devotion emphasize the cosmic character of religion. They take us out
of the world of moral theism into the world of a universal theism.
They draw us away from religion in action to religion in itself;
they give us, not the God of this world, but the God who is from
everlasting to everlasting, to whom a thousand years are but as
yesterday when it is past and as a watch in the night. Thus they help
us to make for ourselves an interior refuge into whose precincts
no eye may look, into whose life no other soul may venture. In that
refuge we can be still and know that He is God. There we can eat the
meat which the world knoweth not of, there have peace with Him. It
is in these central solitudes, induced by worship, that the vision
is clarified, the perspective corrected, the vital forces recharged.
Those who possess them are transmitters of such heavenly messages;
they issue from them as rivers pour from undiminished mountain
streams. Does the world's sin and pain and weakness come and empty
itself into the broad current of these devout lives? Then their
fearless onsweeping forces gather it all up, carry it on, cleanse and
purify it in the process. Over such lives the things of this world
have no power. They are kept secretly from them all in His pavilion
where there is no strife of tongues.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WORSHIP AND THE DISCIPLINE OF DOCTRINE
If one were to ask any sermon-taster of our generation what is the
prevailing type of discourse among the better-known preachers of the
day, he would probably answer, "The expository." Expository preaching
has had a notable revival in the last three decades, especially
among liberal preachers; that is, among those who like ourselves have
discarded scholastic theologies, turned to the ethical aspects of
religion for our chief interests and accepted the modern view of the
Bible. To be sure, it is not the same sort of expository preaching
which made the Scottish pulpit of the nineteenth century famous. It
is not the detailed exposition of each word and clause, almost of each
comma, which marks the mingled insight and literalism of a Chalmers,
an Alexander Maclaren, a Taylor of the Broadway Tabernacle. For that
assumed a verbally inspired and hence an inerrant Scripture; it dealt
with the literature of the Old and New Testaments as being divine
revelations. The new expository preaching proceeds from almost an
opposite point of view. It deals with this literature as being a
transcript of human experience. Its method is direct and simple and,
within sharp limits, very effective. The introduction to one of these
modern expository sermons would run about as follows:
"I suppose that what has given to the Old and New Testament Scriptures
their enduring hold over the minds and consciences of men has been
their extraordinary humanity. They contain so many vivid and accurate
recitals of typical human experience, portrayed with self-verifying
insight and interpreted with consummate understanding of the issues of
the heart. And since it is true, as Goethe said, 'That while mankind
is always progressing man himself remains ever the same,' and we
are not essentially different from the folk who lived a hundred
generations ago under the sunny Palestinian sky, we read these ancient
tales and find in them a mirror which reflects the lineaments of our
own time. For instance,..."
Then the sermonizer proceeds to relate some famous Bible story,
resolving its naïve Semitic theophanies, its pictorial narration,
its primitive morality, into the terms of contemporary ethical or
political or economic principles. Take, for instance, the account of
the miracle of Moses and the Burning Bush. The preacher will point
out that Moses saw a bush that burned and burned and that, unlike most
furze bushes of those upland pastures which were ignited by the hot
Syrian sun, was not consumed. It was this enduring quality of the bush
that interested him. Thus Moses showed the first characteristic of
genius, namely, capacity for accurate and discriminating observation.
And he coupled this with the scientific habit of mind. For he said,
"I will now turn aside and see why!" Thus did he propose to pierce
behind the event to the cause of the event, behind the movement to the
principle of the movement. What a modern man this Moses was! It seems
almost too good to be true!
