Heralds of God

James S. Stewart

• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787208629
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This classic book on evangelical preaching by Scottish minister James S. Stewart, which was first published in 1946, has inspired generations of preachers to strive for greater effectiveness in their proclamations.The pages contained within this book were originally addressed as lectures in the Universities of Edinburgh and St. Andrews to Divinity students and ministers, and it is the author's hope that they will "have something to say to the wider circle of those who Sunday by Sunday are hearers of the Word of God, 'loving the habitation of His house and the place where His honour dwelleth, ' and perhaps even to the critic in the back pew."A practical and inspiring read.

CHAPTER I—THE PREACHER’S WORLD

There shall always be the Church and the World

And the Heart of Man

Shivering and fluttering between them, choosing and chosen,

Valiant, ignoble, dark, and full of light

Swinging between Hell Gate and Heaven Gate.

And the Gates of Hell shall not prevail.

Darkness now, then

Light.

T. S. ELIOT, The Rock.

AMONG the tributes paid to the memory of Sir Walford Davies, one of the noblest was that of a brother musician, Dr. Vaughan Williams. He dwelt on the sacrifice which Walford Davies had chosen to make quite deliberately—the sacrifice of the more aloof, self-centred life of the composer, for that of the organizer, the advocate, the musical propagandist, the educator of popular taste and opinion; and then he added: “It is an eternal problem that confronts all those who feel they have the creative impulse—’shall I shut myself up from the world and follow the dictates of my artistic conscience, or shall I go down to the world of men and show them what I have learnt about eternity and beauty?’ Walford Davies had no doubts—he was a born preacher and he determined to go and preach to the Gentiles. This decision,” declared Vaughan Williams, “was probably right.” I fancy that no one who knows what Walford Davies did for music in this generation will dispute that verdict.

Now the same problem, the same critical decision to which Vaughan Williams called attention in the realm of creative art, reappears even more forcibly in religion; and here it is a problem, not for the few who possess the elusive quality of genius, but for the whole company of believers. “Shall I, as a Christian, be content to pursue the religious quest as a private hobby, and to develop my own spiritual life; or shall I concern myself personally for those outside, and take upon my heart deliberately the whole world’s need for Christ?” No man, with the New Testament in his hand, can have a moment’s hesitation about the answer. “What I live by,” declared St. Augustine, “I impart.”

You have decided this matter in the most emphatic way of all, putting your life itself into the decision. Or rather, it has been decided for you, by the constraint of a higher will. For you the issue has been settled. To bring men face to face with Christ has seemed to you a matter of such immense and overruling urgency that you propose to devote your whole life to doing nothing else. You are determined, God helping you, to go down to the world of men, and show them what you have learnt—what indeed you shall go on learning more clearly every day you live—about the eternity of redeeming love and the beauty of the Lord.

It is a thrilling, noble enterprise. It demands and deserves every atom of a man’s being in uttermost self-commitment.

“To go down to the world of men.” That thrusts upon us this crucial fact—that our work as preachers has to be done in the actual setting of a contemporary situation.

The Gospel, it is true, stands unchanged from age to age. It remains yesterday, today, and for ever the same. In the twentieth century, it is the identical message which was sent by the Lord to former generations through the mouths of His servants Spurgeon and Wesley and Latimer and Xavier and Chrysostom and the apostles. No protean fashions of thought can alter it. No ebb and flow of the tides of history can prevail to modify it. It is as immutable as God Himself.

But while the basic message thus remains constant and invariable, our presentation of it must take account of, and be largely conditioned by, the actual world on which our eyes look out today. The Gospel is not for an age, but for all time: yet it is precisely the particular age—this historic hour and none other—to which we are commissioned by God to speak. It is against the background of the contemporary situation that we have to reinterpret the Gospel once for all delivered to the saints; and it is within the framework of current hopes and fears that we have to show the commanding relevance of Jesus.

This is not a plea for so-called “topical” sermons. It is deplorable that God’s hungry sheep, hoping for the pasture of the living Word, should be fed on disquisitions on the themes of the latest headlines. It is calamitous that men and women, coming up to the church on a Sunday—with God only knows what cares and sorrows, what hopes and shadowed memories, what heroic aspirations and moods of shame burdening their hearts—should be offered nothing better for their sustenance than one more dreary diagnosis of the crisis of the hour.

