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.]
III
HIS ONENESS WITH THE EDUCATED COMMUNITY
The Teacher in the Early Church and His Successor
In the early church there arose those who were called teachers. They were part of the manifold ministry and apparently devoted themselves exclusively to this function. They had the literature of the Old Testament in which probably only the Jewish Christians were specially interested. They also no doubt had early written Christian documents such as narratives concerning the life and teachings of our Lord,1 and the logia of Matthew afterwards used in the Gospel that bears his name, and the written decision of the Council at Jerusalem,2 and the growing Pauline correspondence with the churches. It would be easy for our imagination to picture groups of church-members meeting in various homes3 and under the guidance of teachers studying the Old Testament and the rapidly increasing literature of Christianity. With what delight a new letter from Paul or any other apostle would be hailed! And when our Gospels appeared, what treasures they were to those early teachers and students! How churches would secure copies of the precious documents and meet with enthusiasm to study them under the leadership of the teachers! And when eye-witnesses of Jesus’ life had passed away, and those who like Polycarp had known an apostle had died, with what love the literary remains of the early church were cherished! Is it too much to assume that it was the teacher who deserves the credit for preserving and multiplying these pamphlets that were afterwards collected into our New Testament? They deserved the support that Paul urged should be given to them.4 Their function was differentiated from that of the missionaries, and pastors and preachers.5 They are also spoken of as among the “ascension gifts.”6
1Luke 1: 1,2.
2Acts 15: 23-29.
3Col. 4: 15 et als.
4Gal. 6: 6.
51Cor. 12: 28.
6Eph. 4: 11.
It is not necessary here to describe minutely the particular service they rendered when there was but one church in a city and before Christians had grouped themselves into separate congregations independent of one another.
7Rev. J. W. Bailey, Ph. D., in the “Biblical World,” Vol. XXXVIII, p 58. The entire article on “The Teacher in the Early Church” is illuminating.
No seminary today emphasizes the preparation of fit men for this place in the life of the local church. Short-cut theological institutions are not at all concerned with this ministry. The products of such schools could hardly work efficiently in this service. We are making preachers, are concerned about administrators of church affairs, are emphasizing the sermon and pastoral service, but have hardly begun to appreciate the enormous value of the teaching function. True it is that there has been a great awakening in the sense of our duty to care for the young in genuine religious education, but there is hardly the same desire to produce men whose ministry is conspicuous for its teaching efficiency.
What has become of these teachers in the early church? They survive partly today in the faculties of our schools, but so far as the local church is concerned, only in the voluntary and for the most part untrained teachers in our church schools. A few churches who are financially able to do so have what are now called “Directors of Religious Education.” These concern themselves with the management of the church school and young people’s organizations and in training teachers. They are so few in number that there are scarcely enough to make even a small showing in any denominational statistical table. Probably the function which they seek to discharge would come closer to that of the “teacher” described in the New Testament than any other existing. This ministry of teaching was contemplated by our Lord in “the great commission” when he called upon the Twelve to go out and to preach and teach.8 He himself was called “Teacher” oftener than by any other designation, and his followers were called “disciples,” or learners.
8Matt. 28: 19.
There is no need for us to discount the work of the minister as preacher or pastor. These are necessary. Yet in the discharge of these functions we must not forget that the educational work of the pastor in the true sense is evangelistic in the highest meaning of the term. If it be objected that a teaching ministry adds to the load of an already overburdened man, we can only reply that under present conditions this is inevitable. Since churches are not financially able to have a specialized ministry and one man must do all the work, he must as well as possible seek to realize his manifold service.
III A. Present Functions of The Teaching Pastor
IIIA 1. Uplifting the Uneducated
With this in mind, what position will the teaching pastor have among the educated persons in his community? He should not break with any class. His calling demands that he shall identify himself with all men.9 If he thinks of his relation to those who have not had educational advantages, he will see that it is all the more necessary that one who has possessed them shall join himself hard to those who especially need the development that can come only through his teaching ministry. He is to help these, however, not by sacrificing his own high position, but by lifting up others to share with him the great things that God has given him. He cannot afford to break with the educated element in any community. These are the persons who really control public sentiment. They are the men and women who have had educational advantages, who are teaching in the public schools and in higher institutions of learning. This body of persons is so numerous, and their influence so tremendous that no minister can afford to sacrifice his relations with them for the sake of becoming one with those who have not had such advantages. Nor is it necessary to do so. The vision of our Lord begirt with his towel and with the basin in his hand washing the feet of the Twelve in the upper room10 illustrates the truth that the loftiest consciousness begets the lowliest acts. The mark of real men and women is that they are able to adjust themselves to those whose advantages have been less than their own, and to do this in such a way as not to produce the impression that they are condescending.
91Cor. 8: 19-23. 10John 13: 1-5
IIIA 2. Identification With the Educated
The teaching pastor automatically identifies himself with the intelligent element in the community. If he be such a one as is described in the previous lecture, this oneness will be apparent. Teachers will soon recognize the sameness between his view-points and theirs. Identity of methods will quickly be discovered. Teachers of literature will recognize that the teaching pastor is pursuing precisely the same historical methods in the study and teaching of the Bible that they follow in their classrooms. If a pastor appears only as an exhorter, or a functionary whose business it is to hold meetings, officiate at funerals and marriages, be a propagandist of dogmas and purveyor of pious entertainment, and a kind of ecclesiastical decoration of public assemblies for making opening and closing prayers, whose mission it is to utter formalities miscalled invocations, and dismissions which are misnamed benedictions, it is hard to see how he can make his office an appeal to those whose lives are given to earnest study and honest effort to unfold all the capacities of human beings.
The minister can compel recognition by teachers only in so far as his own life and work identify him with the teaching fraternity. His very ministry should unite him completely with those who like himself are striving to develop and enlarge human personalities, to widen horizons, to help life breathe the world atmosphere, and to train human beings for the best possible living. It does not work against his recognition by the teaching fraternity that the minister is supremely concerned with moral and religious reality while other members of the teaching fraternity are busy with the intellectual or esthetic or physical or social development of the individual. The teaching preacher can easily profit by all that other teachers are doing, can reveal to the public that he is in the widest, truest sense an educator, and thus rank with the intellectual and the educational forces of the community. Where else should he find his rank? Should it not be normally the case that the students of a public school or college could listen to the sermons of a minister, or attend his lectures, or participate in the church school that he directs, and at once feel at home in finding that the methods of study pursued in the church are the same as those to which these students are accustomed in their studies in other literature? Is it asking too much that teachers and professors in State institutions of all grades and in all our colleges should recognize in the interpretations of the Scriptures by the preacher, and in the instruction given in church-school classes identically the same scientific and ethically honest processes they are compelled to use in their own classrooms?
But, it may be objected, the Bible is different from English classics, or those of another tongue. Granted! Yet that difference is appreciated all the more when the same historical methods used in studying Shakespeare are used in Biblical study. Uniqueness can be discovered only in the effort to classify. There is no other way to recognize it. There is a vast difference between the faith, not to say credulity, that rests in the Bible as unique because some one else, or a creed, or an ecclesiastical authority has told us so, and the deep conviction borne in upon our souls because of the sane study of the book itself. Such study and teaching by the pastor and his people will cause that “faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.”11 Indeed, not the least of the causes for the indifference of the teaching profession to the marvelous literature we call the Bible has been that the assumptions, presumptions, and initial demands of its friends upon the scholarly classes have so offended their sanity that they have been repelled from genuine study of it. Allegorizing, fancifulizmg, sheer assumption of double meaning as if an honest writer could use words in a double sense, as if religious teaching eschewed transparency and fell from grace into occult and cryptic expression, have alienated thousands who did not and could not believe that God had given them common sense and culture of brains only to insult them in the name of the Giver. Yes, the Bible is different from other literature, but no one knows that difference so well, or appreciates it so thoroughly as the student who summons the whole of his sanity to understand the Scriptures. The teaching pastor is the only minister who can reach the teaching profession today, who can interest the annually growing product of our schools of all grades.
111Cor. 2: 5.
IIIA 3. Competent Interpretation of the Bible
The teaching pastor will inevitably reach a position of authority so far as the knowledge of the Scriptures is concerned. No one today can be authority upon every matter. Those who serve the world are divided into specialists. The very development of life compels this. In medical realms, after years of training, specialists are expected to be able to give information concerning the human body, its normal activities, and the abnormalities that we call diseases. After long and severe discipline lawyers are supposed to know the principles of law, to be able to state great ideals which have been embodied in the development of justice. In other words, what a patient rightly expects from a physician with regard to his body, and a client reasonably expects from his lawyer with reference to business, the man at large should expect from the minister with regard to the teaching of the Scriptures and the ideals and processes of the moral and religious life. His rank in his sphere should not be less than that of professional or mercantile men in their several realms. It is only when the pastor through the teaching ministry has revealed himself as worthy to hold such a position that he reaches a place of authority. The uneducated minister can seldom attain such a place with those who are the products of our institutions of learning. Some years ago the writer was informed of an overchurched town of about four thousand inhabitants in which there were forty men and women who had received earned degrees of various kinds from our best colleges and universities in the East and in the West. The appalling fact was that not one of the five pastors of churches in that town had ever seen the inside of a college or of a theological seminary. In other words, there were immediately about these ministers many influential citizens who had made themselves inhabitants of the great worlds of literature, science, art, and thinking, while the spiritual leaders in the community knew little or nothing of these vast realms, and were not even expert in their own specialty. Moreover, annually there was an output from the high school of young men and young women bent upon still further intellectual development. These had to go through their training without any glimpses of the affinity of religion with their culture in all realms, and without the stimulus that might have been theirs had they been shepherded in their mental and spiritual natures by pastors whose teaching was as valuable to their moral and religious lives as their high-school education was to their physical, intellectual, and social natures. The degree men and women of that town could consult libraries about history, science, and art, and the youthful incarnate interrogation-marks could go to the high-school faculty for authoritative information concerning matters within their mental horizon; but who will say that those five pastors could speak as authoritatively about the Bible and religion as the lawyers, doctors, and teachers in their several spheres? One trembles to think of the enormous amount of misinformation possible under such circumstances. And beyond the conventional respect that the laity has for the clergyman, what must be the opinion of cultured citizens as to the educational function of ministers who are not qualified as teachers in their own specialty? The minister stands for Jesus Christ and his ideals and for the unfolding of Christian life as revealed in the Scriptures. These are the spheres in which he is to shine, and be as authoritative in his position as the lawyer, the doctor, the professor, and any others of the various social functionaries whose lives minister to the public good. No pastor can afford to stand aloof from the life he seeks to affect. Nor can he afford to be ignored by those who are giving their lives to the education of the young. Nor is he worthy of his high calling if he fails to qualify himself as thoroughly as possible for his position by becoming both authoritative in knowledge and Christ-like in life.
IIIA 4. Mediating Truth to Modern Life
The teaching pastor who pursues the historical method of Bible study, and teaches accordingly, can mediate to a growing world the eternal truths of the Bible in such a way as will commend them to the appreciation and acceptance of the educated community. He will carefully distinguish between vehicle and content. He will know the difference between the water of life and the gourd, or skin, or bucket, or chalice in which it came to thirsty souls. He will be able to disentangle the content from the temporary and accidental form, and to put the eternal ideal into a current contemporary form in which it will be easily assimilable. This was the master art of our Lord as a teacher. Every parable is a witness to his divine expertness in conveying new and unfamiliar truth through forms and expressions well known to his hearers. When he said,12 “The Kingdom of heaven is like,” it seems as if his mind was teeming with vehicles for the spiritual ideals that he would express. Was it not as if, to him, the kingdom was a vast sphere inclusive of all life’s relations and processes, and all the so-called “secular” spheres of living like globules attaching themselves for the moment to the inside of the comprehensive globe, and their points of tangency furnishing splendid and forever priceless glimpses of the kind of living personal and social he came to establish? One cannot help wondering what he would do today in parables with this modern life so vastly richer than Oriental Palestinian life in his day. However fascinating the vehicle, it was only a transient carrier of an eternal truth. None can doubt that were the great Teacher living now he would use our twentieth-century life of which we are part, rather than require an archeological education in modern hearers by recurring to modes of life long since passed away. The intelligent pastor can retranslate the everlasting principles revealed in Biblical literature into modern terms.
12Matt. 7: 24; 11: 16; 13: 24; 18: 23; Mark 4: 30; 13: 28.
Is it not pitiful today when preachers identify the wagon with the food it contains, the words with the thoughts they seek to express, the garments with the person? All teaching pastors with correct viewpoints and methods will escape such a blunder as the effort to make men accept the accidental vehicle as equal in value with the essential truth. An educated element in a community by the very processes and results of its education long since learned to make this discrimination. Probably there is no closer union between vehicle and substance than that between thought and language. Nevertheless, the same thought can be expressed in each of the thousand and more dialects of the world as easily as a human body can change its clothes. Precisely what has taken place in all translations of the Scriptures where an idea expressed in a foreign tongue has been translated into vernacular speech, is happening when ideas and realities are being reinterpreted in each age, each race, and generation by teachers who know how to help their contemporaries. The great miracle of Pentecost is being repeated on a smaller scale wherever men of diverse history, temperament, antecedents, racial peculiarities, and conditions infinitely varied are hearing each “in his own language”13 the same eternal truths. The aspiration to do this is deep in the soul of every true minister of Jesus Christ. He wishes to make “the truth as in Jesus”14 intelligible and assimilable. The ability to do this depends upon his own facility to discover the reality in whatever accidental vehicle or historical form it has come to him; and also upon his acquaintance with the life around him, and his skill in taking the truth thus brought to him by his ability to disentangle the eternal from the transient, and through the use of current forms of life and thought to restate the great things he has discovered. Only the teaching pastor can do this with expertness. It is essential in his pedagogical ministry. Indeed, it is questionable whether there is a higher type of preaching than this very ability to teach eternal reality in contemporary forms. Every real sermon based upon the Scriptures is a severe homiletic exercise in this very art. Our Lord seldom exhorted. He stated spiritual reality to those who heard him in the terms of their own lives and of the processes of living with which they were familiar, and depended upon the spirit of God who broods over every heart to warm the ideals and ideas which he thus expressed into power to appeal to the will and the conscience with its attendant emotions. With him preaching was teaching. He took the very best out of the Old Testament and reshaped it for the life of his day. In addition he brought new conceptions, but was careful to give them in a way that could be easily understood. It is one thing for a minister to state a truth and exhort, appeal, and plead. God be thanked for all who do this! It is a different and more effective method to build into the human mind and conscience a great spiritual reality, and rely upon the Holy Spirit to make this a living and compulsory power in the lives of men. This latter way is that revealed to us in our modern processes of education. Those who have experienced the benefits of our colleges and universities can best be reached by the pastor who uses precisely the same processes which educated men and women have pursued in their education for propagating the divine ideals and spiritual realities with which he in his ministry is exclusively concerned. The vernacular of our educated classes today is not that of the first century, nor medieval. Our thought forms are not those of the picturesque Orient. Our whole educational system is under the dominion of modern science. We cannot change it if we would. And the contemporary preacher would not if he could. We cannot be enthusiastic for our modern education, whole-hearted in devotion to our schools and colleges, and at the same time expect to impress faculties and students in these institutions that we profess to admire by presenting the truths the Scriptures contain in terms foreign to the conceptions and methods of the schools. The teaching pastor will be a real mediator, one with Jesus Christ, and also one with the educated people of his community. He will thus bring to those who are the beneficiaries of modern learning, who are also its apostles, the greater benefit of the heavenly realities God has unveiled and is continuously revealing. He will be the neck of the hour-glass through which will come to contemporaries and to posterity the opulent grains of past experience of God in life.
13Acts 2: 6. 14Eph. 4: 21.
IIIA 5. Evangelization of the Cultured
The evangelization of the educated community is not the least of the perplexing problems presented to the Christian church. It does seem as if the church has fallen into unfortunate conditions. The great world of labor is alienated. Many working men declare that the church has surrendered to the moneyed interests and is under the dominance of capital. In many churches considered wealthy and fashionable there is not to be found a single wage-earner. Even if all our churches were composed of those whom we call working people, the need for the teaching pastor would be unspeakable. On the other hand, while there are many men and women of wealth who are earnest, active Christians, most of those who are rich in this world’s goods have but slight connection with the spiritual interests of our churches. They are not found in prayer-meetings and church schools and at Sunday-evening services, and are seldom active in evangelistic enterprises. One after another these classes seem to have broken with our churches.
Today the divorce between the intellectual community and the church is conspicuous. Many who formerly were church-members have become alienated through their educational experiences. There should be no dearth of teachers in our church schools when we think of the vast numbers of those who have been trained in higher institutions of learning, and of the large number who belong to the teaching class. Yet it is recognized that the crucial problem in all our church schools is that of securing proper teachers. Shall the church make efforts to minister to the wage-earners and working people by standing for simple justice in the industrial world, and seek also to Christianize the wealth of the earth which is so essential for the establishment of the kingdom of God, to sustain its philanthropies and colleges, and to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth, and not seek to reach the educated elements in the community and bring their influence and talents into captivity to Jesus Christ? It is with this last problem that we are now concerned. It must be evident that the ignorant preacher has slim opportunity to reach this influential element of the community, and that the probability of his success is small. It is hard enough for the educated teaching pastor to do this most desirable work, but he has a thousand chances where any other kind of a preacher has one. There are many tangencies the educated teaching pastor can establish which are impossible to one whose ministry is not characterized by the teaching function. All the factors of a given community which make for its higher life should work together. How pitiful is the plight of any pastor in a parish where teachers, lawyers, doctors, and educated people with unbounded respect for one another and confidence in the culture, expertness, and highmindedness of one another fail to take into their group in their united service for the community the minister who represents the moralization of all life’s processes and the spiritualization of all its ideals. A wide-open door to participation with these classes in all community enterprises is offered by the identification of the ministry with the teaching element in the community. There is hardly any limit to this service. Once in a while some outstanding character may be able by the sheer weight of his personality and the commanding influence of his position to become powerful and to attract the educated and the cultured. But for most of us ordinary beings, who must be content to work in comparative obscurity, the direct way to bring the gospel of Jesus Christ to the educated persons of a neighborhood and to the teaching force of a community is by our identification with them. Such evangelism as will be effective, however, must be of a different type from that pursued by those who rely upon emotions or sensationalism, who depend upon appeals to fear or to feeling.
Modern education tries to do four things for the student, none of which is the mere impartation of information, which is a by-product. At the end of the process it asks, not “What does the graduate know?” but “What has he become?” These four aims of education are all essentially Christian. Our Lord insisted upon them all. They are:
First, the enthronement of the passion for reality. Only that is worthy of whole-hearted consecration. Tradition, sentiment, mere human authority, custom, and usage have no weight whatever against reality. The modern educated man “draws the thing as he sees it for the God of things as they are.” The world has too long suffered from the enslaving influences of ignorance, error, and superstition. Education today is redemptive in that it is delivering humanity slowly but surely from bondage to that trinity of blights.
Again, the educated man trusts himself to discover reality. He is not content to accept anything simply upon the assertion of others. He reserves the right to investigate for himself. True it is that where he has confidence in those who are qualified in their several realms for thorough investigation he is willing to accept statements. Nevertheless, he has not surrendered his right to investigate for himself if he desires to do so. The highest degree given at a modern college, that of Doctor of Philosophy, simply means that the recipient has proved that he knows how to use his own powers in the search for reality.
Again, our modern education insists upon the open mind. There is hardly anything more irksome to the truly educated modern man than the demand that something shall be protected from his research, or that any matter be closed, or that he is not at liberty to change his mind if facts compel him to do so. The thought of finality as already achieved is distasteful. We must be free to study anything whatsoever, and we must have open minds to receive any new light that God may send upon anything whatsoever. Education does not produce hermetically sealed souls. In our punctuation of thinking we have use for commas when we take fresh breaths, for semicolons to indicate our classifications so far as we have been able to make them, for interrogation-marks for use of inquiring spirits, for exclamation-points to indicate our delights or disappointments, for multitudes of asterisks and dashes to show our ignorance, but no use for periods. These are the sealed locks that prejudices or preconceptions put upon opinions. “Most men’s conclusions are the places where they grow tired of thinking.”
Once more, modern education stimulates the social consciousness. The pursuit of knowledge is a social matter. No man can claim to have established his contentions beyond the right of others to test his conclusions. One of the most beautiful and stirring visions of progress in knowledge is the way in which investigators in all realms work together, test one another’s experiments and researches, and stand together in adherence to results which have been obtained by proper methods, and use their results for the common good.
This brief description of what an educated person is today will raise certain questions concerning the ministry of a preacher who wishes to bring into the lives of educated people the eternal realities of Jesus Christ. We soon discover that these four characteristics of an educated person are essentially Christian. Only reality emancipates. All else enslaves. If God be the supreme Reality he can build no kingdom anywhere upon any other foundation. In religion Jesus declared that he was the reality.15 In the words of our Lord,16 “The truth shall make you free,” there is reflected the enthusiasm for reality and the profound ethical passion involved in the pursuit of it. The trust of ourselves to discover reality is also involved in the statement of our Lord,17 “The light of the body is the eye.” Our entire rational nature functions in the pursuit of truth. The whole being is involved. The light that is in us illuminates what comes into our souls. We must trust ourselves and must carefully guard all powers of our being so that we may understand and appreciate the light that comes from the Father of lights. “The pure in heart see God”18 here and now. Moreover, Jesus insisted upon the open mind as the very first condition of entering into the kingdom of God. “Unless you turn and become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.”19 No man has ever entered any kingdom with which God has to do without this spirit of receptivity. Jacob did not win Canaan by cunning, but only as Israel upon his knees. Prejudices, preconceptions, prepossessions, closed hearts, and sealed souls prevent entrance into any of God’s kingdoms. Like little children with wide-open minds we must receive the gifts in all God’s realms, most of all in spiritual things. We need not dwell upon our Lord’s insistence upon the social consciousness. The entire ministry of Jesus, as well as many direct sayings, reveals the fact that no man lives unto himself.
15John 14: 6.
16John 8: 32.
17Matt. 6: 22, 23; Luke 11: 34-36.
18Matt 5: 8; cf. Titus 1: 15.
19Matt. 18: 3.
Here are four vital points of tangency between the educated preacher and the teaching classes in our schools and the cultured elements in our communities. If the ministry of the teaching preacher will demonstrate his passion for reality as over against the mere acceptance of traditions, will show that he is not afraid to trust himself in the pursuit of spiritual reality, will exhibit a continuously open mind, and will give himself unstintedly to the life of disinterested service, he will have close contacts with the really educated. Our blessed religion not only permits but requires precisely these four things upon which modern education insists. The teaching pastor through these tangencies will find open doors to commune with teachers upon the claims of Christ on their lives. Surely none who ignore or defy these four things may hope to influence truly educated persons. Pulpit ravings against science and its teachers reveal ministerial shallowness.
IIIA 6. Recruiting Teaching Forces in Religion
The ministry is universal. “According as each received a gift, ministering it among yourselves, as good stewards of God’s manifold grace.”20 Why should not the vast army of teachers in our public schools and colleges consecrate their special gifts to the millions of adults in our churches and of children in church schools? Since teaching is known to be vastly different from parrotlike repetition of language, as in Moslem schools for promoting knowledge of the Koran, the skill of those who by profession are expert could be of untold service to all connected with churches. Why should not this gift be seized upon for religious education? Surely the methods expertly used in teaching literature in grammar schools would be as productive of good results with pupils of the same ages in teaching the Bible in church schools. Already there are many kindergartens in churches whose teachers bring to the moral and ethical development of the little ones the same methods they use in the week-day schools. High-school teachers expert in dealing with adolescents in secular studies could accomplish wonders with the same youth in teaching sacred literature. And there is reason to believe that far larger numbers of adults would attend Bible classes on Sundays and week-days if these were taught by men and women whose standing in the educational world would guarantee thorough instruction. If the lives of enough teachers could be won to serve Christ and men, and their equipment and professional skill were sincerely consecrated to instruction in our churches and their schools, the entire complexion of religious educational work would be changed for the better. This is in no sense a plea for professionalism in Sunday schools, nor in religious education. Biblical instruction could never be given in public schools by unconverted, unsympathetic teachers. The essential moral and religious qualification would be lacking. It would be a farce. No less would that be true in the Sunday school. But the finest thing for our church schools would be an ample supply of Christian teachers whose view-points and methods have been recognized by standard educational tests as the best, consecrating their gifts in the ministry of religious education. The union of Christian love and enthusiasm with psychological and pedagogical skill would be ideal. There are many such now at work, yet their number is very small compared with the need. How can this number be increased? The teaching pastor holds the key to the solution of the problem. In some cases teachers who would be glad to serve cannot work with pastors whose attitudes and methods do not comport with those of the educational world. In far more cases these teachers have quietly dismissed the thought of consecrating their gifts in religious instruction. And, alas, it is to be feared that in more instances than can be estimated the whole attitude and conception of churches and ministers has been such as to alienate members of the teaching fraternity from the church as a whole because of hostility to modern learning, insistence upon outgrown creedal tests, condemnation of scientific conclusions, and mistaken characterization of schools as godless. The educated pastor who will exercise a teaching ministry can do much to remove these difficulties and open the way for most efficient additions to the teaching forces of his church. Though the field of instruction may differ from that of the public school and college, the methods Will be the same, and with the blessing of God the results would compare favorably in religious education with those of the secular schools in their work. Here is a promising field for the teaching pastor.
201Peter 4: 10.
Such are at least some of the offices that a teaching pastor can render to one element in the community. There can be no question that a specific ministry to that element is needed as much as to any other. Because of the special function of teachers in shaping young life, and of the educated in their influence over life in general, it is of great importance that religion shall have its power over their lives. The Book of all others should not be buried beneath the avalanche of literature of all kinds now rolling from presses that stop not day nor night. Who but pastors competent by training, and devoted to giving the Scriptures their right place in religion and in general culture, can render this service to those who mold personal and social life as does the educated element in the community? The work is peculiar and more than any other calls for oneness between the pastor and the cultured part of the community life. All factors of social life are to be evangelized; none can be left out of any plans that are as large as Christ’s conception of his kingdom. None can say that any factor is more important than any other. The industrial, financial, esthetic, artistic, literary, and educational groups alike come within the hunger of the Saviour who came to bring all into right relation to the heavenly Father and to one another. Yet if means must be suited to ends in order to achieve results, the educated minister whose idea of service includes teaching the Bible, will necessarily have special responsibilities for trying to reach those who like himself have devoted themselves to teaching, and also those who have had the blessings of education in modern schools.
Preface lectures: ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX
[Note: Lecture III carefully compared to book on Monday, 6-1-1998. 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 5/15/98. Revised 10/20/00 (prior 6/20/98).