The theology of a preacher

Contents

Chapter page

An Introductory Word 7

I The Significance of His Own Experience ... 13

Chapter I The Significance Of His Own Experience

CHAPTER I

The Significance of His Own Experience

The first important thing about a preacher is that he should be alive. This is by no means so obvious as it sounds. To be rich in vital qualities, to be quickly responsive to all the currents that play through human experience, to be vividly, deeply, and vigorously alive is as superb as it is rare. There are correct preachers, there are earnest preachers, there are learned preachers, there are eloquent preachers; and their qualities are very important for every preacher. When he adds to them the quality of magnetic, contagious vitality, then a man is a preacher indeed.

But we mean something even deeper than this quality of winsome human eagerness which captures constant friends when we say that a preacher must be alive. We mean that he must have lived and fought, that he must have struggled and aspired, 13 that he must have failed and that he must have succeeded, that joy and sorrow, the hour of waiting and the hour of bewilderment must have been his. We mean preeminently that, passing through the winding pathway of his experience, he must have come to a great discovery. He must have discovered the adequacy of Christ. Jesus must have ceased to be merely the Christ of history. He must have become the Christ of experience.

Every preacher must make this discovery for himself. He sails out across the unknown ocean and discovers the new continent of Christian experience, just as if it had never been discovered before. Every man is his own Columbus here, and his experience is as fresh and full of wonder as if no other man had known the joy of the same discovery.

It is the combination of a deep experience of human things and a deep experience of divine things which makes a man a preacher, and it is exactly this combination which makes a man a theologian. At least, it is this which makes

HIS OWN EXPERIENCE him the kind of a theologian whose theology can be preached.

Of course the preacher- theologian is a student. He knows what it is to brood over his Bible until its very spirit enters his life. He studies it until the rhythmic music of its great phrases rings through the corridors of his memory. He studies it with all the implements of modern scholarship, that his knowledge may not only be rich and deep, but accurate and scientific. He studies it until the ancient life out of which it comes is pictured in his own mind clearly and vividly. He journeys often into that far past until he has entered into the meaning of its experience. He opens all the windows of his life until the light which shines in the Scriptures is radiant in his own soul. But he brings to his study of the Bible two great personal contributions. He does not come with an empty mind. He comes as a human struggler who has looked out on life with palpitating interest, who has felt its heat, sometimes warming, sometimes burning; who has felt its cold, some- 15 times stimulating, sometimes freezing. He brings all his alert interest in the world and people. It is as a man of men, dripping with human experience, that he comes to the Bible, and all this human quality is one of his best equipments as a student of God's Word.

He also brings his experience as a Christian. The Son of God has mastered his life. The Saviour has whispered a great word of peace in his soul. He has been made a citizen of the kingdom of God. He has tasted the joy of the great Christian freedom. The world has been made into a new world for him because of his contact with Jesus Christ. The wonder of a new life moving in his heart and brain, the rich joy of a man who has found forgiveness and peace, the new perspective as to life and God and destiny, which his experience as a Christian has given him, he brings to the Bible. So as a man of men and a man of God he extracts from the Scriptures their fundamental theological conceptions, his reading and his study constantly guided and checked by his

HIS OWN EXPERIENCE experience as a man and his experience as a Christian.

Of course he is a student of church history. He studies it because it tells of the past of men. He studies it because it tells of the past of Christian men. He does not read it as a scholastic exercise. He reads it as a revelation of life. This story of how other men have interpreted the gospel, this story of how other Christians have lived and of what they have thought, is of the greatest interest to him. Slowly through all the burdened years the thought of the Church has clarified. The logic of experience has decided against some ways of looking at the faith. It has decided for others. The history of the Church is a sort of vast laboratory showing how almost every sort of theological conception has worked when it has been put to the test of life. The preacher reads with infinite interest. He wants to make no mistakes in the conceptions he flings forth hot and creative to mold the lives of his people. He wants to learn the lessons of the past. Here too he brings 17 all his experience as a man and as a Christian. He tests the history of the Church by a standard he finds in his own life. It is made vivid for him because he interprets it in the light of his own struggle and his own peace. So, because he reads the history of the Church with the light of his life as a man and his life as a Christian shining on it, he draws from it the deepest truths the growing life of the Church has to tell. He discovers the contribution the history of the Church and the Church's thought has to make to the theology of a preacher.

