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The Sermon on the Mount through the Centuries: From the Early Church to John Paul II
Believers around the world and throughout time have relied on their knowledge of the Lord's Prayer, the Beatitudes, and the Golden Rule. The Sermon on the Mount through the Centuries offers illuminating insights into our identity in Christ as it is found in his most famous words. These enlightening essays will heighten the reader's relationship with Christ and make the founders of the faith wholly accessible today. Contributors include Stanley Hauerwas, David Lyle Jeffrey, Margaret M. Mitchell, Mark A. Noll, and Robert L. Wilken.
289 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 1, 2007
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38 people want to read
About the author
Jeffrey P. Greenman
14 books4 followersJeffrey P. Greenman (Ph.D., University of Virginia) is associate dean of biblical and theological studies and professor of Christian ethics at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. He is a coauthor with George Sumner of Unwearied Praises and is coeditor for the books The Sermon on the Mount Through the Centuries, Reading Romans Through the Centuries and Teach Me Your Paths.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 29, 2025
Not super easy to read at all, but some really good stuff that I would reference again if I were teaching the Sermon on the Mount. My favorite chapters were the ones about Bonhoeffer, Spurgeon, and Stott’s interpretations. Also, the most difficult chapter to read was the one about the use of the Sermon on the Mount in The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, but it ended up being super interesting after Lindy helped me understand what it was talking about!
July 11, 2020
Some summary thoughts on each theologian's respective view of Christ's Sermon on the Mount.
Chapter 2: John Chrysostom
1. Chrysostom interprets Jesus sermon as a ‘sermon’, an oral argument made by Christ, rife with rhetorical device and masterfully crafted.
2. Although he views the sermon as a literary unit within the Matthean Gospel, his interpretation is thoroughly canonical, appealing to the apostle Paul for exegetical help at least 50 times throughout his own series of sermons on Christ’s sermon.
3. Chrysostom’s use of the sermon appears to have been largely philosophical, an apologetic for the Christian way of life as foundational to a Christian republic, in an effort to ‘democratize monastic virtues onto the urban laity of Antioch and Constantinople around the turn of the fifth century, in contrast to lesser visions of the ideal politeia (e.g. Plato’s Republic).
Chapter 3: Augustine
1. Augustine views the sermon as unique among the teachings of Christ, as a special unit of higher teaching delivered by Christ—God incarnate—to mature believers, calling them and instructing them towards the highest form of human existence: becoming like God in virtue and godliness.
2. His interpretation of the sermon is heavily theological, consistently abiding by the spirit of the principle, later called Scriptura scripturam interpretat, appealing to numerous places throughout Scripture to interpret Jesus’ words.
3. His use of the sermon seems to be primarily to call Christians to full maturity in the Spirit, to the telos of becoming godly in heart and deed like Christ himself, in addition to the fact that in the corpus of his writings contra Pelagius he also repeatedly used portions of the sermon polemically to argue that humans prior to glorification always fall short of perfection.
Chapter 4: Hugh of St. Victor
1. Hugh appears to super-impose a rubric over the sermon informed more by classical categories of virtue than the either the sermon itself or Matthew’s gospel, a grid he calls the ‘Five x Seven’ rule of interpretation.
2. This interpretive scheme is exemplified in his treatment of the Lord’s Prayer, aligning each of its seven phrases both with a Greco-Roman classical virtue and its corresponding beatitude, a reading that to me appears rather fanciful and arbitrary.
3. Hugh seems also to interpret the sermon with a Christological focus, describing our fallenness, our redemption in Christ, and the active work of the Spirit in our lives bringing forth the virtues described in the beatitudes.
Chapter 5: Dante and Chaucer
1. Dante appears not only to allude to portions of the Sermon on the Mount in his poems, for example, the Purgatorio, but even to structure the poem according to the contours of the Beatitudes, focusing on the ‘beatific vision’ of God achieved by development of personal virtues, especially in the afterlife.
