Preaching the Word with John Chrysostom E-Book

Gerald Bray

• Herausgeber: Lexham Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Lived Theology
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 204

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Learn from the early church's greatest preacher.John of Antioch, later called "chrysostomos" ("golden mouth"), preached over 600 extant sermons. He was one of the most prolific authors in the early Church, surpassed only by Augustine of Hippo. His example and work has inspired countless Christians through the ages.In Preaching the Word with Chrysostom, through a combination of storytelling and theology, Gerald Bray reflects upon 1,500 year-old pastoral wisdom from one of church history's most prolific Christ-centered preachers. Chrysostom's eloquent preaching and influence on Christian teaching left a legacy that is still recognized today.The Lived Theology series explores aspects of Christian doctrine through the eyes of the men and women who practiced it. Interweaving the contributions of notable individuals alongside their overshadowed contemporaries, we gain a much deeper understanding and appreciation of their work and the broad tapestry of Christian history. These books illuminate the vital contributions made by these figures throughout the history of the church.

Leseprobe

PREACHING THE WORD

WITH

JOHN CHRYSOSTOM

GERALD BRAY

Preaching the Word with John Chrysostom

Lived Theology

Copyright 2020 Gerald Bray

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

LexhamPress.com

All rights reserved. You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [email protected].

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from ESV®Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Print ISBN 9781683593669

Digital ISBN 9781683593676

Library of Congress Control Number 2019957123

Series Editor: Michael A. G. Haykin

Lexham Editorial: Todd Hains, Jeff Reimer, Danielle Thevenaz

Cover Design: Micah Ellis

LIVED THEOLOGY

Contents

Timeline of John Chrysostom’s Life

Series Preface

Chapter 1

John the Man

Chapter 2

In the Beginning

Chapter 3

John’s Portrait of Jesus

Chapter 4

In the Footsteps of Paul the Apostle

Chapter 5

The Legacy

Further Reading

Subject Index

Scripture Index

Timeline of John Chrysostom’s Life

Series Preface

Men and women—not ideas—make history. Ideas have influence only if they grip the minds and energize the wills of flesh-and-blood individuals.

This is no less true in the history of Christianity than it is in other spheres of history. For example, the eventual success of Trinitarianism in the fourth century was not simply the triumph of an idea but of the biblical convictions and piety of believers like Hilary and Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea and Macarius-Symeon. Thirteen hundred years later, men and women like William Carey, William Ward, and Hannah Marshman were propelled onto the mission field of India—their grit and gumption founded on the conviction that the living, risen Lord has given his church an ongoing command: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt 28:19–20). These verses had an impact when they found a lodging-place in their hearts.

The Lived Theology series traces the way that biblical concepts and ideas are lived out in the lives of Christians, some well known, some relatively unknown (though we hope that more people will know their stories). These books tell the stories of these men and women and also describe the way in which ideas become clothed in concrete decisions and actions.

The goal for all of the books is the same: to remember what lived theology looks like. And in remembering this, we hope that these Christians’ responses to their historical contexts and cultures will be a source of wisdom for us today.

And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect. Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith. (Hebrews 11:39–12:2 KJV)

Michael A. G. Haykin

Chair and Professor of Church History

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

CHAPTER 1

John the Man

HIS LIFE

John was born to a Christian family in Antioch, probably in or around the year AD 349.1 His father died when he was still a boy, and he was brought up by his mother. He received an excellent classical education and was taught rhetoric by a man called Libanius, who was widely regarded as the greatest teacher of the subject at that time. When John was eighteen years old, he broke off his studies and tried to adopt a strict monastic way of life, much to his mother’s distress. He was baptized about this time and eventually managed to escape to the nearby mountains, where he found refuge with a hermit. After four years in the hermit’s cave, John branched out on his own. For two years he practiced the most extreme asceticism, doing considerable damage to his health in the process. In the end it was too much for him, and he returned to Antioch, where he sought medical help and went back to the church of his youth.

In 381 John was ordained a deacon by Bishop Meletius of Antioch, and five years later he was made a priest by Meletius’s successor Flavian. For the next eleven years John preached regularly in the city’s main church, and it was there that he acquired his enduring reputation as a preacher. His most famous sermons were delivered during those years, which in hindsight were the happiest ones of his life. He developed an expository style of preaching and seems to have worked his way through Genesis, Isaiah, and the Psalms in the Old Testament, along with Matthew, John, and the Pauline Epistles (including Hebrews) in the New.

