Rhetorical Device in Expository Ministry: A “how-to”

This is the second installment in a series on the expository ministry of John Calvin.

While no one today has ever heard John Calvin preach, we still have around 1,460 of his extant sermons to study with about another 1,000 manuscripts either missing or destroyed [according to John Leith, “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Proclamation of the Word and Its Significance for Today in Light of Recent Research” in Review and Expositor, (1989), p.29]. Princeton scholar, Hughes Oliphant Old shares an appreciation for Calvin when he says, “few preachers have affected such a tremendous reform in the lives of their congregation as did the Reformer of Geneva.” So what was the chief piece of artillery at Calvin’s disposal and more specifically how did he wield it? Old answers that Calvin, “drew his hearers into the sacred text along with him.” To be sure, Calvin was not the only reformer to enjoy a robust expository preaching ministry. Old tells us that “Calvin had the same tools…which the older Reformers had; it was just that Calvin’s were a bit sharper.” The focus of this essay will examine how Calvin used his “sharper” tools and their benefit to preachers today?

Without going into much detail over definitions, let it be said that Calvin was an expositor homiletically and all his sermons reflected this commitment (see T. H. L. Parker’s, Calvin’s Preaching). He was committed to expository preaching because he believed that the text should be taken at face value and that grammatical-historical exegesis was the only corrective to the allegorical method so prevalent in some of his predecessors. Therefore the principles that one may draw from his example are only true to the source if repeated within a consistent expository ministry that is rooted in sound hermeneutical principles (which should be the subject of another essay all together).

Eye-witness accounts and sermons left behind help us to see that one of the reasons for Calvin’s effectiveness was his use of rhetorical device. Simply put, he was a master of the language and worked hard to make sure that his message was simple in its style yet profound in its content (One of the more lucid analyses of Calvin’s preaching that has contributed to my thinking on this subject is Hughes Oliphant Old’s The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Church: Volume 4 The Age of the Reformation, pp.90-134). Rhetorical device refers to the use of the word pictures, questions, metaphors, etc. to communicate the ancient truths of Scripture to a modern audience. To be effective in this is to clearly distill that message, communicate it through individual giftedness all without truncating the original intent of the author(s). Over the next few posts, I will explore each of the following rhetorical devices found in the preaching of Calvin and show how they are rooted in Biblical examples and useful for preaching today.

1. Outlines as device
2. Similes and synonyms
3. Paraphrases
4. The “Negative” or “Corrective”
5. Expansion
6. Contrast
7. Sarcasm/absurdity
8. Simplification
9. Symphonic preaching
10. vocabulary