But as yet we have merely scratched the surface of the story. For
he took his shoes from off his feet when he inspected this new
phenomenon, feeling instinctively that he was on holy ground. Thus
there mingled with his scientific curiosity the second great quality
of genius, which is reverence. There was no complacency here but an
approach to life at once eager and humble; keen yet teachable and
mild. And now behold what happens! As a result of this combination of
qualities there came to Moses the vision of what he might do to lead
his oppressed countrymen out of their industrial bondage. Whereupon
he displayed the typical human reaction and cried, "Who am I, that I
should go unto Pharoah or that I should lead the children of Israel
out of Egypt!" My brother Aaron, who is an eloquent person--and as it
turned out later also a specious one--is far better suited for this
undertaking. Thus he endeavored to evade the task and cried, "Let
someone else do it!" Having thus expounded the word of God (!) the
sermon proceeds to its final division in the application of this
shrewd and practical wisdom to some current event or parochial
situation.
Now, such preaching is indubitably effective and not wholly
illegitimate. Its technique is easily acquired. It makes us realize
that the early Church Fathers, who displayed a truly appalling
ingenuity in allegorizing the Old Testament and who found "types" of
Christ and His Church in frankly sensual Oriental wedding songs, have
many sturdy descendants among us to this very hour! Such preaching
gives picturesqueness and color, it provides the necessary sugar
coating to the large pill of practical and ethical exhortation. To
be sure, it does not sound like the preaching of our fathers. The old
sermon titles--"Suffering with Christ that we may be also glorified
with Him," for instance--seem very far away from it. Nor is it to be
supposed that this is what its author intended the story we have been
using to convey nor that these were the reactions that it aroused
in the breasts of its original hearers. But as the sermonizer would
doubtless go on to remark, there is a certain universal quality in all
great literature, and genius builds better than it knows, and so each
man can draw his own water of refreshment from these great wells of
the past. And indeed nothing is more amazing or disconcerting than the
mutually exclusive notions, the apparently opposing truths, which can
be educed by this method, from one and the same passage of Scripture!
There is scarcely a chapter in all the Old Testament, and to a
less degree in the New Testament, which may not be thus ingeniously
transmogrified to meet almost any homiletical emergency.
Now, I may as well confess that I have preached this kind of sermon
lo! these many years _ad infinitum_ and I doubt not _ad nauseam_. We
have all used in this way the flaming rhetoric of the Hebrew prophets
until we think of them chiefly as indicters of a social order. They
were not chiefly this but something quite different and more valuable,
namely, religious geniuses. First-rate preaching would deal with Amos
as the pioneer in ethical monotheism, with Hosea as the first poet of
the divine grace, with Jeremiah as the herald of the possibility of
each man's separate and personal communion with the living God. But,
of course, such religious preaching, dealing with great doctrines of
faith, would have a kind of large remoteness about it; it would pay
very little attention to the incidents of the story, and indeed,
would tend to be hardly expository at all, but rather speculative and
doctrinal.
And that brings us to the theme of this final discussion. For I am one
of those who believe that great preaching is doctrinal preaching and
that it is particularly needed at this hour. The comparative neglect
of the New Testament in favor of the Old in contemporary preaching;
the use and nature of the expository method--no less than the
unworshipful character of our services--appear to me to offer a final
and conclusive proof of the unreligious overhumanistic emphases of our
interpretation of religion. And if we are to have a religious revival,
then it seems to me worshipful services must be accompanied by
speculative preaching and I doubt if the one can be nobly maintained
without the other. For we saw that worship is the direct experience
of the Absolute through high and concentrated feeling. Even so
speculative and, in general, doctrinal preaching is the same return
to first principles and to ultimate values in the realm of ideas.
It turns away from the immediate, the practical, the relative to the
final and absolute in the domain of thought.
Now, obviously, then, devout services and doctrinal preaching should
go together. No high and persistent emotions can be maintained without
clear thinking to nourish and steady them. There is in doctrinal
preaching a certain indifference to immediate issues; to detailed
applications. It deals, by its nature, with comprehensive and abstract
rather than local and concrete thinking; with inclusive feeling,
transcendent aspiration. It does not try to pietize the ordinary,
commercial and domestic affairs of men. Instead it deals with the
highest questions and perceptions of human life; argues from those
sublime hypotheses which are the very subsoil of the religious
temperament and understanding. It deals with those aspects of human
life which indeed include, but include because they transcend, the
commercial and domestic, the professional and political affairs of
daily living. We have been insisting in these chapters that it is that
portion of human need and experience which lies between the knowable
and the unknowable with which it is the preacher's chief province to
deal. Doctrinal preaching endeavors to give form and relations to its
intuitions and high desires, its unattainable longings and insights.
