Heralds of God

Front matter

How are they to believe in One of whom they have not heard? And how are they ever to hear, without a herald? And how can men be heralds, unless they are sent by God?

St. Paul to the Romans.

NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Preface

PREFACE

IHAVE chosen the title of this book to stress one fundamental fact, namely, that preaching exists, not for the propagating of views, opinions and ideals, but for the proclamation of the mighty acts of God. This is demonstrably the New Testament conception of the preacher's task; and it is this that will always give preaching a basic and essential place at the very heart of Christian worship.

To write about preaching is therefore to deal with an enterprise with which not only the man in the pulpit but the whole worshipping community is vitally and intimately concerned: a fact which emboldens me to hope that the pages which follow, addressed originally as Lectures in the Universities of Edinburgh and St. Andrews to Divinity students and ministers, will have something to say to the wider circle of those who Sunday by Sunday are hearers of the Word of God, "loving the habitation of His house and the place where His honour dwelleth," and perhaps even to the critic in the back pew.

I desire here to record my thanks to the Trustees of the Warrack Lectureship, for their invitation to me to undertake this task, and to my friend, the Rev. Graham W. Hardy, B.D., who has revised the proofs.

James S. Stewart.

Chapter 1: The Preacher's World

Chapter I

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

There shall always be the Church and the World And the Heart of Man Shivering and fluttering between them, choosing and chosen, Valiant, ignoble, dark, and full of light Swinging between Hell Gate and Heaven Gate. And the Gates of Hell shall not prevail. Darkness now, then Light.

T. S. Eliot, The Rock.

AMONG the tributes paid to the memory of Sir Walford Davies, one of the noblest was that of a brother musician, Dr. Vaughan Williams. He dwelt on the sacrifice which Walford Davies had chosen to make quite deliberately—the sacrifice of the more aloof, self-centred life of the composer, for that of the organizer, the advocate, the musical propagandist, the educator of popular taste and opinion; and then he added: "It is an eternal problem that confronts all those who feel they have the creative impulse—'shall I shut myself up from the world and follow the dictates of my artistic conscience, or shall I go down to the world of men and show them what I have learnt about eternity and beauty?' Walford Davies had no doubts—he was a born preacher and he determined to go and preach to the Gentiles. This decision," declared Vaughan Williams, "was probably right." I fancy that no one who knows what Walford Davies did for music in this generation will dispute that verdict.

Now the same problem, the same critical decision to which Vaughan Williams called attention in the realm of creative art, reappears even more forcibly in religion; and here it is a problem, not for the few who possess the elusive quality of genius, but for the whole company of believers. "Shall I, as a Christian, be content to pursue the religious quest as a private hobby, and to develop my own spiritual life; or shall I concern myself personally for those outside, and take upon my heart deliberately the whole world's need for Christ?" No man, with the New Testament in his hand, can have a moment's hesitation about the answer. "What I live by," declared St. Augustine, "I impart."

You have decided this matter in the most emphatic way of all, putting your life itself into the decision. Or rather, it has been decided for you, by the constraint of a higher will. For you the issue has been settled. To bring men face to face with Christ has seemed to you a matter of such immense and overruling urgency that you propose to devote your whole life to doing nothing else. You are determined, God helping you, to go down to the world of men, and show them what you have learnt—what indeed you shall go on learning more clearly every day you live—about the eternity of redeeming love and the beauty of the Lord.

It is a thrilling, noble enterprise. It demands and deserves every atom of a man's being in uttermost self-commitment.

"To go down to the world of men." That thrusts upon us this crucial fact—that our work as preachers has to be done in the actual setting of a contemporary situation.

The Gospel, it is true, stands unchanged from age to age. It remains yesterday, to-day, and for ever the same. In the twentieth century, it is the identical message which was sent by the Lord to former generations through the mouths of His servants Spurgeon and Wesley and Latimer and Xavier and Chrysostom and the apostles. No protean fashions of thought can alter it. No ebb and flow of the tides of history can prevail to modify it. It is as immutable as God Himself.

