_Preface and Apology_
Most of the reflections recorded in these pages were prompted by
experiences of a local Christian pastorate. Some are derived from wider
contacts with the churches and colleges of the country. For the sake
of giving a better clue to the meaning of a few of them, it may be
necessary to say that they have as their background a pastorate in an
industrial community in which the natural growth of the city made the
expansion of a small church into a congregation of considerable size,
in a period of thirteen years, inevitable. By the time these lines
reach the reader the author will have exchanged his pastoral activities
for academic pursuits.
It must be confessed in all candor that some of the notes, particularly
the later ones, were written after it seemed fairly certain that
they would reach the eye of the public in some form or other. It was
therefore psychologically difficult to maintain the type of honesty
which characterizes the self-revelations of a private diary. The
reader must consequently be warned (though such a warning may be
superfluous) to discount the unconscious insincerities which no amount
of self-discipline can eliminate from words which are meant for the
public.
The notes which have been chosen for publication have been picked to
illustrate the typical problems of a modern minister in an industrial
and urban community and what seem to be more or less typical reactions
of a young minister to such problems. Nothing new or startling was
attempted in the pastorate out of which these reflections grew. If
there is any justification for their publication, it must lie in
the light they may throw upon the problems of the modern church and
ministry rather than upon any possible solutions of these problems.
The book is published with an uneasy conscience, the author half hoping
that the publishers would make short shrift of his indiscretions by
throttling the book. Some of the notes are really too inane to deserve
inclusion in any published work, and they can be justified only as a
background for those notes which deal critically with the problems of
the modern ministry. The latter are unfortunately, in many instances,
too impertinent to be in good taste, and I lacked the grace to rob them
of their impertinence without destroying whatever critical value they
might possess. I can only emphasize in extenuation of the spirit which
prompted them, what is confessed in some of the criticisms, namely,
that the author is not unconscious of what the critical reader will
himself divine, a tendency to be most critical of that in other men to
which he is most tempted himself.
The modern ministry is in no easy position; for it is committed to
the espousal of ideals (professionally, at that) which are in direct
conflict with the dominant interests and prejudices of contemporary
civilization. This conflict is nowhere more apparent than in America,
where neither ancient sanctities nor new social insights tend to
qualify, as they do in Europe, the heedless economic forces of an
industrial era.
Inevitably a compromise must be made, or is made, between the rigor
of the ideal and the necessities of the day. That has always been
the case, but the resulting compromises are more obvious to an
astute observer in our own day than in other generations. We are a
world-conscious generation, and we have the means at our disposal
to see and to analyze the brutalities which characterize men’s
larger social relationships and to note the dehumanizing effects
of a civilization which unites men mechanically and isolates them
spiritually.
Our knowledge may ultimately be the means of our redemption, but for
the moment it seems to rob us of self-respect and respect for one
another. Every conscientious minister is easily tempted to a sense of
futility because we live our lives microscopically while we are able
to view the scene in which we labor telescopically. But the higher
perspective has its advantages as well as its dangers. It saves us from
too much self-deception. Men who are engaged in the espousal of ideals
easily fall into sentimentality. From the outside and the disinterested
perspective this sentimentality may seem like hypocrisy. If it is
only sentimentality and self-deception, viewed at closer range, it
may degenerate into real hypocrisy if no determined effort is made to
reduce it to a minimum.
It is no easy task to deal realistically with the moral confusion of
our day, either in the pulpit or the pew, and avoid the appearance,
and possibly the actual peril, of cynicism. An age which obscures the
essentially unethical nature of its dominant interests by an undue
preoccupation with the application of Christian principles in limited
areas, may, as a matter of fact, deserve and profit by ruthless satire.
Yet the pedagogical merits of satire are dubious, and in any event its
weapons will be foresworn by an inside critic for both selfish and
social reasons. For reasons of self-defense he will be very gentle in
dealing with limitations which his own life illustrates.