Of course he is a student of systematic theology. He understands the eagerness of the great theologians to articulate the truths of the Christian faith into a strong symmetrical organism of belief. He too desires "to see life steadily and to see it whole." He desires to climb to some eminence where he can see the whole of the city of God — the way the streets of the city lie, their relation to each other, and just where the great buildings stand. He wants to see just how the truths of

HIS OWN EXPERIENCE the faith fit together in one total view of tilings. And right zestfully he follows the endeavors of the great thinkers to build the structure of their philosophy of the Christian faith. Here too our preacher brings his memories, his knowledge, and his hopes as a man, his memories, his knowledge, and his hopes as a Christian.

He knows the danger of making a system logical but lifeless. He knows the danger of the dissecting room. He does not want to study the corpse of the Christian faith. He wants to study Christianity alive, dominant, the blood rich and pure, the whole vigor of triumphant vitality in every limb. So he tests all that the theologians say by his life as a man and his life as a Christian. Theology must be kept human, and it must be kept electric with the energy of the gospel. It must face all the facts of life; it must face all the facts of God. So, studying theology with the tests his manhood and his Christian experience give, he is able constantly to move toward a Christian view of things which shall be symmetrical, the truths articulated 19 together; which shall be warmly human, the theology of living men; and which shall glow with all the beauty of the life of God in the soul of man.

The preacher-theologian is a student of the world's literature. He studies it because it is the most revealing output as to the souls of men. He studies it because it is a sort of gigantic mirror held up to the past. If the Bible is a great revelation of God, literature is a great revelation of men. Their noisy activities, their quiet thoughts, their mounting aspirations, their cold, hard despairs, their torrid, tropical joys, their wonder and hope and fear — all these and much more he finds waiting his study in the literature of the world. It has captured human joy and held it bound in garlands of speech. It has captured human strength and built it into sentences like cedars. It has gained possession of the heart, the brain, and the will of man and expressed them in imperishable speech. Not simply the "still sad music of humanity," but all the varieties of the music of humanity, its majors, and its " 20

HIS OWN EXPERIENCE minors, and its harsh, grating discords, are here.

But to read literature without a guide is to be lost in a confusion of conflicting emotions. It is to have a sense of dashing human feeling beating against one's life without any real comprehension of its meaning. The preacher-theologian reads the world's literature with the two guides he has brought to his other study. His own experience as a man helps him to interpret this vast maelstrom of human emotion expressed in words. His experience as a Christian gives him a standard by which to appraise and value it. He knows that which at its best literature has found. He knows that which at its worst literature has missed. He knows the word which has healing for the tale of woe it tells, the way of peace after all its torturing unrest, and the way of victory after its sin.

So at every point the preacher in his study is essentially a man of God and a man of men. His experience gives him keys to the meaning of that which he finds in books and that which he finds in the 21 world about him. He has the benefit of academic training, but academic discipline has not contributed the defining element to his equipment. As a man with the real past in human things and in the things of Christ he approaches his tasks.

Chapter II The Men Among Whom He Lives

CHAPTER II

The Men among Whom He Lives

There is a contrast which the preacher faces in his study of man. On the one hand, he reads the chapters on anthropology in his books on systematic theology. On the other, he thinks of James Brown and John Smith and all the other men he knows. Between the anthropology and concrete men there seems to be a great gulf fixed. How shall he so think of James and John as to take advantage of all the profound principles he has learned in the books on theology as they discuss man ? And how shall he so read the discussions in the volumes on theology as to add to them the concreteness and the tang of reality which belong to actual human beings ? How shall he keep his theory of man human ? And how shall he keep his thinking about actual living men philosophically adequate?

These very questions are revealing as to the necessary answers. They suggest a 25 constant bringing of theology to the test of life, and a study of life in the light of the profoundest principles which come to light as a result of theological discipline.

In truth, the preacher occupies a position of strategy in respect of this whole situation. He has to do with the theory of man. He has to do with actual men. He ought to be able to construct a doctrine of man which will be philosophically adequate and yet surge with the blood of life.