John’s reputation spread, and in 397 he was chosen to become patriarch of Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. John did not want to go, but the emperor intervened and forced him to leave Antioch. On February 26, 398, he was consecrated a bishop in his new see, but it turned out to be an unfortunate choice. Constantinople was a hotbed of corruption and political intrigue, and John was too forthright to be able to negotiate its treacherous byways successfully. He condemned the moral laxity of the city without compromise and did what he could to reform the church, which had succumbed to its atmosphere. By deposing unworthy bishops and clergy he made enemies who became increasingly determined to get rid of him, and his denunciations of the imperial court’s luxury and decadence earned him no friends there either. In particular, the empress Eudoxia turned against him, having been convinced by John’s enemies that his criticisms were directed mainly at her.

John also faced problems caused by the rivalry between Antioch and Alexandria. He had been consecrated as patriarch by Theophilus of Alexandria, but the latter was acting under duress, having been forced by the emperor to perform the ceremony. A few years later, Theophilus was summoned to Constantinople to answer charged leveled against him by some Egyptian monks. The trial was presided over by John, and Theophilus came to believe that the whole affair had been instigated by him. Seeking revenge, Theophilus summoned a meeting of thirty-six bishops, twenty-nine of whom were Egyptians like himself, in order to try John on a series of trumped-up charges. The strategy worked, and in August 403 he was deposed, a decision that the emperor lamely accepted.

John was expelled from the capital, but he was recalled the very next day when riots broke out in the city in his defense. John was restored to his office, and things seemed to be patched up, but two months later he was again accused of attacking the empress. This time the accusation stuck. The emperor ordered John to retire from his functions, but John refused to do so, and trouble soon followed. John had many followers in Constantinople, and when the army tried to expel him from his church the congregation resisted, with some loss of life. The situation became intolerable, and on June 9, 404, five days after Pentecost, John was forced to leave the city. He was exiled to the Armenian town of Cucusus (now Göksun in south central Turkey), where he lived for the next three years.

Unfortunately for John, Cucusus was not all that far from Antioch, and his former parishioners were soon making the pilgrimage to visit him, along with some dedicated followers from Constantinople. Nor was Cucusus a safe place for someone of John’s stature to reside. It was subject to periodic raids by the mountain men of nearby Isauria, and John had to flee from them at least once during his stay there. The support that he received from both Antioch and Constantinople alarmed John’s enemies, who had the emperor banish him to Pityus (now Pitsunda in the Abkhazian region of Georgia). Forced to go there on foot, and exposed to the hardships of bad weather and a semidesert terrain, John never made it to his destination. On September 14, 407, he died in Comana Pontica, a city that lay near modern Tokat, about halfway between Cucusus and the Black Sea, and is now in ruins.

John’s death came to be seen as a form of martyrdom, and his fame spread. A century after his death he became known as Chrysostomos (“golden mouthed”) because of his gift for preaching, and the name has stuck. The Roman church broke off relations with Constantinople because of what happened to John, and it was not until the wrong done to him was put right that relations between the two largest churches of the Christian world were restored. Thirty years after he passed away, John’s remains were brought back to Constantinople, and the emperor Theodosius II (408–450), the son of Arcadius and Eudoxia, publicly begged forgiveness for his parents’ sin in opposing John’s ministry. In later times John became the best loved of all the Greek fathers of the church, and his extensive legacy has been preserved almost intact. The simplicity of his life, the sincerity of his faith, and the sufferings he was unjustly forced to endure all combined to enhance his reputation, which was particularly strong among the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century, who regarded him as a model Christian leader.

John’s reputation began to suffer in the late nineteenth century, when interest in the early church period turned more toward studying the history of Christian doctrine. John was not particularly involved in any of the great theological controversies of his time, though he was a convinced and consistent defender of Nicene orthodoxy. His pastoral approach left the impression that his theology was simplistic, and some scholars started to wonder whether he could be called a theologian at all. The result is that today John is little known and seldom read. There are few recent translations of his writings, and it is only quite recently that interest in them has started to pick up again, partly because of a renewed concern for patristic biblical interpretation. Whether this will lead to a renewed interest in John as a preacher remains to be seen, though it is probably true to say that this is unlikely to occur unless it is accompanied by a more general revival of interest in preaching.

HIS WORKS

John wrote a few treatises on moral and pastoral subjects, and he has left us a fair amount of correspondence, but his reputation rests mainly on the large number of his sermons that have survived. Unfortunately for us, his fame as an orator was such that many people sought to imitate him, and much of what later circulated under his name comes from these admirers rather than from him. The task of sorting out the genuine sermons from the spurious ones remains unfinished, and there is as yet no critical edition of his works, which puts him at a disadvantage when compared with great contemporaries like Athanasius and the Cappadocian fathers (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa). There is also a difficulty regarding translations. By no means all of John’s vast output is available in English, though his expository sermons on the New Testament were published between 1888 and 1893 in five volumes of the Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. The translation style is somewhat archaic for modern readers and makes John seem old fashioned and occasionally obscure, but there is nothing comparable available elsewhere. John’s sermons on the Old Testament and his other writings are only partially translated, and much remains to be done to make them accessible to modern readers.

