The Theologian and the Preacher

James Denney was incontestably right: our churches need pastors who are both theologians and evangelists, men who know theology and who at the same time have the pastoral spirit and the evangelistic burden. For no minister of the Gospel can be abidingly effective unless he obeys the Pauline exhortation: “Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15).

Yet how can a hard-pushed preacher possibly continue to engage in the study of theology? First, he has no money to buy books except occasionally a dog-eared volume from a second-hand dealer or a selection by some club or other. Think of the rising cost of living. Think of the sheer necessity of purchasing a new Ford annually if a clergyman is to hold his head high in Suburbia. Think of the miscroscopic salary that many churches pay. No! Books are a luxury that must be ruthlessly pared from the parsonage budget.

Second, what conscientious servant of Jesus Christ has time to study theology? Consider his exhaustive responsibilities. He must oversee the complicated activities of a fellowship which has wheels within wheels, and he must keep those wheels lubricated—and sometimes placate the bigger ones! He must direct a program of education which stretches from the cradle to the grave. He must spearhead the evangelistic outreach of his people. He must promote and sustain an intelligent concern for the missionary enterprise. He must participate in counseling situations that would tax the combined resources of King Solomon, Sigmund Freud, and William Menninger. He must raise enough money to support this whole structure without abandoning his role as a man of serene faith who eschews mundane realities. He must all the while be a model husband, a devoted father, and a responsible citizen. Oh, yes, and incidentally he must preach several times a week, and his sermons must be interesting and edifying so that his members not only grow in grace but grow in knowledge and thus are able to apply Christian principles to the problems of industry, sex, war, justice, race, and what not. All of these things make a burden heavy enough to crush a spiritual Hercules.

Is Theology Superfluous?

Is it realistic, then, to urge that ministers add to their work load the straw of theological study? Remember the camel’s back. Consider too that the study of theology is really of very little value after college and seminary have been left behind. If a man buries himself in his books, he will neglect his primary duties as the shepherd of the flock. And, worse still, he may unthinkingly begin to soar above the heads of his poor congregation, talking in unintelligible and profitless gobbledygook. Or perhaps his devotion to Jesus Christ will slowly evaporate, his evangelistic passion burn low. No, the serious study of theology has definite drawbacks. It is a danger, a danger likely to breed carnal conceit, a danger to be studiously avoided!

Furthermore, the study of theology is a superfluity. In order to be a pastoral success in this lush epic of American history, a man does not need theology. He needs the knack of winning friends and influencing people. He needs a course in personality development so that he may radiate a Norman Vincent Peale kind of dynamic magnetism. He needs administrative know-how. He needs skill in organizing a Sunday School. He needs an inexhaustible supply of snappy subjects and stirring stories. He needs glibness in dispensing streamlined advice. Yes, these are the tools that he needs rather than familiarity with theology, whether classical or modern. Churches are not especially interested in spirituality. They are looking for efficiency, drive, and sparkle. And Hodge, Strong or Barth can contribute nothing of that nature. In short, the serious systematic study of theology is alike impossible and unnecessary.

These objections are undeniably formidable. But perhaps a few qualifications are in order. Certainly a man needs to be adequately equipped in the fields of administration, publicity, counseling, and homiletics. Certainly our churches desperately require the leadership of first-rate pastors rather than the services of tenth-rate Hebraists who may rashly rush into an exegetical thicket where even a Gesenius might fear to tread. Certainly we must avoid pedantry and irrelevant erudition. Nevertheless, in obedience to our Lord we are under obligation to make our minds servants of Christian love; and that act of spiritual obedience necessitates a measure of intellectual discipline. To be specific, it necessitates the serious systematic study of theology.

You see, we are confronted by the antithetical perils of an overemphasis and an underemphasis on scholarship in the ministry. And the peril of underemphasis is by far the more prevalent and menacing. In our evangelical circles today we have succumbed to a disease which seems to be afflicting the whole of American life: that disease is anti-intellectualism, the contaminating dread of the egghead. That is why we fall ready victims to doctrinal vagaries and excesses. That is why we can seize upon one detail of eschatological chronology, the time of the rapture, and let it assume bizarre proportions. That is why our sermons lack depth and power. That is why our evangelism is frothy, sloganistic, and shallow. That is why we are failing to make any significant impact upon the entrenched forces of liberalism. God may be doing so in our day, but we are not lending him any particularly effective help. That is why we are frustrated and bewildered as we confront our world with its conflicting ideologies, its communism, naturalism, secularism, Roman Catholicism, existentialism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, and other philosophies which by the dozen are competing for the allegiance of human minds and hearts. And that is why evangelicalism has been dismissed by many intelligent people and by huge masses in the Orient and Africa as a dead option.

