Plough: To get us started, can you tell us about your theology and practice of preaching?

Fleming Rutledge: It’s so important for people to understand that preaching the gospel requires a complete shift of categories. Preaching the gospel is not like anything else. Preaching is unto itself, because preaching is inhabited by and worked by the agency about whom we are preaching. We are not speaking under our own strength. We are not summing up our rhetorical gifts. We are not sharing our personal experiences either, except with reservations, under certain circumstances, and with care. This is because at all times during the sermon, we are actually being used by the power of the Word of God, which is unlike any other power that the world has ever known. And this idea that God speaks and lives through God’s own Word transmitted through human beings is unique to Christianity. That’s what can happen in any sermon. However dignified and mainline it may be, the sermon is the opportunity for the power of the Holy Spirit to make Jesus alive with us – well, not making him alive, because he is alive, but manifesting him, alive, in the preacher’s speaking.

What is the Spirit’s role in preaching, and what does it mean for the preacher’s understanding of his or her role?

The preacher has been chosen, called by God, to the service of God’s Word. The preacher has not been called to exhibit his or her personal opinions or personal experiences or personal beliefs or personal philosophy. The preacher is least of all called to be “spiritual” in the common understanding of the word. “Spirituality” suggests some kind of human capacity that needs to be developed from our end. But the Spirit is not like that. The Spirit, as Annie Dillard would say, knocks around, knocks people’s hats off, so you have to wear a helmet. The Spirit blows where it wills. And we can’t make the Spirit work the way we think we can by being more spiritual.

So my emphasis throughout my theologically aware life is that preaching means always being aware of, attuned to, and waiting for God to move. God is the active agent. It is not the preacher whose experiences are important. It is what God might be saying through the preacher. And saying this takes a certain amount of audacity, because our entire culture focuses on self-sufficiency, self-development, self-finding, and self-making.

All photographs by Kati Q. Gaschler. Used by permission.

James F. Kay, who taught homiletics for many years at Princeton Seminary, tells a story about a class in which the students were doing practice preaching. There was a student from a Bible-belt evangelical background who was very confident about the superiority of his background and his biblical orientation. But at the end of his sermon, Professor Kay said in exasperation, “Do you realize that God was not the subject of a single sentence in your sermon?” This Bible-believing, self-confident young preacher did not understand that if God is not the subject of the key sentences in the sermon, then it’s not the Word of God.

The preacher is just this humble servant of the Trinity. And great, great things will pass through you by the power of the Spirit. There’s nothing else like it. It happens Sunday after Sunday after Sunday. And notice this: the sermon may not speak to more than one person or two in the congregation. It is up to the Spirit to speak to the people whom the Spirit chooses to have hear. But if God is speaking to one or two or three people in the congregation, that’s all that counts. That’s all you need to know. And you may not even know. The Spirit knows.

How does this play out in sermon preparation and delivery?

The preacher should begin with exegesis. That was emphasized by my homiletics professor, Edmund Steimle. Before I would write a word, I would spend hours doing exegesis with modern textual commentaries, but I always ended up with Calvin and Barth. Karl Barth is the theologian who is, I think, still the most dependable and focused on the power of the Word. For me, it’s key to think in the Reformed – and patristic – way about God’s active presence in the scriptures. As you do the exegesis, you are listening to the scripture in front of you. God is speaking in this word. What does he intend for me to say tomorrow or this coming weekend? What is God saying through this passage?

This is called expository preaching. I don’t hear very many sermons like that nowadays. Most preachers seem to be throwing together their own ideas. I think that sounds harsh, and I don’t mean to sound harsh. I just mean to sound extremely disappointed. I’m disappointed that it is apparently not being taught that the preacher’s responsibility is to let God speak, not to string anecdotes together or try to draw upon their own “spiritual” insights.

One time I was going to preach at the Duke University Chapel. I was staying at the little hotel where I always stayed in Durham. The night before, I had to get something fixed in my room, and a member of the staff – a middle-aged black man – came up to fix it. I must have mentioned that I was going to preach at the Duke Chapel. And he said, “May the Lord give you the strength to deliver the message.” This person I’d never seen before and would never see again immediately recognized that I – this white woman, totally unknown to him – was a messenger and that I needed to be given the strength to be the messenger. And that has stayed with me all these years, that he understood that I was bringing a message: “Look, this is a message from the Lord, not from me, but from the Lord. I have brought you a message from the living Lord Jesus Christ. I’m the runner who’s going to drop dead at the end, but I’ve got this message.”

This kind of urgency doesn’t require a raised voice. It doesn’t require shouting. It doesn’t require gestures. Some speakers gesture, but I never do. The energy is not coming from my energetic gestures or my ability to act out something. If it’s a scriptural message, it’s coming to you from the Holy Spirit. The preacher also should not show unnecessary emotion, in my opinion, because it’s not about the preacher’s emotion. It distracts. If the preacher gets too emotional, people start worrying about the preacher and not thinking about what the preacher is saying. That’s the point: try to serve the Word by disappearing yourself.

What grounds preachers and enables them to keep sharing this message day in and day out?

