Believing. Horton Davies
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Sermons, by their nature are mostly argumentative. They appeal to reason in order to provoke action. Apart from the usual pattern of Doctrine, Reason and Use, common to all Puritan sermons, Davies uses logic to compare and contrast as well as categorize in explicative discourse. “God’s Covenant with men” spends much time explaining the word covenant by analogy with contract and agreement, and most of the sermon is argumentative. In “The meaning of the Cross” he dwells on the similarities and the contrasts between Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and opposes, by quoting Dorothy Sayers, a ludicrously superficial to a deeper view of Christianity. In “The Severity of God,” he uses logical arguments to show why people should come to church on a regular basis. This may be one of his rare moments when he uses invective, considering absenteeism as “blasphemy,” at the same time as gentle humor, disclaiming that he is ONLY begging for his salary. “Essentials of happiness” gives four recipes for a good conscience in prescriptive order and within each category, there is a list of advice. Finally “Christianity as the Servant Church” deviates from the usual pattern of doctrine, reason and use to denounce the major changes in the twentieth century both in art and in religion and attempt to correlate the two.
Let us take as an example “Why I Believe in the Holy Catholic Church.” The sermon starts with objections to the church. It starts with 1.) The reality of the church: criticism of the church; why indeed have a church at all; religion is private, but it is also corporate; the failures and successes of the church; hypocrisy in the church; concluding with reform the church from inside. Then Davies delineates 2.) The ideal church: as divine society; as undivided society despite the schisms, beyond space and time; as a holy society of redeemed and dedicated men and women.
Rhetoric and Imagery
Sermons, to appeal to the congregation in a twenty minute span or so, need to be wrought with rhetoric and imagery; so we find references to classical lore, many historical references to the past, church history, and the contemporary; his examples are taken out of the Bible or out of life to illustrate his points. Scenes are particularly vivid, as one might expect of someone who took art as a full-time occupation during much of his retirement. Because of his imagination both examples and scenes sometimes become interesting dramatizations, of which there is less of a sample here, but which are even more obvious in two series called Jesus Monarch of Men and in the Cross-examination sermons.
Rhetoric
To appeal to a mixed audience, the logical progression is often carefully dressed in rhetoric and craftsmanship. Because Davies adheres to the plain style, there are very few, if any, allegories, personifications, metonymies or periphrases; because of the compassion of his tone and clarity of message, there are few examples of figures of substitution like antiphrasis, litotes, or euphemisms or of omission like ellipses. On the other hand figures marking opposition and figures designed to amplify and insist abound. We find parallelisms and antitheses, anaphora and repetition, enumerations, rhetorical questioning and exclamations, an occasional use of hyperbole and hypothesis, and a plethora of imagery in comparisons, similes and metaphors.
Davies’s rhetoric was aimed at being persuasive rather than coercive: parallelism, repetitions and anaphora abound: In “Immortality” we hear:
Sometimes that judgment comes in History, as it comes today with a rising crescendo of fury, terrible as an army with banners. Sometimes that judgment waits until the Judgment Day of Christ. Sometimes that judgment of God comes in personal life, where the soul has so neglected the spiritual help of Christ and his church, that it is an empty vault, a mask of a face covering sheer emptiness.
In “The Verdict on the Cross” the repetition “You are poor Peter . . . You are poor Judas . . . You are the frightened disciples . . . “is last combined with an antithesis: “You are there and I am here.”
In “Wanted a perpetual Pentecost,” repetition is mixed with progression and accumulation: “It was an empty church, a church in a graveyard, a church which modernity had left in a backwash of history, building its town in a new quarter, a church of inner darkness, a church of spectators.”
And to show that he is aware of the difficulties of the splitting church, we hear in “Why I believe in the Holy Catholic Church”: “Well, I can tell you of some of the splits: the Roman Catholics, the Church of England, the Methodists (all three brands of them), the Baptists, the Congregationalists, the Quakers and the Plymouth Brethren.”
In “All things work together for those who love God” we find enumeration combined with rhetorical questioning, as if pounding into his flock’s hearts:
Do you love God? Do you love God and serve Him above all other masters; do you love Him more than your own life? Or do you live with one eye on God and the other eye on the main chance? Tonight I am challenging youth in the morning of life; do you love God? I am challenging men and women here in the middle busy years of life; do you love God? I am challenging men and women in the evening of life; do you love God?
To wake up the congregation from its sleep, apostrophe and rhetorical questioning are quite common. It was used by Christ a few times as he asked: “Who do you think I am?” and “Do you love me?” Davies asks in “Saints Alive,” “Where is your Rome?”
Sympathetic to the degrees of faith in his parishioners, the preacher often starts his sermons with questions: “What is Christian love? Is it the sense of pity?” (“The harvest of the Holy Spirit”) or “Why did Jesus come to earth? (“Essentials of happiness”) or “Is the Christmas story a lovely legend? Or is it eternal truth?” (“The Incarnation”).
Questions and oppositions are shot at the listener in the hope to elicit an inner response before stating the truth. In “Sin is rebellion against God,” Davies attempts to put some backbone into the usually bland view that sin is only psychological error. He asks about the concept of Original Sin, inherited from the mother’s womb: “An extravagance? An attempt to shift the blame? A refuge in talk of heredity and environment? No, a deep perception of spiritual truth.”
There is no pussyfooting in Davies’s sermons, but clear definition as to what he saw as the truth. Antitheses can be flippant as in “I Believe in the Holy Catholic Church” when the preacher affirms, as he admits the shortcomings and dissentions and the occasional cruelty in and perpetrated by the Christian church: “I believe in the Holy Catholic church and I regret that it does not exist.”
Speaking of the effect the Saints of the church have on us in “Victorious faith conquering Skepticism” he expresses ambiguity: “We are attracted by what contradicts us most. But this is only half the truth. The other half is that we are condemned by what contradicts us most. St. Francis, Dr. Schweitzer, and supremely their Lord and ours, shame us, humble us.”
The sermon “Christianity as the Servant Church” is particularly resonant with oppositions, as Davies tries to show the evolution of the church for the needs of the modern world. Describing Christ as the man for others, Davies states: “He is not the pre-existent Christ but the pro-existent Christ.” Defining the social role of the church, we hear: “It is to be a holy secularity, not set apart, but sent serving into secularity” and later, according to Gibson Winter, it is neither a “cultic organism . . . nor a confessional fortress . . . but . . . a prophetic fellowship.”
Questioning can occasionally become hypothesis to convince the unbeliever. In “The Hidden God,” Davies has to defend to a stricken congregation the choice of God to give us free will to do good or bad. To the question: “Why doesn’t God intervene and stop the war?” he retorts: “Suppose God had chosen the former way: then there would be no moral evil in the world . . . But what would be the value of such service, when the creature who gave it was not free to do otherwise?” But this is a rare occurrence.
What is not rare is the use of exclamation as a way to reach the heart in assent or indignation. In “Immortality” Davies expresses the liberation brought by the assurance of immortality in these terms:
It is the eternal home-coming! What are twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty years compared with eternity! What is liberation from the evil clutches of the Gestapo, compared