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Very few homileticians trained after the mid-1970s--not preachers but
homileticians, those who teach preaching--even know who Andrew W. Blackwood
is, or was. A few years ago, I asked a younger colleague, a well-published,
highly-respected preaching professor, what she thought of Blackwood, and she
said she had never heard of him. Who is he? she wanted to know.

Ironically, Andrew W. Blackwood was probably the best known--as well as the
most widely published and read-homiletician of the Twentieth Century. Yes, the
Twentieth Century, the century just past!

During his homiletics teaching career which spanned 28 years, Blackwood
published a total of 22 books-22 books!--on every aspect of preaching. Who today
can even come close to that? Among the titles are Biographical Preaching for
Today, Planning a Year's Pulpit Work, Preaching In Time of Reconstruction, The
Fine Art of Preaching, Pastoral Leadership, The Growing Minister, Doctrinal
Preaching for Today, and what, in my judgment, is his best book, published in
1958, The Preparation of Sermons. He was 76 when he wrote that book. There are
virtually no topics related to preaching, and even to ministry, that he did not write
about.

In 1953, Pulpit Digest, then the most widely-circulated homiletics journal in the
country, devoted an entire issue to his work and influence, calling him "Mr.
Homiletics," and saying of him on its cover that he is one "whose influence will be
discernible in a large proportion of the sermons preached in the United States next
Sunday, or any Sunday."

Nor did Andrew Blackwood teach at some outpost theology school. For 20 years,
from 1930 to 1950, he was the center of the preaching faculty at Princeton
Theological Seminary. When he retired from Princeton in 1950, he continued
teaching a lighter load at Temple University School of Theology, from which he
retired a second time in 1958.

He died on March 28, 1966, at the age of 84. ALL of his monumental work in
homiletics died shortly after that.

In 1975, one of Blackwood's students, Jay Adams, wrote a short book about him,
trying to keep his work alive, at least in evangelical circles, and to some extent he
did. But the book is extraordinarily defensive of Blackwood, since it was already
clear by then that Blackwood's legacy would not endure for even a decade after his
death.

My own experience with Andrew Blackwood resulted from the fact that I studied
homiletics in two eras, as an undergraduate ministerial student from 1960 to 1964,
and as a seminarian much later in life, in the 1980s. In those early '60s, we read and
learned Blackwood: The Preparation of Sermons was our text. By the 1980s, we
read a host of other, "new" homileticians, Craddock foremost among them. But
Blackwood, literally, was nowhere to be found. He had died. His work had died.
Completely.

So what happened? The answer is not difficult to find, even though a full treatment
of how it all happened is beyond the scope of our notes here-though someday it
should be written.

In short, what happened is that the world changed. The assumptions and ideas
with which Blackwood approached preaching in all of his writing were overturned;
and overturned decisively and spectacularly, within a decade: the decade of the 60s.
The world was no longer clean-cut and relatively predictable, based on shared
American values, ambitions, and hopes. That all came crashing down. That was a
world of major premises and minor premises, from which conclusions about truth
could be drawn. That was a deductive world, a world that "accepted things," a
world of sin, perhaps, but not cynicism. But it did not last.

By the early '70s, the cart was completely overturned. There would be many
casualties of that collapse; and one of them would be the way that Andrew W.
Blackwood had understood, taught and wrote about Christian preaching for three
decades.

In 1971, a young New Testament scholar named Fred Craddock wrote a little book
called As One Without Authority. It was a book that implicitly called into question
virtually every assumption on which Blackwood had worked-and a new era in
preaching began. Craddock's book caught the rising wave of the new skeptical,
questioning mind that was intent on working inductively, not deductively; the
shared assumptions about American culture and religion were no longer shared.
The world was a mess. There were no longer any ready answers for anything-not in
the Bible, not in the pulpit, not in the church, not anywhere. An inductive,
searching spirit and mind were called for. With that, all of Blackwood's work was, at
least for mainstream Christian seminaries and preachers, profoundly and
immediately out of date. Blackwood was dead.

But--why bring this up now?

I do so because, in my judgment, the study of homiletics since those 1970s has
become something of a morass of ideas, theories, viewpoints, pro-this, post-that,
anti-something else. Preachers, and even homileticians-myself among them-are not
just confused; we are not even sure how to think clearly about this work of
speaking to people in public every week. What are we supposed to be speaking
about? What do people who still come to hear us expect from us? What, after all, is
preaching? What in the world is it for? Why are we doing it? How do we keep doing
in it a way that seems exciting and hopeful and of real value in the lives of people
interested enough to show up?

Homiletically, as most preachers know, we really have lost our way. The books pour
out, yet the water becomes murkier.

The questions that call to us who preach are all basic ones, THE basic ones. But,
in our writings about homiletics we continue to muddle around. We who write have
a way of making things more complicated rather than less. Preachers deserve better
from us. Their patience with us homileticians is not very long these days.

So, of late, I have gotten out some old Blackwood books and started reading in
them again. They are from a different world, a different era. They do have a naive
feel to them in many ways. But-at the same time-there is something startlingly fresh
about them. They provide a way (at least they do for me) to see what I have done
for the past couple of decades in something of a new light.

So, for now, let me make one or two observations to summarize.

First, Blackwood wrote extensively because he was a master writer. Such clarity of
statement and thought one seldom, if ever, finds today. I told a friend recently that
only Professor Craddock even comes close to the elegance of Blackwood's writing.
Blackwood is a joy to read-still.

Second, Blackwood understood that all preaching, whether as sermon formation or
as sermon delivery, rested on fundamental principles. In retrospect, that is as true
today as it was in his day-and, remarkably, those fundamentals probably have not
changed as much as we would like to think, despite the cultural shifts. A thousand
things that we still need to know about preaching-things that today are mostly
lost-one can still read in Blackwood. He could help us all regain our footing in
fundamentals, even as we see through and around a lot of his views of Bible and
deductive organizing and thinking.

In short, the next time you are in a good used bookstore with a substantial religion
section, look for books by Andrew W. Blackwood. It is about the only place you can
find them these days. Buy one, or more. Take a read. You will not only be
surprised, but the chances are very good that you will grow as a preacher.
Blackwood may not actually be dead yet.

--Joseph M. Webb