The necessary limitation of the number of these lectures caused the giving up of the first intention to open the course with a treatment of the historical method of Bible study. Every lecture is based upon the use of that method. ...the Scriptures cannot be understood, nor their power appreciated, without some knowledge of the historical situations out of which they grew. [From the preface.]
II
REACTIONS OF HIS MINISTRY ON HIS LIFE
Necessity of Proper Qualifications
It has been said that the pastor must be qualified for this work of teaching. His educational career at college and at the theological seminary will give him a good start. It must not be thought, however, that the man of God will be thoroughly furnished unto all good works, especially that of dividing the word of truth aright,1 simply because he has had such educational opportunities. Indeed, so vast is the equipment necessary that probably no one has ever been thoroughly qualified. The college and seminary prepare us only to start. Real preparation is perennial and continuous. The pastor must be at work all the time upon the great book.
In addition to, and equally important with, the knowledge of the Scriptures will be the forming of contacts with the people who are to be led, as Jesus did with the Samaritan woman, in their common desire for water;2 the appreciation of the sincerity of men and women and their praiseworthy clinging to truth as they understand it though they be either faulty or mistaken in their ideas;3 the tact that would introduce new conceptions only by bringing others face to face with facts that are self-evident;4
12Tim. 2: 15. 2John 4: 7. 3Acts 18: 26; 19: 1-4. 4Acts 3: 10; 4: 14.
II A. Reactions on Personal Life
Beneath all public and professional ministries there is the individual life that is the secret of all we can accomplish. What we are is the secret of all we can say or do.
IIA 1. Compulsory Systematic Bible Study
The need of being qualified compels systematic Bible study. “Thou that teachest another, dost thou not teach thyself?”5 There are passages in the Bible which are “More to be desired than fine gold, yea, than much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb,”6 upon which any human being, however unskilled in Bible study, might nourish his soul. It is true that these may be possessed and the spiritual ideal they contain enthroned over our lives. Nevertheless, we may possess all of these and be ignorant of the Book itself. Yet it cannot be denied that spiritual reality which is the instrument of the Holy Spirit in the regeneration and development of our lives, can best be discovered, appreciated, and enthroned only by sane methods of Bible study. Too often the minister thinks he is so engrossed with parish details, visitings, chores, and public functions that he cannot give himself to systematic Bible study. The pastor who ceases to be a student of the Scriptures when he enters upon his ministry and fails to develop his knowledge of the Bible is destined to experience an atrophy of soul, to become a mere mechanic, and a bungling homiletic artisan. He must keep in touch with the sources of life, maintain uninterrupted connection with the reservoir if the waters are to flow through him to freshen and invigorate the lives of others, and nourish his own soul in the process of distribution. The minister may piously read the book through “from cover to cover,” may know its language and its contents, and yet be densely ignorant of its message. His daily Bible readings may merely salve his conscience, or appease the claims of ministerial duty. But his use of the Bible is to be far different. Only systematic study will put him in possession of the significance of a book, give him the message of that book to the day and generation in which it was written, and help him to understand the view-point of the writer or speaker whose words are therein recorded. Habits of study are essential. The minister who will every day conscientiously devote a given period to faithful, honest investigation of a book of the Bible will find himself much richer at the end of a month than if he had spent the same amount of time in so-called devotional reading, or in desultory and saltatory uses of the Scriptures. There is no excuse for laziness here, nor should any one be satisfied with anything less than the very best study he can possibly give.
5Rom. 2: 21. 6Ps. 19: 10.
There have been instances where congregations assembled early in the morning for the purpose of hearing the New Testament read through in a single day. Different readers followed one another. It would be unfair to say that no advantage resulted to anybody from such an unusual experience. Nevertheless, it can hardly be questioned that if the day had been devoted to a single book of the New Testament in an honest effort to understand the life out of which it grew, the purpose of the writer in producing it, and the message it bore to those for whom it was written, the results of the day would have been vastly more helpful.
