Abstract
Literary criticism evolved slowly in southern Africa. One of the first commentators to write about this topic was the Unitarian minister, Ramsden Balmforth (1861-1941), a native of Yorkshire and Unitarian minister who emigrated to Cape Town in 1897. Eschewing conventional homiletics in its various forms, in dozens of instances he illustrated ethical and spiritual points in his Sunday sermons or ‘discourses’ by discussing their manifestation in literary works. Crucially, these texts did not merely yield illustrations of Biblical themes, but themselves served as the primary written vehicles of moral and ethical principles, and the Bible was rarely mentioned in them. Balmforth’s orations about novels were published in 1912. The following year he preached about selected operas by Richard Wagner, and in the 1920s Balmforth issued two additional series of discourses focusing on dramas. In all of these commentaries he consistently emphasised thematic content rather than narrative and other literary techniques. He extracted lessons which he related to his ethically orientated version of post-orthodox religious faith.
Highlights
The phenomenon of preaching has hardly been an unexplored topic in the history of Christianity
One of the many overlooked dimensions of this sub-topic is how Ramsden Balmforth, who served as the sagacious minister of the Free Protestant or Unitarian church in Cape Town from 1897 until 1937, perennially used various genres of modern literature in a series of sermons to impart his liberal understanding of Christianity to his cultivated and largely, though by no means exclusively, white audiences in Hout Street, whose ethnic composition was said to have been relatively diverse (Phillips 1927)
Much of the general history of Unitarianism in South Africa remains unwritten, the present writer has described the origins of the Free Protestant Church, which David P
Summary
The phenomenon of preaching has hardly been an unexplored topic in the history of Christianity. A crucial difference is that, for Balmforth, the novels became the vehicles of truth – not merely latter-day illustrations of Biblical truths http://www.indieskriflig.org.za sympathy for any kind of Christianity.
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