2. In his work, the Tale of Malibee, Chaucer leans upon Matthew 5:9, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” by which he appropriates the sermon as a defense in the wake of his being fired as Clerk of the King’s Works and Wyclif’s losing of his teaching chair at Oxford.
3. So it seems that the primary understanding and use of specifically the Beatitudes in the works of Dante are limited to achieving virtue as a form of redemption in the afterlife, in contrast to Chaucer’s appropriation of the sermon primarily as a means for ‘personal and social action’, as a guidepost in this life and not the afterlife.
Chapter 6: Martin Luther
1. Theologically, Luther approaches the sermon neither as law nor gospel, but as instruction in righteousness for those who have been justified by faith in Christ.
2. In this sense, he departs diametrically from the view (held, for example, by Augustine) that the sermon is intended only for elite (or mature) Christians, for instance, Catholic monks, insisting rather that it is intended for all Christians.
3. Luther’s use of the sermon goes beyond pastoral and into a polemical realm, reading into the sermon his own ongoing conflicts with those in his day whom he deems (following Jesus’ choice of words and analogies) enemies, false prophets, false brethren, and wolves.
Chapter 7: Calvin
1. Fundamentally, Calvin depicts the Sermon on the Mount as a diverse collection of Christ’s teachings gathered and edited by the apostle Matthew.
2. Calvin views the sermon as containing the ‘doctrine of Christ’, relating to a ‘devout and holy life’, which agrees, in his view, perfectly with both the law and the gospel as a means of conforming believers into the image of Christ himself.
3. A key focus of Calvin’s interpretation follows Christ’s pattern of contrasting an outward keeping of God‘s law (including political and national; remember, Geneva was a Reformed city) with what the gospel requires of those who are born again—keeping the law from a pure heart inwardly enflamed with holy affection for God.
Chapter 8: John Wesley
1. The Sermon on the Mount looms large throughout the prolific ministry of Wesley, playing a large role in his theology of Christian perfection(ism).
2. Wesley also wields the sermon’s words on meekness to socially castigate European nations containing so many professed Christians for being at war with each other in the 18th century.
3. Wesley interprets the sermon canonically, in keeping with the larger New Testament teaching on justification by grace through faith, firmly situating practical righteousness (though not as a basis for one’s justification) as an integral part of the lives of Christians justified by faith.
Chapter 9: Charles Haddon Spurgeon
1. Spurgeon’s hermeneutic of the sermon is distinctively Calvinistic in nature, often going out of his way (perhaps isogetically) to take ‘pot shots’ at Wesleyan Free Will theology.
2. His interpretations of passages in the sermon are also of a conservative Evangelical bent, disparaging Roman Catholicism and the Church of England and regularly applying texts as gospel appeals to repent and believe in Christ.
3. Spurgeon went beyond those who think of the Beatitudes merely as means of moral formation, interpreting them as progressive levels of moral development (the first being the threshold and the last being the most difficult to reach), not entirely different than Dante’s view.
Chapter 10: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John Howard Yoder
1. Bonhoeffer sees the Beatitudes as the key to interpreting the entire sermon, not a list of requirements but a multifaceted description of the lives of those who follow Jesus, the One who embodies each of these characteristics.
2. For both Bonhoeffer and Yoder, Jesus’ sermon—especially the Beatitudes—announce his intention to build a new society of disciples, having begun with the earliest ones Yahweh called out to himself in the OT and continuing in the form of those who forsake all else to gather around Jesus in a new covenant community, described by this distinctive Blessedness.
3. The ideals of ‘pacifism’ by which both theologians are classically characterized, based on the sermon, is not mere anti-violence against evil but a resolution that those who make up this new community, in light of their forgiveness through the cross, are able to bear the most ardent opposition against themselves.