But while the basic message thus remains constant and invariable, our presentation of it must take account of, and be largely conditioned by, the actual world on which our eyes look out to-day. The Gospel is not for an age, but for all time: yet it is precisely the particular age—this historic hour and none other—to which we are commissioned by God to speak. It is against the background of the contemporary situation that we have to reinterpret the Gospel once for all delivered to the saints; and it is within the framework of current hopes and fears that we have to show the commanding relevance of Jesus.

This is not a plea for so-called "topical" sermons. It is deplorable that God's hungry sheep, hoping for the pasture of the living Word, should be fed on disquisitions on the themes of the latest headlines. It is calamitous that men and women, coming up to the church on a Sunday—with God only knows what cares and sorrows, what hopes and shadowed memories, what heroic aspirations and moods of shame burdening their hearts—should be offered nothing better for their sustenance than one more dreary diagnosis of the crisis of the hour.

But this is not to say that the preacher must stand aloof, cultivating a spirit of detachment from the march of events. "What is history," cried Cromwell, "but God's unfolding of Himself?"—and the real work of the ministry in this generation will not be done by any man who shuts himself in with his academic interests and doctrinal theorizings, as though there were no surge and thunder of world-shattering events beating at his door. Surely in this immensely critical hour, when millions of human hearts are besieged by fierce perplexities; when so many established landmarks of the spirit are gone, old securities wrecked, familiar ways and habits, plans and preconceptions, banished never to return; when the soul is destined to meet, amid the crash of old beliefs, the ruthless challenge and assault of doubt and disillusionment; when history itself is being cleft in twain, and no man can forecast the shape of things to come—the Church needs men who, knowing the world around them, and knowing the Christ above them and within, will set the trumpet of the Gospel to their lips, and proclaim His sovereignty and all-sufficiency.

The question, therefore, is this: If the Gospel, in itself unchanging, must always be set forth in the nexus of a particular historical situation, what are the characteristic moods and tendencies which must influence the presentation of the message to-day?

Attempts are sometimes made to define the spirit of the age in a single phrase—to call it, for example, "an age of doubt," "an age of rationalism," "an age of revolt," and so on. But all such generalizations are misleading. The reality cannot be thus simplified. We have to reckon with a mental and spiritual climate full of the most baffling contradictions. It would indeed be true to say that the most characteristic feature of the modern mood is precisely the unresolved tension between opposing forces. Here we touch the very nerve of the preacher's problem. There are three directions in which this element of tension, of radical paradox and spiritual conflict, of thrust and counter-thrust, is manifesting itself dramatically in the world we face to-day.

I

First, there is the tension between Disillusionment and Hope.

You are going out with the evangel into a world which has reacted strongly and even violently against the bland humanistic optimism which dominated the opening decade of the century. Then the great watchwords were the adequacy of materialism, the inevitability of progress, and the sufficiency of man. Science, having finally broken through the bondage of ignorance, and having shattered the tyranny of superstition, was hailed as the New Messiah, the supreme disposer of human destiny. Indeed, so startling and spectacular were the boons and bestowals of this new Messianic age, so strange and exciting the faculties put at man's disposal, that one sinister fact went almost unobserved: all its gifts were double-edged. The dazzling splendours of its achievements masked only too effectively the grim truth—later to be learnt at an immeasurable cost of blood and tears—that science (to quote the words of Reinhold Niebuhr) "can sharpen the fangs of ferocity as much as it can alleviate human pain." That aspect was conveniently ignored. With this new Messiah leading the way, it was argued, was there any limit to what humanity might accomplish? It was an intoxicating prospect. Would not social effort, reinforced by all the resources of technology, speedily bring the New Jerusalem down to earth from heaven? Surely the wilderness wanderings of the children of men were over, and the path of progress must now lead straight and unbroken to the shining Utopia of their dreams. The Renaissance humanists and the ancient sophists had been perfectly right: man was indeed the measure of all things. His will was the architect of destiny. His intelligence, storming the secrets of the universe, had occupied the throne of God. "Thou art smitten, thou God," shouted Swinburne vociferously, thou art smitten; thy death is upon thee, O Lord. And the love-song of earth as thou diest resounds through the wind of her wings— Glory to Man in the highest! for Man is the master of things.

