In my seminary days a friend who lived across the hall was writing a master’s thesis on a famous nineteenth century preacher, and asked me if I would mind reading over the chapters as he finished them. What struck me most in consulting this preacher’s sermons and other writings, which I found necessary as the man in the thesis, much admired by my friend, appeared chapter by chapter more bizarre and less believable, was the utter confidence with which he held forth on everything he said and wrote.
Much of his work was tripe, piffle, speculation, and, I strongly suspect, high embroidery, set in a plain of free-range pseudo-intellectualism. There was, however, no evidence of hypocrisy. The preacher believed himself an anointed man, clearly convinced himself before he attempted to convince anyone else, and spoke as the oracles of God. Freely mixing the gospel of Christ with grandiloquent gasbaggery, he left no doubt about the worth of his numerous critics’ misgivings.
This sort of preaching survives to this day among pastors of high conviction and low accountability, although my impression is that it is becoming rarer. It is much inhibited by education, and killed outright in seminaries where the scriptures are only as authoritative as critical scholarship du jour allows. This renders out in the pulpit as “be nice, oppose meanness, and hope for the best.” Any Christianity in it is entirely incidental, for to this mind the Christian faith is not itself truth, but subject to a higher critical authority that knows Christianity only as religion, and regards every religion's relation to truth as exemplary, at best.
The desired end in these matters, however, is not a kind of golden mean where preachers get as much education as they can, remain as orthodox as they can in the process, and give their sermons with as much authority as their consciences thereafter allow—an essentially negative prospect, built mostly upon avoidances. No, the desideratum is a positive quality that shows submission to the Holy Spirit by preaching with the power and conviction of the man to whom I refer above, but without his mistakes.
I have heard it done, believe it can be done consistently, and that it can characterize an entire career. It is the kind of preaching that is acceptable before orthodox Christians of any denomination and can be preached with confidence in any Christian church. It cleaves to the sure center of the main road of Christian belief, treating the scriptures as the Word of God, and can be tested by the Creed. It avoids the disputable, the speculative, the personal hobby-horse, and undue attention to current opinion. Its education seeks to gain the classicist’s instinctive knowledge of this main road as a historical phenomenon, to gain skill in its negotiation and fluency in its language.
It is both catholic and evangelical, catholic in that it is what has been believed everywhere, at all times, and by all Christians, and evangelical in that its substance, put-forward in the power of God, is the voice of the Good Shepherd, and as such will most certainly be heard by all who are his. It needs no apologetic through subjection to modern thinking, systematic theologies, or popular taste, but stands in confident judgment on all of these.
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