EXPERIENTIAL PREACHING AS OPPOSED TO LETTER PREACHING (SANTAMARIA)

Let’s put them face-to-face, the way the old Baptists themselves loved to do — the living voice of experimental preaching against the barren drone of dead-letter preaching.

Dead-letter preaching

• Definition: A bare recital of Scripture stories, doctrines, or morals, without the Spirit’s life.

• Effect: It informs the head but never reaches the heart. The hearer may nod in agreement, but he does not feel pierced, comforted, or drawn to Christ.

• Style: Often polished, orderly, and respectable. The sermon sounds like a lecture or essay, more fit for a classroom than a church.

• Outcome: People remember the preacher, his wit, his eloquence — but not Christ.

Beebe once quipped that such men “preach the shell, not the kernel.” Trott warned that repeating Bible events without spiritual application is like “a lifeless body: it has shape but no breath.”

Experimental preaching

• Definition: Truth spoken by one who has tasted it, accompanied by the Spirit’s unction.

• Effect: It convicts, consoles, and points to Christ. The hearer feels exposed, then healed; hungry, then fed.

• Style: Not always smooth, sometimes halting — but heavy with reality. The sermon sounds less like an essay and more like testimony: “This I have felt; this Christ has done.”

• Outcome: People forget the preacher but remember Christ. They say, “The word found me.”

Dudley said such preaching “carries the savor of Christ’s own presence.” Bartley said, “It interprets the believer’s inward travel.”

The contrast in one sentence:

• Dead-letter preaching is truth on paper read aloud;

• Experimental preaching is truth on fire pressed into the soul.

The Old School men were sharp on this point, and they left behind vivid statements about experimental (or “experiential”) preaching. Here are a few voices in their own idiom:

Elder Gilbert Beebe (Signs of the Times, 1830s–40s):
Beebe wrote that true preaching is not simply “a rehearsal of Bible history,” but must be felt in the preacher’s own soul:

“If the minister has not been experimentally led into the truths he declares, he can only speak as a parrot. But when the word has burned in his own heart, it comes forth with power, for the Spirit applies it through him to the hearts of others.”

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Elder Samuel Trott (Black Rock era, 1830s):
Trott described the danger of cold sermonizing:

“The letter of truth, without the life of it, is but as sounding brass. Our people do not need to be told again and again what the Scriptures say, but to have the word opened to their condition, so that the hungry may taste, the faint be strengthened, and the poor rejoice.”

Elder Thomas P. Dudley (mid-19th century):
Dudley said:

“The true preacher brings not only the doctrine, but the experience of it. He speaks of sin as one who has groaned under it, and of grace as one who has tasted it. Thus Christ is not presented in theory, but in living power.”

Elder David Bartley (later 19th century):
Bartley reflected:

“A sermon is barren when it does not touch the conscience. But when the preacher has himself been in the valley and upon the mount, his words come with savor. Then the saints feel that their own inward travel is interpreted, and that Christ Himself is speaking by the Spirit.”

The Black Rock Address (1832):
Even in the famous declaration, the ministers insisted that true gospel preaching is not a moral lecture or dry history:

“The gospel is not a system of moral lessons… it is the testimony of God, revealed by His Spirit and felt in the heart. Without this, all preaching is vain.”

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So in their own words, experimental preaching meant two things together:

1. The preacher must have experienced the truth personally — conviction, comfort, deliverance.

2. The Spirit must apply that same truth through his words to the hearer’s heart.

That is why they would often say: “Preaching is not man teaching man, but Christ teaching through man.”