Now it was hardly to be expected that in the heyday of this confident utopianism religion could remain uninfluenced and immune. The Bible might insist that "your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour," but theological liberalism smiled to itself in a superior and even contemptuous way: it was not going to take such rhetoric too seriously. The conceptions of the world as fallen, of human nature as infected with a radical taint, of sin as a vicious circle which could be broken through only by supernatural action from outside—these were classed as outmoded fictions, and relegated to the scrap-heap of an antiquated theology. The evolutionary hypothesis, so fruitful in other fields, began to invade the deepest sanctities of the soul: it now appeared that all man had to do for his redemption was to Move upward, working out the beast. And let the ape and tiger die.

The Kingdom of Heaven was not, as Jesus and the apostles had proclaimed it, a gift of God breaking into history from the beyond: it was a human achievement, the product of social amelioration, culture and scientific planning. Jesus Himself according to this view, was the Pioneer of progress, the supreme Leader, the apex of the vanguard of the pilgrim host of humanity—not a terrific Being shattering history with the explosive word, "Before Abraham was, I am." Christianity sounded in men's ears as good advice, rather than good news: an exhortation to be up and doing, to fight the good fight and follow the gleam, not the announcement of something which God had already done, decisively and for ever. There was accordingly an inclination to regard the preacher as the purveyor of religious homilies and ethical uplift, not the herald of the mighty acts of God. So far did the prevailing mood push the tendency to "change the glory of the uncorruptible God into the image of corruptible man" that there actually appeared a plagiarizing hymn, "Nearer, Mankind, to thee, Nearer to thee": a sentiment, said G. K. Chesterton tersely if somewhat scurrilously, which "always suggested to me the sensations of a strap-hanger during a crush on the Tube." Characteristic of this whole attitude was the reduced emphasis upon a theology of atonement and redemption. Why should man, conscious as never before in history of his own vast potential resources, grovel as a miserable sinner, or confess himself immeasurably indebted to sheer unmerited grace? Every virtue we possess, And every victory won, And every thought of holiness

were not "His alone,"—emphatically not that—our personal meritorious achievement, the praiseworthy product of our innate spirituality. It was a mood which came dangerously near to making religion itself the handmaid and confederate of that pride which is the final blasphemy and the basic sin of man.

To-day the scene is changed. When you go forth as preachers bearing Christ's commission, it is to a generation which has very largely repudiated the confident optimism of its predecessors. The great tower of Babel—collective man's monumentum aere perennius—has crashed, and the world is littered with the wreckage of disillusionment.

Back in 1918, a few days after the signing of the Armistice, Lord Curzon, moving the Address in the House of Lords, quoted the chorus from Shelley's Hellas:

The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return.

Such sanguine words sound almost sardonic now. "We are living," confessed Aldous Huxley, "in a rather grisly morning-after." The shining dream has proved to be a mirage. Of what profit is man's creative power, theme of his proudest boasts, if it is to become by a strange irony of fate the very instrument of his self-destruction? The old, ruthless dilemma, to which St. Paul gave classic expression in the seventh of Romans, has man in its torturing grip. And across the human scene to-day there echoes the haunting, unbearably poignant cry of Jeremiah long ago: "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved."

Along with this, there has crept a deeper note into theology. We are no longer inclined to underestimate the radical stubbornness of sin. It has been borne in upon us that human wisdom cannot solve the dark enigma, nor can human action break the fast-bound fetters of the world. If there is any healing for humanity's hurt, it must come, not from man's side, but from God's.