Chapter 11: Pope John Paul II and Leonardo Boff
1. Whereas Boff sees laws (be it in the OT or in the precepts of the sermon) as flexible notions that Christians in maturity eventually outgrow, Pope John Paul II understands obedience to God’s laws as crucial to entering into the freedom God purposes for us.
2. For John Paul II, in contrast to Boff, the fulfillment of the law in Christ does not mean the moral requirements of the law no longer apply but that love for God and neighbor fulfills, embodies, and even goes beyond the letter of the law, but never falls short of the law’s requirements.
3. The differences in interpretation between these two theologians lie in their view of what fundamental problem(s) Jesus addresses: Boff sees the problem as oppression, capitalism, and poverty and John Paul II sees the problem as human sin—transgressing and living outside of the boundaries of revealed truth in the law God has given for human flourishing.
Chapter 12: John R. W. Stott
1. At a very basic level, Stott sees the standards and values in Christ’s sermon as describing, in effect, an alternative society, a way of living that God has always intended for humans.
2. Not altogether different from Bonhoeffer’s reading, Stott interprets the sermon in keeping with God’s redemptive initiatives throughout biblical history, specifically of call to himself a separate people and thereby creating a new society both described and shaped by Christ’s famous sermon.
3. The major interpretive theme of the sermon for Stott is that this new society composed of Christian disciples lives by a set of values altogether different—even antithetical—to the values of our fallen world, drawn largely from Christ’s words about his followers being salt and light, which Stott sees as central to how we should understand the entire sermon.
Chapter 2: John Chrysostom
1. Chrysostom interprets Jesus sermon as a ‘sermon’, an oral argument made by Christ, rife with rhetorical device and masterfully crafted.
2. Although he views the sermon as a literary unit within the Matthean Gospel, his interpretation is thoroughly canonical, appealing to the apostle Paul for exegetical help at least 50 times throughout his own series of sermons on Christ’s sermon.
3. Chrysostom’s use of the sermon appears to have been largely philosophical, an apologetic for the Christian way of life as foundational to a Christian republic, in an effort to ‘democratize monastic virtues onto the urban laity of Antioch and Constantinople around the turn of the fifth century, in contrast to lesser visions of the ideal politeia (e.g. Plato’s Republic).
Chapter 3: Augustine
1. Augustine views the sermon as unique among the teachings of Christ, as a special unit of higher teaching delivered by Christ—God incarnate—to mature believers, calling them and instructing them towards the highest form of human existence: becoming like God in virtue and godliness.
2. His interpretation of the sermon is heavily theological, consistently abiding by the spirit of the principle, later called Scriptura scripturam interpretat, appealing to numerous places throughout Scripture to interpret Jesus’ words.
3. His use of the sermon seems to be primarily to call Christians to full maturity in the Spirit, to the telos of becoming godly in heart and deed like Christ himself, in addition to the fact that in the corpus of his writings contra Pelagius he also repeatedly used portions of the sermon polemically to argue that humans prior to glorification always fall short of perfection.
Chapter 4: Hugh of St. Victor
1. Hugh appears to super-impose a rubric over the sermon informed more by classical categories of virtue than the either the sermon itself or Matthew’s gospel, a grid he calls the ‘Five x Seven’ rule of interpretation.
2. This interpretive scheme is exemplified in his treatment of the Lord’s Prayer, aligning each of its seven phrases both with a Greco-Roman classical virtue and its corresponding beatitude, a reading that to me appears rather fanciful and arbitrary.
3. Hugh seems also to interpret the sermon with a Christological focus, describing our fallenness, our redemption in Christ, and the active work of the Spirit in our lives bringing forth the virtues described in the beatitudes.
Chapter 5: Dante and Chaucer
1. Dante appears not only to allude to portions of the Sermon on the Mount in his poems, for example, the Purgatorio, but even to structure the poem according to the contours of the Beatitudes, focusing on the ‘beatific vision’ of God achieved by development of personal virtues, especially in the afterlife.
