Lay Preaching and Living Saints

Chapter 3 explores the hesitant and outright critical responses to new forms of sainthood that developed within and beyond England at the close of the twelfth century and into the thirteenth. This chapter situates orthodox hostility toward these “new saints” in relation both to the gift of prophecy, to which many charismatics aspired, and to debates about preaching. At this chapter’s centre is an Anglo-Latin rule for anchorites, the Regula reclusorum (c.1280), which is examined alongside several twelfth- and thirteenth-century figurations of preachers and prophets. Here a discourse directed against allegedly “false” prophets and preachers owes much to the collaboration between the charismatic voices that emerged through lay-anchoritic communities and the forms of sanctity that were quickly gaining ascendancy in the thirteenth century. Contemporary anchorites often summoned the demonic nightmare of orthodox culture by replicating and thereby obviating clerical work, as well as by encouraging lay preaching.

Sermons and Preaching

Preaching has always been central to the dissenting Protestant tradition. The fact that sermons were a crucial means of mass communication ensured that ‘hotter Protestants’ would be locked in a perpetual struggle with the ecclesiastical and political authorities for possession of parish pulpits and town lectureships. This chapter explores the means by which dissenting preachers were trained and deployed, and how they managed to deliver their message to a wider audience in the face of often intense official harassment and censorship. Calvinist preaching was always intended to inspire congregations to act as well as listen; a fact which explains both the anxieties of the political authorities regarding public discussion of theological and political matters, and the alarm (even among Puritan clergy) at the growth of unregulated lay preaching. This chapter therefore not only surveys how nonconformist preaching developed during this period, but also how it helped fragment the dissenting movement.

Methodists

While the Wesleys themselves might have been sceptical about the connections between Methodists and Dissenters, there were several ways in which their stories were interlinked. John Wesley’s parents had both been brought up within the Dissenting fold and reading seventeenth-century puritan authors, as well as Pietists, was central to Wesley’s theological development. Many Methodists formally separated from the Church of England after Wesley’s death but their earlier habits of lay preaching and separate societies, alongside an extensive publication programme, meant that there was already a sense of Methodist self-consciousness and identity long before that. While Wesley and many of his followers did not share the Calvinism characteristic of other branches of Dissent, George Whitefield and his Calvinistic Methodist followers did. Moreover, as the political climate changed in the second half of the eighteenth century, field preaching became more suspect and Methodists were increasingly lumped, by their detractors at least, with other Dissenters.

Uprawnienie duchownych do przepowiadania Słowa Bożego w świetle Kodeksu Prawa Kanonicznego z 1983 r.

Ministers help people to recognize Christ’s face. One of the many ways to do it is preaching the Word of God. This article analyzes preaching functions of ministers in the actual canon law. Bishops are responsible for the ministry of the divine word. They can preach on the whole world. In a particular church they are moderators of the preaching. Presbyters and deacons help in this function. In the actual canon law they can preach because their ordinations. This is a change with the previous law. Faculty of the preaching could be restricted by a com petent ordinary or particular law, and it is used with a presum ed consent of the rector of the church. Some theological and canonical problems in preaching are with the expression „in persona Christi”. Ministers preach „in persona Christi”, especially during the Holy Mass. This fact eliminates lay preaching in the Eucharistic, but it needs some more searching.