But this is not to say that the preacher must stand aloof, cultivating a spirit of detachment from the march of events. “What is history,” cried Cromwell, “but God’s unfolding of Himself?”—and the real work of the ministry in this generation will not be done by any man who shuts himself in with his academic interests and doctrinal theorizings, as though there were no surge and thunder of world-shattering events beating at his door. Surely in this immensely critical hour, when millions of human hearts are besieged by fierce perplexities; when so many established landmarks of the spirit are gone, old securities wrecked, familiar ways and habits, plans and preconceptions, banished never to return; when the soul is destined to meet, amid the crash of old beliefs, the ruthless challenge and assault of doubt and disillusionment; when history itself is being cleft in twain, and no man can forecast the shape of things to come—the Church needs men who, knowing the world around them, and knowing the Christ above them and within, will set the trumpet of the Gospel to their lips, and proclaim His sovereignty and all-sufficiency.

The question, therefore, is this: If the Gospel, in itself unchanging, must always be set forth in the nexus of a particular historical situation, what are the characteristic moods and tendencies which must influence the presentation of the message today?

Attempts are sometimes made to define the spirit of the age in a single phrase—to call it, for example, “an age of doubt,” “an age of rationalism,” “an age of revolt,” and so on. But all such generalizations are misleading. The reality cannot be thus simplified. We have to reckon with a mental and spiritual climate full of the most baffling contradictions. It would indeed be true to say that the most characteristic feature of the modern mood is precisely the unresolved tension between opposing forces. Here we touch the very nerve of the preacher’s problem. There are three directions in which this element of tension, of radical paradox and spiritual conflict, of thrust and counterthrust, is manifesting itself dramatically in the world we face today.

I

First, there is the tension between Disillusionment and Hope.

You are going out with the evangel into a world which has reacted strongly and even violently against the bland humanistic optimism which dominated the opening decade of the century. Then the great watchwords were the adequacy of materialism, the inevitability of progress, and the sufficiency of man. Science, having finally broken through the bondage of ignorance, and having shattered the tyranny of superstition, was hailed as the New Messiah, the supreme disposer of human destiny. Indeed, so startling and spectacular were the boons and bestowals of this new Messianic age, so strange and exciting the faculties put at man’s disposal, that one sinister fact went almost unobserved: all its gifts were double-edged. The dazzling splendours of its achievements masked only too effectively the grim truth—later to be learnt at an immeasurable cost of blood and tears—that science (to quote the words of Reinhold Niebuhr) “can sharpen the fangs of ferocity as much as it can alleviate human pain.” That aspect was conveniently ignored. With this new Messiah leading the way, it was argued, was there any limit to what humanity might accomplish? It was an intoxicating prospect. Would not social effort, reinforced by all the resources of technology, speedily bring the New Jerusalem down to earth from heaven? Surely the wilderness wanderings of the children of men were over, and the path of progress must now lead straight and unbroken to the shining Utopia of their dreams. The Renaissance humanists and the ancient sophists had been perfectly right: man was indeed the measure of all things. His will was the architect of destiny. His intelligence, storming the secrets of the universe, had occupied the throne of God. “Thou art smitten, thou God,” shouted Swinburne vociferously,

thou art smitten; thy death is upon thee, O Lord.

And the love-song of earth as thou diest resounds through the wind of her wings—

Glory to Man in the highest! for Man is the master of things.

Now it was hardly to be expected that in the heyday of this confident utopianism religion could remain uninfluenced and immune. The Bible might insist that “your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour,” but theological liberalism smiled to itself in a superior and even contemptuous way: it was not going to take such rhetoric too seriously. The conceptions of the world as fallen, of human nature as infected with a radical taint, of sin as a vicious circle which could be broken through only by supernatural action from outside—these were classed as outmoded fictions, and relegated to the scrap-heap of an antiquated theology. The evolutionary hypothesis, so fruitful in other fields, began to invade the deepest sanctities of the soul: it now appeared that all man had to do for his redemption was to

Move upward, working out the beast,

And let the ape and tiger die.

