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Preacher
David H. C. Read’s Sermons at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church
Edited by John McTavish
Preacher
David H. C. Read’s Sermons at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church
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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-0574-1
hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-0576-5
ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-0575-8
Manufactured in the U.S.A. September 5, 2017
Permission to reproduce these sermons by David H. C. Read granted by Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, 921 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10021.
In Memory of David H. C. Read
“ . . . he being dead yet speaketh . . . ”
Hebrews 11:4
Introduction
Preacher
I have stood toe to toe with cheering Spaniards and Italians as Pope Paul was carried into St. Peter’s on a throne for a Sunday Mass. I have gazed with wonder at the lofty Gothic architecture of New York’s Riverside Church and Dr. Coffin at his eloquent preacherly best. I have seen Jimmy Swaggart cry on television.
Striking experiences all. But the preacher who has most nourished my soul and stimulated my mind over the years has been a Scottish import by the name of David H. C. Read. From 1956 to 1989 Dr. Read was the pastor of New York’s Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church. For twenty-five of those years he was also a regular preacher on NBC’s National Radio Pulpit. He had his own weekly Sunday program on WOT-AM radio entitled “Thinking It Over” and he published over thirty books, which included some of the only collections of sermons that major publishing firms such as Eerdmans and Harper and Row have ever dared to cast into print. All in all, a modern day prince of the pulpit, if there ever was one.
Yet search the internet for the names of great modern day preachers and Read’s name is not likely to appear. Instead we get names like Billy Graham, John Stott, and Joel Osteen representing the evangelical side, and Fred Craddock, William Sloane Coffin, and Barbara Brown Taylor carrying the torch for the liberals. Inspiring preachers all, but no mention of David Read.
Why?
Perhaps the minister from Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church was too much of a theological centrist to enjoy what passes in ecclesiastical circles as a fan club. The crowds tend to gravitate to simplistic extremes if only because the extremes give the impression of radicalism and rigor. Yet surely the true radical is the person who gets to the radix, or “root,” of things. This in any event is what Read’s preaching does, displaying a combination of theological discernment and literary charm that puts this preacher pretty much in a homiletical class by himself. Who was this man, what made him tick, and what can we learn from his powerful proclamation of the Gospel?
David H. C. Read was born in 1910 and grew up in Edinburgh, where he attended the Church of Scotland with his family. He flirted briefly with agnosticism, but then one day a high school friend invited him to attend a popular evangelical summer camp. There, in the magnificent countryside of the Scottish Highlands, Read enjoyed games, expeditions, concerts, songs, and a spiritual awakening. The camp teemed with university students and young professionals who spoke of Christ as a real person whom one could get to know in a deep and intimate way. David Read accepted the message and became, as he tells us in his autobiography This Grace Given, “if not a dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalist, at least a fervid evangelical ready to do battle for the faith.”
Even so, the young convert couldn’t help noticing that the camp leaders often applied psychological pressure on the campers to make decisions for Christ. They condemned the worldliness of smoking and dancing while spending lavish sums on sports cars and fancy clothes, and railed against issues of personal immorality while saying nothing about the crushing economic issues that many were facing in those early years of the Depression. Worst of all, they blithely ignored the fire-breathing madman who had recently emerged in Germany. Still, these were the people who had given David Read the pearl of great price, the incomparable gift of the Gospel, and for that he remained thankful.
After graduating from high school, Read enrolled in an Honors English course at the University of Edinburgh. He now began juggling the world of Shakespeare and Milton with soccer on Saturdays and worship services on Sundays. He continued attending the local parish of the Church of Scotland with his family, but on Sunday evenings he often made the round of churches, imbibing the pulpit eloquence of such Edinburgh greats as James Black, James Stewart, and George Macleod.
Read also enjoyed listening occasionally to Graham Scroggie, a Baptist minister who delivered expository sermons in a rather dry but straightforward and no-nonsense way. One Sunday evening he went to hear this fellow Scroggie preach, only to learn that the minister had been called away for the weekend and a substitute stood in his place. Read considered leaving, but at the last minute he decided to stay and hear what the substitute had to say. The experience proved life-changing. As he recalls in his memoirs: “I remember neither the preacher’s name nor anything he said. What I do remember, with luminous clarity, was that in the middle of the sermon I was suddenly and totally convinced that God wanted me to be a minister.” Never before or after did David Read experience such an overpowering sense of the divine summons. Make of this moment what one will, but that night the bright young university student went home and quietly resolved to become a minister.
After gaining his degree in English, graduating summa cum laude, Read began making plans to study theology at New College, the Edinburgh-based seminary of the Church of Scotland. (He had come to realize that, for all his concern that a theological liberalism might amount to “little more than agnosticism with a halo,” the Church of Scotland was still basically his spiritual home.) But then the budding young theologian learned that New College was offering a scholarship which would allow him to study theology at the three seminaries—Montpellier, Strasbourg, and Paris—of the French Protestant Church. This was even better. Read immediately contacted the donor of the scholarship, and gained the coveted opportunity to begin his theological studies in Montpellier, France.
A transforming learning experience soon occurred when Pierre Maury came to the Montpellier seminary to conduct a retreat. The dynamic Maury, on his way to becoming one of France’s greatest preachers, was known to be a disciple of Karl Barth, and in fact was coming from Bonn where he had been studying under the great Reformed theologian. The impact that Maury had upon Read was both profound and lasting. Read had been clinging to the theology of the evangelicals as a refuge from the theological wasteland of a liberalism that seemed to reduce the gospel to little more than what Matthew Arnold once called “morality tinged with
