Hindrances to Study
If we are to build bridges into the real world and seek to relate the Word of God to the major themes of life and the major issues of the day, then we have to take seriously both the biblical text and the contemproary scene. We cannot afford to remain on either side of the cultural divide. To withdraw from the world into the Bible (which is escapism), or from the Bible into the world (which is conformity), will be fatal to our preaching ministry. Either mistake makes bridge building impossible and non-communication inevitable. Instead, it is our responsibility to explore the territories on both sides of the ravine until we become thoroughly familiar with them. Only then shall we discern the connections between them and be able to speak the divine Word to the human situation with any degree of sensitivity and accuracy.
Such exploration means study. There is no doubt that the best teachers in any field of knowledge are those who remain students all their lives. It is particularly true of the ministry of the Word. “None will ever be a good minister of the Word of God unless he is first of all a scholar” (Calvin). Spurgeon had the same conviction. “He who has ceased to learn has ceased to teach. He who no longer sows in the study will no more reap in the pulpit.”
There is a freshness and a vitality about every sermon which is born of study; without study, however, our eyes become glazed, our breath stale, and our touch clumsy. “The preacher’s life must be a life of large accumulation,” said Bishop Phillips Brooks in his 1877 Yale Lectures. He went on:
He must not be always trying to make sermons, but always seeking truth, and out of the truth which he has won the sermons will make themselves. . . . Here is the need of broad and generous culture. Learn to study for the sake of truth, learn to think for the profit and the joy of thinking. Then your sermons shall be like the leaping of a fountain, and not like the pumping of a pump.
The best-known living evangelist addresses the same exhortation to preachers today. Speaking to about 600 clergy in London in November 1979, Billy Graham said that, if he had his ministry all over again, he would make two changes. People looked startled. What could he possibly mean? First, he continued, he would study three times as much as he had done. He would take on fewer engagements. “I’ve preached too much,” he said, “and studied too little.” The second change was that he would give more time to prayer. Moreover, in making these emphases, he must have been deliberately echoing the apostolic resolve: “we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the Word” (Acts 6:4). Because afterwards I commented appreciatively on what he had said, Dr. Graham wrote to me the following day and added: “I remember that Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse (of Tenth Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia) once said: ‘If I had only three years to serve the Lord, I would spend two of them studying and preparing.’”
Since the Christian pastor is primarily called to the ministry of the Word, the study of Scripture is one of his foremost responsibilities, to which he commits himself at his ordination. This is very plain in the Church of England Ordinal of 1662. In his exhortation to the candidates the bishop says:
Seeing that you cannot by any other means compass the doing of so weighty a work, pertaining to the salvation of man, but with doctrine and exhortation taken out of the holy Scriptures, and with a life agreeable to the same, consider how studious ye ought to be in reading and learning the Scriptures. . . . We have good hope that you have well weighed and pondered these things with yourselves long before this time; and that you have clearly determined, by God’s grace, to give yourselves wholly to this Office, whereunto it hath pleased God to call you: so that, as much as lieth in you, you will apply yourselves wholly to this one thing, and draw all your cares and studies this way; and that you will continually pray to God the Father, by the mediation of our only Saviour Jesus Christ, for the heavenly assistance of the Holy Ghost; that, by daily reading and weighing of the Scriptures, ye may wax riper and stronger in your ministry.
The higher our view of the Bible, the more painstaking and conscientious our study of it should be. If this book is indeed the Word of God, then away with slovenly, slipshod exegesis! We have to make time to penetrate the text until it yields up its treasures. Only when we have ourselves absorbed its message can we confidently share it with others. God spoke to Samuel when he listened to God; then when Samuel spoke to Israel, they listened to him (1 Sam. 3:9–4:1). Similarly, before Ezekiel was in a position to speak God’s Word to the people, he had himself to devour and digest it. God said to him: “Son of man, . . . eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel” (Ezek. 3:1).
Our Bible study should have at least three characteristics.
First, it must be comprehensive. A man “does not qualify to be a preacher of the Word,” John Huxtable has written, “by making weekly sallies into the good book to discover some peg on which to hang some scattered observations about men and affairs.” Sporadic and haphazard dipping into the Scriptures is not enough. Nor must we limit ourselves to our favorite passages, or concentrate on the microscopic examination of a few key texts. Such selective knowledge and use of Scripture plays into the devil’s hands. Every heresy is due to an overemphasis upon some truth, without allowing other truths to qualify and balance it. Biblical induction is the only safe way to begin theology, moving, that is, from a wide variety of particular texts to general conclusions. But it presupposes a thorough knowledge of the diverse particularities of Scripture. It is in this way that the grand themes of Scripture emerge. Only then are we ready for a more deductive approach, as we view each part in the light of the whole.
