THE PREACHER FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.
IN a recent sermon on the “Church of the Twentieth Century,” Dr. Joseph Parker, of City Temple, London, said some good things as to what the preacher ought to be. We present below some extracts:— How did men preach in the first century of the Christian era? Did they write sermons and read them to languid or resentful congregations? Did they study the classical use of words, and pride themselves on polished composition and eloquent effusion, to say nothing of mechanical and calculated climax? In reading the New Testament nothing seems to be further from the apostolic method than methods which are accounted timely and popular in our own age. In apostolic5times very great effects suddenly followed the preaching of the Gospel. There was probably not much comment on the classical beauty of the literature of the sermons, nor were many complimentary remarks passed respecting the manner, whether elegant or inelegant, of the preacher himself. We read that when one sermon was delivered, the hearers gnashed with their teeth upon the preacher, and hurled Him out to be stoned. On another occasion we read that whilst the hearers listened, they were pricked in their hearts, and cried out, some with vengeance, and some with a degree of penitence. The Gospel has always in its best preaching been followed by two distinctly contrastive effects. First, it has either been received with gladness, with a great emotion of thankfulness and consciousness of a new life of love in the heart; or it has been resented, denounced, and virulently hated. We have little of the latter effect in our own age. The sermon has lost so much of its point, emphasis, and high color that it is barely tolerated by one section and almost conscientiously avoided by another, even of the church-going public. . . . Nobody could hear the apostle Paul with indifference. When audiences turned away from him, they did not speak about the weather or about local politics, they spoke immediately and emphatically about the discourse to which they had just listened; they stamped with their feet, they gnashed with their teeth, or they openly gave God thanks and rejoiced with a great joy. 1. The preacher for the twentieth century must have a definite, luminous and practical message to his day. He will have no need to puzzle his brains as to the selection of a subject; his topic is assigned to him. He is a man who has taken “holy orders” in the best sense—taken them directly and immediately from the Head of the church. He has to preach the Gospel. He has not merely to preach about the Gospel, but to preach the Gospel in its heart, soul, and essence, and to do this with abiding and beneficent effect he must, so to say, be bathed in the very river of the Gospel. His subjects will flow upon him. He will not be suffering from spiritual dearth or pulpit sterility; he will be, indeed, embarrassed by the riches with which God will intrust all His faithful stewards. The preacher for the twentieth century must be full of the New Testament. If he can repeat it word for word in the original language, so much the better. The preacher ought, at all events, to be able to repeat most of the New Testament, certainly all the utterances of Christ, in his mother tongue. The Word of God should abide in him richly, overflowing with a great redundancy alike of knowledge and emotion. The preacher’s vocation limits him to opportunities of thirty or forty minutes of earnest address to a congregation which will never be identically reconstituted. The preacher should work upon the intelligence and the feeling of his hearers, so that at the close of the discourse they will know definitely what the preacher demands of them by way of oblation and service. We are not called upon to invent a Gospel, but to preach one. We are men under authority. We have had, as it were, direct personal communication with the Master, and all we have to do is to apply His sayings to the age in which we live. 2. The preacher for the twentieth century must be a man who lives in the open air. We have had enough of monastic preaching. Preaching is not a learned profession, an art or a craft only known to those who have been masonically initiated. . . . We must not preach as if we were preaching to dolls or mummies or statues made of clay or carved in stone. . . . The impression made by the preacher should never be, “See how much more I know of religious things than any mere layman can ever know!” That is the worst popery. Popery is never so bad as when it is perpetrated under Protestant patronage and shelter. Blessed is the preacher who can be “familiar, but never vulgar.” Right welcome is the brother-preacher who has a seat at every table, and has an invitation, not written but spiritually understood, to kneel at every bedside, where sickness suffers, and where the river of death is approaching in all the horror of its cold waters. I have sometimes thought that a preacher should rather study to avoid anything even in dress, or in “holy white,” which