238 - A Psychology for Preaching

A Psychology for Preaching
By Edgar N. Jackson
New York, Harper & Row, Minister's Paperback Library, 1981. 191 pp. $5.95.

In content this is a "Fosdick Era" book appearing first in 1961, reprinted in 1981 with a new introduction. The Riverside Church pulpit is on the cover, and the publisher claims a Fosdick preface, which, curiously, is missing. There is much here about the sick soul and the preacher as essentially a healer of souls through words. Jesus is the "Master Physician of Souls". Dated phrases these.

Its intent is to bring preaching and pastoral care together as a counseling technique, with preaching viewed as an art. And the psychology necessary to perfect this art is well stated in the early chapters.

Here is a working manual on communication. Yet in the chapter on" Communicating the Word" there is no indication of what the Word is in any theological sense. The actual content for the technique apparently ties elsewhere.

Worship is well described as "group therapy". The admonition to make it meaningful as part of the therapeutic value of the preaching art is emphasized. An analysis of group response is well done and to the point - in contrast with the surprise, shock, and confusion manifest in the media at the time of the Jim Jones tragedy.

If there are therapeutic values in the Sermon on the Mount and in the disciples' preaching at Pentecost, they do not seem to fit the mold for meeting the paramount personal problems the average congregation brings to worship. According to the author these problems are intensely personal, marital, sexual, generational, and so on.

I had the feeling that in seeking first the Kingdom of God and righteousness (the Gospel as the Word), these matters, to a degree, might take care of themselves through a new understanding of Grace. Yet this would be a different theological emphasis from the one assumed in this book. Whatever one's theology, the psychological techniques for communicating it are well developed here.

John O. Mellin
The First Presbyterian Church in the City of New York, N.Y.