The use of the Bible in preaching

Abstract

There can of course be no doubt that medieval preaching was closely and intimately linked to the Bible. By definition, preaching dealt with the ‘word of God’, as found in the books of holy scripture, both Hebrew and Christian, and proclaimed not just their teachings and ideas but their very words. From the beginning of the Christian church, whether in oral discourse or in written communications, preachers drew on scripture extensively. Jesus himself quoted the Jewish scriptures, and so did the apostles from the earliest days of the church onwards. Later theologians would define, with scholastic crispness, that ‘preaching is the announcement of the word of God to inform faith and morals’; hence scripture is the foundation of all sermon making, for the word of God is food for the life of our souls, a sound to ward off error, and a sword to cut back our vices. The question, then, is not whether the Bible was used in medieval preaching, but in what ways, to what extent and with what attitudes. Such questions can be most fully answered with regard to Christian preaching in western Europe, which has been studied extensively and for which there is a wealth of documentation. For the use of the Bible in Jewish preaching in the medieval period, Marc Saperstein's studies reveal strong parallels between medieval Jewish and Christian preaching, such as: the connection between sermon and the biblical reading as part of the liturgy (here primarily the Torah or Pentateuch); the difficult and varying relationship between what was said in the sermon and surviving written documents; and the rise of the ‘thematic’ sermon (in Jewish preaching, only in the late fifteenth century). For preaching in the Byzantine East, however, comprehensive studies are lacking. It can be said, though, that there the ‘homily’ form (see below) continued in use through to the fourteenth century, together with other conventional types of sermons, such as encomia of saints or secular rulers, funeral speeches and others.

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