There is, however, a danger here. It is possible for the reaction from the creed of human self-reliance to be so violent that the disillusioned spirit is carried by it right across into pessimism and despair. Dark suspicions rear their heads. Has faith been a ghastly mistake? Is there perhaps no rationality anywhere? What if the spiritual interpretation of life is nothing more than the creation of pious sentiment, muddled thinking and credulity? How can the Christian evangel be relevant in a blatantly non-Christian world? Do not its basic axioms look frightfully incongruous and inapposite? Never forget as preachers that all around you to-day are men baffled and tormented by the assault of that fierce ultimate doubt.

I would have you notice, moreover, that theology itself, in certain of its aspects, has shared in the pessimistic reaction. There are those, for example, whose reflections on the contemporary scene have landed them in hopeless dualism. The world, as they see it, is the battleground where dark demonic forces wage war unceasingly with the hosts of heaven. By this conflict God Himself is limited, thwarted in His purposes, constrained to strive and struggle indecisively for the realization of His holy will. It is a recrudescence of the Manichaean heresy. It is quite oblivious of the repeated trumpet-note of the New Testament—that at the Cross once for all Christ raided the dark empire of evil, and vanquished the demons, and led captivity captive.

With others, again, the pessimistic mood expresses itself in religious quietism. They have carried their distrust of human nature to the point of denying the worth of any social action. Confronted with the collapse of the humanist gospel of man's self-redeemability, they seek refuge in the unethical mysticism of a thoroughgoing otherworldliness: "Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest."

Once again, there are those for whom the pressure of disillusionment has resulted in theological irrationalism. Man, according to this view, is so radically corrupt that there is no point of his nature left at which the living God can take hold. If ever he was made in the divine image, so completely has that image been obliterated that to talk of fellowship between man and his Creator is downright sophistry and self-deception. The light of reason itself is treacherous and perfidious. He that would frame dogmas, let him abjure the aid of logic. He that glorieth, let him glory in his irrationalism! It is hard to believe that this position, supported though it is by great and honoured names, can maintain itself indefinitely. God intends His pilgrims to struggle through the Slough of Despond, not to make it their theological home.

Here let me interpolate a quite personal remark. If you as preachers would speak a bracing, reinforcing word to the need of the age, there must be no place for the disillusioned mood in your own life. Like your Master, you will have meat to eat that the world knows not of; and that spiritual sustenance, in so far as you partake of it daily, will strengthen your powers of resistance to the dangerous infection. Surely there are few figures so pitiable as the disillusioned minister of the Gospel. High hopes once cheered him on his way: but now the indifference and the recalcitrance of the world, the lack of striking visible results, the discovery of the appalling pettiness and spite and touchiness and complacency which can lodge in narrow hearts, the feeling of personal futility—all these have seared his soul. No longer does the zeal of God's House devour him. No longer does he mount the pulpit steps in thrilled expectancy that Jesus Christ will come amongst His folk that day, travelling in the greatness of His strength, mighty to save. Dully and drearily he speaks now about what once seemed to him the most dramatic tidings in the world. The edge and verve and passion of the message of divine forgiveness, the exultant, lyrical assurance of the presence of the risen Lord, the amazement of supernatural grace, the urge to cry "Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel"—all have gone. The man has lost heart. He is disillusioned. And that, for an ambassador of Christ, is tragedy.

How to maintain yourselves against the menace of this mood—that I shall speak of more specifically when we come to consider the preacher's inner life. But maintain yourselves you must: or else—don't try to speak to men in the name of God! For your task is to confront the rampant disillusionment of the day, and smash it with the Cross of Christ and shame it with the splendour of the Resurrection. What makes your calling in the Church so urgent and so critical is the fact that human hearts, bombarded with grim perplexities and damaging shadows of despair, are crying as never before, "Is there any word from the Lord?" Men who have seen war's scourge let loose twice in a generation are not going to be put off with polite trivialities and polished essays and pulpit dialectic. They don't want our views, opinions, advice or arguments. Is there any word from the Lord? Tell us that, they demand. Has Christianity failed? Must God's hopes be wrecked for ever on the rock of man's anarchic nature? Are we mad to pray "Thy kingdom come"? These demonic forces of evil in the universe, mocking all our dreams and best endeavours—are they fated to have the last word? It is all very well to stand up in church and sing:

So be it. Lord! Thy throne shall never, Like earth's proud empires, pass away; Thy Kingdom stands and grows for ever, Till all Thy creatures own Thy sway.

