is that he is just as able a preacher of the Old Testament as he is of the New Testament.
A few words about Kingsley’s modus operandi when dealing with the OT are in order. In one of the sermons you will find towards the end of this collection he says this—“The Christian Church is Israel’s heir. We have entered into the privileges and responsibilities of Zion. We have this explicitly in the fifteenth chapter of John. Christ himself is the vine, we are the branches.” He is following the lead of New Testament writers, and some would call this super-cessionism. You will notice however that he is careful to speak of the Church being Israel’s heir, not her replacement. The language is familial. An heir follows the parent, and may inherit their legacy and property, but an heir is not a replacement of the parent any more than an heir is a duplicate of the parent. This is a crucial point. And of course parents can have more than one heir.
But what this hermeneutical move does is it gives CKB permission to read the Old Testament in light of the New Testament, and to see it as a book suitable for use in preaching to Christians, just as 2 Tim 3.16 suggested and insisted. When you read these sermons on the Old Testament, note how rapidly Kingsley extrapolates things and connects them with the Gospel, and with an application to Christians. He does not read the New Testament back into the Old Testament5, he reads the former as the continuation and fulfillment of the latter. He allows the Old Testament to have its say, but he never leaves it there, without connecting it in some way to Christian thought and application. It would be fascinating to know how Kingsley would have preached one of these Old Testament texts if given the opportunity to preach in a synagogue. Alas, we have no such sermons from his hand, only sermons delivered in Christian Churches or University and other school settings.
Another prominent feature of all these sermons is their practical bent. Kingsley is always keen, some would say at times too keen, to get quickly to the practical application of the text. This sometimes leads to what may appear to some to be imbalance— not enough exposition of the text, and too quick an application of this phrase or idea to some modern context. For example, read through the one sermon from Nehemiah in this collection and you will see why this might be said at times. This imbalance happens only rarely, and it would be well to remember that many of the audiences CKB addressed were far more Biblically literate than our current audiences, and so there was less need to rehearse or belabor the content of the Biblical text.
These sermons are however at their best when there is that excellent mix of detailed and incisive interaction with the substance of the Biblical text, and the bringing in of the Wesleyan heritage by way of quoting hymns or Wesley’s Journal and other works, as well as good illustrations of this point or that, and direct application of all the above to one audience or another. In the later sermons, one notices much less quoting from the hymns in the Methodist hymn book. I suspect this is partly because Kingsley knew that many, if not most, of his audiences in the chapels at that point were younger than he was, were unfamiliar with the old hymns, and would not have instantly resonated with or been able to recognize such hymn quotations which are not identified.
Another feature of these sermons comes to light when you have read the vast majority of them as I have done. Of the older Protestant Reformers, it is clear that Kingsley had a specially affinity for Luther. He comes up again and again in these sermons, by way of quotation or illustration, but there is also evidence of theological influence too. For instance, in the discussion of Romans 7, CKB follows Luther in affirming the idea that the Christian is simul justus et peccator, still dealing with the bondage of sin even after conversion. This idea Wesley clearly repudiated. His stock phrase about the Christian life was “while sin remains it no longer reigns.” There are times as well where the theme of legalism, so much emphasized by Luther but not by Calvin, is found in these sermons as well.6 Notable by its absence however are mentions of or quotations from Calvin.7 Of the more popular Christian theological writers of his own generation, we find regular citations from G. K. Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers.
Of the more modern biblical scholars, there is repeated reference to several famous German scholars of the twentieth century— Schweitzer (mostly for his medical missionary work in Africa), Bultmann (called probably the greatest of the NT scholars of the twentieth century, whom Barrett visited while on sabbatical in the early 1960s) and E. Kasemann, who became a good personal friend. I and other doctoral students were the beneficiaries of that friendship when the Barretts hosted us in their home. We sat around the dining room table discussing profound theological matters whilst munching on lebkuchen—“Kasemann’s cookies.”
It may prove helpful to consider briefly the rhetoric in these sermons here. By this I mean the ways CKB tries to persuade his audience. To start with, the style of these sermons is conversational. One of the things that comes through again and again is how solicitous he is of the audience. He is constantly concerned about how they are taking his words. One of the very most frequent phrases he uses, numbering in the hundreds of uses, is “don’t misunderstand me” and then he will give a further or plainer elucidation of what he means. He asks rhetorical questions of the audience to keep them engaged. He uses a dialogical approach, sometimes talking directly to the audience, sometimes dialoguing with an imaginary dialogue partner, like Paul’s use of the ancient diatribe style, sometimes putting himself into the shoes of a character in the biblical narrative and imagining what he was thinking, or why he was acting in this way or that.
And always he loves to paint a picture for the audience of the ancient context or larger story involved, and his descriptive powers are of such a caliber that you can picture yourself there in the scene in the text watching it happen.
To take but one example, consider Kingsley’s description of the scene described in Heb 12.1–4—“There are 20,000 perhaps 30,000 spectators gathered in the circus. The buzz of their voices becomes a rising roar in excitement. The heat of the southern sun rises from the sand of the arena in wavy shimmering lines and plays with the bright clothes of the crowds until you would think a many-colored cloud had settled over the track; the bunting and the awning of the banners make bright strips of light. Yes, they are coming out now, the runners stripping for the race until now they are standing at their marks quite naked, nothing to impede their speed and exertion. They are off, and the runner has eyes for nothing but the track and the mark, unless his glance creeps up to the central box, where sits the patron of the games, perhaps the Emperor himself; Lord and Savior and God they call him. . . .The athlete looks up at the Emperor in the royal box. And as he looks the appearance of the monarch changes. He has lost his glorious clothes, he has lost his well-lived careless polish. He too is stripped for the contest, he too is panting, straining for his breath, fighting to the last ounce. Yes, this King has gone the same way. He endured the cross and despised the shame; he has won through now to glory, but not lost his wounds. Do not forget the rest of the crowd, but keep your eye there. He didn’t have to come down to the sweaty sand of the track, he did it for you. He is the beginning of faith and the end of it. He is the starter in the race and the judge.”
Here it may be useful to note that CKB preached a good deal less on the General Epistles and Revelation than he did on the other portions of the Bible included in this volume of sermon. Hebrews 11–13 is something of an exception to this rule, as are some texts from 1 John, but I had to search these notebooks thoroughly to find these sermons on the General Epistles and Revelation, as they were badly outnumbered by sermons on the Gospels, Paul, and the Old Testament. In particular, Kingsley seems to have inherited the reticence of the Reformers, Luther, Calvin, and Wesley in regard to preaching from the book of Revelation. Consider this revealing comment from Kingsley’s sermon on Rev 11.8: “I announce this text with a certain amount of diffidence and hesitation. You will, I think, bear me witness that on Good Fridays and on other days, I have kept on the whole to plain solid matter-of-fact things, and have not gone in for myths, mysteries, mysticism, for the visionary, and symbolic and imaginative. I take no credit for that, I am a pretty earthy sort of person, and I dare say I have erred on
