PREACHING THE BIBLE by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 1, 1880

PREACHING THE BIBLE.

By Editor

In Chancellor Crosby's lectures on preaching, before the Yale Theological Seminary, we find the following excellent remarks on the necessity of "acuteness of perception," on the part of the preacher; of his recognizing the fitness of things; of his depending solely on the Bible, and taking just views of its doctrines. Without this he well remarks that his capacity for doing harm is immense:—

"A preacher with this defect is apt to take a text without any regard to its context, or the conditions under which it was written, and will use it as a motto to his preconceived notions. He is readily deceived by a word. He regards hell as hell, whether it be gehenna or hades. He never discriminates between the Holy Spirit and the human spirit, between salvation in its sense of rescue from sin and death, and salvation in its sense of completed redemption. Wherever he sees the word "soul," he has only one idea regarding it. Everywhere his want of critical acumen confounds things that differ, and by his clumsiness he often, instead of implanting truth, sows the seeds of doubt in the minds of discriminating hearers.

"We hold that the preacher is the interpreter of God's word; that he has the divine teaching first to gather and then to distribute; and that he has no other source of instruction than the revelation God has made by prophets and apostles, in using which he has the guidance of the Holy Spirit, through the ordinary faculties of his mind. All other knowledge that he may possess is of avail to him as preacher only as it is subservient to the illustration of the divine revelation. In this we take direct issue with those who would make the preacher the general instructor of his people in philosophy, who could as well take his text from the Vendidad, or the works of Confucius, or the dialogues of Plato as from the Bible. If the preacher is to hold this relation to his people, for Christianity is substituted culture, and for the church, civilization. It is not what man can develop out of himself; it is not what science and philosophy can teach; but it is what God has revealed, over and above all that man could otherwise know, with which the preacher has to deal. The Bible, therefore, is his one treasury from which he is ever to draw."