When the preacher-theologian approaches the problem in this attitude, with a sense of concrete men and their actual behavior in the background of his thinking, he is at once struck by the fact that the men of the Bible correspond to his experience of actual men. Whether it be David or Solomon or Peter or John, whether it be Abraham or Jeremiah or Paul or John the Baptist, the men of the Bible impress the reader as actual human beings. The first appeal of the Bible is that it introduces you to a company of real people.

Now, leaving out of account for the present the great moral tragedy which 26

MEN AMONG WHOM HE LIVES blights the lives of the men of the Bible and the men of the world about us, what are the defining and significant facts about the people whose fingers touch ours in the daily experiences of life, and those whose faces look out upon us from the ancient Scriptures ?

Three outstanding facts impress the student of men's lives: they can know, they can do, and they can feel. The whole of human experience and the whole of the doctrine of man hang about the significance of these three facts.

The knowledge of the ordinary man in the parish of the preacher is, of course, a very different matter from the knowledge of the scientific investigator or the trained thinker. The mind of many a man is much like an old curiosity shop, with odds and ends of knowledge scattered everywhere in the most disorderly fashion. Then there are minds like country stores, with the knowledge needed for daily use conveniently shelved, but carrying very little stock which does not have to do with immediate practical demands. Then there 27 are minds like art stores, which seem to carry a stock of ideas with reference to their beauty rather than their utility. The use of this mental material is varied enough. Often it is allowed to be covered with dust. There are people who actually use their minds in positive thought only as a matter of last resort when everything else has failed. There are untrained men with a shrewd practical use of the instruments of the mind which is a constant surprise to the observer. There are men who use all mental skill to arrange their view of life according to their own likes and dislikes rather than according to the reality of things. There are minds which are slow but sure-footed. There are minds which have wings but soon tire. There are minds which work with fine steadiness and minds which work by jerks. All of this mental variety the preacher meets in his contact with men. Out of this experience come his first convictions about man. The power to know is a growing thing. It needs training and guidance. The power to know is a moral thing. It must be used with

MEN AMONG WHOM HE LIVES heroic candor or it will become an instrument of deception.

The second fact about men is their ability to do. When we say that a man can do things we mean something different in kind as well as quantity from what we mean when we say that a horse can do things. The horse obeys the machinery of an animal life. The man obeys the behests of a free and knowing mind. With man, back of the physical act is a mental act. He does a thing with his mind before he does it with his hand.

This doing with consciousness and freedom is not a characteristic of all human activity, but it is a characteristic of much of the activity of all human beings. Men share the life of the lower creation, and their actions are often intuitive and mechanical, the expression of flashing impulse and quick desire. But a man can command his activity. He can make it the servant of his mind. He chooses how much he shall be like a beast and how much he shall be like manhood at its highest.

This mixture of deeds which are a sort 29 of mechanical response to environment and deeds which are the slaves of a mastering mind is seen among men everywhere. It is the necessary assumption of practical life that man has the power of reigning over his deeds. It is the clear verdict of careful observation that he does not always do it. Sometimes nature has its way with him. No end of speculative perplexity and difficulty may be encountered by the thinker who attempts to deal with these facts. The preacher-theologian is saved from much academic confusion and many verbal straits by applying the test of life at this point. All of human experience is based on the implicit assumption of freedom. It is a major premise of life. It must not be disturbed. But in many ways it is true that freedom is a possibility rather than a complete possession. The preacher comes to certain definite convictions in respect of this matter. At his high point of experience man is free in the decisions which lead to his deeds. The mastery of his activity is a solemn demand which life makes of him. It is his duty to be free.

MEN AMONG WHOM HE LIVES

The third significant fact about the life of a man is that he can feel. Some things appeal to him more than others. Some people appeal to him more than others. He does not meet life with a cold, critical stare. He has all sorts of feelings about it. The negative of love is hate. As some things and people draw him, so some things and people repulse him. There is a spontaneous up-reach of feeling in response to all the experiences of life.

This matter of feeling is one of much subtlety and perplexity. A man cannot directly command his feelings as he can command his actions. He cannot decide to feel in a certain way. If he attempts to do it, there is simply no emotional response.

