Smith delivers 8th annual Dockery Lectures

Famous preachers Charles Spurgeon and Helmut Thielicke each “had a highway to Jesus in their sermons,” Robert Smith Jr. said at Union University March 25.

“Christ was not located in the circumference but rather in the center of their ministry,” Smith said.

Smith, professor of Christian preaching at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama, was the featured speaker for the eighth annual David and Lanese Dockery Lectures on Baptist Thought and Heritage. Named for former Union President David S. Dockery and First Lady Lanese Dockery, the series is annual event designed to examine the importance of the Baptist heritage, the distinctives of Baptist thought and the influence of the Christian intellectual tradition.

Smith examined the influence of Spurgeon, the famous 19th century English preacher, on Thielicke, the 20th century German theologian.

“Spurgeon influences Thielicke, and they’re cut out of the same cloth, because they see the centrality of Christ, the necessity, the indispensability of Christ as the savior of the world,” Smith said.

Both Spurgeon and Thielicke recognized that the entire Bible is ultimately a story about Jesus, Smith said. They both shared a love for the people they preached to, and they understood the needs of people living in a godless world while pointing them to Christ.

“Jesus is not simply the word that he speaks from God,” Smith said. “He is the word himself.”