Thursday 16 September 2010

McGlasson on Hughes Oliphant Old's The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church

I noticed that Logos have Hughes Oliphant Old's 7 volumne tome on pre-pub and thought I'd most comments that Paul McGlasson made on the volume:
The horizontal and vertical dimensions of Christian proclamation are held together best in the expository sermon. In his comprehensive history of preaching, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church, Hughes Oliphant Old has sought to recover the brilliance and excitement of the grand tradition of Christian proclamation. His multivolume survey clearly lays before the contemporary reader the vast range of powerful and exciting voices from the Christian past, with the corresponding challenge that those voices present for the future. Old has done the universal church an enormous service. Above all, his endeavor to show the magnificent reach of proclamation in every time and place across the face of the globe sets a hight standard for the work of the coming generations. In this introduction, Old charts what he sees as the primary forms of proclamation that ebb and flow across the years: the expository sermon, evangelistic preaching, catechetical preaching, festal preaching, and prophetic preaching. There is no doubt that Old has accurately captured the wide range of preaching in this classification. Throughout the volumes, he is able to show the various forms shaped and reshaped  according to the changing resources of the church. Furthermore, every working minister knows that the form and function of sermons occasionally differ according to changing circumstance. Surely any real progress in contemporary proclamation will depend upon a fresh recovery of the grand tradition that Old describes.
P. McGlasson, Invitation to Dogmatic Theology: A Canonical Approach, 168-169.

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