Surprising though it may seem, John’s reputation has also suffered from the fact that most of his sermons are expositions of Scripture. One reason for this is that his expository style seldom attracts the interest of modern biblical scholars, whose work is based on different hermeneutical principles and often leads to quite different interpretations of the texts. More significantly, John’s applications of those texts, while it had a powerful effect in his day, is frequently hard for later generations to appreciate because of the very different circumstances in which we now live. Nevertheless John’s methods and principles often remain valid, even if many of the details now seem obscure or irrelevant, and it is by examining them that we can rediscover his genius and its ongoing importance for preachers in every age.

A difficulty with reading sermons is that it is impossible to recapture the original atmosphere in which they were preached. John’s use of gestures, his tone of voice, his sense of humor, his allusions to contemporary events that are unknown to us now—all of these are lost to the modern reader. Nor can we be sure to what extent the texts we have represent what he actually said. Some of them may have been reproduced verbatim in written form, but it is probable that most of them were edited, either by John himself or by a literary executor. It is also possible that some of the sermons were never actually preached but were prepared directly for publication, using a standard homiletical format. We must therefore be careful not to assume too much about his preaching style, which may have been somewhat different from what the surviving evidence suggests. At the same time, John’s live presentation cannot have been so different from the texts as to make it unrecognizable. We can be fairly certain that his imprint is stamped over the surviving sermons to a degree that makes them authentically his, even if we cannot recapture his original delivery.

John’s most important sermons are expository ones on different books of the Bible. He was not the only church leader who preached in that way, but he was a master of the genre whose sermons were preserved when those of most others were forgotten. From the Old Testament we have seventy-six sermons on Genesis, subdivided into two collections. The first consists of eight homilies on Genesis 1–3 with a ninth that ranges over the remaining chapters. The second collection covers the entire book, with much of the material from the first series repeated almost word for word. We also have fifty-eight sermons on selected psalms and a complete series on Isaiah that survives only in an Armenian translation.2 In addition to that, there are isolated sermons on Hannah, the mother of Samuel, on David and Saul, and on Elijah, along with extensive fragments of homilies on Job, Proverbs, Jeremiah, and Daniel.

From the New Testament, John has left us the first complete commentary on Matthew, which he covered in ninety sermons, and eighty-eight on the Gospel of John. He also produced fifty-five sermons on the Acts of the Apostles, the only commentary on that book to have survived from ancient times, as well as a collection of 244 sermons on the Pauline Epistles, including Hebrews.3 Most of these were delivered in Antioch, though the seventy-seven homilies on Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and Hebrews date from his time in Constantinople, as does the series on Acts. There are also a number of stand-alone sermons on particular passages, many of them tied to events in the life of Jesus that are commemorated in the liturgical year.

In all, John has left us about six hundred sermons on specific biblical texts, but we must note that these include about 18,000 references or clear allusions to other parts of Scripture as well. John never quoted Ruth or the short epistles of 2 and 3 John, and there are other books that he mentioned only once (Ezra, Esther) or twice (Nahum). But this seems to be accidental and does not indicate that he rejected their canonicity. John also accepted the Old Testament Apocrypha as Scripture, but he seldom used it. There are only three sermons on 1 and 2 Maccabees, for example, and a few quotations from other apocryphal books elsewhere. Like most of the church fathers, it seems that John regarded the Apocrypha as inspired because it was part of the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), but he had little use for it in practice and never preached on it systematically.

Looking beyond the sermons that were specifically expository, we find that John preached against both Arians and Jews, and that he often denounced contemporary immorality in diatribes devoted to such evils as the theater and the circus games. A number of sermons dedicated to preparing candidates for baptism have survived, as have occasional pieces composed to celebrate various liturgical feasts or to honor the memory of great saints and martyrs. Especially notable among these are seven sermons in praise of the apostle Paul, whom John admired and with whom he felt a particular kinship, perhaps because they were similar personalities.4 Occasionally John stepped directly into the political arena, as when he preached a series of twenty-one sermons dealing with the destruction of the imperial statues by an Antiochene mob in 387. The emperor threatened to destroy the city in retaliation, but the intercession of Bishop Flavian persuaded him to show mercy. John’s interventions were evenhanded. He deplored the emperor’s thirst for vengeance and prayed that it might be stayed (as it was), but he also castigated the Antiochenes for their behavior, which had brought down condemnation on them. Later on, in Constantinople, he preached in favor of the disgraced imperial minister Eutropius, who had been his friend and mentor before his fall from power. John could not save the minister, but Eutropius was exiled to Cyprus rather than put to death, which in the circumstances may be considered a success.5

