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ABSTRACT
Campbell Morgan was born on December 9, 1863 in Tetbury, Gloucester. After early schooling at home, he graduated from the Douglas Collegiate School for Young Gentlemen in 1881. Morgan initially entered the teaching profession, first as a junior teacher in the Islington Wesley Day School and then as Assistant Master of the Jewish Collegiate School for Boys (bath in Birmingham). He presented himself to the Wesleyan Methodist church for ordination in 1888 but was rejected. That same year he married Nancy Morgan and accepted a pastorate with the Congregational church at Stone in Staffordshire. Ministries at Rugeley, Birmingham (Westminster Road), and London (New Court Chapel) followed. After a brief term with Moody's Northfield work in America, Morgan accepted his first call to ministry with the Westminster Chapel. The first ministry lasted 13 years. After a lengthy itinerate ministry in the United States and Canada, Morgan returned for a second ministry at Westminster after which he retired.
he prevailing world views of Morgan's day were naturalism and existentialism (the end results of earlier deism). Both world views manifested themselves in theology and hermeneutics. Naturalism manifested itself in the classical liberalism of the Tubingen school and in the Social Gospel. Existentialism manifested itself in neo-orthodoxy and demythologization. Morgan himself went through a period of doubt before entering the ministry but became a fundamentalist and a dispensational premillenialist.
he secret to Morgan's success as an expository preacher was intense, first hand, systematic Bible study including work with the original languages. He practiced historical-grammatical exegesis. He also employed the "hyperliteral" method of interpretation of dispensational hermeneutics which has weaknesses. His major source of material is the Bible. other sources include literature, poetry, music, history, science, nature and personal experiences.
organ was primarily a "textual" preacher whose sermons tended to be of a didactic nature. Frequent themes in his preaching are God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Church, the Christian life and salvation. Though he was a dispensationalist, such views receive a low profile in his preaching. He did not tend to preach on current events or social issues frequently. He also avoided apologetic sermons, preferring to practice an "apologetic by interpretation” There are weaknesses in his approach to apologetics as well as to hermeneutics.
organ's homiletical theory is summarized in his book Preaching. He defined preaching as "the declaration of the grace of God to human need on the authority of the throne of God." He held Truth, Clarity and Passion to be the essentials of sermonizing. Five particular sermon strategies surface regularly in the Westminster Pulpit: 1) the "plain style" sermon, 2) the antithetical or "problem-solution" sermon, 3) partitioning the text, 4) the classification or "key word" sermon and 5) the climactic arrangement of points (or "ladder" sermon). His support, strategies included sub-headings, illustrations, statements of definition, restatement and repetition, comparisons and contrasts, description and narration, quotes, examples and specific instances, and internal summaries.
he short range significance of Morgan's preaching can be seen in the size of attendances at services and meetings where he preached, the response to his published sermons, invitations to preach and lecture, and evaluations of his contemporaries. The lasting contributions of his work can be seen in the continued impact of his books and the references to his preaching in homiletics textbooks. However, the "apologetic by interpretation" practiced by Morgan and others did not defend Scripture against the attacks of science, naturalistic humanism, Biblical criticism, secularism and pluralism.
here are some important lessons for preachers to learn from this study. They should avoid preaching Morgan's sermons because of possible hermeneutical fallacies, because the intricacy of their development is hard to follow for an audience which has become passive as a result of the media revolution, and because prevailing world views in the secular world demand apologetic address. Morgan's books must be read critically, but when so read are valuable tools because of his quality work with the text. Above all we learn of the importance of preaching the Bible for the church.
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