separates him from the great commonality of the people. We need not go down to them in any sense that vulgarizes ourselves. True gentility is not debased even when it goes out to seek and to save the lost. 3. The preacher for the twentieth century will not be so much a revolutionist as a transformer. In a sense, he will be able by the power of heaven to transubstantiate common things so as to invest them with great meanings and solemnities. There are reformers enough. Jesus Christ never attempted to reform society; He regarded it as sick unto death; He regarded it as beyond self-help; He came to seek and to save that which was lost. As the Lord Himself transformed the common bread and wine into symbols of His body and blood, so the preacher who would influence his age profoundly and beneficently must show the possible religious uses of common things. He must be a man gifted in propounding vital definitions and luminous expansions of common words. The age of mean things has gone. The people are now prepared to see the idealism and true poetry of things. The flesh has had but a limited reign; yea, tho we have known Christ Himself after the flesh, yet we know Him no more in that limited and local relation. The preacher of the Gospel of Christ is not a member of a committee at work for the reform of society. He has come with a special mission, and nothing must distract his attention. In Christ’s name and Christ’s power he comes to save the world, and to do nothing else. Whilst he is in the pulpit he has nothing to do with merely local disputes or angry controversies; he has to lay down great principles, which will put an end to all tumults, and to unrighteous and complicated conflicts. The preacher is not to be a clever little sub-committeeman; he has always to stand upon the sublimest heights and to unveil the purpose and the nearness of the kingdom of God. 4. The preacher for the twentieth century is to be a true, in contradistinction to a formal or artificial, priest. I see no reason why we should regard the word priest with prejudice, except in so far as it has been misapplied by men who have had some knavish purpose to accomplish. Jesus Christ Himself is a priest, the Priest, the High Priest. In our degree we should, as preachers, cultivate the priestly element. God has been pleased in His good providence to work through agency, instrumentality, or some kind of mediation. There is one Advocate with God. As we are followers of that Advocate, and as we hold our orders from Him, we, too, should be intercessors, pleaders, holding the people in our hearts, and bearing them up before God in loving, wise, and tender prayer. Our ministers must never forget that there is pastoral prayer as certainly as there is pastoral visitation. The former is infinitely preferable to the latter, as the latter is often perfunctorily carried out. Not a word would I say against pastoral visitation when it is charged with a solemn purpose and realized in a spirit of thoro sympathy with all sickness and infirmity and sense of self-helplessness on the part of the people. We must have no dominion over other men’s faith. We must not hold a secret which the simplest heart cannot share with us. Indeed, that simplest heart, if it fails to equal us in knowledge, may greatly surpass us in love. The strong man holds his strength for the weak. The wise man is the trustee of the uninstructed man. So it is with the truly good Christian preacher. What he holds, he holds for the benefit of all the people, and they are all welcome to look, as it were, into his heart, and see that he is doing nothing by mere skill of hand or cunning of intellect, but that he is faithfully executing the will and realizing the purpose of God. 5. The preacher for the twentieth century must be a contemporary rather than an antiquarian. Some of our people really do not care much about the heresies of the early centuries of the Christian era. . . . I have long held that there is nothing true in time that has not its exposition and defense in eternity. The people who long to go back and search the archives of forgotten centuries should put themselves on a still higher level, and go back, as it were, into the chambers of eternity and listen to the counsels that were held before the foundation of the world. The fault I have to find with many people is not that they are antiquated, but that they are not sufficiently venerable. If they were more venerable, they would be more modern. I would not advise the preacher for the twentieth century to go back to the Puritans; I would strongly advise him to go back to the prophets and to the apostles. Do not let your antiquarianism be too shallow and too obviously wanting in color and moss and proofs of incalculable age. I would rather hear a Biblical preacher than a preacher who founds himself on the methods of the Puritans. The Puritans I hold in high honor; I would on no account, disparage their solid and careful teaching; but if I have to choose between a prophet and a Puritan, I unhesitatingly choose the prophet.