There is a native alliance between the doctrine of Immanence and
expository preaching. For the office of both is to give us the God of
this world in the affairs of the moment. There is a native alliance
between expository preaching and humanism which very largely accounts
for the latter's popularity. For expository preaching, as at present
practiced, deals mostly with ethical and practical issues, with the
setting of the house of this world in order. There is also a native
and majestic alliance between the idea of transcendence and doctrinal
preaching and between the facts of the religious experience and the
content of speculative philosophy. Not pragmatism but pure metaphysics
is the native language of the mind when it moves in the spiritual
world.
But I am aware that already I have lost my reader's sympathy. You do
not desire to preach doctrinal sermons and while you may read with
amiable patience and faintly smiling complacency this discussion,
you have no intention of following its advice. We tend to think that
doctrinal sermons are outmoded--old-fashioned and unpopular--and we
dread as we dread few other things, not being up to date. Besides,
doctrinal preaching offers little of that opportunity which is found
in expository and yet more in topical preaching for exploiting our
own personalities. Some of us are young. It is merely a polite way of
saying that we are egotistical. We know in our secret heart of hearts
that the main thing that we have to give the world is our own new,
fresh selves with their corrected and arresting understanding of the
world. We are modestly yet eagerly ready to bestow that gift of ours
upon the waiting congregation. One of the few compensations of growing
old is that, as the hot inner fires burn lower, this self-absorption
lessens and we become disinterested and judicial observers of life and
find so much pleasure in other people's successes and so much wisdom
in other folk's ideas. But not so for youth; it isn't what the past or
the collective mind and heart have formulated: it's what you've got
to say that interests you. Hence it is probably true that doctrinal
preaching, in the very nature of things, makes no strong appeal to men
who are beginning the ministry.
But there are other objections which are more serious, because
inherent in the very genius of doctrinal preaching itself. First:
such preaching is more or less remote from contemporary and practical
issues. It deals with thought, not actions; understanding rather than
efficiency; principles rather than applications. It moves among the
basic concepts of the religious life; deals with matters beyond and
above and without the tumultuous issues of the moment. So it follows
that doctrinal preaching has an air of detachment, almost of seclusion
from the world; the preacher brings his message from some pale world
of ideas to this quick world of action. And we are afraid of this
detachment, the abstract and theoretical nature of the thinker's
sermon.
I think the fear is not well grounded. What is the use of preaching
social service to the almost total neglect of setting forth the
intellectual and emotional concept of the servant? It is the quality
of the doer which determines the value of the deed. Why keep on
insisting upon being good if our hearers have never been carefully
instructed in the nature and the sanctions of goodness? Has not the
trouble with most of our political and moral reform been that we have
had a passion for it but very little science of it? How can we know
the ways of godliness if we take God Himself for granted? No: our
chief business, as preachers, is to preach the content rather than the
application of the truth. Not many people are interested in trying
to find the substance of the truth. It is hated as impractical by
the multitude of the impatient, and despised as old-fashioned by
the get-saved-quick reformers. Nevertheless we must find out the
distinctions between divine and human, right and wrong, and why they
are what they are, and what is the good of it all. There is no more
valuable service which the preacher can render his community than to
deliberately seclude himself from continual contact with immediate
issues and dwell on the eternal verities. When Darwin published _The
Descent of Man_ at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, the _London
Times_ took him severely to task for his absorption in purely
scientific interests and hypothetical issues. "When the foundations
of property and the established order were threatened with the fires
of the Paris Commune; when the Tuileries were burning--how could a
British subject be occupying himself with speculations in natural
science in no wise calculated to bring aid or comfort to those who
had a stake in the country!" Well, few of us imagine today that
Darwin would have been wise to have exchanged the seclusion and the
impractical hours of the study for the office or the camp, the market
or the street.
