When Augustine became the bishop of Hippo, North Africa, in 391, he almost immediately asked for a vacation—to study the Bible. He had been a Christian for only five years and felt that he needed more immersion in the Scriptures before he could teach others. A few years later he began to write On Christian Teaching (which some have called “a manual for preachers”), from which the following selection is taken.

Here, he insists that preachers tackle the difficult issues of sin and repentance instead of giving their people “verbal froth” on superficial matters.1 But more than this, they must be sure that their words are grounded in personal consecration, born of earnest prayer—prayer both for their hearers and for themselves. Otherwise, they are hypocrites.

But a serious congregation . . . will not . . . take delight in the attractive style that is devoted not to presenting iniquity but to enhancing trivial and ephemeral goods with the sort of ostentatious verbal froth which could not even enhance important and lasting things in a tasteful and serious way . . .

The aim of our orator, then, when speaking of things that are just and holy and good—and he should not speak of anything else—the aim, as I say, that he pursues to the best of his ability when he speaks of these things is to be listened to with understanding, with pleasure, and with obedience. He should be in no doubt that any ability he has and however much he has derives more from his devotion to prayer than his dedication to oratory; and so, by praying for himself and for those he is about to address, he must become a man of prayer before becoming a man of words. As the hour of his address approaches, before he opens his thrusting lips he should lift his thirsting soul to God so that he may utter what he has drunk in and pour out what has filled him.2

Footnotes:
1
Though Augustine’s point is supported throughout the Bible, his citation of Psalm 35:18 in this particular context is off the mark. He translates “I will thank you in the great congregation . . .” (ESV) as “I shall praise you in a serious congregation . . .” But as Keil and Delitzsch observe, the word for “great” (the translation they favor) parallels the word for “mighty” or “much” in the second part of the verse. Thus it refers “to strength of numbers or to strength of power,” not to a no-nonsense attitude, as Augustine supposes. See F. Delitzsch, Psalms, vol. 5 of Commentary on the Old Testament in Ten Volumes, C. F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, trans. Francis Bolton (1866-1891; repr., Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2001), 273.

2
Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 120-121. In other editions, see book 4, paragraphs 84 and 87.
article adapted from Kairos Journal

First Baptist Church of Perryville is located on Rt. 40 in Maryland.