Read more of Kim Lawton's interview about Gardner Taylor with Duke Divinity School professor of preaching Richard Lischer:

Q: Looking at the American religious scene, how significant has Gardner Taylor been?

A: He's very significant, because he almost single-handedly has elevated and made visible great preaching in America at a time when preaching in general was seen as a lost art. He has managed to bring eloquence -- which is the usual word people think of when they think of Gardner C. Taylor -- into the public arena. He was a parish pastor for many years in Brooklyn in Concord Baptist Church [and] a tremendous influence not only in the black church on great black preachers such as Martin Luther King, but also he is one of the first whose influence crossed over into the realm of white homiletics and white preaching.

Q: What is it about his preaching that elevates it to the level of great preaching?

A: This is an age when information is the key thing, and eloquence is often forgotten. In the computer and television milieu that we live in, we go for sound bites and clipped, brief, dumbed-down sorts of expressions. And along comes someone like Gardner Taylor and [he] says, "The Bible isn't written that way," and what makes a preacher a great preacher is one who can "voice" the Bible. The Bible has a whole literary and emotional range to it, from blessings to laments to praise to prophetic denunciation, so a preacher has to have not only a physical voice, but a theological voice that enables him to let the Scripture speak. If you're not letting the Scripture speak as a preacher, you're going to be a dry well pretty soon. Gardner Taylor, first and foremost, is a biblical preacher.

Q: What about the sound of his voice and how he delivers his message?

A: The sound of his voice is inimitable. Generations of African-American preachers and now white preachers have tried to imitate what he does. He has a beautiful high baritone voice, like an organ, which he knows how to use, knows how to play without ever going overboard, without ever going too far. He has the full range at his disposal of the preacher's rhetorical techniques, whether it's alliteration or antithesis or parallelism. He is a person who brings his message to an incredible climax, a peroration, pulls out all the stops at the end, but without ever giving way to posturing, histrionics. He manages to keep an enormous range of rhetorical skill under tight, disciplined control, so that when you're listening to a Gardner Taylor sermon, you feel like something is about to break out or explode, and the preacher is just managing to hold it together, to help you see something glorious. His use of language parallels the Bible's use of language. There are these soaring denunciations and soaring expressions of hope to be found from Genesis to Revelation. Gardner Taylor's style and voice are capable of giving voice to those.

Q: What about the intellectual along with the theological underpinnings that are also there? How do those work together?

A: In addition to being a scholar of the Bible, Gardner Taylor is a student of preaching. He has read an incredible number of treatises on preaching and [he] studies the great preachers. When he says the great preachers he usually means the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century preachers who speak in cadences that were perhaps more at home in the Victorian world than our own. But he mixes into that love of language the wonderful quotations from Langston Hughes and African-American poets and then adds his own knowledge of politics and what's going on in Brooklyn, his own borough. I think that's a very important thing to say about Gardner Taylor, as Tip O'Neill said: "All politics is local." All prophesy is local, too, and a preacher really has to understand that, as Taylor did. He is not one -- and this is perhaps why he is not as well-known as some other African-American preachers and other white preachers, for that matter -- he doesn't simply make pronouncements on the state of the world or on geopolitics or on domestic politics, but he begins where he lives. He talks about crime and injustice and terrible conditions in his own borough, on his own street, and moves out from that local vision, as any great biblical prophet would have done, to look at the larger, more apocalyptic picture. The prophet is always seeing something that the rest of us don't quite see. He's just glimpsing something that we are only feeling after. The prophet was called a seer, and it's no accident that the prophet is called a seer, because he is speaking and seeing from a privileged position that God has given him. We saw this perhaps most dramatically in our nation's history when Martin Luther King stood up in front of a quarter-million people and said, "I have a dream." He was seeing something about America that in 1963 most Americans couldn't see.

Q: What role did he play in the civil rights movement?

A: Gardner C. Taylor played a role I would characterize as a background but highly influential role in the civil rights movement. He not only raised a lot of money in and around New York City, as did other African-American leaders and pastors in northern cities, but he was a moral influence and a role model as what a great pastor and preacher ought to be for a whole host of leaders in the civil rights movement, most of whom were reverends themselves. Gardner Taylor was not willing to leave his congregation and to strike out as an operative, as it were, but he was an immense influence in the movement. He struck a balance between the prophetic voice that speaks to injustice across America and the pastoral voice that understands personal issues, problems within one's own congregation.

Q: How did he influence Martin Luther King Jr.'s preaching?

A: His influence is very clear, but difficult to trace. It's hard to find a smoking gun. You don't find too many actual phrases in Martin Luther King that are taken from Gardner C. Taylor the way you might from Benjamin Mays, who was the president of Morehouse College, and other preachers and homileticians. I do believe Gardner Taylor was a role model for the very highest and most elevated view of preaching that was available to King's generation and to ours. [Taylor was] a serious scholar of the Bible, a student of the Bible who insists on a message drawn from Scripture, and one that is delivered with the utmost power and authority. He has his purple passages, the way King did. He has all the rhetorical techniques, and King, too, was a master of alliteration and balance and antithesis, beautiful phrasing, and certainly the emotional peroration, which is marked by repetition and a growing sense of power. Both men, of course, had the ability to draw the congregation into them, so that the congregation would then feed them with its response and then create further power. In both cases of King and Taylor, they did not posture in the pulpit. Some preachers have a way of asking for a response, asking for it. King never did, and neither does Taylor. They're simply themselves, at the best of the preaching tradition.

Q: And that calls forth, then, the response.

A: Yes. The congregation can't help itself. The congregation is going to speak back, talk back to the preacher, even if the preacher doesn't ask for it. Gardner Taylor can read a text, as I heard him once do from the Gospel of Luke, where he mentions some place names in Judea -- Trachonitis -- and the congregation was already, when he said the word Trachonitis, amening and saying "yes, sir." It's a form of authority, and it also is a form of partnership with the congregation that you don't generally see in the white Protestant church. The event of communication becomes the achievement of the group, and that sounds like a facile way of putting it when you have a great speaker like a King or a Taylor, but it fact one can hear tapes, at least of King, speaking before an all-white audience, and if you walked out of the building, you'd say nothing was happening. But an African-American congregation will make something happen. There is a symbiosis there that works its way out rhetorically and theologically. Taylor touches on the great themes of humanity and biblical religion the way King did as well. He talks about the importance of being somebody, and that is rooted in Christianity's doctrine of the image of God. Everybody is somebody, no matter how poor, no matter how oppressed, because God made you. He talks about the passion of suffering, and he roots that passion in the suffering of Jesus on the cross, and he puts you beneath the cross. He has a wonderful sermon in which he does a riff on soldiers of the cross. It's about Jesus dying on the cross, but soon you see these old black storekeepers and workers in the fields walking from the cross, and Taylor has identified them as soldiers of the cross. It's very moving, the way he brings the biblical picture and the biblical world into the real world of today. He also, along with King, spoke most notably about redemption and deliverance, and this is a theme that's rooted in the Old Testament version of the Exodus.