22 July 2008

Sibbes: Aiming for the Heart

Sibbes on the importance of preaching a strawberry-rhubarb theology:

[W]itty things only, as they are spoken to the brain, so they rest in the brain, and sink no deeper; but the heart (which vain and obnoxious men love not to be touched), that is the mark a faithful teacher aims to hit.

(I would only add, at the end: "through the brain"!)

--Richard Sibbes, in the preface to John Smith, Introduction to the Creed, cited in Ralph Turnbull, Jonathan Edwards the Preacher (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1958), 54.

No comments: