It was John Ruskin who charged preachers with playing "stage tricks with the doctrines of life and death", for like many moderns he had no confidence in either preachers or preaching.
For sure, preaching today takes place in an over-communicated society with ads and words from sponsors being delivered with all the sincerity of an evangelist.
What is more, modern theology with its depotentiated, dumb God has robbed many preachers of an authoritative message. The most they can offer are some holy hunches.
However, as again we hear extracts from St Paul's Second Letter to Timothy, the young minister of the congregation in Ephesus, read tomorrow in church, it is hard to imagine a worse situation for any preacher than that described by the apostle.
He warns that bad times are coming in the church when "men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths." (4:3-4)
With the Irish Preachers' Conference taking place in Dublin this coming week, the parallels with Ephesus across two millennia are striking. The temptation either to not take the Bible seriously as God's relevant and powerful word to every age, or to water it down, is as seductive today as ever it was.
Why does Paul take verbal communication of the Christian message so seriously? Simply, because God has spoken. Yet it is precisely here that modern theology, with its aversion to the words of God and the idea that God speaks, parts company with the apostle.
God is, God engages in self-disclosure, God acts, give signs of his presence; but there is great coyness about the proposition that God has spoken.
Why this reluctance? The new Archbishop of Sydney, Dr Peter Jensen, puts his finger on part of the problem, which is not just a theologian's difficulty: "We would prefer a dumb, dark thing, a non-relational, faraway god, to be approached on our own terms and worshipped as we see fit."
This kind of god asks no questions, makes no promises and threatens no punishments. Equally true, of course, of the company of dumb animals which some people prefer to their own kind for precisely the same reasons! In the past two decades, however, the rejection of the meaning and purpose of God has trekked into more remote territory. The post-modern move against meaning in words, and against words themselves, terminates not only in a world without God but in a universe without meaning.
What is on the agenda, then, for the Irish Preachers' Conference? It will need to pay attention to its theology because without God's words there can be no preaching of His Word. If God is dumb, we may speak but we cannot speak God's words for there are none to speak.
From the Second Letter to Timothy the preachers can take heart on a number of fronts. If they conclude God has spoken, then he has spoken to be understood, for God speaks the truth.
Equally basic is the conclusion that God speaks powerfully today from what he said in the past, and the whole enterprise is coherent for it is structured to draw men and women into deepening friendship with Him.
If you're a punter, listen carefully to the preaching tomorrow. If the sermon does not grapple seriously with the Bible passage and teach heart-warming truth about God, could the preacher's god be of the dumb variety? Someone should find out!
G.F.