I am personally grateful to Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, formerly minister of Westminster Chapel, for introducing me perhaps twenty years ago to Robert Murray M’Cheyne’s “Bible Reading Calendar.” M’Cheyne produced it in 1842 for the members of St. Peter’s Church in Dundee, Scotland, which he was serving at that time. It enables one to read the whole Bible through every year, the Old Testament once and the New Testament twice. As Dr. Lloyd-Jones has subsequently written in Preaching and Preachers, “I would say that all preachers should read through the whole Bible in its entirety at least once every year. . . . That should be the very minimum of the preacher’s Bible reading.” M’Cheyne’s lectionary sets four chapters to be read daily. His intention in those tranquil Victorian days was for two to be read in private devotions (morning and evening) and the other two in family prayers (also morning and evening) every day. My own practice has been rather to take three chapters each morning, if possible reading two and studying the third, and to keep the fourth chapter for the evening. What is particularly helpful about M’Cheyne’s scheme is the way in which he allocates the chapters. We do not begin on 1 January with Genesis 1–4, continuing with Genesis 5–8 on 2 January and Genesis 9–12 on 3 January. Instead, we start on New Year’s Day with the four great beginnings of Scripture, namely Genesis 1 (the birth of creation), Ezra 1 (the re-birth of the nation), Matthew 1 (the birth of the Christ), and Acts 1 (the birth of the Christian church). In this way we follow the parallel lines of God’s unfolding purpose. One day we may be reading about the patriarchs, Esther, the ministry of Jesus, and the Pauline journeys; on another day we may be following the fortunes of the monarchy, listening to the message of a prophet, studying John’s portrait of Jesus, and peering into the future disclosed by the Revelation. Nothing has helped me more than this to survey the rolling landscape of Scripture and to grasp its underlying and recurring themes.
If we hope to help our congregation to develop a Christain mind, we have to develop one ourselves. And the only way to do this is to soak our mind in the Scriptures. “Be masters of your Bibles, brethren,” said Spurgeon to his students; “whatever other works you have not searched, be at home with the writings of the prophets and apostles. ‘Let the Word of God dwell in you richly.’” “To understand the Bible should be our ambition; we should be familiar with it, as familiar as the housewife with her needle, the merchant with his ledger, the mariner with his ship.” Again, “it is blessed to eat into the very soul of the Bible until, at last . . . your blood is Bibline and the very essence of the Bible flows from you.” This steeping of the mind in Scripture was a major secret of the powerful preachers of the past. “Origen, the greatest scholar of the early Church. . . seems to have held the whole of Scripture in solution in his mind,” Bishop Stephen Neill has written, while Chrysostom’s sermons contain 7,000 quotations from the Old Testament, and 11,000 from the New.
If our study of the Bible must be comprehensive, it must also be open-minded. That is, we must genuinely desire through our Bible reading to hear and heed God’s Word, without distorting its meaning or avoiding its challenge. How is this possible? So far, in thinking of preaching as a bridge building exercise between the biblical and modern worlds or cultures, we have concentrated on the need to relate the one to the other. But we have said little about the third factor in the operation, namely the bridge builder himself who may belong to yet another culture. In fact, the exciting though demanding discipline of Christian communication is concerned with the interplay between these three cultures. The preacher or evangelist says to himself: “How can I, who have been brought up in one culture, take a particular biblical text which was given in a second culture, and expound it to people who belong to a third culture, without either falsifying the message or rendering it unintelligible?” At this moment our concern is not so much with the exposition of Scripture as with our personal reading and understanding of it. For this we have to take the two cultures involved with the utmost seriousness, namely, that of the biblical text on the one hand and our own who are seeking to interpret it on the other. It is the great merit of what is now referred to as the “new hermeneutic” that it emphasizes this necessity.