But he will be generous in judgment for another reason. His intimate
view of the facts will help him to see that what an outside critic
may call hypocrisy may really be honest, because unconscious,
sentimentality and self-deception. When virtues are used to hide moral
limitations the critic ought not to be too sure that the virtues are
bogus. Sometimes they are. But sometimes they merely represent the
effort of honest but short-sighted men to preserve the excellencies
of another day long after these have ceased to have relevancy for the
problems of our own day; or sometimes they spring from efforts to apply
the Christian ideal to limited and immediate areas of conduct where
application is fairly easy. In such cases no one can be absolutely sure
whether it is want of perspective or want of courage which hinders the
Christian idealist from applying his ideals and principles to the more
remote and the more difficult relationships.
That the ministry is particularly tempted to the self-deceptions
which afflict the moral life of Christians today is obvious. If it is
dangerous to entertain great moral ideals without attempting to realize
them in life, it is even more perilous to proclaim them in abstract
terms without bringing them into juxtaposition with the specific social
and moral issues of the day. The minister’s premature satisfaction
in the presentation of moral ideals is accentuated by the fact that
he is a leader in a community in which appreciative attitudes are on
the whole more prevalent than critical ones. The minister is therefore
easily fooled by extravagant conceptions of his own moral stature,
held by admiring parishioners. If he could realize how much of this
appreciation represents transferred religious emotion he could be more
realistic in analyzing himself. And if he could persuade himself to
speak of moral ideals in terms of specific issues and contemporary
situations, he would probably prompt currents of critical thought which
would destroy the aura which invests his person with premature sanctity.
If a minister wants to be a man among men he need only to stop
creating devotion to abstract ideals which every one accepts in theory
and denies in practice, and to agonize about their validity and
practicability in the social issues which he and others face in our
present civilization. That immediately gives his ministry a touch of
reality and potency and robs it of an artificial prestige which it can
afford to dispense with, and is bound to be stripped of, the kind of
prestige which is the prerogative of priests and professional holy men.
The number of ministers who are perfectly realistic about their
tasks and who are sincerely anxious to help the modern generation
find itself, not only in the intricate problems of the personal life
but in the moral and social complexities of an industrial society, is
much larger than the critics outside of the church are able to know
and willing to concede. If I have any regrets, it is that these pages,
preoccupied with criticism, deal inadequately with such men and fail
to discharge my debt of gratitude to them. It is comparatively easy
for professors, secretaries and even bishops to criticise the man in
a local situation from the perspective and the safety (relative, of
course,) which an irresponsible itinerancy supplies.
No amount of pressure from an itinerant “prophet” can change the fact
that a minister is bound to be a statesman as much as a prophet,
dealing with situations as well as principles. In specific situations,
actions must be judged not only in terms of absolute standards but in
consideration of available resources in the lives of those whom the
minister leads.
It may be well for the statesman to know that statesmanship easily
degenerates into opportunism and that opportunism cannot be sharply
distinguished from dishonesty. But the prophet ought to realize that
his higher perspective and the uncompromising nature of his judgments
always has a note of irresponsibility in it. Francis of Assisi may
have been a better Christian than Pope Innocent III. But it may be
questioned whether his moral superiority over the latter was as
absolute as it seemed. Nor is there any reason to believe that Abraham
Lincoln, the statesman and opportunist, was morally inferior to William
Lloyd Garrison, the prophet. The moral achievement of statesmen must be
judged in terms which take account of the limitations of human society
which the statesman must, and the prophet need not, consider.
Having both entered and left the parish ministry against my
inclinations, I pay my tribute to the calling, firm in the conviction
that it offers greater opportunities for both moral adventure and
social usefulness than any other calling if it is entered with open
eyes and a consciousness of the hazards to virtue which lurk in it. I
make no apology for being critical of what I love. No one wants a love
which is based upon illusions, and there is no reason why we should not
love a profession and yet be critical of it.