The Kingdom of Heaven was not, as Jesus and the apostles had proclaimed it, a gift of God breaking into history from the beyond: it was a human achievement, the product of social amelioration, culture and scientific planning. Jesus Himself, according to this view, was the Pioneer of progress, the supreme Leader, the apex of the vanguard of the pilgrim host of humanity—not a terrific Being shattering history with the explosive word, “Before Abraham was, I am.” Christianity sounded in men’s ears as good advice, rather than good news: an exhortation to be up and doing, to fight the good fight and follow the gleam, not the announcement of something which God had already done, decisively and for ever. There was accordingly an inclination to regard the preacher as the purveyor of religious homilies and ethical uplift, not the herald of the mighty acts of God. So far did the prevailing mood push the tendency to “change the glory of the uncorruptible God into the image of corruptible man” that there actually appeared a plagiarizing hymn, “Nearer, Mankind, to thee, Nearer to thee”: a sentiment, said G. K. Chesterton tersely if somewhat scurrilously, which “always suggested to me the sensations of a strap-hanger during a crush on the Tube.” Characteristic of this whole attitude was the reduced emphasis upon a theology of atonement and redemption. Why should man, conscious as never before in history of his own vast potential resources, grovel as a miserable sinner, or confess himself immeasurably indebted to sheer unmerited grace?

Every virtue we possess,

And every victory won,

And every thought of holiness

were—not “His alone,” emphatically not that—our personal meritorious achievement, the praiseworthy product of our innate spirituality. It was a mood which came dangerously near to making religion itself the handmaid and confederate of that pride which is the final blasphemy and the basic sin of man.

Today the scene is changed. When you go forth as preachers bearing Christ’s commission, it is to a generation which has very largely repudiated the confident optimism of its predecessors. The great tower of Babel—collective man’s monumentum aere perennius—has crashed, and the world is littered with the wreckage of disillusionment.

Back in 1918, a few days after the signing of the Armistice, Lord Curzon, moving the Address in the House of Lords, quoted the chorus from Shelley’s Hellas:

The world’s great age begins anew,

The golden years return.

Such sanguine words sound almost sardonic now. “We are living,” confessed Aldous Huxley, “in a rather grisly morning-after.” The shining dream has proved to be a mirage. Of what profit is man’s creative power, theme of his proudest boasts, if it is to become by a strange irony of fate the very instrument of his self-destruction? The old, ruthless dilemma, to which St. Paul gave classic expression in the seventh of Romans, has man in its torturing grip. And across the human scene today there echoes the haunting, unbearably poignant cry of Jeremiah long ago: “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”

Along with this, there has crept a deeper note into theology. We are no longer inclined to underestimate the radical stubbornness of sin. It has been borne in upon us that human wisdom cannot solve the dark enigma, nor can human action break the fast-bound fetters of the world. If there is any healing for humanity’s hurt, it must come, not from man’s side, but from God’s.

There is, however, a danger here. It is possible for the reaction from the creed of human self-reliance to be so violent that the disillusioned spirit is carried by it right across into pessimism and despair. Dark suspicions rear their heads. Has faith been a ghastly mistake? Is there perhaps no rationality anywhere? What if the spiritual interpretation of life is nothing more than the creation of pious sentiment, muddled thinking and credulity? How can the Christian evangel be relevant in a blatantly non-Christian world? Do not its basic axioms look frightfully incongruous and inapposite? Never forget as preachers that all around you today are men baffled and tormented by the assault of that fierce ultimate doubt.

I would have you notice, moreover, that theology itself, in certain of its aspects, has shared in the pessimistic reaction. There are those, for example, whose reflections on the contemporary scene have landed them in hopeless dualism. The world, as they see it, is the battleground where dark demonic forces wage war unceasingly with the hosts of heaven. By this conflict God Himself is limited, thwarted in His purposes, constrained to strive and struggle indecisively for the realization of His holy will. It is a recrudescence of the Manichaean heresy. It is quite oblivious of the repeated trumpet-note of the New Testament—that at the Cross once for all Christ raided the dark empire of evil, and vanquished the demons, and led captivity captive.

With others, again, the pessimistic mood expresses itself in religious quietism. They have carried their distrust of human nature to the point of denying the worth of any social action. Confronted with the collapse of the humanist gospel of man’s self-redeem-ability, they seek refuge in the unethical mysticism of a thoroughgoing otherworldliness: “Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest.”

Once again, there are those for whom the pressure of disillusionment has resulted in theological irrationalism, Man, according to this view, is so radically corrupt that there is no point of his nature left at which the...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER I-THE PREACHER’S WORLD
• CHAPTER II-THE PREACHER’S THEME
• CHAPTER III-THE PREACHER’S STUDY
• CHAPTER IV-THE PREACHER’S TECHNIQUE
• CHAPTER V-THE PREACHER’S INNER LIFE
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER