THE UP-TO-DATE BOOK

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · May 28, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 22.

THE UP-TO-DATE BOOK.

Praise God that there are voices that ring out now and then loud and clear, and in no uncertain tones of loyalty to the old Gospel of God in Christ Jesus, voices of warning against the evils which are creeping in and depriving the pulpit, consecrated to the Gospel, of its power. Such a voice is that of Joseph Parker, D.D., of London City Temple, in the Homiletic Review for May. The subject of his paper is “The Preacher’s Relations to the Socialistic Features of the Day.” We give some of the more striking excerpts below:—

The temptations which beset the preacher to-day to intermeddle with things which he does not understand are at once innumerable and overpowering. There is a mean and sneaking desire in many quarters to be considered modern, up-to-date, and fully abreast with the times. In a large and important sense I am dead against such petty ambitions. I hold that no man is abreast with the times except the man who lives in close communion with God and in continual association with the Spirit of Jesus Christ. To my mind, the Bible is the newest of all books. We have done infinite mischief in closeting a good many things within the four corners of dictionaries and antiquities. For example, we suppose that the scribes and Pharisees lived some hundreds of years ago, whereas they are among us to-day, still the enemies of Christianity, and still tempting the heart to hostility toward all the deepest meanings of the cross. My constant conviction is that Jesus Christ is just as much among us at this moment as He was in the days of His flesh. To Christ I go for the deepest and truest interpretations of human spirituality, motive, and immediate relationship to God. We have put even God Himself far away from our daily thinking. We have set Him high in the heavens, and have given Him all the throne He can occupy, provided it is far enough away from this disciplinary state of schooling.

We must alter all this if we would put ourselves as preachers in the right relations to the burning questions of our times. The Bible must not be regarded as an old book, but a new book. Bethlehem is not a term in Eastern geography; it ought to express the place which Christ occupies in our hearts as Child, and Boy, and Man, and Saviour. This being my conviction, I am afraid I shall be regarded as out of sympathy with all up-to-date and fussy movements,—movements which depend for their temporary success on bands, demonstrations, and all the various instruments and tabernacles of angry ignorance.

If any preacher will give himself night and day to the study and exposition of the Gospel as it is found in the New Testament, he will do all that any preacher is required to do. Surely preachers were not intended for any other work than the direct and fervent declaration and exposition of the Gospel.

The motto of the pulpit should be, Educate the conscience, rouse the conscience, encourage and support the conscience. Great questions must be settled spiritually before they can be settled politically. But some men are never easy unless they are in a public meeting, shouting, declaiming, cheering, and opposing, as the case may be. It is difficult for me to believe that such men know anything whatever about the Spirit of Christ and the purpose of His kingdom.

Every generation brings its peculiar prophet, its special gospel, its unique and unparalleled nostrum for the cure of social evils. Those of us who have been long in the field of Christian service have seen programs rise and fall, social schemes flourish like a green bay tree, and yet in after-years they have been sought for but have not been found. There have been been hypotheses upon which the state was to be reconstructed and turned into a happy family. All these paltry and superficial and tricky inventions have risen, flourished, faded; but the Word of the Lord endureth forever, and this is the Word which is by the Gospel preached unto the nations. The Christian preacher does not awaken from his nightly slumber to find what new social invention he has to adopt. Truly his motto is Semper Eadem. His Gospel awaits his awakening. It is always the same; it is always adapted to every changing state of society; it is so simple yet so profound as to admit of being preached to every creature under heaven, and yet we may have too often yielded to the time-spirit and gone out after daily novelty as if it were daily bread. We must get back to commonplaces—to such places as God rules, Christ redeems, the Spirit illumines and sanctifies.

Let us reject with intellectual scorn any plan that sets itself in competition with the cross. Would God that my voice could reach all preachers, teachers, and holy men, when I repeat it as my solemn conviction that this world is only to be brought back to God through the medium of a Gospel evangelical in doctrine and evangelical in tone.