To begin with, we have to transport ourselves back, by the use of both our knowledge and our imagination, into the biblical writer’s context, until we begin to think what he thought and feel what he felt. Our responsibility is not to assimilate his views to ours, by reading our opinions back into what he wrote, but to assimilate our views to his by struggling to penetrate into his heart and mind. In order to do this, we need more than imaginative insight into his situation; we need also to be self-critical with regard to ours. It is essential to give up the illusion that we come to the biblical text as innocent, objective, impartial, culture-free investigators, for we are nothing of the kind. No, the spectacles through which we look at the Bible have cultural lenses. And the mind with which we think about the Bible, however open we keep it, is not empty. On the contrary, it is filled with cultural prejudices. So, though we cannot altogether rid ourselves of our cultural inheritance, we should be aware of our cultural bias. We should also seek increasingly to ensure that the presuppositions with which we approach the Bible are not drawn from outside it (e.g. those of the humanist, the capitalist, the Marxist, or the scientific secularist) but are Christian presuppositions supplied by the Bible itself.
Here, then, are two cultural horizons, that of the biblical author and that of the Bible reader. As Dr. Tony Thiselton sums up in his thoroughly researched and closely argued book Two Horizons (1980), “understanding takes place when two sets of horizons are brought into relation to each other, namely those of the text and those of the interpreter.” How, then, are they to relate? The expression “the hermeneutical circle” has been used in a variety of ways, some of which are unacceptable because they give the impression that the interpreter controls the meaning of the text. But, on the contrary, it is the text which challenges the interpreter. The true “hermeneutical circle” is a kind of dialogue between Scripture and us, in which Scripture is the senior partner, or a “dynamic interplay between text and interpreters.” It is not difficult to grasp why this is necessary. When we approach the Bible, the questions we have in our minds, and the answers which we expect to get, are both determined by our cultural background. “What is received back, however, will not be answers only, but more questions. As we address Scripture, Scripture addresses us. We find that our culturally conditioned presuppositions are being challenged and our questions corrected. In fact, we are compelled to re-formulate our previous questions and to ask fresh ones. So the living interaction proceeds.” As it does so, our understanding of God and of his will, our faith and obedience, continuously grow and deepen. It is “a kind of upward spiral, in which Scripture remains always central and normative.”
These are some of the implications of an “open-minded” approach to Scripture. We have to open our minds wide enough to risk hearing what we do not want to hear. For we have been taught to come to the Bible for solace. Does not Paul himself write of “the encouragement of the Scriptures” (Rom. 15:4)? So naturally we cherish the hope that through our Bible reading we shall be comforted; we have no wish to be disturbed. Hence we tend to come to it with our minds made up, anxious to hear only the reassuring echoes of our own prejudice. Moreover, it is not difficult to insulate ourselves against the challenges of God’s Word, or to barricade ourselves against his unwelcome incursions. The very two cultures we have been thinking about—of Bible authors and Bible readers—can act like two layers of thick cushioning to protect us against the impact, sometimes the shock, of the Word he wants to speak to us. The first step toward opening ourselves up to his Word is to be aware of the protective padding which has to be removed. We have to be willing for God himself to lay down the ground rules and to decide what he wants to say to us, however uncongenial we may find it. We have no liberty to circumscribe him, or to suggest lines of demarcation within which we are prepared to negotiate. No, we have to break down the cultural barriers and struggle to open our hearts and minds to listen to whatever he has to say.
Thirdly, our Bible study needs to be expectant. At least two conditions are hostile to the joyful expectancy with which we should come to the Scriptures. The first is pessimism, aroused in some by the current hermeneutical debate itself. The interpretation of Scripture now appears to them so complicated that they become cynical and despair of ever gaining a true and balanced understanding of God’s Word. But if the new hermeneutic had really put biblical interpretation beyond the reach of all but the professionals, then we would have to condemn it as a dangerous abberation. For Scripture is intended for ordinary people like us. Even 1 Corinthians, with all its profound teaching on doctrine, ethics, and church order, was addressed to a Christian community to which “not many wise” belonged. The new hermeneutic has not reversed the blessing of the Reformation, however, and taken Scripture out of the hands of the lay people again. A little patience in learning to grasp and apply its unfamiliar principles should cure us of premature pessimism.
