On originality in sermons and religious authority

The Very Rev. Dr. Andrew McGowan, Dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale (where I attended seminary), had a fascinating piece in the latest issue of Yale Divinity School’s magazine Reflections. In the piece, entitled “Preaching, Plagiarism, and AI,” McGowan asks what, exactly, about the use of AI aids in putting together sermons is so troubling to us. He points out that - granting the obvious problems with the misrepresentation involved in plagiarism and with the fact that AI cannot discern truth from falsity - we are broadly suspicious in general about sermons preached using words that aren’t the preacher’s own. This is because, he argues, we have embraced an account of preaching (indeed, embraced it so fully that it seems natural and obvious) that a good sermon comes from, as he puts it, an individual “encounter between the preacher and the Holy Spirit” in the sermon’s composition. The sermon, that is, is to be an expression of the “originality” and thus the “personality” of the preacher, whose authority comes from his or her particular (hopefully Spirit-enabled) spiritual insight.

This way of thinking, McGowan argues, has more to do with distinctly modern notions of individual authenticity and religious authority than historic Christian views of preaching. A lack of originality, rather than heresy, is now the cardinal sin in preaching — if, as McGowan notes, Episcopal Church disciplinary cases are any indication. He points to the Church of England’s Book of Homilies and, a millennia before, Caesarea of Arles’ free homiletical borrowings from St. Augustine to remind us that this has not always been so. Earlier Christians were less concerned that their sermons were the result of a specific encounter between the Spirit and their preacher than that they faithfully taught the faith of the church. And perhaps this is a model we might recover; McGowan writes that a potential positive outcome of our wrestling with the use of AI is an increasing willingness to do the same today. It’s an excellent peace, and I strongly encourage you to read it.

Now, as someone who occasionally uses (with attribution) others’ sermons while leading public worship, it’s small surprise that I find myself in broad agreement with Dean McGowan. But what I found most helpful about this piece is the way that it uses our aversion to preachers preaching others’ sermons to make a broader diagnosis about contemporary religious culture. McGowan puts it this way: “Personality has become our “orthodoxy” in liberal and conservative circles alike, and homiletic originality is its sacramental and spoken seal.”

I think this is basically correct, and it brought to mind something I think about a lot: what constitutes religious, and specifically clerical, authority in the contemporary mainline. In short, I worry that we often think about clerical authority as grounded in technique and in charismatic¹ leadership stemming from individual spirituality rather than in confession of the faith and obedience to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the church. And I think we see this shown very well in precisely the attitude towards preaching that McGowan describes.

Let me explain: I’ve expressed concern before that much of what our churches look for in prospective ministers is a set of content-neutral techniques in preaching, pastoral care, and liturgical leadership at the expense of sound doctrine or holy living. That is, to be ready to be a minister is to have mastered certain techniques.

But I don’t actually think that this is the sum total of how ministerial authority is constructed in our churches today. There’s also an emphasis on a minister’s authority as stemming from their unique and individual spiritual experiences as an expression of their identity. For example, one of the few overtly spiritual questions that discernment committees regularly ask is for your “call story.” “When was the moment that you knew that you wanted to be a minister,” you will be asked. In effect, this typically teaches that one’s decision to seek ordained ministry should normatively be grounded in some sort of specific spiritual experience (rather than, say, reasoning out that one’s commitments and aptitudes are a good fit for ministry).

Even more tellingly, upon being ordained, you’ll often hear people say (no doubt well-meaningly) that the church in ordaining you hasn’t actually changed anything. No: it has just recognized what was already the deepest truth about yourself, that you are a minister in Christ’s church. Ordination on this understanding isn’t the church recognizing your capacities and commitments and then acting to set you in a position of formal religious authority; it is the church recognizing the individual charismatic religious authority you possessed all along. These are perhaps the most obvious examples of a larger trend in which one’s sense of ministerial authority is not normatively grounded in one’s confession of and vowed fidelity to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of one’s church; it is rather in one’s individual God-consciousness and one’s professional mastery.

It seems to me that these two ways of thinking about clerical identity and authority come together in the sermon with its focus on “homiletic originality,” as McGowan puts it. That is, the original sermon is both an expression of one’s mastery of various techniques (of exegeting a text, composing an argument, public speaking) and of one’s personal spirituality (the sermon as resulting from an encounter between the individual preacher and God). It is precisely because ministerial authority is understood in these ways that reading a sermon someone else wrote seems like a betrayal.

Now, to be clear, I think that both certain technical proficiencies and a living and vital relationship with God are crucial for Christian clergy. It is necessary that you can compose a sermon and lead worship and care for the sick and dying if you are going to be a pastor, at least in the Christian ministry as currently configured. And while not everyone has a dramatic call story, some people certainly do have them! More broadly, mainline churches could certainly stand to encourage all their people - lay and clergy alike - to a deeper life of prayer and spirituality, and it is part of the role of ministers to publicly model that. I certainly find it helpful to occasionally use examples from my own spiritual life in my sermons, although more often use examples of failures than of spiritual achievements.

Yet all these caveats notwithstanding, I think it is a mistake to see clerical authority as grounded in these things. No: my authority as a minister comes from being ordained to serve, rather than my ordination being an expression of my already-existing religious authority. My authority is grounded in my vow to conform to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of my church and to teach the same to those I serve, and ends if (God forbid!) I no longer keep this vow. It’s not that my personal beliefs don’t matter; if I don’t hold the faith, I cannot be a good minister. But my personal faith is authoritative for my work as a minister not because it is the expression of my own authentic religious experience but because (and only insofar as) it is consonant with what Scripture teaches, as set forth by the church as Scripture’s guard and keeper.² And so, to come full circle, this means that my preaching must be more concerned with orthodoxy than with originality. I am a man under authority; I simply am not allowed to preach whatever might seem interesting to me at a given moment because it is my responsibility to teach the faith once delivered to the saints. Sometimes this may require all the homiletic originality at my disposal; sometimes it may be best instead to read a sermon by faithful preachers from the Christian past.

It is my hope, then, that those of us in the mainline associated with what is loosely called inclusive orthodoxy will work to recover this older and to my mind much better account of clerical authority, grounded neither in ministers’ technical skills nor superlative spiritual experiences,³ but in our humble obedience to the church which has called us to serve, to Holy Scripture which is the church’s guiding norm, and to God who has given us both Scripture and the church to lead us to him.

1. I mean “charismatic leadership” here in the sense of leadership grounded in one’s individuality and identity rather than one’s position in a larger institution, not with any reference to the charismatic movement within Christianity.

2. There are, of course, situations in which the church fails to be obedient to Scripture and thus disobedience to the church is obedience to God.

3. The point is not that God can never call people to serve him outside the institutional authority of the church by means of dramatic experiences that compel others’ attention and confidence. Certainly I think he has and still does. But, it seems to me, this is not where the authority of the office of ministry normatively comes from.