A Primary Responsibility

Ignoring all of this, however, we must keep on insisting that the serious study of theology is a primary responsibility of a pastor no matter how crowded his schedule may be. Why so? Suppose we counter that question with this question: what is the ultimate, last-ditch purpose of our ministry, the objective of all the administration, all the educational program, all the counseling, all the evangelism, all the preaching, all the outreach in missionary enterprise and social action? What is it all for anyway? How is it relevant to life in the twentieth century or indeed to life in any century? Let Paul Tillich and Immanuel Kant explain.

Now Paul Tillich, whose writings are not the kind of thing one reads for relaxation unless he is trying to conquer insomnia, constructs his interpretation of man and the universe by what he calls the method of correlation. Philosophy, he says, raises certain problems, issues which spring inescapably from the very structure of human experience, and theology furnishes the solutions to those problems. Accordingly, the task of Christian thinkers—and the pastor certainly belongs in that category—is to correlate the disclosures of revelation with the persistent inquiries which haunt our minds. This method of correlation is a principle of tremendous range and value. We can and must jettison much of the speculative superstructure which Tillich builds upon this foundation, but we can unhesitatingly utilize the foundation itself. For existence confronts our people with agonizing questions, regardless of how unphilosophical our people may ordinarily be.

Here we are in a vast cosmos which seems to be utterly inscrutable and heartless. Indeed, sometimes it seems to be mindless as well. Here we are then, instinctively longing to preserve our lives yet knowing that we are doomed to death. Here we are then, environed by mystery; we are in the darkness, and yet like Alfred Lord Tennyson we are praying for light. We wonder with an insatiable wonder, and in our bewilderment what is it about which we wonder? Immanuel Kant summed up the matter succinctly. “What may I know?” We wonder about that. “What may I hope?” “What ought I to do?” “What is man?” We wonder about these. And in this revolutionary age, as in every age, it is the preacher’s ultimate responsibility to correlate the revealed answers of the Bible with the questions which haunt the minds of people hurled unasked out of nothingness into being.

A Holy Privilege

It is the preacher’s task to show that the Gospel of Jesus Christ meets with amazing adequacy the total predicament of his congregation in a world where every security is threatened and where the profound anxiety of man can be overcome only by a profound message concerning God. It is thus the preacher’s holy privilege to bring man into a redeeming experience of the grace and power of Jesus Christ who alone can meet our deepest need. And never forget that it is the preacher’s supreme joy in the discharge of his pastoral duties, not only to give man information about God, which of course must be correct and gripping, but to bring man into continual encounter with God by proclaiming the re-creative Word under the anointing of the Holy Spirit.

But to do this as he ought to do it the preacher must study persistently. He must steadily grow in knowledge, for to genuinely grow in the knowledge of God is to grow in the grace of God. The pastor must correlate divine revelation with human predicament. And in order to do this he must read the theological classics of days gone by, and he must also listen to the theological conversation of our day. Very few of us are equipped to join in that conversation, but we can listen in. Hence the pastor must listen to what is being said by the resurgent evangelicalism of which Carl Henry and Bernard Ramm are typical. He must listen to what is being said by dispensational biblicism of which Chafer and Walvoord are representative. He must listen to what is being said by Dutch Calvinism of which Berkouwer and Dooyeweerd are champions. He must listen to what is being said by neo-orthodoxy—if there is any such identifiable animal in the theological zoo—of which Karl Barth and Emil Brunner are the embattled antagonists. He must listen to what is being said by irenic Anglicanism of which William Temple and Allen Richardson are authentic prophets. He must listen to what is being said by American liberalism of which Harry Emerson Fosdick is still the shining symbol. He must listen to what is being said by religious naturalism of which Henry Nelson Wieman is a distinguished torchbearer. Most emphatically he will not concur with everything he hears. He cannot! Certainly he will have staunch convictions and justified prejudices. But just as certainly, and precisely because of his convictions and prejudices, he will listen with attention and care.

For The Gospel’S Defense

He will listen, for one thing, in order to be set for the defense of the Gospel. Too much of the evangelical criticism of contemporary theology has been intemperate, uninformed, and distorted. And this has been especially so in some cases when criticism has been made from the pulpit. Instead of being rigidly objective (and objectivity is the strongest basis for devastating criticism), it has frequently been hysterical and badly deficient, calculated to score a polemical victory even though the cause of honesty and graciousness may have suffered a blistering defeat. Thus the pastor must listen to what is being said in order that his appraisal of deviants from orthodoxy may be accurate and well-grounded.

