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Page 67
But a second reason why we dislike doctrinal preaching is because we
confound it with dogmatic preaching. Doctrinal sermons are those which
deal with the philosophy of religion. They expound or defend or relate
the intellectual statements, the formulae of religion. Such discourses
differ essentially from dogmatic sermonizing. For what is a doctrine?
A doctrine is an intellectual formulation of an experience. Suppose
a man receives a new influx of moral energy and spiritual insight,
through reading the Bible, through trying to pray, through loving and
meditating upon the Lord Jesus. That experience isn't a speculative
proposition, it isn't a faith or an hypothesis; it's a fact. Like the
man in the Johannine record the believer says, "Whether he be a sinner
I know not: but one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I
see."
Now, let this new experience of moral power and spiritual insight
express itself, as it normally will, in a more holy and more
useful life, in the appropriate terms of action. There you get that
confession of experience which we call character. Or let it express
itself in the appropriate emotions of joy and awe and reverence so
that, like Ray Palmer, the convert writes an immortal hymn, or a body
of converts like the early church produces the _Te Deum_. There is the
confession of experience in worship. Or let a man filled with this new
life desire to understand it; see what its implications are regarding
the nature of God, the nature of man, the place of Christ in the scale
of created or uncreated Being. Let him desire to thus conserve and
interpret that he may transmit this new experience. Then he will begin
to define it and to reduce it, for brevity and clearness, to some
abstract and compact formula. Thus he will make a confession of
experience in doctrine.
Doctrines, then, are not arbitrary but natural, not accidental but
essential. They are the hypotheses regarding the eternal nature of
things drawn from the data of our moral and spiritual experience. They
are to religion just what the science of electricity is to a trolley
car, or what the formula of evolution is to natural science, or what
the doctrine of the conservation of energy is, or was, to physics.
Doctrines are signposts; they are placards, index fingers, notices
summing up and commending the proved essences of religious experience.
Two things are always true of sound doctrine. First: it is not
considered to have primary value; its worth is in the experience
to which it witnesses. Second: it is not fixed but flexible and
progressive. Someone has railed at theology, defining it as the
history of discarded errors. That is a truth and a great compliment
and the definition holds good of the record of any other science.
Now, if doctrines are signposts, dogmas are old and now misleading
milestones. For what is a dogma? It may be one of two things. Usually
it is a doctrine that has forgotten that it ever had a history;
a formula which once had authority because it was a genuine
interpretation of experience but which now is so outmoded in fashion
of thought, or so maladjusted to our present scale of values, as to
be no longer clearly related to experience and is therefore accepted
merely on command, or on the prestige of its antiquity. Or it may be
a doctrine promulgated _ex cathedra_, not because religious experience
produced it, but because ecclesiastical expediencies demand it. Thus,
to illustrate the first sort of dogma, there was once a doctrine of
the Virgin Birth. Men found, as they still do, both God and man in
Jesus; they discovered when they followed Him their own real humanity
and true divinity. They tried to explain and formalize the experience
and made a doctrine which, for the circle of ideas and the extent
of the factual knowledge of the times, was both reasonable and
valuable. The experience still remains, but the doctrine is no
longer psychologically or biologically credible. It no longer
offers a tenable explanation; it is not a valuable or illuminating
interpretation. Hence if we hold it at all today, it is either for
sentiment or for the sake of mere tradition, namely, for reasons other
than its intellectual usefulness or its inherent intelligibility. So
held it passes over from doctrine into dogma. Or take, as an
example of the second sort, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception,
promulgated by Pius IX in the year 1854, and designed to strengthen
the prestige of the Papal See among the Catholic powers of Europe and
to prolong its hold upon its temporal possessions. De Cesare describes
the promulgation of the dogma as follows:
"The festival on that day, December 8, 1854, sacred to the Virgin, was
magnificent. After chanting the Gospel, first in Latin, then in Greek,
Cardinal Macchi, deacon of the Sacred College, together with the
senior archbishops and bishops present, all approached the Papal
throne, pronouncing these words in Latin, 'Deign, most Holy Father,
to lift your Apostolic voice and pronounce the dogmatic Decree of the
Immaculate Conception, on account of which there will be praise in
heaven and rejoicings on earth.' The Pope replying, stated that he
welcomed the wish of the Sacred College, the episcopate, the clergy,
and declared it was essential first of all to invoke the help of the
Holy Spirit. So saying he intoned _in Veni Creator_, chanted in chorus
by all present. The chant concluded, amid a solemn silence Pius IX's
finely modulated voice read the following Decree:
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