Theology Thursday: Seeing Beauty and Saying Beautifully

If the content of a sermon is faithful and true, has the preacher done his job? Should any attention be paid to the manner in which a sermon is delivered? What about other forms of communication? Is the message what matters and the manner in which it is communicated irrelevant?

In this short book, John Piper continues his series of books on influential Christians, considering here how ‘poetic effort’ was a hallmark in different ways of the lives and ministries of George Herbert, George Whitefield and C.S. Lewis. In the context of Piper’s usual theological emphases it is perhaps not surprising to hear him argue that the manner in which we preach is important not just because of how it may better magnify the message for the hearer, but because the manner of preaching in itself can draw the preacher closer to Christ and glorify him.

Piper begins with an important objection: surely the apostle Paul explicitly rejects the use of eloquence or persuasive words at the beginning of 1 Corinthians. This chapter is important and worth reading even without what follows. Piper shows very carefully that the eloquence that Paul rejects is a self-glorifying eloquence, not the God-glorifying eloquence of Herbert, Whitefield, Lewis et al. A particularly striking point is that the language Paul uses to argue against the eloquence of the super-apostles is itself poetically eloquent. Clearly he cannot be ruling out all poetic eloquence in speech.

Piper then considers what we may learn from Herbert, Whitefield and Lewis. Herbert teaches us that careful consideration of how to say things about God will help us see new things about God in fresh ways; it will in itself draw us closer to God, as it did Herbert. Many preachers speak about unseen realities as if they were imaginary, but the ‘actor-preacher’ Whitefield in his ceaseless preaching spoke about unseen realities as if they were real. Lewis, who Piper is at pains to point out was not a Calvinist in contrast to the other two, nevertheless was a supernaturalist who used ‘myth and story and metaphor and poetry’ to show how the perceived world is both like and unlike heavenly realities.

There is much detail about the lives and works of each of these three that whets the appetite and encourages further study of them all. Preachers, theologians and other wordsmiths will find much to stimulate them here.

Watts, Tom. Review of John Piper, Seeing Beauty and Saying Beautifully: The Power of Poetic Effort: George Herbert, George Whitefield and C.S. Lewis (Nottingham: IVP, 2014).

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