But that is not all. We evangelicals must listen in order to learn. Everything that we hear must be evaluated with caution and conscientiousness in the light of the cherished and changeless criteria which generations of devout scholars have drawn from God’s self-revelation recorded in the Old and New Testaments. Much that we hear from some quarters can at once be discarded as worthless. But again and again as we listen we will come to realize that God by his common grace has been operative in the thinking of men who share neither our understanding of divine truth nor our experience of him who is the truth. Again and again we may be compelled to remember Jehovah’s word to pagan Cyrus, “I girded thee although thou hast not known me” (Isa. 45:5). In short, the pastor must critically evaluate and judiciously appropriate, profiting by the insights of some theologians who, while by no means evangelical, have nevertheless wrestled strenuously with the existential and intellectual problems which confront ourselves and our people.

A Divinely Assigned Task

The gist of this plea is simple. As pastors we have a divinely assigned task. Essentially our task is to correlate the revelation of God with the problems and needs of the people whom we serve. That job, however, cannot be done as it ought to be done—and must be done—unless we become acquainted with the whole range of theological reflection, whether classical or modern—whether, in some significant instances, heterodox! In our revolutionary day a pastor must speak with authority and clarity. He must bear in mind the fervent exhortation of the Marine commander to the chaplain as a detachment of men were preparing to invade a South Sea island during the Second World War. “For God’s sake, padre, if you have anything to say, say it now.” We evangelicals do have something to say, the only message which can meet man’s need. May we say it, then, and say it with the authority and clarity which spring from the serious and systematic study of theology.

We Quote:

JOHN FOSTER DULLES

Secretary of State

Our nation was founded as an experiment in human liberty. Its institutions reflected the belief of our founders that men had their origin and destiny in God; that they were endowed by him with certain inalienable rights and had duties prescribed by moral law; and that human institutions ought primarily to help men develop their God-given possibilities. We believed that if we built on that spiritual foundation we would be showing men everywhere the way to a better and more abundant life.

We realized that vision. There developed here an area of spiritual, intellectual and economic vigor, the like of which the world had never seen. It was no exclusive preserve; indeed world mission was a central theme. Millions were welcomed from other lands, to share equally the opportunities of the founders and their heirs. Through missionary activities, the establishment of schools and colleges and through travel, American ideals were carried throughout the world. We gave aid and comfort to those elsewhere who sought to follow in our way and to develop societies of greater freedom.

Material things were added unto us. Our political institutions worked. That was because they rested upon what George Washington said were the “indispensable supports” of representative government, that is morality and religion. And, he added, it could not be assumed that morality would long prevail without religion.

Our people enjoyed an extraordinary degree of personal liberty. That was because the individuals making up our society generally accepted, voluntarily, the moral law and the self-discipline, self-restraint and duty to fellow-man that the moral law enjoins.…

I hear it asserted today that the qualities that made America honored and judged great throughout the world no longer have an adequate appeal and that we must invent something new in order to compete with Soviet dictatorship and its materialism.

My first reaction is that faith is not something put on, taken off or changed merely to please others.

My second reaction is to challenge the correctness of the assertion. It may be that, partly through our own faults and partly through communist publicizing of our faults, the image of America has become distorted in much of the world. Our individual freedom is made to appear as individual license and a casting aside of those restraints that moral law enjoins and that every society needs.

Sales talk based on the number of automobiles, radios and telephones owned by our people fails to win converts, for that is the language of the materialists.

Our capitalistic form of society is made to appear as one devoid of social responsibility.

I do not believe that human nature throughout the world has greatly changed from what it was when “the great American experiment” in freedom caught the imagination of men everywhere. I am afraid that the fault, if any, may be here at home in that we ourselves have lost track of the close connection between our faith and our works and that we attempt to justify our society and to make it appealing without regard to the spiritual concepts which underlie it and make it work. So many material things have been added unto us that what originally were secondary by-products now seem to rank as primary. And if material things are to be made primary, then it is logical to have a materialistic creed that justifies this primacy.—In an address to the Military Chaplains Association on April 22, 1958.

ALEXANDER MILLER

Associate Professor of Religion, Stanford University

In the present confrontation with Soviet Communism the Christian citizen will be concerned with the issue at all four levels—power, politics, economics and faith: but he will be more aware than the generality of men that the issue could be won on one level and lost on another, and he will be wary of turning what is certainly in part an issue of faith into an all-out religious war, as if Christianity were domesticated in the West.—In an address on “Christianity and Communism: Two Faiths in Conflict” at the University of Chicago Conference on “Religion Faces the Atomic Age,” Feb., 1958.

Vernon Grounds is President of the Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado, where he served as Dean from 1951–1956. He holds the A.B. degree from Rutgers University, B.D. from Faith Theological Seminary, Ph.D. from Drew University, and D.D. from Wheaton College. He has written The Reason for Our Hope and many magazine articles. His special interests are in psychology and counseling.

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