IIA 2. Fellowship in Pursuit of Spiritual Reality
Systematic study will bring the minister into close fellowship with others who are seeking to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height, and to know the love of God that passes knowledge.7 The pursuit of knowledge is a social matter. No one saint alone could comprehend the love that passes the knowledge of any one person. Each of us needs to have the light that has come into another’s soul. Sometimes this corrects our own views, often increases our perceptions, or modifies our conclusions, and frequently gives us the joy of confirmation of our results. In any event it stimulates any one who is engaged in this systematic study for the purpose of teaching. In all departments of knowledge men work together. They receive one another’s results, test them, verify them, correct them, modify them in various ways. To be in fellowship with those who have such high purposes is in itself a holy privilege. How can one forego membership in such a consecrated fraternity? Communion of saints in pursuit of knowledge is blessed.
7Eph. 3: 19.
The uplift that comes to the pastor’s life in being related to others in this quest for light cannot be surpassed except by the joy that the possession of the light brings. To have one’s ignorance enlightened, to see one’s mistakes corrected, and his partial visions amplified, to become enriched through the honest workings of another’s brain and heart—are gains to ourselves that are beyond estimate. The dogmatic spirit is exorcised by such union in efforts. No one can live unto himself in any realm of life.8 Isolation is fatal to expansion. The teaching pastor is forced out of all insularity. He must join with others in the common pursuit of spiritual reality as recorded in the Bible. It is true that many lives were necessary to produce that priceless literature. It is equally true that many lives are needed to interpret it. Why travel this path like a lonely tramp when a great company awaits our fellowship in the journey?
8Rom. 14: 7.
IIA 3. Wide Culture as a By product of Teaching
The cultural value of this preparation for teaching is beyond all power to describe. The historical method of Bible study compels each student to know the situation out of which each book of the Bible came and the purposes of the writer to influence those for whom his book was written. One must become acquainted with literary methods current at the time the book was produced, make to live again the historical conditions that existed, become acquainted with geography, archeology, customs, great world movements, relations personal and international, and abandon for the time being his citizenship in the present to live again with those who wrote the Scriptures. How is it possible for any one to understand the Old Testament prophets unless their books are read in the light of the crises that produced them, of the hunger for world-wide empire on the part of Assyria, Egypt, Babylonia, the Hittites, of the geographical location of Palestine as a thoroughfare over which these contending countries had to go in order to get at one another? The fact is that these great world powers are mentioned at all in the Old Testament, which deals specifically with the development of the religion of Jehovah among the Hebrew peoples, only because the prophets were interpreters of universal history and saw in world movements indications of the purposes and the spirit of the God of all the earth. They were students of international politics. Assyria was Jehovah’s rod9 and his razor.10 Cyrus was Jehovah’s Messiah.11 Isaiah gave us a philosophy of history at the time when Rome was founded. These and numberless other things indicate how lean and meager are interpretations of the Old Testament prophets which ignore the great cosmic currents. How could any one hope to understand the tortuous development of the idea of Messianism unless he was acquainted with the religious conceptions of the people who touched Israel in its national development? The same questions might be asked about every other part of the literature of the Old Testament. It is not enough for us to have merely a good English translation. We must know thousands of things that are not expressly stated in the literature in order that we may understand the literature itself.
9Isa. 10: 24. 10Isa. 7: 20. 11Isa. 45: 1.
Precisely the same is true of our New Testament, although the life that it records is centuries nearer to our own than the life out of which the Old Testament grew. How much light is thrown upon the early Christian literature by recognizing the pre-literary period of the early church, and realizing the epistolary period as revealed in the Pauline correspondence, and that all the letters of the great apostle were written before our earliest existing Gospel was produced! When one goes further and asks why this was the case with this priceless literature, and discovers the causes that really produced this situation, the information gained puts a wholly new conception upon the New Testament. In other words, the minister who would qualify himself for the service herein described necessarily is led into large regions of knowledge, the mere acquaintance with which is denied to those who are indifferent to thorough preparation for Bible teaching. The cultural value of such study cannot be exaggerated. It is not too much to say that countless books have been produced to help us know and appreciate the messages of the Biblical books dealing with these unmentioned but luminous conditions which alone can make clear the sacred pages.
