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The problems are compounded when the clergyman is a liberal in theology, which may mean that he is uncertain about the importance and accuracy of the Bible or even about the urgent need for biblical teaching. Seminary instruction in homiletics (the techniques of sermon preparation) is generally good. But to conservative critics this work is often undermined by Bible faculties. "Seminarians are not sure God is speaking in the Bible," says James Boice of Philadelphia's Tenth Presbyterian Church. "The professors think of the Bible as a collection of human documents. Centuries ago, even the heretics believed the Bible was the Word of God; they were just wrong in the way they interpreted it."
Princeton Theological Seminary, considered among the best Protestant seminaries in training preachers, requires three courses on the subject. One covers enunciation, pace, voice production, posture and similar techniques, and is taught by a layman trained in speech. A second analyzes the construction of model sermons from the past. The student learns to mine Bible commentaries, boil his message down to a single sentence, then write out a well-organized sermon. In the final course, students in groups of twelve deliver sermons and criticize one another's-performances.
The graduates face a formidable challenge. Churchgoers today are "theologically illiterate," says Lutheran Minister Richard John Neuhaus in Freedom for the Ministry. A lot of things have to be explained rather than taken for granted. (A recent Christianity Today-Gallup survey showed that while 84% of Americans believe the Ten Commandments are still valid, more than half could not even identify five of them.) Preachers have less time in which to do the explaining too. Says Donald Macleod, who has taught homiletics at Princeton for 32 years: "The minds of listeners are geared to TV and the 30-second commercial."
While Macleod insists on an 18-minute maximum, in former times sermons would run more than an hour. Ministers commanded an authority that would be unthinkable today. They could give full play to docere, delectare, flectere (to teach, to delight, to move), the three purposes of preaching once listed by St. Augustine.
The most famous sermon ever preached in America was Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," which compared the sinner's plight to "a spider or loathesome insect" held over a fire. When Edwards preached, all New England shook in its boots. But the so-called Golden Age of Preaching did not come until the 19th century, with stemwinders like Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn and Phillips Brooks of Boston. Clyde Fant of the First Baptist Church in Richardson, Texas, a former homiletics teacher, notes that even then folks found fault with the state of the pulpit. "Where are the good preachers?" asks Fant. "Right where they've always been —few and far between." By most accounts, the 20th century giant was Harry Emerson Fosdick, who died in 1969.