Christ and him crucified. His sermons on the Cross and Resurrection are especially compelling.
All of these sermons are found in little notebooks that could easily fit in one’s jacket pocket. They are all written out in a small meticulous cursive hand, word for word. Interestingly, Kingsley’s handwriting is slanted from left to right, and his father’s just the opposite. Kingsley’s sermon usually take up twelve or so handwritten pages in these little notebooks, but a few go up to eighteen pages, and one even to twenty pages. I remember, because he told me, that he would go over the text of the sermon on a Saturday night before heading to one chapel or another on Sunday, sometimes as many as three different ones on a Sunday morning, afternoon, and evening. I say this because the print of these sermons is so small that they surely did not serve as a text from which Professor Barrett would read from the pulpit, but perhaps they served as a reminder from time to time. Having seen him preach, I doubt he needed much prompting from the manuscript. Equally interesting is the fact that CKB seems to have made very few revisions to the original sermon text at later dates, even when he was preaching the sermon decades later and for the twentieth or thirtieth or fortieth time (yes, there are a few sermons he preached some forty times all over the Northeast of England).
Just occasionally one will see in pencil an added line or a crossed out paragraph in some of these sermons. And there are a few sermons that are “rewritten,” by which Kingsley means he has updated a sermon he had previously preached on some text. All of this suggests he didn’t much change his opinion of what the text said, or how it should be preached whether it was preached in the 1930s or in 2009. These one hundred sermons were preached an amazing 1737 times over the course of Kingsley’s seventy-five years of preaching. Interestingly, the most preached sermons from this volume tended to be those that dealt with Jesus’ parables.
We are thus fortunate that both Barretts wrote their whole sermons out in long hand complete with headings and careful organization, as if they planned for the text to see the light of day at some juncture, or at least just in case somebody else, like me, did someday put them into print. In these sermons you will find profound reflections coupled with some of Kingsley’s famous wry wit, and not a small amount of personal reflections that show the openness and humility of the man. In fact in personal interaction he was sometimes quite shy, but when he got behind a lectern or a pulpit one was in for a formidable discourse, or as he himself once said upon first hearing his old Cambridge teacher C. H. Dodd—“I realized immediately that I was in for some heavy weather!”
You will see at once that these are no ordinary sermons. For one thing, they are not your typical homiletical fare—neither expository sermons that take you line by line and word by word through a text in its original order, nor the usual multiple point sermon to which is added illustrations, which sadly, often have little to do with the point in the text, though many of these sermons do have three main points. Almost without fail, Kingsley would hone in on just a small number of verses in a sermon and milk them for all they were worth. I have included only two sermons that have longer and shorter versions (see e.g., “The Marriage Feast”), to give a sense of how a morning service might differ from an evening one somewhere, while using the same text. Evening services, especially with communion included, tended to be shorter.
From a rhetorical point of view, these sermons fall into the category of “amplification,” the taking of a major theme or idea in a passage and thinking logically through it and reflecting carefully on the pith or substance of the subject, spinning out its implications and applications. Some of the sermons like the one on “The Christian Viewpoint” reflect the fact that Kingsley was given a topic and asked to preach on it, but for the most part the texts in these sermons seem to have either been chosen by Kingsley or reflect an effort to preach on texts appropriate to the Church calendar, or to the occasion on which the sermon was given (e.g., chapel anniversaries, weddings, funerals etc.). But in every case what lies either on the surface of the sermon or just beneath is penetrating reflection on the meaning of the Biblical text. The Church he preached most frequently in was Bondgate Methodist in Darlington which he had served as pastor from 1943–45. But they kept asking him to come back for many decades thereafter and he graciously agreed.
What has dawned on me as I have worked through these many, many sermons preached in eight different decades is that the largest and most continual part of the ministry of Kingsley Barrett throughout his adult life was in preaching. This was true, before, during, and after his full-time academic career of lecturing and attending conferences and writing good books on the New Testament. Many of his doctoral students, like me, would only occasionally hear him preach, and had no idea how much time and effort he put into writing sermons and preaching hither and yon, from the smallest chapel, to the largest cathedral.
One anecdote must suffice at this juncture. The rumor went around his doctoral students in the late 1970s that he had turned down some major (and well-endowed) lectureship in America because when he looked in his date book, he was scheduled to preach in some little county Durham chapel populated by a few dozen faithful souls. As it turns out—this was no rumor, it was true. As he once said to me—“a promise is a promise, and he who is faithful in little will also be faithful in much.” And without question, this is one reason so many of his fellow Methodists all over England, and especially in the Northeast, loved him and his preaching. He was a person of real integrity, who kept his word.
Kingsley Barrett knew very well that good preachers stick to and preach the Biblical text, not themselves or their pet topics, whereas mediocre and poor ones are like those figures in the Old Testament—wandering Aramaeans who never quite arrive at the promised land. We will have occasion to say more about Fred Barrett and his sermons in the third volume in this series. In the meantime, I trust you will be challenged and encouraged as I was, as I worked through these sermons. They will indeed “tease the mind into active thought” (to borrow a phrase from Dodd), and at the same time nourish the soul.
These one hundred sermons on the Gospels and Acts should be seen as an ἀρραβών, an “earnest” as CKB would say, a large part of a payment, given in advance as a security that the whole will be paid afterwards. Put another way, there is much more to follow. Many of these sermons in this volume were preached an amazing number of times over the course of CKB’s preaching career, with little or no alteration, it would appear. They are battle-tested! Not only so, they reflect the constancy and faithfulness of the preacher who did not see the need to alter his views from the 1930s to 2009 on the unchanging Word of God. He had always believed it was true since his youth, and was sure that the truth can set you free.
BW3—ADVENT 2016
FOREWORD
I must start this by thanking Ben Witherington for all the hard work and enthusiasm that he has put into this project. I knew that my father had always hoped to find the time to put together some of his and his father’s sermons into a book for publication. The project has already far exceeded my expectations and I am immensely grateful to Ben and Wipf and Stock for making this dream a reality.
When my father, Charles Kingsley Barrett, filled in his application for Cambridge University his plans for his future were already clear. His intention was to start with
