Barnabas and Boanerges: Archetypes of Eighteenth-Century Preaching

JAMES DOWNEY Barnabas and Boanerges: Archetypes of Eighteenth-Century Preaching Like nearly everything else, preaching has its categories. There's social preaching and ethical preaching, evangelical, expository, apologetic polemical, devotional, doctrinal, and so on. But when we look beyond scholarly taxonomies to irreducible essences, we discover that there are two - and only two - prototypical preachers. One is casual in demeanour, cheerful in temperament, and exhortative in style. He is Barnabas, 'son of consolation.' The other is direct, exuberant, vituperative. He is Boanerges , 'son of thunder.' As archetypes these figures go back well beyond Christianity. For Christian preaching, however, their origins may be seen in the somewhat schizophrenic personality of jesus Christ as he is represented in the Gospels. There are, as every Sunday-school child knows, two jesuses. There is 'gentle jesus, meek and mild: Prince of peace, lover of concord. This jesus dispenses beatitudes which announce that the meek will inherit the earth and that only the pure in heart can see God. He quietly reassures his disciples of his abiding presence and his gift of peace; he insists that the little children be brought to him and celebrates their innocence; he permits himself to be led as a lamb to the slaughter - in silence, without protest. This is Barnabas-jesus, Lord of 'mercy, pity, peace, and love.' But there is, as Blake never tired of proclaiming, another jesus: a fiery, impatient revolutionary who came 'not to bring peace buta sword'; ajesus who eschewed sentiment ('let the dead bury their dead'), and divided the world sharply into those who were for him and those who were against; an impulsive jesus who verbally attacked the established religious leaders of his day and physically attacked money-changers in the Temple; an impatient, seemingly spiteful jesus who used his divine powers to wither a fig tree because it wasn't bearing fruit when he happened by; a portentously prophetic jesus pronouncing doom upon a 'generation of vipers' who had not heeded his call. This is Boanerges-jesus: in Blakean terms, this is Los, son of Orc. The allusions to Blake are unavoidable. Barnabas and Boanerges are but another typology for the binary fission of human psychology which Blake characterizes as the 'two contrary states of the human soul.' 'Gentlejesus, meek and mild' is the central figure in the world of Innocence - the UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 51, NUMBER I, FALL 1981 0042-0247/8111000-0036-0046$01.5010 © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PREACHING 37 comforter oflittle lost girls, chimney sweeps, and charity school children. But the God who made the lamb also made the tiger. The jesus of Experience is a Boanerges: an angry radical who denounces social injustice, spiritual phariseeism, and sexual repression. Blake is in no doubt as to which jesus is more needful to his age. 'Gentle jesus, meek and mild' has become the 'yea, nay, creeping jesus,' the all too obedient offspring of old 'Nobodaddy.' Only a true Boanerges can effect the awakening, social and spiritual, that is long overdue. Because of the extremeness of his rhetoric Blake has often been seen as a proleptic figure: the culmination of Romanticism rather than its semination . Be that as it may, his preference for the Sons of Thunder was consonant with the general homiletic taste of his age. The reaction against a reasonable, comfortable, Barnabas-style Christianity (the sort Blake rejected as effete and bloodless) had already set in with the Wesleys, Whitefield, Edwards, and a host of less well-known 'evangelicals' a generation earlier. Before turning to these Sons of Thunder and their triumphant assault on Latitudinarianism, I should like briefly to set the stage for the dramatic rise of Evangelicalism in eighteenth-century England. By the last quarter of the seventeenth century the English Church, still only a century and a half old, had enjoyed, or endured, its share of outstanding preachers. It had heard the inspired vituperation of Latimer, the intellectualized passion of Donne, the elegant meditations of Taylor, and the caustic wit of South. But not until john Tillotson did it know a uniquely English Barnabas, a true son of consolation and of the new liberal theology. His voice is deep, modulated, reassuring...