Yet the same fear of occupying ourselves with central and abstract
matters still obsesses us. At the Quadrennial Conference of the
Methodist Episcopal Church held recently at Des Moines, thirty-four
bishops submitted an address in which they said among other things:
"Of course, the church must stand in unflinching, uncompromising
denunciation of all violations of laws, against all murderous child
labor, all foul sweat shops, all unsafe mines, all deadly tenements,
all excessive hours for those who toil, all profligate luxuries, all
standards of wage and life below the living standard, all unfairness
and harshness of conditions, all brutal exactions, whether of the
employer or union, all overlordships, whether of capital or labor,
all godless profiteering, whether in food, clothing, profits or wages,
against all inhumanity, injustice and blighting inequality, against
all class-minded men who demand special privileges or exceptions on
behalf of their class."
These are all vital matters, yet I cannot believe that it is the
church's chief business thus to turn her energies to the problems
of the material world. This would be a stupendous program, even
if complete in itself; as an item in a program it becomes almost a
_reductio ad absurdum_. The _Springfield Republican_ in an editorial
comment upon it said: "It fairly invites the question whether the
church is not in some danger of trying to do too much. The fund of
energy available for any human undertaking is not unlimited; energy
turned in one direction must of necessity be withdrawn from another
and energy diffused in many directions cannot be concentrated. Count
the adjectives--'murderous,' 'foul,' 'unsafe,' 'deadly,' 'excessive,'
'profligate,' 'brutal,' 'godless,' 'blighting'--does not each involve
research, investigation, comparison, analysis, deliberation, a heavy
tax upon the intellectual resources of the church if any result worth
having is to be obtained? Can this energy be found without subtracting
energy from some other sphere?"
The gravest problems of the world are not found here. They are
found in the decline of spiritual understanding, the decay of moral
standards, the growth of the vindictive and unforgiving spirit, the
lapse from charity, the overweening pride of the human heart. With
these matters the church must chiefly deal; to their spiritual
infidelity she must bring a spiritual message; to their poor thinking
she must bring the wisdom of the eternal. This task, preventive not
remedial, is her characteristic one. Is it not worth while to remember
that the great religious leaders have generally ignored contemporary
social problems? So have the great artists who are closely allied
to them. Neither William Shakespeare nor Leonardo da Vinci were
reformers; neither Gautama nor the Lord Jesus had much to say about
the actual international economic and political readjustments which
were as pressing in their day as ours. They were content to preach the
truth, sure that it, once understood, would set men free.
But a second reason why we dislike doctrinal preaching is because we
confound it with dogmatic preaching. Doctrinal sermons are those which
deal with the philosophy of religion. They expound or defend or relate
the intellectual statements, the formulae of religion. Such discourses
differ essentially from dogmatic sermonizing. For what is a doctrine?
A doctrine is an intellectual formulation of an experience. Suppose
a man receives a new influx of moral energy and spiritual insight,
through reading the Bible, through trying to pray, through loving and
meditating upon the Lord Jesus. That experience isn't a speculative
proposition, it isn't a faith or an hypothesis; it's a fact. Like the
man in the Johannine record the believer says, "Whether he be a sinner
I know not: but one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I
see."
Now, let this new experience of moral power and spiritual insight
express itself, as it normally will, in a more holy and more
useful life, in the appropriate terms of action. There you get that
confession of experience which we call character. Or let it express
itself in the appropriate emotions of joy and awe and reverence so
that, like Ray Palmer, the convert writes an immortal hymn, or a body
of converts like the early church produces the _Te Deum_. There is the
confession of experience in worship. Or let a man filled with this new
life desire to understand it; see what its implications are regarding
the nature of God, the nature of man, the place of Christ in the scale
of created or uncreated Being. Let him desire to thus conserve and
interpret that he may transmit this new experience. Then he will begin
to define it and to reduce it, for brevity and clearness, to some
abstract and compact formula. Thus he will make a confession of
experience in doctrine.