The second condition which militates against expectancy is spiritual staleness, and this can be a major problem for all pastors. If we read through the whole Bible annually, then after a few years we feel we know it fairly well. The temptation is to become blasé and to come to our daily reading with no very lively expectation that God is going to speak to us through it. Instead, we should be confident, in the famous words of John Robinson, pastor of the separatists’ church in Holland from which the Pilgrim Fathers sailed in the Mayflower in 1620, that God has “more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy Word.” We need therefore to “present ourselves before the Lord” each day like the angels (Job 1:6; 2:1), to ask for an “awakened ear” like his servant (Isa. 50:4), and to request him as Samuel did to speak, because his servant is listening (1 Sam. 3:10). We need to “cry out for insight and raise our voice for understanding,” to “seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden treasures,” for then we shall understand and “find the knowledge of God” (Prov. 2:3–5). Such seeking perseveres even in the face of an apparent rebuff. It lays hold of God like Jacob and refuses to let him go until and unless he blesses us (Gen. 32:26). It is this spirit of eager and determined expectation which God honors. He promises to fill the hungry with good things; it is only the complacent whom he sends away empty-handed (Luke 1:53). So we must not give in to spiritual staleness as if it were normal or even tolerable, but must pray for the refreshment of the Holy Spirit so that if our appetite is blunt he will sharpen it, and if our heart is cold he will rekindle within us the fires of expectancy.
In this comprehensive, open-minded, and expectant study, although the Bible itself is always our text book, we shall of course take advantage of the many aids to biblical understanding which are available to us today. Books are the preacher’s stock-in-trade. How widely we spread our theological reading will depend on the time we have available, and where we concentrate our studies will depend on our individual interests. In any case, since such a cataract of theological books pours off the presses of Europe and North America, we all have to be severely selective, which means that we need to look at the book reviews and ask each other for suggestions of the most important books.
We shall be wise to read old books as well as new, especially the Christian classics which expound biblical passages and doctrines, and which, having stood the test of time, are often more valuable than transitory modern writing. At the same time, we shall need to keep abreast of the modern theological debates, at least in general if not in the particulars, and through summary articles in journals if not by reading the books themselves. For these debates do not stay in academic ivory towers for long; they are soon given publicity on radio and television, and it is not long before they filter down into school textbooks. So our congregation will expect us not only to be aware of current controversy but also to be able to help them respond to it thoughtfully. History is another vital dimension of theological study. Few truths or heresies are new; most are a rehash of ancient ideas. Some knowledge of historical theology gives us a well-adjusted perspective from which to view the latest doctrinal fashions. Biography, too, brings balance, wisdom, and encouragement as we learn how God has dealt with other Christians in other times and places. And in all this reading, our objective is not so much the accumulation of knowledge as the stimulation to think Christianly.
As books get ever more expensive, western city-dwellers are increasingly grateful for access to good public libraries. In addition, every local church should be able to manage a small lending and reference library, and pastors can lend books both to one another and to their church members.
As for the “well contrived library” which John Wilkins, seventeenth-century Bishop of Chester, recommended clergy to build, we shall probably concentrate on essential reference books, especially dictionaries and commentaries, to which we shall need to turn again and again.
I often find myself wishing that local clergy gatherings, whether denominational or interdenominational, could be more effective in stimulating thought. When we meet, we are no doubt obliged to transact some business, but we could also encourage one another in study. The second half of the eighteenth century was the great time for the founding of societies for English clergy, especially evangelicals. The first was Samuel Walker’s “Clerical Club” in Truro (c. 1750), whose purpose was to “strengthen each other’s hands in the work of the Lord.” During the following years about ten others arose in different parts of the country. “Why may we not meet to pray, when others meet to play at bowls?” asked Thomas Robinson of Leicester. “Why may we not have deliberative assemblies, when others of our brethren have their dancing and drinking assemblies? Why may we not seek to edify one another, while they care not if they corrupt one another?” The most famous and influential of these clubs was the Eclectic Society, founded in 1783 by John Newton, ex-sea captain and slave trader, but at that time rector of St. Mary Woolnoth in the city of London, and his friends. They met every other Monday. “We begin with tea,” wrote Newton (the teapot is preserved in Church Missionary House in London); “then a short prayer introduces a conversation for about three hours upon a proposed subject, and we seldom flag.” He added that the group deserved to be called the Royal Society since “I trust the members are all of the royal family, and the King Himself condescends to meet with us.”