But is that true? What if it is only a pose, the silly pretence of the self-deceiving? Was Thomas Hardy perhaps right when he recommended Christianity to "throw up the sponge and say 'I am beaten,' and let another religion take its place"? There is the vast, intolerable mystery of suffering. Is there any word from the Lord about that? There is the more intimate and personal disillusionment, the monotonous misery of defeat in a man's own soul: "the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do. O wretched man that I am!" Is there any word from the Lord about that? Such is the demand which thrusts itself clamorously and uncompromisingly upon the Church to-day. And to that demand, you—please God—shall have a right to speak.

Let me at this point remind you, for your encouragement, that if there is a vast amount of disillusionment going about in the world to-day, there is also an immense stirring of eager and passionate hope. The tension between these two attitudes is indeed one of the cardinal factors in the situation. Nor is this strange blending of disillusionment and hope in the minds of men so paradoxical as at first sight it may appear. For a complete breakdown of humanist self-confidence is a true praeparatio evangelica: it makes straight through the desert a highway for our God. Preach to a soul strong in untroubled egotism, mens sibi conscia recti—and it will be like hammering at granite. But bring the Gospel to bear upon a soul whose self-trust has been broken, and there before your very eyes the ancient miracle may be renewed, and the glory of the Lord be revealed. Complacence of any kind—whether it be national or social, intellectual or moral, humanitarian or religious—is God's greatest enemy. But when the foundations are undermined, and the edifice of man's vaunted achievements comes down with a crash, then is the time, declared Jesus, to "look up, and lift up your heads; for redemption draweth nigh."

Thus the very disillusionment of to-day is the raw material of the Christian hope. Men are beginning to suspect that no new order which seeks to erect itself on the ruins of the old can have one atom of survival-value, or be other than a patchwork and a sham, unless it has direct and deliberate reference to the mind and programme of God for humanity. Consider in this connection the following verdict, which comes significantly from Dr. C. E. M. Joad: "There is in many Englishmen to-day, and especially in young people newly come to maturity, a renewed interest in the religious view of the world, and a disposition to examine afresh, in the light of it, the traditional answers to fundamental questions which Christianity has provided. … That the seeds of a spiritual revival are germinating in the minds of the people of this country, I, for one, do not doubt." The fact is that to-day, as so often in past history, the very complexity of the human predicament becomes in Christ's hands a weapon for the further advance of His Kingdom. And if your calling as preachers in this generation is one of immense difficulty, you will be strong in hope, giving glory to God, not in spite of the difficulties, but precisely because of them. For still to-day, as at the first, it is when the doors are shut, in the bitter hour of disillusionment, that Christ is apt to break in, and stand in the midst, and say "Peace be unto you." And then, out of the dark misery of self-despair, men begin to arise and shine, knowing that their light is come!

Don't listen to the lugubrious voices that incessantly deplore the deadness of the age, and groan about the thankless uphill task of the Christian ministry and the desolating lack of response. It is a thrilling hour in which to bear the commission of your Lord.

I find certain words of St. Paul to the Romans dramatically relevant here. The eighth chapter is one of the most lyrical and triumphant things that ever came from the heart of man: but the note of disillusionment is there. "To this day," wrote the apostle, "the entire creation sighs and throbs with pain." For none knew better than he that the shining civilization was demon-ridden, and that ruthless forces held the souls of men in bitter thraldom. But what his piercing insight saw was this, that the mood of tragic desperation was itself the harbinger of hope. Just because this sighing, groaning creation was racked with pain, it was also tense with a breathless expectancy:

Still nursing the unconquerable hope, Still clutching the inviolable shade.