IIA 4. Ethical Enthusiasm Pervading All Processes
There is an ethical reaction also that occurs in the life of the pastor who prepares himself for this teaching ministry. His passionate devotion to reality will force him without reserve to ascertain what the facts are. He will not be content with anything else than exactness and thoroughness. In other words, all that is implied in honest study will rush back in upon his total character. He will find integrity in mental work breaking through mere intellectual bounds and seizing upon and dominating his love, his plans, and his relations. He will soon come to believe that only reality can satisfy anywhere. No pains will be too severe for him to discover truth. He will be willing to sweat his brains. He will be courageous enough to admit that he does not know. He will never be content with make-believe or with sham anywhere. He will soon come to see that only the truth can make us free.12 Only reality emancipates. All else enslaves. With processes of study so thoroughly ethical, his entire nature soon comes to yield to the ethical ideal as sovereign. He will not take advantage of the ignorance of those with whom he deals to employ unreal methods or to state half-truths simply because he may get some response from those whose lives he touches. He will scorn as unworthy of the God of reality or of the Christ who said,13 “I am the truth,” anything else or less than exactness of statement, and to the best of his ability will use only that which has verified itself to his sincere studies as being the fact. The only way to escape bondage from error, ignorance, and superstition is through surrender to reality. If God be the great Reality, he can build no kingdom anywhere upon the foundation of ignorance or of error or of superstition. Still less than any other realm can he found the kingdom of Christ upon any other basis than reality.
12John 8: 32. 13John 14: 6.
Is it not well worth while to pursue a discipline that shall thus react upon one’s total character? One of the highest fruits of this preparation for teaching others will be such ethical fiber in all the minister’s life. All prophets of God need it. “Will ye, for God, speak that which is wrong, and for him will ye utter deceit?” said Job.14 “Let me alone; and speak will I, let come upon me what will. Wherefore do I take my flesh in my teeth, and put my life in my hand? Behold—He may slay me; I may not hope; but my ways will I maintain, to His face. Nay, that shall be to me also for salvation, for no false one shall come into His presence.” 15 Such will be the stern adherence to facts by one whose whole being is steeped in the ethical baptism of reality. The real God will tolerate no sham. Nowhere do we so learn that truth as in Biblical study. And begirt with its strength the pastor will in all the recesses of his being and in all leadership of his people be courageous enough to scorn all temptation to compromise with unreality anywhere. Is it too much to claim that our Lord himself in the experiences of his temptation won his battles because his soul was armored in impregnable ethical equipment partly at least acquired from his study of his Bible? He met all assaults by spiritual and ethical repulses expressed in Old Testament language.16
14Job 13: 7.
15Job 13: 13-15, Genung’s translation in the “epic of Inner Life.”
16Matt. 4: 4; cf. Deut. 8: 3; Matt. 4: 7; cf. Deut. 6: 16; Matt. 4: 10; cf. deut. 6: 13; 10: 20.
IIA 5. Devotional Appreciation of Sacred Literature
The devotional value of such study to the pastor’s life is inconceivable. Preachers’ souls need precisely the same nourishment which they wish to bring to others. Nevertheless, we cannot feed ourselves upon husks. No mere words nor any torture of them in the hope of squeezing out spiritual significance can nourish our spirits. If we live again with those who lived in Biblical times, feel their hopes and fears, experience their trials and comforts, our own hearts will glow with the same fires that warmed the spirits of those who broke out into hymns of praise or prayers, because the same humanity, the same trials, and the same God belong to us alike. We shall find the same courage for troubles and dark days and hardships. There will be no part of the Bible growing out of human experience that will not yield to us its precious strength for our personal lives. We shall suffer with those who suffered, rejoice with those whose thanksgivings burst forth with such music and power. We shall sit with them in their darkness, and be illuminated with the light that shone upon their careers. This is the true devotional experience. It is something that is vital and that does not depend upon a misuse of a single word in all the Bible. We enter into life. We see that all expressions of it recorded in this literature are windows through which we can peer into the sacred experiences of the lives of men and women, and doorways through which we can enter into their deepest secrets. The soul of the Bible will enter into our own souls, and we shall have the holy communion of spirits which will bring us afresh the feeling that God is in all life and that every place is a sanctuary. Surely a study that will yield such experiences is far more truly devotional than any mere sentimentalism that may rest upon an untrue use of any word even though it be in the Bible.
The truest devotional use of the Bible is in such study. The fact of the unity of the soul makes it impossible for us to share the companionship of any Biblical character or writer without participating in his emotions as well as his thoughts. Only as we project ourselves back into the history of those who found in God their hopes and deliverances will our own hopes and faith become strong to meet our experiences. Detached maxims and mottoes, mere quotations from the literature wholly apart from the circumstances that begot them, have no real virility. We may try to warm these isolated sentences by imagination, and make them take the chill from our cold souls, but the caloric that emanates from our own fancies is only a delusive substitute for the fire that other lives have kindled in their rough friction with fears, distresses, and perplexities. Into these flames we can throw ourselves with our own peculiar and personal needs, and become fresh fuel for the proven heat. Only in this vital method of sharing the lives of others can we truly use their words of sorrow and joy. Lives must become one before language is identical. The real devotional value of sane Bible study far exceeds any other conceivable devotional uses of the Scriptures.
II B. Effects upon His Public Ministry
The effect upon the public ministry of the teacher will likewise be most valuable. Our personal experiences will be reflected in our public life. We are the mediators of divine life to the souls of others. Behind the public ministry is the man. In personality, private habits, the effects of this preparation for our teaching ministry will reveal themselves. They cannot be concealed. A life that has dedicated itself as has just been outlined can have no official or professional aspects. It will be genuinely personal, the gift of one’s self. It cannot be conventionally ministerial. Jesus was what he taught. All his words, deeds, and attitudes were only normal revelations of himself. He was not one being in the interior of his soul, and another before the world. In him there was no professionalism. The Teacher expressed himself, spoke what he knew.17 His words were spirit and life.18 He unfolded himself and asked others to be like himself. That is the highest preaching. Alas, that we dare not do the same. Yet that is to be our ideal.
17John 3: 11. 18John 6: 63.
IIB 1. Uses of Scriptures in the Pulpit
The noblest public ministry is simply the expression of our best personal lives. What then does this mean for our uses of the Bible in public?
We shall let our sane study of the Bible determine our uses of the Scriptures in the pulpit. No longer will the reading of the Scriptures in public worship be simply an item in so-called “preliminary exercises,” or a part of “introductory services,” as if the sermon were the center of our interest in the house of God. We speak to God in our prayers. He speaks to us in the reading of the Scriptures. The reading of the Scriptures will be far more than a traditional feature in a public service. We shall carefully select it. We shall read it with a consciousness that in it there is a message for ourselves and for others. We shall be like Ezra at the water gate who “read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.”19 There can be nothing more delightful or effective than the reading of the Scriptures by one who understands the significance of the particular passage he is bringing to the people. What could better help to prepare hearts to receive a genuine message from God through the preacher to the people than a passage of Scripture whose reading is also its interpretation. No pastor whose deep study had led him into the very life recorded or expressed in a Scripture selection could be careless in choosing the section to be read, or mechanical in the reading of it. Imagine if you can the feelings of the Teacher when he unrolled the scroll until he came to Isaiah 61 : 1-3, for his text for the sermon in the synagogue of his home town. Study the meaning of that Scripture as originally uttered. Ponder the familiarity of our Lord with the Old Testament as revealed in his choice of those particular words. With what interpretative power he read it, because he saw its ideals completely realized in his conception of his mission.20 Should not all pastors try to make their pulpit use of the Scriptures as effective as our Lord made this section in his reading at Nazareth, so far as is possible? Only the studious pastor who knows his Scripture will be able to say,21 “This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears.”
19Neh. 8: 8. 20Luke 4: 17-19. 21Luke 4: 21.