Biblical and theological studies do not by themselves make for good preaching. They are indispensable. But unless they are supplemented by contemporary studies, they can keep us disastrously isolated on one side of the cultural chasm. David Read addressed himself to this danger when, as chaplain to the University of Edinburgh, he gave the 1951 Warrack Lectures. “‘O for the wings of a dove! Far, far away would I rove’ is all too often the appropriate anthem before the sermon,” he said. For frequently our preaching sounds remote, detached from society, “untouched by its agonies, immaculate in its irrelevant ideals.” He went on to give a young minister’s description of what he regarded as “the ideal building-plan for church and manse.” Here it is:
The salient feature was a long straight corridor with a door at one end leading out of the manse study and a door at the other end opening into the pulpit of the church, . . . the highway for the Word of the Lord, the straight path from the mind of the preacher to the hearts of his hearers.
No interruptions, no distractions. But, David Read went on,
that theologically-cushioned, isolated study is a lethal chamber, and it is a dead word that is carried out along the corridor . . . not the living Word, spoken as it must be, from heart to heart and from life to life.
He then added his own understanding of how sermons are born:
It remains an axiom of Christian preaching that the road from study to pulpit runs through a living, demanding interrupting manse; out into the noisy street; in and out of houses and hospitals, farms and factories, buses, trains, cinemas . . . up between rows of puzzled people to the place where you are called to preach. . . . For the living Word there is no by-pass road from study to pulpit.
We need, then, to study on both sides of the divide. As Austin Phelps put it at the end of the last century, a thoroughly trained preacher is first a human being, at home among human beings, and then a scholar, at home in libraries: “No other profession equals that of the pulpit in its power to absorb and appropriate to its own uses the world of real life in the present and the world of the past as it lives in books.” Phelps’ whole series of lectures, published under the title Men and Books, was devoted to this theme, and to the need for preachers to exploit these two resources.
I am glad for this emphasis that our study of the modern world begins with people, not books. The best preachers are always diligent pastors who know the people of their district and congregation and understand the human scene in all its pain and pleasure, glory and tragedy. And the quickest way to gain such an understanding is to shut our mouth (a hard task for compulsive preachers) and open our eyes and ears. It has been well said that God has given us two ears and two eyes, but only one mouth, so that he obviously intends us to look and listen twice as much as we talk.
A wise old owl lived in an oak.
The more he saw, the less he spoke;
The less he spoke, the more he heard;
Why can’t we all be like that bird?
We need, then, to ask people questions and get them talking. We ought to know more about the Bible than they do, but they are likely to know more about the real world than we do. So we should encourage them to tell us about their home and family life, their job, their expertise and their spare-time interests. We also need to penetrate beyond their doing to their thinking. What makes them tick? How does their Christian faith motivate them? What problems do they have which impede their believing or inhibit them from applying their faith to their life? The more diverse people’s backgrounds, the more we have to learn. It is important for us to listen to representatives of different generations as well as of different cultures, especially of the younger generation. The married pastor who has teenage children has no excuse not to be earthed in reality. Humble listening is indispensable to relevant preaching. It also makes preaching a co-operative enterprise as our knowledge of the Bible and other people’s knowledge of the world combine to construct bridges.
I take it for granted that, in addition to careful listening, we shall read a daily or weekly newspaper (for many years now I have found a thorough reading of a weekly much more profitable than the cursory scanning of a daily), watch some television, and peruse the secular book reviews in order to discover the most influential contemporary books to get and read. It seems clear that we shall also find it necessary to see some of the most notable films and plays, since nothing mirrors contemporary society more faithfully than the stage and the screen.
Because I guess that some of my readers will have received their spiritual nurture, as I did, in a Christian subculture which frowns on the cinema and the theater, it may be right for me at this point to anticipate possible criticism. First, a reader may ask, are there not some plays, films, and books which we would be wise to avoid, lest we expose ourselves to unnecessary temptation? Yes, indeed there are. Although we have no liberty to legislate for others, we should certainly keep away from anything likely to upset our own moral or spiritual equilibrium. The teaching of Jesus about the offending eye, foot, or hand still applies. So it is sensible to make careful enquiries about recommended novels and plays in order to be discriminating in what we see and read. In the case of borderline plays and films, and of those whose influence is particularly insidious because its spirit of antichrist is more subtle than overt, I have found it helpful to go not alone but with a group of friends, for it is then easier to retain one’s critical detachment and refuse to be sucked into the atmosphere.