2. In his work, the Tale of Malibee, Chaucer leans upon Matthew 5:9, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” by which he appropriates the sermon as a defense in the wake of his being fired as Clerk of the King’s Works and Wyclif’s losing of his teaching chair at Oxford.
3. So it seems that the primary understanding and use of specifically the Beatitudes in the works of Dante are limited to achieving virtue as a form of redemption in the afterlife, in contrast to Chaucer’s appropriation of the sermon primarily as a means for ‘personal and social action’, as a guidepost in this life and not the afterlife.
Chapter 6: Martin Luther
1. Theologically, Luther approaches the sermon neither as law nor gospel, but as instruction in righteousness for those who have been justified by faith in Christ.
2. In this sense, he departs diametrically from the view (held, for example, by Augustine) that the sermon is intended only for elite (or mature) Christians, for instance, Catholic monks, insisting rather that it is intended for all Christians.
3. Luther’s use of the sermon goes beyond pastoral and into a polemical realm, reading into the sermon his own ongoing conflicts with those in his day whom he deems (following Jesus’ choice of words and analogies) enemies, false prophets, false brethren, and wolves.
Chapter 7: Calvin
1. Fundamentally, Calvin depicts the Sermon on the Mount as a diverse collection of Christ’s teachings gathered and edited by the apostle Matthew.
2. Calvin views the sermon as containing the ‘doctrine of Christ’, relating to a ‘devout and holy life’, which agrees, in his view, perfectly with both the law and the gospel as a means of conforming believers into the image of Christ himself.
3. A key focus of Calvin’s interpretation follows Christ’s pattern of contrasting an outward keeping of God‘s law (including political and national; remember, Geneva was a Reformed city) with what the gospel requires of those who are born again—keeping the law from a pure heart inwardly enflamed with holy affection for God.
Chapter 8: John Wesley
1. The Sermon on the Mount looms large throughout the prolific ministry of Wesley, playing a large role in his theology of Christian perfection(ism).
2. Wesley also wields the sermon’s words on meekness to socially castigate European nations containing so many professed Christians for being at war with each other in the 18th century.
3. Wesley interprets the sermon canonically, in keeping with the larger New Testament teaching on justification by grace through faith, firmly situating practical righteousness (though not as a basis for one’s justification) as an integral part of the lives of Christians justified by faith.
Chapter 9: Charles Haddon Spurgeon
1. Spurgeon’s hermeneutic of the sermon is distinctively Calvinistic in nature, often going out of his way (perhaps isogetically) to take ‘pot shots’ at Wesleyan Free Will theology.
2. His interpretations of passages in the sermon are also of a conservative Evangelical bent, disparaging Roman Catholicism and the Church of England and regularly applying texts as gospel appeals to repent and believe in Christ.
3. Spurgeon went beyond those who think of the Beatitudes merely as means of moral formation, interpreting them as progressive levels of moral development (the first being the threshold and the last being the most difficult to reach), not entirely different than Dante’s view.
Chapter 10: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John Howard Yoder
1. Bonhoeffer sees the Beatitudes as the key to interpreting the entire sermon, not a list of requirements but a multifaceted description of the lives of those who follow Jesus, the One who embodies each of these characteristics.
2. For both Bonhoeffer and Yoder, Jesus’ sermon—especially the Beatitudes—announce his intention to build a new society of disciples, having begun with the earliest ones Yahweh called out to himself in the OT and continuing in the form of those who forsake all else to gather around Jesus in a new covenant community, described by this distinctive Blessedness.
3. The ideals of ‘pacifism’ by which both theologians are classically characterized, based on the sermon, is not mere anti-violence against evil but a resolution that those who make up this new community, in light of their forgiveness through the cross, are able to bear the most ardent opposition against themselves.
Chapter 11: Pope John Paul II and Leonardo Boff
1. Whereas Boff sees laws (be it in the OT or in the precepts of the sermon) as flexible notions that Christians in maturity eventually outgrow, Pope John Paul II understands obedience to God’s laws as crucial to entering into the freedom God purposes for us.