IIB 2. Choice and Treatment of Texts in Sermons
Such a ministry will govern the preacher in his use of texts for sermons. Hardly anything could be more contemptible than a misuse of passages of Scripture as texts. The people have been brought to believe that the Bible is “the word of God,” as it certainly is in a real and true sense. Could anything be more unbecoming than for a supposedly authoritative teacher of the Bible to misuse the text and have the people think that divine authority is behind his misused text? No honest man would so treat a letter which he received from a friend. One of the canons of correspondence is that the reader shall try to discover precisely what was in the mind of the writer. Any deviation from this canon marks the reader as essentially untrustworthy, as really dishonest. In a great picture the idea of the whole pervades every line of the perspective, every particle of color, every movement of the artist’s brush. Each detail gets its meaning and significance from the idea that the entire picture is intended to give to the beholder. In a classical musical composition the feeling and language of the entire production pervades every phrase, every chord, and every single note. Each sound both alone and in its grouping is intended to minister to the emotion which the composition is intended to produce in the hearer. It is precisely so with the Scriptures. All sentences in a Biblical book are to be pondered in the light of the purpose of the writer.
Alas, how many times this has been forgotten or deliberately ignored by preachers who are not students. There has been much contemptible mottomongering. Because the words of King James’ version seemed to lend themselves to the purposes men had in mind words have been torn out of their context, sometimes infelicitously adapted, occasionally cruelly mutilated, often grotesquely “spiritualized,” and have been made texts and pretexts for so-called sermons. It is to be feared that often the Scriptures have been used only as a collection of proof-texts for dogmas, or of mottoes for sermons.
One cannot catalog the Scriptures that have been so misused. “The king’s business required haste” was the lie of an outlaw,22 and tells us of the untrue statements to which occasionally a good man in desperate straits feels forced to resort. It is in no sense a divine statement that God is in a hurry, and that we who attend to his affairs had better make haste. When Amos said23 that he saw “A basket of summer fruit” he was not handing out a figure for twentieth-century preachers to use in reciting summer vacation experiences, but was describing a rotten condition of Israel’s morals that called for quick judgment. When the same rugged man of the wilderness asked,24 “Can two walk together, except they be agreed?” he was not framing a question for contentious twentieth-century dogmatists to ask in the mistaken supposition that there could be no spiritual fellowship between those who had differences of opinion, nor forging a doctrinal compress to bale guesses into an authoritative creed. How many times have these words been used as a club to scare honest persons from original thinking! He was stating in a beautiful way his idea of the law of cause and effect. In a pathless wilderness two could not meet in a certain spot unless there had been a previous agreement or a trysting. When Laban said to Jacob,25 “The Lord watch between me and thee when we are absent one from another,” he was not preparing thousands of years before the Christian Endeavor Society was organized a beautiful Mizpah benediction which was intended to describe the trust that we should have in one another and God’s care for all of us. Nor was he coining the word “Mizpah” for the inside of engagement rings. It was the language of suspicion and not of confidence. Two unscrupulous Semites had made an agreement. One of them said, “Since we are not to be together to keep an eye on each other, the Lord keep an eye on both of us to see that we are true to our bargain.” When one of the sages said,26 “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he,” he was not framing a psychological truth to express the idea that thoughts really are the indexes of our character. He was describing an insincere host whose guest was told:27 “Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye, neither desire thou his dainties; for as one that reckoneth within himself so is he. Eat and drink, he saith unto thee; but his heart is not with thee. The morsel which thou hast eaten shall thou vomit up, and lose thy sweet words.” When discerning and intelligent Bible students or sensible persons in the pew hear ministers misuse texts in this way, they are disgusted and lose all respect for a teacher who will so pervert the words of Holy Writ. Some years ago I was asked by a very distinguished pulpit orator if I knew of a volume which classified the texts of the Bible according to their meaning. The question was puzzling, as if any such volume was at all possible. He explained that he supposed there must be some book which classified the different sentences of Scripture according to the subjects with which they dealt. He was reminded that modern Biblical study was of an entirely different type, that we try to understand the books as books, and that such a volume could represent only the opinions of the person who produced it as to the meaning of the detached Biblical sentences. I told him that when I lived in New York I had such a volume, but when I moved to St. Louis had sold it as junk with many hundreds of others accumulated in the times of my ignorance at which God forgivingly winked. He insisted upon knowing the name of it, because often when he had finished his sermon he was at a loss to find an appropriate text.