Secondly, what about the “weaker brother” (or sister), of whom Paul wrote so much to the Romans and Corinthians? Even if we feel ourselves to be strong enough to risk contamination, might not our example lead weak Christians astray? Yes, this is another important question. Scripture has much to say about our responsibility for other people, and about the power for good or evil of our example. One of our Lord’s fiercest denunciations and most solemn warnings was reserved for anybody who causes “little ones” (i.e. children, either literally or spiritually) to stumble. It would be better for him to be drowned, he said. Nevertheless, we have to recognize that the “weakness” of weaker brothers and sisters refers not to their will, so much as to their conscience. A weak conscience is an over-scrupulous conscience. And although, even when mistaken, it is not to be violated, it does need to be educated. If, therefore, we have “weaker brethren” in our congregation who would be offended by our going to the theater or cinema, we have no one to blame but ourselves: it is up to us to educate or “strengthen” their conscience!
Thirdly, some disagree with the call to study the modern novel, stage, and screen because they consider it a compromise with fashion. They regard the quest for “relevance” in preaching as a surrender to worldiness. Those who give in to it are dismissed as men-pleasers whose main objective is to be trendy rather than godly. Once again, we need to heed this criticism. The lust for popularity is indeed imperious, and many of us are twentieth-century Pharisees who love “the praise of men more than the praise of God” (John 10:43). One of the most trenchant critics of this tendency was W. R. Inge, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral from 1911 to 1934. Invited to lecture in 1911 on “The co-operation of the Church with the spirit of the age,” he declared in his diary that this topic was “a red rag for me.” He went on, “there are many spirits of the age, most of them evil” and “if you marry the spirit of your own generation, you will be a widow in the next.” This is a wise warning. But it does not condemn a study of contemporary trends. For what I am proposing is not co-operation with the spirit of the age, still less marriage to it, but rather an understanding of it with a view to confronting it with a relevant word from God.
What kind of study, then, will increase our understanding of the modern world? I want to bear witness to the immense stimulus which I have myself received from the reading group which I helped to bring into being in 1974. It consists of about a dozen young graduates and professional people, and includes doctors, lawyers, teachers, a housing officer, an architect, a personnel manager, and some post-graduate students. We meet monthly when I am in London, and at the end of each meeting decide what we will read before next time. Then we spend a whole evening together sharing our reactions to the book, discussing its message and implications, and trying to develop a Christian response to it. Some of the books selected are written from a Christian perspective, like Jacques Ellul’s Violence and The Meaning of the City, E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, Donald McKay’s Clockwork Image, John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus, Colin Morris’s Unyoung, Uncoloured, Unpoor, and John V. Taylor’s Enough is Enough. Other books we have studied present some rival ideology to the evangelical Christianity we represent. We have read the Koran, tried to understand the contemporary appeal of eastern mysticism, studied other “isms” with the help of James Sire’s The Universe Next Door, been fascinated by the Yaqui way of knowledge advocated by Carlos Castaneda, felt the pull of Marxism through Christians and Marxists (the mutual challenge to revolution) by José Miguez Bonino, and looked at Hans Küng’s liberal Roman Catholicism outlined with such erudition in his On Being a Christian (1977).
But we have tried to concentrate on secular rather than religious books, because the main purpose of our group is to help us understand the secular mind of the post-Christian west, in order to combat it with a Christian mind. I have tried, therefore, to encourage the group to take responsibility for each month’s choice, and they have certainly selected some titles which I would otherwise never have heard of, like R. M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motor-cycle Maintenance. We have profited from several analyses of modern culture like Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counterculture, Charles Reich’s The Greening of America, and Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. We have tried to grapple with popular modern philosophers like Herbert Marcuse (the students’ cult hero in the 1960s) and Erich Fromm. We have struggled to understand the issues involved in the debates about feminism, abortion, and euthanasia, and we spent one sensational evening examining the evidence for UFOs. We have also attempted to come to grips with popular novelists (different group members reading different works) like Camus, Kafka, William Golding, Hermann Hesse, and John Fowles.
