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Page 64
"I suppose that what has given to the Old and New Testament Scriptures
their enduring hold over the minds and consciences of men has been
their extraordinary humanity. They contain so many vivid and accurate
recitals of typical human experience, portrayed with self-verifying
insight and interpreted with consummate understanding of the issues of
the heart. And since it is true, as Goethe said, 'That while mankind
is always progressing man himself remains ever the same,' and we
are not essentially different from the folk who lived a hundred
generations ago under the sunny Palestinian sky, we read these ancient
tales and find in them a mirror which reflects the lineaments of our
own time. For instance,..."
Then the sermonizer proceeds to relate some famous Bible story,
resolving its na�ve Semitic theophanies, its pictorial narration,
its primitive morality, into the terms of contemporary ethical or
political or economic principles. Take, for instance, the account of
the miracle of Moses and the Burning Bush. The preacher will point
out that Moses saw a bush that burned and burned and that, unlike most
furze bushes of those upland pastures which were ignited by the hot
Syrian sun, was not consumed. It was this enduring quality of the bush
that interested him. Thus Moses showed the first characteristic of
genius, namely, capacity for accurate and discriminating observation.
And he coupled this with the scientific habit of mind. For he said,
"I will now turn aside and see why!" Thus did he propose to pierce
behind the event to the cause of the event, behind the movement to the
principle of the movement. What a modern man this Moses was! It seems
almost too good to be true!
But as yet we have merely scratched the surface of the story. For
he took his shoes from off his feet when he inspected this new
phenomenon, feeling instinctively that he was on holy ground. Thus
there mingled with his scientific curiosity the second great quality
of genius, which is reverence. There was no complacency here but an
approach to life at once eager and humble; keen yet teachable and
mild. And now behold what happens! As a result of this combination of
qualities there came to Moses the vision of what he might do to lead
his oppressed countrymen out of their industrial bondage. Whereupon
he displayed the typical human reaction and cried, "Who am I, that I
should go unto Pharoah or that I should lead the children of Israel
out of Egypt!" My brother Aaron, who is an eloquent person--and as it
turned out later also a specious one--is far better suited for this
undertaking. Thus he endeavored to evade the task and cried, "Let
someone else do it!" Having thus expounded the word of God (!) the
sermon proceeds to its final division in the application of this
shrewd and practical wisdom to some current event or parochial
situation.
Now, such preaching is indubitably effective and not wholly
illegitimate. Its technique is easily acquired. It makes us realize
that the early Church Fathers, who displayed a truly appalling
ingenuity in allegorizing the Old Testament and who found "types" of
Christ and His Church in frankly sensual Oriental wedding songs, have
many sturdy descendants among us to this very hour! Such preaching
gives picturesqueness and color, it provides the necessary sugar
coating to the large pill of practical and ethical exhortation. To
be sure, it does not sound like the preaching of our fathers. The old
sermon titles--"Suffering with Christ that we may be also glorified
with Him," for instance--seem very far away from it. Nor is it to be
supposed that this is what its author intended the story we have been
using to convey nor that these were the reactions that it aroused
in the breasts of its original hearers. But as the sermonizer would
doubtless go on to remark, there is a certain universal quality in all
great literature, and genius builds better than it knows, and so each
man can draw his own water of refreshment from these great wells of
the past. And indeed nothing is more amazing or disconcerting than the
mutually exclusive notions, the apparently opposing truths, which can
be educed by this method, from one and the same passage of Scripture!
There is scarcely a chapter in all the Old Testament, and to a
less degree in the New Testament, which may not be thus ingeniously
transmogrified to meet almost any homiletical emergency.
Now, I may as well confess that I have preached this kind of sermon
lo! these many years _ad infinitum_ and I doubt not _ad nauseam_. We
have all used in this way the flaming rhetoric of the Hebrew prophets
until we think of them chiefly as indicters of a social order. They
were not chiefly this but something quite different and more valuable,
namely, religious geniuses. First-rate preaching would deal with Amos
as the pioneer in ethical monotheism, with Hosea as the first poet of
the divine grace, with Jeremiah as the herald of the possibility of
each man's separate and personal communion with the living God. But,
of course, such religious preaching, dealing with great doctrines of
faith, would have a kind of large remoteness about it; it would pay
very little attention to the incidents of the story, and indeed,
would tend to be hardly expository at all, but rather speculative and
doctrinal.
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