22Sam. 21: 8.
23Amos 8: 1, 2.
24Amos 3: 3.
25Gen 31: 49.
26Prov. 23: 7.
27American revised Version, Margin
What could be more beautiful and effective than for the hearers of a preacher to know that whenever their minister took a text his exhortations would not be based upon the mutilation or distortion of sacred words! Is it not astonishing how often it is seen that a high sense of verbal inspiration is not incompatible with such a misuse of Scripture as we are describing? Even in the pulpit while he is preaching the pastor does not cease to be a teacher of the Bible. There is no justification for making the impression upon one’s hearers that it makes little difference what a Biblical writer meant, so long as a modern preacher can use the words of an English translation as a motto. Dr. H. G. Weston once told his class about an institute for ministers he had just held in a certain State, and summed up his work in his homiletic lectures by saying, “I must have killed at least ten thousand old sermons based upon misused texts.”
IIB 3. The Joy and Vitality of Preaching
Such study and dedication to the work of teaching provides for a joy in preaching unknown to those who are not conscious of having behind their utterances the experiences and lives whose vital experiences are recorded in the Bible. We too today can teach with the authority of “Thus saith the Lord” when we have clearly come to know the will of God and his thought. There is such a thing as subjective homiletics. The sermon is vastly more than an exercise in sacred rhetoric. Far be it from our purpose to depreciate the utmost endeavor on the part of the preacher to give his utterances the best possible form. The best we can do would come far short of appropriate tribute to any truth we are trying to proclaim. Nor could it be too good for those who listen to us. While in every way desirable, form is not essential. The majesty of God’s truth and the needs of human souls are so imperative that no form that could assist the sermon is to be despised. Nevertheless, the essential thing is that the soul of the preacher should be so suffused, saturated, penetrated by the truth that, without despising or neglecting the best possible form, the preacher himself should feel overwhelmingly the power of the truth itself. The Old Testament prophet used forms not only for help in conveying his message, and as devices to aid the memories of his hearers, but mostly as vehicles for his richest power. He did not despise contemporary forms, nor did he set aside any method that would fix his message on the souls of people. He would go barefoot or naked through the streets of a city.28 He would snatch off his girdle.29 He would defy conventionality. Nevertheless, one reads the Old Testament prophet to little purpose if he fails to see behind all his literary or oratorical or sensational devices the flaming fire of the divine message in the soul of the preacher. Is not this what is needed today, this accent of life, this “burden” the prophet felt, this “fire in his bones”?30 How else can one so well come to share this passion with prophet and apostle as by the kind of study we have insisted upon, by discovering mighty truth and human need for it? Compelled by our responsibility as teachers we can bathe our souls in precisely the same fountains of reality. Not only the vision of the truth itself, but the call of circumstances in which we live for the truth that has been revealed to us, will set our hearts aflame. This is what is meant by subjective homiletics, this penetration of our spirits by the spirit of reality. If as teachers we would bring people to share the enthusiasms of those whose utterances make our Bible, we can reach that ability through no other process than living again with those whose words send forth heat and light, though their voices have long been hushed in the progress of the ages.
28Isa. 20: 2, 3.
29Jer. 13: 1-11.
30Jer. 20: 9; 23: 38; Mal. 1: 1; Isa. 13: 1; 14: 28; etc.
Was not this precisely the secret of the glow that characterized the preaching of the New Testament times? Contact with life made the preachers vital and courageous. Our Lord chose Twelve to “be with him, and that he might send them forth to preach.”31 Contagion from the Teacher was relied upon to produce fervor in the preacher. Not all at once did this effect follow, but it endlessly increased. What mighty courage filled Stephen’s soul as he reviewed national history, and felt the sin of the persistent refusal to cherish the spirit of receptivity until it reached its climax in the rejection of Jesus.32 “Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye.” The same glow is felt whenever we listen to Paul, or read his letters. There is a spiritual power, a bathing of words in his very life’s blood. He was no maker of essays, no rhetorical mechanic treating subjects in a dainty way. He brought life to bear upon life. Because he had not only yielded himself to the life he propagated, but made himself one with the life he would influence, he had a double vitality. Blessed is the studious preacher who so enriches himself by making his own the lives of those whose religious experiences are recorded in the Scriptures that his own soul is incandescent with the same illumination. Such is the real Scriptural preaching. It is not the phonographic repetition of Biblical language, nor the adherence to special types of teaching found in the Bible. It is a personality gleaming with the very same light and virile with the same vitality that filled all prophets and apostles when each one witnessed to divine reality in his day and generation. And this joy of preaching can come only to those who have studied these men of old moved by the Holy Spirit, and have come to open their lives to the same Spirit.
