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"Weight which listeners felt": Chadwick on Calvin's Preaching |
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Written by Michael R. Walker
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Saturday, 03 April 2010 02:56 |
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"Calvin lay back on his bed thinking out what to say, but he could preach or lecture without notes and usually took with him only the Greek or Hebrew text of the Bible to expound. The words went flowing out of him. Every other week he preached every weekday and every Sunday he preached twice, that is 260 sermons in a year, with very numerous lectures in addition. Anyone who tries to speak knows that in a far lower frequency of utterance no one can talk sense all the time because no one, not even a person who takes so short a time for sleep as Calvin, has time to suck in enough to make good what goes out; not at least without an excess of repetition. But audiences were not bored. They were supposed to go to church but did not need to go to Calvin’s church and most preferred it. His sermons were not amusing nor anecdotal. They were not decked with the devices of eloquence; they did not come over with passion, though sometimes interesting through vehemence of denunciation; they had none of Luther’s fun and fewer flashes of original insight; but they thumped away, like a battery of hits that landed on target, with clarity of thought, style, and arrangement, reinforced by the manifest conviction of truth in the speaker. No witness said that he had a musical voice. It was weight which listeners felt."
Owen Chadwick, The Early Reformation on the Continent. Oxford, 2001, pp. 195-6.
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