On the other hand, a close observation of men makes it clear that if the deep trend of the life moves in a certain direction, in the long run the feelings follow. If a man keeps acting on a certain feeling's suggestion, it grows in strength. If he refuses to make it the basis of a deed, it tends to waste away and die. All this involves what may be called the indirect 31 control of the feelings. Whatever kind of an emotional outfit a man has, he may become the possessor of a noble devotion by a continued habit of doing noble things. The response is not immediate, but if the evil emotions which enter the house of a man's life are treated with continual coldness, at last they realize that they are not welcome and go away. The way to learn to love the highest is to continue to live as if one loved the highest. The way to banish evil feelings is constantly to refuse to coin them into deeds.

Back of what we have said about knowing and doing and feeling there has been a constant reference to moral standards, a recognition of good and evil, better and worse. This too is a part of human experience. Perhaps it should be denominated the fourth significant fact about man. He does not discover the distinction between right and wrong. He comes to life with that written away in his nature. It is his moral equipment. He does make discoveries as to what is right and what is wrong. Here there is distinction enough in different

MEN AMONG WHOM HE LIVES men. A man begins life with a sense that there are duties. He goes forth to discover what they are.

This lordship of the moral men all feel, but they do not all accept it. There are ethical rebels in plenty in the world. The fact is that there are just two kinds of moral differences among men. The first arises from the fact that some men are trying to do the right and others are not. The second arises from the fact that honest men differ in their conviction as to what particular things are right and wrong. The second kind of differences arise from the use of the judgment and may exist in men equally earnest. The first represents the fundamental moral cleavage among men.

The consciousness of these various facts rushes in upon the preacher as he attempts to think about man. He gathers them up into a few intense convictions. Man has a complex life of infinite possibility. He can know with a constant increase of completeness and adequacy. He can do with a kingly mastery of his deeds. He can feel with the whole circuit of the emotional life more and more mastered by the noblest things. His knowledge and activity and feelings are under the moral lordship of a great captain who cries "You ought" in the depths of his soul.

These aspects of a man's life are crowned by another. Something in his nature — something as wide as human experience and as deep as the longings of the heart of man — cherishes a great desire to worship. Man's nature calls for God. In some great sense humanity calls for comradeship with the Most High.

There are vague outreaches in the life of man, there are unquenchable thirsts, and unappeasable hungers, which can be satisfied only when God is known in the intimacy of personal fellowship. God has made us for himself, and our souls are restless until they find rest in him."

Chapter III The Supreme Tragedy Chapter III

The preacher is sitting in his study at night. He feels drenched with the evil of the life of the man who has just left hLs house. He feels as if the man had left tracks of moral slime when he went away. The weariness of the day's work seems in some way to have departed. With brain moving with quick alertness and heart drawn by the passion and pain of it, the preacher sits staring at sin. Kindly halftruths and apologetic compromising statements stand out in their poor inadequacy. With a relentless moral candor and a stern realism, his mind demands the whole truth. So with the stinging sense of contact with its shamefulness and brutal reality, the preacher works out his theology of sin.

His first feeling is a consciousness that the men who spoke and wrote the great passages of the Bible felt about sin as he feels now. He turns to the fifty-first psalm and reads over the passionate cry of a 37 stricken soul appalled at its own sinfulness. There he finds something which completely corresponds to the feeling in his own heart, and with all the memories that psalm arouses, there is a personal quality to the repulsion and horror with which he draws back from the full picture of sin which is forming itself in his mind. It is not simply the foe of the man who has just gone from his presence. It is his foe too. And for a moment he seems to feel the hot breath of some beast of the forest against his face, so concrete has his thought become.

There are some chemical reactions which are brought about only by the application of heat. You cannot think of sin calmly and at the same time think adequately. The heat of a mind alive to all its meaning is necessary for a man who would gain a true conception of sin.

Of course it is necessary to make distinctions. There is a difference between sin and evil, though the one often expresses itself in the form of the other. Sin is intentional wrongdoing. Evil is wrongdoing 38 whether it is intentional or not. Evil is often the result of heredity and environment, and not of personal intention. Sin always has personal intention behind it.