2. For John Paul II, in contrast to Boff, the fulfillment of the law in Christ does not mean the moral requirements of the law no longer apply but that love for God and neighbor fulfills, embodies, and even goes beyond the letter of the law, but never falls short of the law’s requirements.
3. The differences in interpretation between these two theologians lie in their view of what fundamental problem(s) Jesus addresses: Boff sees the problem as oppression, capitalism, and poverty and John Paul II sees the problem as human sin—transgressing and living outside of the boundaries of revealed truth in the law God has given for human flourishing.
Chapter 12: John R. W. Stott
1. At a very basic level, Stott sees the standards and values in Christ’s sermon as describing, in effect, an alternative society, a way of living that God has always intended for humans.
2. Not altogether different from Bonhoeffer’s reading, Stott interprets the sermon in keeping with God’s redemptive initiatives throughout biblical history, specifically of call to himself a separate people and thereby creating a new society both described and shaped by Christ’s famous sermon.
3. The major interpretive theme of the sermon for Stott is that this new society composed of Christian disciples lives by a set of values altogether different—even antithetical—to the values of our fallen world, drawn largely from Christ’s words about his followers being salt and light, which Stott sees as central to how we should understand the entire sermon.
February 23, 2015
Good overview of authors throughout Christian history and their shifting perspectives on the Sermon the Mount. A pretty dry read, inconsistent from one essay to the next, unfortunately.
July 27, 2021
The value of every compilational work depends on the strength of its individual contributions. In the case of this book, those contributions are strong. With the exception of the chapter on Dante and Chaucer, I learned something of importance in every chapter.
Authors in the work include such names as Robert Louis Wilken, Mark Noll, and Stanley Hauerwas. Each chapter considers how one or two major Christian writers from the past handled the Sermon on the Mount--these writers are: Chrysostom, Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor, Dante, Chaucer, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Spurgeon, Bonhoeffer, John Howard Yoder, Pope John Paul II, Leonardo Boff, and Stott. As a Protestant, I found the chapter on John Paul and Boff less engaging, but almost all the rest were clear and truly helpful.
Authors in the work include such names as Robert Louis Wilken, Mark Noll, and Stanley Hauerwas. Each chapter considers how one or two major Christian writers from the past handled the Sermon on the Mount--these writers are: Chrysostom, Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor, Dante, Chaucer, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Spurgeon, Bonhoeffer, John Howard Yoder, Pope John Paul II, Leonardo Boff, and Stott. As a Protestant, I found the chapter on John Paul and Boff less engaging, but almost all the rest were clear and truly helpful.
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September 10, 2022Thought-provoking, and a great reminder of the core message of mercy and non-judgement for Christians; challenging to see how some traditions 'moderate' or limit the application of some commands.
September 8, 2012
Was more of an overview of the theological approaches of the covered theologians and pastors than a collection of their writings on the sermon. Nonetheless it was helpful, but certainly not a primary source for the exegesis or exposition of the text by the authors in the table of contents.
If you want a resource that includes the writing or preaching of the sermon throughout history this is not the book. If you want to understand the the presuppositions or hermeneutic or homiletic approach of several men throughout history, then this is a good resource.
If you want a resource that includes the writing or preaching of the sermon throughout history this is not the book. If you want to understand the the presuppositions or hermeneutic or homiletic approach of several men throughout history, then this is a good resource.
February 11, 2016
Good overview of the Sermon on the Mount, looking at the writings of John Chrysostom, Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor, Dante, Chaucer, Martin Luther, Calvin, Westley, Spurgeon, Bonhoeffer, John Howard Yoder, Pope John Paul II, Leonardo Boff, and John Stott. I enjoyed the chapter on Spurgeon and the on on John Stott the most.
January 6, 2015
Very helpful survey on the history of Christian thought on the Sermon on the Mount.
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