John also wrote several treatises on the priesthood, the monastic life, virginity, the education of children, and suffering, many of which became popular devotional works in later times. Significantly, the Greek Orthodox Church has a Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, which it celebrates on particular feast days, but how much of it goes back to John himself is uncertain. Most of the other works that survive under his name, including an important (but unfinished) commentary on Matthew, are now regarded as spurious.6

READING CHRYSOSTOM TODAY

With such a vast array of material to choose from, deciding where to begin reading John is extremely difficult. In the past, many students have chosen to concentrate on particular treatises, especially the ones on priesthood, because they have felt that in them John was addressing subjects that were still of great interest and relevance to modern church life. But important as they are, those treatises do not represent the heart of John’s labors. For him, expounding the Bible from the pulpit and applying its lessons to the lives of his congregations remained his fundamental concern throughout his life, and to understand him properly we must begin with them.

Even so, it is scarcely practical to try to cover everything. Limitations of space force us to be selective, and most scholars would probably agree that this is best done by concentrating on four key texts—the creation narrative in Genesis 1–3, the Gospels of Matthew and John, and Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. The creation narrative was a favorite theme of patristic commentators and is important because it established the worldview of Christianity over against the received wisdom of the pagans. Today, when the church is once again facing challenges from a secular culture that rejects the biblical doctrine of creation, this emphasis needs to be recalled in the hope of learning lessons from the past that may help us to resolve the conflicts of the present.

The Gospels of Matthew and John are self-evidently important because they recount the life and teaching of Jesus, albeit from different perspectives. John Chrysostom’s exposition of them reveals his doctrine of Christ, which is that of Nicene orthodoxy, and which remains central to the life of the church today. His exposition of Romans is widely regarded as his best work, and it gives us an insight into John’s deep affinity with the apostle Paul. It also speaks to the perennial controversies inherent in the Christian faith—the nature of original sin, the relationship of Jews to gentiles in the divine plan of salvation, and justification by faith alone. These themes remain as vital to our understanding of the gospel now as they have ever been, and it would not be surprising if modern readers resonate with John more fully in the sermons where he is discussing them than elsewhere in his writings.

What I propose to do is to work my way through each of these four texts, outlining how John read them himself, how he expounded them to his hearers, and how he applied them to the Christian life. Once beginners have mastered these principles, they will be ready and able to tackle the rest of John’s legacy, secure in the knowledge that they understand where he is coming from and able to interpret what he says in a way that is faithful to his intentions. We have to remember that John was a fallible human being who lived a long time ago, and we should not expect to be able to follow him uncritically, but in spite of everything there is enough in his works that transcends the limitations of time and space and allows us to experience the communion of saints that unites us all in the eternal body of Christ.

JOHN CHRYSOSTOM’S MINDSET

To understand where John was coming from in his preaching, we have to consider what his intellectual background was and what he was trying to communicate to his congregations in his sermons. All forms of literature are products of their time, and it is only if they can speak not only to the original hearers but also to the second and third generations that read them that they are likely to survive beyond the circumstances in which they were produced. If this is true of books, it is even more true of speeches, and sermons are a particularly focused form of speech. Preachers do not necessarily look beyond their immediate congregations, but even if they do, they know that they must first persuade the people sitting in front of them of both the truth and the importance of what they have to say. That John’s sermons should have survived in the quantity that they have is an impressive testament to their worth, but even so, modern readers will inevitably find it difficult to enter fully into the spirit of his preaching. We are obliged to read what was originally a three-dimensional performance in a one-dimensional format, a handicap that we must try to overcome by looking carefully at the background John came from, and at the expectations that both he and his hearers would have shared.

Today we live in an audiovisual world in which the spoken word is reduced to a minimum. Tweets and sound bites have replaced lectures and speeches, and for most people, a twenty-minute sermon is the most extended form of address that they are likely to hear on a regular basis. To make things even more difficult for the modern preacher, congregations are not trained to listen to and absorb what they hear, so they are easily distracted or bored. Preachers nowadays usually have no training in rhetoric and have to learn from experience what communicates to their congregations and what does not. John Chrysostom lived in a different world. In his time, oratory was highly prized, people were generally attentive to what they heard, and speakers were taught how to use their voice to best effect. Not everyone succeeded to the same degree, of course, but expectations were great and standards were high. John inherited a long tradition of public speaking that went back to ancient Greece, and in particular to the great Athenian orator Demosthenes (mid-fourth century BC), who made his name by opposing the expansionist plans of King Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great.