Peter Gomes came to Harvard in 1970, and in 1974, the year I got there he had just been named preacher to the University, serving Sunday by Sunday in Memorial Chapel. I was a student in the BTI, the Boston Theological Institute which allowed me to take courses at Gordon-Conwell and at Harvard, which I indeed did. But as a Methodist who got a job at South Hamilton UMC, alas I was on the North Shore on Sunday mornings and never got to hear this American Baptist rhetorical master, both eloquent and erudite African American native of Plymouth Massachusetts. More’s the pity. My college roommate however heard him with some regularity, and the reports were impressive. Furthermore, he was visiting professor at both of my alma maters in North Carolina— UNC and Duke. And as it turns out, he had the same editor at Harper that I had– Roger Freet. So now, closing in on 50 years later, I’m finally finding time to read some of his books, the first of which is in fact the last of which he wrote before he died in 2011, and you can see the title above. It is very readable, sometimes moving in its eloquence, and leaves you thinking for its 270 some pages.
The book is not as well known as his NY Times bestseller The Good Book, and like many books by preachers it has some great paragraphs and stories, but it is not really a continuous flowing argument or presentation. The first third, under the heading of the Trouble with Scripture and the second the Gospel and Conventional Wisdom, are the best portions of the book. After that, Gomes rides some of his favorite hobby horses and laments about the church and its parochial character. But those first two portions are worth the price of admission, as they challenge a lot of our own rather flawed assumptions about the church and the faith, in good ways.
Here is a sermon he preached in Duke Chapel only a year before he died…..
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