Empty Admiration
Robert Lewis Dabney’s Expository Homiletic
- Preaching & Worship
- Publisher: Pickwick Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2020
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Publisher's Description
"Do as I say, not as I do." It is not only parents who fail to model instructions for their children, but also teachers of preaching. Robert Lewis Dabney was a nineteenth-century Presbyterian theologian who taught theology and preaching at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia prior to and after the United States Civil War. He is remembered for his powers as a systematic theologian, his defense of southern Christianity, and his life-long racism. A formidable theologian and respected teacher of preachers, Dabney's Sacred Rhetoric (1870) poised him to influence a generation of young preachers to devote themselves to verse-by-verse expository preaching through books of the Bible. Yet Dabney failed, instead equipping his students to preach--and modeling for them--topical sermons preached on mere fragments of text, often without context. Empty Admiration traces Dabney's thought and action from his preaching theory to his classroom instruction to his personal practice, revealing a man at odds with himself, whose students--not unlike children--preached as Dabney preached, not as Dabney said.
Endorsements (3)
Foreword
“Russell St. John provides a fascinating, engaging, and enjoyable read of the life and preaching of this Southern Presbyterian preaching professor, Robert Dabney. The book honestly assesses his life and contribution—and even inconsistencies—providing substantial insight into the world of this Southern gentleman teacher of preachers. Readers will appreciate St. John’s respectful, careful, and albeit honest study of this important figure in the history of preaching and American life.”
“With meticulous research, Russell St. John has placed Robert Dabney in the spotlight of homiletical scholarship. Dabney belongs there because he was one of the luminaries of the nineteenth century. In those days giants walked the land. St. John’s writing is elegant, and his analysis is incisive yet gentle as he shows us that even luminaries can sputter when they move from theory to practice.”
“This is a rare book that reveals the distinctions of faithful preaching by exposing the deficiencies of such preaching in the practice of one of its more ardent defenders. St. John does no damage to the principles of Dabney, but rather underscores their importance by indicating how inconsistencies in translating the lofty principles to personal practice damaged the life and proclamation of an esteemed man whose life ended with much sadness, in part caused by these very inconsistencies. This is a telling cautionary tale for all who would be faithful in actual practice as well as in articulated principles.”
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