Knowing the Lord is what it’s all about. If any preacher knows the Lord, then the Lord will make himself known through that preacher. When we preach, we should be saying, “Let me tell you about what this person said. I want to tell you what the Master did.” My grandmother called Jesus “the Master.” She was a Southern Baptist. And I still think it would be wonderful if we went around talking to each other as Christians about the Master. It made a tremendous impression on me as a very young child. She would talk about the Master as if he was coming in the door any minute. “The Master said this,” or, “The Master helps us to do that.” My grandmother died when I was about eight, but she was perhaps the key figure for me because she knew the living Lord and she talked about him as a person whom she knew.

That’s what the preacher is chosen to be doing, to say, “Let me tell you some more about the Master. I want to tell you another story. Let me tell you some more about what he has done and what he is doing and what he will do and how he loves you and how he wants you to be one of his friends and how he will never leave you and he will be at your side in your troubles and he will lift you up.” It’s a story in which Jesus is the subject, the one doing all the acting.

What does it look like to preach about politics in the present political moment in a way that is faithful and God-centered?

I’m really very sorry that I’m not younger and able to preach now, because I think that these are times of almost unique crisis in America. And for preachers to avoid even mentioning it – this idea that you should just preach the gospel as if there was nothing happening – I just don’t agree with this.

I think there’s a way to mention it elliptically. You can preach to a congregation that’s politically divided if you give illustrations. You can use illustrations from life that make the point, without saying, “You should think this” and “You should do that.” Never do that. Never tell people what they should be doing. Just illustrate it. If it’s something that you know from your own town or your own city, that’s even better. Choose something recognizable, something that people might identify with, because most people are intimidated by hearing stories of heroic resistance. That’s the only way I think you can do it without driving half the congregation out of the door. You can give an illustration of somebody behaving in a godly way. I did have somebody walk out on me a couple of times, but only a couple.

However, while people might be intimidated by stories of heroic resistance, if the Holy Spirit is leading you out, you can do anything. This was key to the civil rights movement, which I think was the human movement in history where God was most obviously acting. I think often of this story, told by Andrew Young in An Easy Burden (1996), about a protest in which this group of dignified, beautifully dressed, stoically prepared – no, not stoically prepared, Spirit-prepared – black demonstrators came up to an array of police standing in a phalanx. And then for some unknown reason, the police moved back and let them come through. And this old black woman shouted, “Great God Almighty done parted the Red Sea one more time.”

What has the idea of the supernatural, or transcendence, meant for your preaching and life of faith?

I think that “a sense of transcendence” is a better way of talking about this subject than “supernatural.” I most emphatically do not believe in ghosts and I do not believe in the kinds of experiences that seem to get people all excited about something they’ve seen or heard. I see it in terms of intimations of the reality of God, the sense of the supernatural conveyed in the King Arthur stories, all the classic fairy tales, George MacDonald, and so on. That’s what Tolkien saw and wanted to convey. He never mentions God, famously, in The Lord of the Rings. But God is always there in the story. So in that sense, I very much believe in transcendence.

As a child, I read the original Mary Poppins books over and over. If you read the books, you understand there’s something there – talk about transcendence! – layers of suggestion of another dimension where there is a kind of supreme humanity, civility, humanity fulfilled, a wisdom that exists and it comes from somewhere else and is not just cooked up by our imaginations. So in that sense, the Mary Poppins books, I think, teach a kind of transcendence, which I think has nothing to do with “supernatural” in the sense of the paranormal. There is a realm of wisdom, somewhere, that sends messengers to us.

There’s a lot more to be said about the supernatural. I was greatly impressed by picking up the original 1897 Dracula book on a whim and reading it and being completely bowled over. I’d had no idea that it was a literary work. I think the idea that there is evil out there, done in such a sophisticated way, is very important too, along with what we were calling “transcendence.” Indeed, Satan is a sort of transcendent figure. He appears out of God only knows where. I’ve worked on this question of Satan and the origin of evil very seriously for many years. It’s all in my chapter on evil in The Crucifixion(2015). That’s the most original chapter, and I think of it as my very best work. It is the fruit of a lifetime of discovery, because I started worrying about evil when I was about sixteen. I came across the idea that God did not create evil, that in the Genesis narrative the serpent simply appears in the garden. Where did the serpent come from? We do not know, but I think the question has to be posed. That’s another reason that we have to be able to think of a realm that we don’t understand, and we have to admit that we don’t understand it in order to be able to do battle against it effectively. Well, we’re not effective. God is effective.

Before we wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share?

May I take a minute to talk about my professorship? Before my husband began to develop Alzheimer’s, he encouraged me to implement an idea of endowing a Fleming Rutledge Professorship of Biblical Theology at Wycliffe College, Toronto School of Theology. The goal of this professorship is to find and hire the best of the best from the worldwide pool of biblical theologians who are rooted in the doctrine of the Word of God – people who have PhDs in systematic theology but think biblically. I had two or three of those kinds of professors when I was at Union and they made all the difference. That’s the tradition that I would like to try to enable Wycliffe to perpetuate.

This interview was conducted by Plough contributor Benjamin Crosby on March 10, 2025, and has been edited for concision and clarity.