"The whole creation," wrote Paul, "waits with eager longing for the sons of God to be revealed." It is listening for the sound of a distant pilgrim chorus, the march of a great consecrated brotherhood in Christ, the decisive emergence of a new race, the true sons of God, sealed with the Cross. It is scanning the roads down which that ransomed host, that nobler breed of saints, shall come at destiny's hour to bring history to its fulfilment.

It is a daring, magnificent conception. Are we wrong to see in it a parable of that thrust and counter-thrust of disillusionment and hope upon which we look out to-day, and with which as preachers we have to reckon? When a generation has been robbed of its familiar gods of material security, progress, human self-sufficiency, or when the individual soul has found its conventional religion stolen away by the marauding forces of agnosticism, trouble and despair, then strikes God's hour to break in with His salvation. Must we not say that any weariness, unsettlement or consternation is in the last resort a blessed thing if it makes a man or an age in the mood to welcome God? It is a great thing to be brought right down to the depths, if so be that there at last we strike that bedrock which is the Rock of ages; a great thing that life itself should break up even violently the hard core of our proud self-reliance, if so be that the human spirit may be ready then to cast itself upon its ultimate resource in Jesus Christ.

Therefore I counsel you—let no fog of spiritual defeatism chill your ministry. Refuse to listen to the lying voices which insinuate that this is an unpropitious hour for the proclamation of the faith. You are to be the heralds of a religion which once saw the blackest, most desperately unpropitious hour in history—the hour of the crucifying of Jesus—turned into history's crowning glory and mankind's brightest hope. Go forth, then, in the heartening assurance that this present cataclysmic hour is alive with spiritual potentialities.

To take but one striking line of evidence, there is the new demand, particularly amongst youth, for a cause worthy of sacrifice or devotion, the new urge towards complete self-commitment. It will be tragic if the Church cannot take that generous impulse and baptize it into Christ. If you are wise, you will not in your preaching mask or minimize the overwhelming, absolute nature of Christ's demand. Men are ready for a Leader who will unhesitatingly claim the last ounce of His followers' courage and fidelity. Field-Marshal Wavell has told, in his notable lectures entitled Generals and Generalship, the story of how Napoleon, when an artillery officer at the siege of Toulon, built a battery in such an exposed position that he was told he would never find men to man it. But Napoleon had a sure instinct for what was required. He put up a placard—"The battery of men without fear": and it was always manned. This is no time to be offering a reduced, milk-and-water religion. Far too often the world has been presented with a mild and undemanding half-Christianity. The Gospel has been emasculated long enough. Preach Christ to-day in the total challenge of His high, imperious claim. Some will be scared, and some offended: but some, and they the most worth winning, will kneel in homage at His feet.

II

I pass on now to a second form in which the fact of tension, of paradox and conflict—so characteristic, as we have remarked, of the mental and spiritual climate of to-day—thrusts itself upon the preacher of the Word. This is the radical tension between Escapism and Realism. You will encounter nothing more baffling than the way in which an urgent quest for reality and an intense desire to avoid reality at all costs can apparently consort together.

Consider the latter tendency first. Some of you will know St. John Adcock's striking poem The Divine Tragedy. It is an imaginative attempt to conceive what would happen if Jesus of Nazareth were to come back to the modern world; if some of those who profess our holy religion, and remain safe and snug behind a façade of second-hand dogma and devotion, were suddenly confronted with the blazing reality of Christ Himself. Hear the poet's conclusion:

When a blithe infant, lapt in careless joy, Sports with a woollen lion—if the toy Should come to life, the child, so direly crost, Faced with this Actuality were lost. … Leave us our toys; then happier we shall stay While they remain but toys, and we can play With them and do with them as suits us best; Reality would add to our unrest. … We want no living Christ, whose truth intense Pretends to no belief in our pretence And, flashing on all folly and deceit, Would blast our world to ashes at our feet, … We do but ask to see No more of Him below than is displayed In the dead plaything our own hands have made To lull our fears and comfort us in loss— The wooden Christ upon a wooden Cross!