Doctrine and Life: George Herbert and the Augustinian Rhetoric of Example

Abstract

When at the beginning of his poem "The Windows" George Herbert asks, "Lord, how can man preach thy eternali word?" he is really posing two questions at once.1 The first, metaphysical, question is the more readily recognizable. Placing the emphasis on "man," it confronts a fundamental tension in Reformation thought and locates it in the context of the ministerial vocation, where the strain shows most clearly and affects Herbert most deeply. Luther's doctrine of justification by faith calls into question the value of all human work from a divine perspective, but the dilemma is especially pointed with respect to preachers: given the increased emphasis on human depravity, how could they presume to give voice to divine truths? The question thus posed is a central one, stimulating among other things a whole new theology of vocation and eliciting different responses along the entire spectrum of Reformation writing. What keeps it from being merely rhetorical, especially as it concerns preachers, is an equally firm insistence on the doctrine of the Word. If Luther's concept of justification seems on the one hand to disqualify human speech as an agency of divine truth, his emphasis on the Word on the other hand empowers the preacher, making the pulpit much more central in Protestantism than it had been in the medieval church; and by privileging the spoken and written word, mechanically reproduced, the doctrine carries the practical advantage of facilitating the rapid and persuasive dissemination of his ideas. In the light of these conflicting pressures, ministers are forced to re-examine the nature and function of their vocation and the status of its