Fr. Finigan at Hermeneutic of Continuity posted this video a couple of days ago. I’d never seen it before. It’s an excerpt from a famous sermon by Dr. S. M. Lockridge about Jesus as King.
Although Dr. Lockridge was black, and it’s rare to find a black Fundamentalist preacher in the groups I came of age in (not that they don’t exist of course – they certainly do, but they have historically kept to themselves in the South, and it’s rather a shame), his style of preaching is exactly what I have heard a hundred thousand times from pulpits at the fundamentalist college I attended and countless back-country churches.
It’s a funny thing, but 10 years ago I would have probably never imagined myself saying this. I miss this kind of preaching dearly. It’s very much a style of speaking that is particular to my people, and I don’t just mean the accent. It’s poetic, musical, and so very powerful. I miss these guys a lot. Whatever their estrangement from the One True Church, and whatever else we may say about them in terms of their doctrinal peculiarities, it was preachers like these who could once bring a tent revival full of some pretty unsavory characters to their knees in tears and get them right with God.
What a unstoppable force men like these would be as priests.