31Mark 3: 14. 32Acts 7: 51.
II C. Inevitable Church Educational Atomosphere
One of the inevitable results of emphasis upon the teaching function of the pastor will be a general church atmosphere. If he is faithful to his ideal in the treatment of the Scriptures, in the selection of his texts, in the character of his sermons, and in directing the affairs of his church school and young people’s societies, there will be an educational atmosphere which cannot fail to be noticed. This does not mean that there will be a cold, icy intellectualism pervading the pulpit, the church school, and the various organizations in the church. Education as used throughout these lectures means the unfolding of the whole human personality, its thinking power, its spirit of love and service, its will in devotion and persistence, its social qualities, its moral possibilities. The ideal of Christianity is not suppression but expression. If the old Greek idea of self-realization be baptized into Jesus Christ it will express what the Master came to achieve. What could be more beautiful than to have a church known as striving in every department for this development of personality and its relations? Is not this the very idea of salvation, a right relation to God and to our fellow men in this world, Jesus himself being the standard of these relations? Such an atmosphere is the native air in which a Christian church should live. Its ideals are those for which the church exists. If the preacher is devoted to a ministry like this his evangelism will rest upon an appeal to the whole personality. All pulpit teaching and work in the church school will be influenced by this conception. The institution will stand for these ideals, and will express them in a thousand ways.
When Jesus chose the Twelve, he had in mind at least three things. First, he became their Teacher. That was the name by which he was known. He gave them truth as they were able to bear.33 Secondly, he sent them out to give expression to the truth that they understood. It was their practise of what they knew that most concerned him. And thirdly, and most of all, he chose them to be with him. They really learned more from contact with his person and from spiritual reality incarnated in him than they did from any other source. They got inspiration from that blessed association. Today our pedagogy is catching up with the divine Teacher. We are beginning to see that the three essential things are: Adapted instruction which can be assimilated; the practise of what has been taken into our lives; and the method of contagion, of fellowship for stimulus, courage, and perseverance. Where a pastor can make these ideas dominant in the life of his church, he is succeeding.
33Mark 4: 33; John 16: 12.
After all, it is the man who makes the minister. It is not within the power of a college or a seminary to make him. These may cultivate qualities of manhood that constitute the real minister. Words cannot express the gratitude that the world should feel to institutions of learning for their development of men who seek the moral uplift of humanity. It is not by laying on of hands, or so-called “ordination,” that ministers are made. There is no digital grace that can be conferred by one person upon another. Rites, ceremonies, and forms are the language of the soul, but they are not the causes of the vitalities of the spirit. It will rest with every man who aspires to the ministry to decide whether teaching in the noblest, highest sense shall be his function, or whether he shall spend his life in other ways that in the end do not count for the full, rounded unfolding of human life that can be secured only by the patient, consecrated teaching ministry of the pastor. Each of us has only himself to give to God and mankind. To give the best self possible is privilege as well as duty. We can make our very “high calling” contribute to the enlarging and enriching of ourselves. There is no way to do this more efficiently than in the ministry of a teaching pastor.
Preface lectures: ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX
[Note: Lecture II carefully compared to book on Sunday, 5-31-1998. All discovered errors and omissions corrected (this is not a claim of perfection!). The use of colors and links (if any), of course, are my additions, and the purposes may relate to considerations beyond the scope of the lecture. ...wcb2]
William C. Bitting II
wbitting@yahoo.com First posted 5/14/98. Revised 10/20/00 (prior 6/20/98).