Lanterns at Dusk

Proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favourable or unfavourable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching.
(1 Timothy 4:2, NRSV)

From the very beginning, preaching has been central to the church's understanding of its life and ministry. Paul's encouragement to Timothy reflects a confidence in the message and its communication that many in today's world and church find troubling. Does the ministry of preaching have a future and, if so, how must it change if it is to be effective in the formation of the lives of contemporary disciples of Jesus?

Bruce Barber's mind was formed in the context of the tumultuous and contested theological movements of the later half of the twentieth century, wherein the modern Western paradigm has increasingly shown itself to be anachronistic, not least with regard to the sermon. At the same time, the book is an outcome of a working life spent endeavouring to bridge the gulf between the disciplines of systematic and practical theology, especially in the implications both have for preaching.

It is not a book on the subject of homiletics, as that enterprise has conventionally been understood. That is, it is not a manual attempting to teach how to preach. Rather, the sermons included are intended to illustrate the conclusions that have been argued for in the early sections. These opening chapters offer an interpretation of the significant shifts that systematic theology has had to engage within Western culture, culminating in the contemporary legacy of rising atheism in popular culture, and the increasingly widespread disillusionment with religion. The title plays on Friedrich Nietzsche's Parable of the Madman in his doomed search for God, which is used as the lens for viewing the present situation in Western culture, not least in Australia. Barber draws out the implications of this parable for the task of preaching in the third millennium.


Bruce Barber is a retired Uniting Church minister. He was educated in Melbourne, completing Arts and Divinity degrees, followed by post-graduate study in Europe and the United States of America from 1963 to 1965. After two years of parish ministry, he spent his remaining working life engaged in theological education, first in Perth, Western Australia, and later in Melbourne where for more than twenty years he was Dean of the United Faculty of Theology. In both places, he taught in the fields of systematic theology and homiletic.