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LUMINESCENCE
The Sermons of C.K. and Fred Barrett
—Volume Two—
Edited by Ben Witherington, III
LUMINESCENCE
The Sermons of C. K. and Fred Barrett
Volume Two
Copyright © 2017 Ben Witherington III. 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: 978-1-5326-1665-5
hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-4054-3
ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-4053-6
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 two / edited by Ben Witherington III.
Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books, 2017 | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-5326-1665-5 (paperback) | ISBN 978-1-4982-4054-3 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-1-4982-4053-6 (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.
INTRODUCTION
One of the things that, as it turned out, most attracted me to studying with C.K. Barrett was that there was a Methodist pastoral side to him. Indeed, he had been on the circuit for many years before he was called to teach at Durham in 1945, and it is very interesting to hear what he says about that in his sermon on 1 Cor 7.29–31 which is included in this volume. He says this: “When I came to Durham twenty-eight years ago, I did not feel committed to university life. Certainly, it attracted me, but I did not wish to turn my back on circuit work. I would have a change, perhaps after a few years go back to a circuit. But here I am.1 You only live once. You cannot have two careers. You can only do one worthwhile job at a time and most worthwhile jobs take a lifetime to learn.” Until he retired from fulltime academic life in 1982, he was known around the world for some thirty-seven years as a scholar. Indeed, that is the only way I actually knew about him on this side of the Atlantic until I went to Durham in 1977. Understandably so. I knew him from his books. For the whole period of my life between birth in 1951 and 1977 CKB had been a full time academic.
But as it turns out, this was a minority of his ministry. He had been pastoring and preaching up until he was called to Durham in the mid-40s, and he continued to preach a lot during his academic years at Durham, and for almost thirty years after he finished teaching full time he was continually involved in preaching and circuit work. Yes, he continued to write scholarly books, and yes he continued to lecture hither and yon all over the world, but you can tell that his heart had been and always was in preaching. It was his first love, and he never gave it up, never turned his back on it. In fact, to judge from the content of these many sermons, Kingsley was the preacher of choice for many of these chapels during the high holy days of the Christian year— Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Pentecost. There are so many, many sermons from those seasons in the Church calendar, and for special days too like Trinity Sunday or Reformation Sunday. This love for preaching, and great appreciation of Kingsley’s preaching led to some interesting choices.
In a tribute to Professor Barrett, her mentor as well, Morna Hooker said this in 2011 when he passed away—“Kingsley Barrett was a remarkable man. He was the last of a great line of notable British biblical scholars. And like others among them, he combined great scholarship with modesty. Very few—if any—members of the congregations of those Durham village chapels where he faithfully preached over so many years would have realized that they were listening to the foremost New Testament scholar in the country. Nevertheless, they knew that they were listening to the gospel, and gained great benefit from his exposition.”2 And just how faithful was he? The 126 sermons in this volume were preached an amazing 2,262 times over his more than six-decade preaching career!3
One of the questions one asks when one has read Kingsley’s scholarly books, as well as now these many, many sermons, is—when in the world did he have time to do all this, especially when he was a fulltime professor at Durham between 1945 and 1982? One clue is found in the obituary written by Robert Morgan published in the Guardian in 2011—“Each night, the hours from 10pm to 2am were set aside for research. The lectureship at Durham in 1945, and chair in 1958, allowed him to settle into a more reasonable 14-hour day, which he carried into retirement.”4
When I became the senior editor of the New Cambridge Bible Commentary series in the early 1990s, I wrote Kingsley about contributing the volume on Galatians for the series. It was after all the one Pauline epistle from the so-called Hauptbriefe, the main indisputably Pauline letters, that he had long considered writing a commentary on. After a long silence, he finally wrote me back and said that though he was tempted, he had not kept up with the scholarship on Galatians as would be required to take on such a task, and besides, he needed to finish his work on Acts for the ICC series. What he did not say, but could have said was “and besides I’m still out on the circuit almost every single week and still writing a myriad of new sermons.” You will find many of those later sermons, as well as many earlier ones, in this collection focusing on his sermons on the Epistles, Revelation, and on the Old Testament as well.
Kingsley’s preaching is thematic in character and he is always talking about “digging” things out of the text—facts, theological ideas, ethical ideas, consequences of all these things. He clearly believes that if you just preach what is on the surface of the text you will be truly skimming, it will be superficial at best. Detailed study of the text first is required before preaching the text. He is often drawn to puzzles in the Biblical texts, hard sayings, problematic pronouncements, not because he delights in pointing out problems in the Bible, but because he assumes these texts make some good sense, and he wants to “dig” out what that sense may be. He is also drawn to texts that challenge him personally, though some like Isaiah 53 he mostly shied away from until near the end of his preaching career, because, as he says in the sermon on Isa 53.4, it has such depth and scope that one could not do justice to it in a single sermon. It is as if he needed to preach the text to himself first, before proclaiming it to others. In this he is unmistakably following Wesley