Doctrines, then, are not arbitrary but natural, not accidental but
essential. They are the hypotheses regarding the eternal nature of
things drawn from the data of our moral and spiritual experience. They
are to religion just what the science of electricity is to a trolley
car, or what the formula of evolution is to natural science, or what
the doctrine of the conservation of energy is, or was, to physics.
Doctrines are signposts; they are placards, index fingers, notices
summing up and commending the proved essences of religious experience.
Two things are always true of sound doctrine. First: it is not
considered to have primary value; its worth is in the experience
to which it witnesses. Second: it is not fixed but flexible and
progressive. Someone has railed at theology, defining it as the
history of discarded errors. That is a truth and a great compliment
and the definition holds good of the record of any other science.
Now, if doctrines are signposts, dogmas are old and now misleading
milestones. For what is a dogma? It may be one of two things. Usually
it is a doctrine that has forgotten that it ever had a history;
a formula which once had authority because it was a genuine
interpretation of experience but which now is so outmoded in fashion
of thought, or so maladjusted to our present scale of values, as to
be no longer clearly related to experience and is therefore accepted
merely on command, or on the prestige of its antiquity. Or it may be
a doctrine promulgated _ex cathedra_, not because religious experience
produced it, but because ecclesiastical expediencies demand it. Thus,
to illustrate the first sort of dogma, there was once a doctrine of
the Virgin Birth. Men found, as they still do, both God and man in
Jesus; they discovered when they followed Him their own real humanity
and true divinity. They tried to explain and formalize the experience
and made a doctrine which, for the circle of ideas and the extent
of the factual knowledge of the times, was both reasonable and
valuable. The experience still remains, but the doctrine is no
longer psychologically or biologically credible. It no longer
offers a tenable explanation; it is not a valuable or illuminating
interpretation. Hence if we hold it at all today, it is either for
sentiment or for the sake of mere tradition, namely, for reasons other
than its intellectual usefulness or its inherent intelligibility. So
held it passes over from doctrine into dogma. Or take, as an
example of the second sort, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception,
promulgated by Pius IX in the year 1854, and designed to strengthen
the prestige of the Papal See among the Catholic powers of Europe and
to prolong its hold upon its temporal possessions. De Cesare describes
the promulgation of the dogma as follows:
"The festival on that day, December 8, 1854, sacred to the Virgin, was
magnificent. After chanting the Gospel, first in Latin, then in Greek,
Cardinal Macchi, deacon of the Sacred College, together with the
senior archbishops and bishops present, all approached the Papal
throne, pronouncing these words in Latin, 'Deign, most Holy Father,
to lift your Apostolic voice and pronounce the dogmatic Decree of the
Immaculate Conception, on account of which there will be praise in
heaven and rejoicings on earth.' The Pope replying, stated that he
welcomed the wish of the Sacred College, the episcopate, the clergy,
and declared it was essential first of all to invoke the help of the
Holy Spirit. So saying he intoned _in Veni Creator_, chanted in chorus
by all present. The chant concluded, amid a solemn silence Pius IX's
finely modulated voice read the following Decree:
"'It shall be Dogma, that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first
instant of the Conception, by singular privilege and grace of God,
in virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of mankind, was
preserved from all stain of original sin.' The senior cardinal then
prayed the Pope to make this Decree public, and, amid the roar of
cannon from Fort St. Angelo and the festive ringing of church bells,
the solemn act was accomplished.'"[42] Here is an assertion regarding
Mary's Conception which has only the most tenuous connection with
religious experience and which was pronounced for ecclesiastical and
political reasons. Here we have dogma at its worst. Here, indeed, it
is so bad as to resemble many of the current political and economic
pronunciamentos!
[Footnote 42: _The Last Days of Papal Rome_, pp. 127 ff.]