The Bowery child, brought up in an atmosphere of moral loathsomeness, does a great many evil things without knowing that they are evil. It is quite possible that he swears with no more understanding of its wrongness than the parrot who repeats the oaths of a profane sailor. A great amount of the evil of the world is a crystallization of environment into the activity of the particular man. Perhaps some of the evil in the life of the depraved man who has just left the preacher's study was of this sort, but that was not the root of the man's condition. The preacher detected a slimy liking for evil in the man's eye, a certain foul at-homeness with vice, a certain leering personal intention which struck ice to his heart. If the man had been simply a victim, how easy it would have been to pity him! how easy it would have been to come close as a brother to help! But the citadel of the man's person- 39

THE THEOLOGY OE A PREACHER ality was wrong. He liked evil. He wanted evil. He disliked the discomfort which resulted from sin, but he was not at all alienated from sin itself. So the preacher faces the heart of the problem. Sin is personal commitment to evil.

Classification, to be sure, is very difficult. A particular man, fairly suffocating with the atmosphere of vice he breathes, may have learned to hate it and be battling with all his strength against it. A man to whom environment and heredity have given every gift may be living a life of hard and cruel selfishness which is the very essence of sin. A man whose thought is much confused, in spite of the vices whose evil he does not understand, may be flinging himself in utter self-abandon out into the attempt to realize some ideal of courage or manhood which has, somehow, penetrated his mind. This is the heroism of the slums. A man who uses Christian phrases with facility may steadfastly refuse to face the moral meaning of some part of his life. This great refusal may brand him a particularly dangerous sort of sinner. Yes, classification is 40 difficult, but the main principles stand out clearly.

The blighting tragedy of life is when a man turns from the good he knows to be good, to the evil he knows to be evil. The other tragedies which come from moral confusion and moral misconception are widespread enough, and are practically very great problems, but they can be dealt with by education. They can be dealt with by a changed environment. They can be dealt with by the ministry of a loving touch which makes moral truth concrete and clear and luminous. The preacher is ready to assist the social worker in every practical way in his dealing with the problem of evil, but his own task is deeper. It is more fundamental. It is more discouraging. It has to do with the deepest heartache and agony of the world. It is the problem of sin.

Somewhat impatiently the preacher thinks of those kindly and superficial students of life who bring forward true statements about some human experiences and insist that they cover all possible cases. The 41 man with an imprisoned soul eager for nobility in spite of the mire of life in which he dwells has responded to their kindly ministries. He has blossomed out like a rich and fragrant flower. Then those who ministered to him say: "This is all there is of sin. The opportunity for good has been lacking. Give a man a good environment and you will have a good man."

The preacher thinks of one of the boys of his congregation. His home had a certain glow of winsome purity. It was full of bright good cheer. It seemed as if good morals were a part of the air the boy breathed. Yet from all that he turned to devastating evil. With beautiful and loving tact his mother sought to restrain him. With a sad, kind sternness his father sought to turn him from his evil way. The very resources of friendly, eager, suffering love seemed exhausted in the endeavor to reach that boy. And in vain. He liked bad things. He wanted them. He chose them. He set his face steel-like against helpers and help. He deliberately allied himself with evil.

The preacher feels that he would like to bring this young man with his hard, inscrutable face, strong in its devotion to sin, to the apostles of the moral invincibility of a pure environment. Then he would like to say to them: "Look at this young man! What are you going to do with him ?"

The preacher feels deep tenderness for all the misguided earnestness in the world; he knows the meaning of a true heart and a confused brain. Every true thing the modern theorists say about evil he accepts and has made use of again and again. He almost smiles as he thinks how often men deep of sympathy but slow of speech had acted on these principles before modern sociologists had announced them. His own social passion is as eager as theirs. But what they say, true as much of it is, simply ignores the most defining fact of all when they have not really faced the meaning of personal sin.

It is a strange anomaly. It seems as if we might all be experts in the analysis of sin, for we all know what it is to look 43 at a good thing and not like it and not want it. We all know what it is to look at an evil thing, to eve it with a subtle fascination, and to feel that we want it for ourselves. We all know that eruption of self-will in our feelings which makes everything seem hateful but our own way. W T e all know the inrush of that imperial self-consciousness which is ready to object even to God if he interferes with our personal plans. We all know that inner anarchy which no tenderness of friends or beauty of environment can change. We all know the pang of a hot and restless heart which enshrines unreason and repulses control. All this is sin, sometimes coming in stately and alluring garb, sometimes coming with furtive eye and cautious step. It is the marshaling of the forces of self-will and evil desire against the higher lordship of righteousness and love. It is the lifting up of the flag of rebellion against the complete mastery of our lives by God.