On several occasions we have been to a film or play instead of reading a book. Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind introduced us to the whole realm of science fiction, and Whose Life is it Anyway? and Sentenced to Life to the campaign for voluntary euthanasia and its opponents. Bergman’s Autumn Sonata made a profound impact on us. We sat silently glued to our seats when it was over, overwhelmed by the tragic effects which being deprived of love has on successive generations in the same family. We had to walk to church and pray together in order to relieve our pent-up emotions. We were deeply moved in Kramer v. Kramer by the tug-of-war over the custody of the child which divorce brings. Then that tragi-comedian Woody Allen in his recent films, combining humor and humanity, searching for love yet bouncing helplessly from one sexual liaison to the next without finding it, has enforced for us the Christian truth that there is no authentic love without responsible commitment.
The experience of the reading group—of the books we have read, the films and plays we have seen, and the discussion they have provoked—has not only increased our understanding of the modern world, but excited our compassion for human beings in their lostness and despair, confirmed our Christian faith, and rekindled our sense of Christian mission. I commend the value of such a group to all my fellow-clergy. There can hardly be a congregation in any culture, however small, which could not supply a few thoughtful people to meet with their pastor to discuss the engagement of the church with the world, the Christian mind with the secular mind, Jesus Christ with his rivals. The London group has given me the necessary stimulus to read at least some of the books I ought to be reading and has provided me with some sharp-witted, warm-hearted young people as a congenial context in which to discuss the issues raised. They have helped to drag me into the modern world and have planted my feet on the soil of contemporary reality; I am very grateful to them.
In addition to the reading group which meets regularly, I have derived great benefit from several ad hoc resource groups. The staff team of All Souls Church, chaired by Michael Baughen the rector, decided about two years ago that we should have a series of quarterly sermons entitled “Issues Facing Britain Today” and invited me to preach them. The topics chosen were “The Multi-Racial Dream,” “Work and Unemployment,” “Industrial Relations,” “The Arms Race,” and “The New International Economic Order.” Although I accepted the invitation (or challenge), I knew at once that I was out of my depth. To be sure, I cherished certain biblical convictions relating to these issues, but I had little factual knowledge of race relations or armaments or economics, and no personal experience of industry or unemployment. How, then, could I presume to address myself to such questions with integrity? Here was a situation in which I plainly needed help.
First, I needed some well-informed, up-to-date literature which would supply me with facts and figures, and also stimulate my thinking. Let me at this point defend the inclusion of factual non-biblical information in our sermons. Without it the biblical message is proclaimed into a vacuum. Thus, we can expound the Christian doctrine of work from the Bible, but our exposition becomes much more significant if we can set it against the background of rising unemployment. We can preach on Christ’s command to his disciples to be peace-makers, but his call sounds much more urgent when we know the appalling size of the super-powers’ arsenals. Again, we can teach from Scripture that God cares for the poor, defends the power-less, demands justice, and calls his people to generous sharing, but this message becomes much more poignant if we add that 800 million people in the world are destitute and that 10,000 die of starvation or related diseases every day. Similarly, we can summarize the biblical basis for world mission and preach our hearts out in calling a congregation to pray, to give, and to serve, but our appeal becomes much more compelling when we add that approximately 3,000 million people, about three-quarters of the world population, have had no adequate opportunity to hear and respond to the gospel.
Secondly, I felt the need before each quarterly sermon of discussion with an ad hoc group of specialists who would be willing to spend a couple of hours with me. Each group was representative of different, and sometimes conflicting, viewpoints. Before the sermon on industrial relations, for example, it included a full-time union official who had previously been a shop steward and branch secretary, and now looked after nearly 6,000 workers, a postal union worker who was a chairman of his local branch, a man who had worked in a brewery for fifteen years both as a manager and as marketing director, and was now studying for the ordained ministry, a health insurance consultant and broker who had served both management and union members, and an economics lecturer specializing in the impact of inflation on the bargaining process, together with a doctoral student who had “never done a paid day’s labor in his life.” Then before the even more controversial topic of the arms race, the group included a committed pacifist from the Anabaptist tradition, a civil servant with a Ph.D. in war studies, a naval commander taking a mid-career course at the National Defence College, and a chief education officer for the Army in one of the regions of England. The third example I would like to mention relates to the group advising me on the sermon about work and unemployment. It comprised an employer, a personnel controller (who had the unpleasant task of breaking the news to staff who were being made redundant), a young lecturer and researcher in economics, the chaplain to the Oxford Street stores, an insurance company employee, and two people with experience of unemployment. One was a man who had worked as a journalist, a press officer, and in public relations, and who was made redundant at the age of thirty-five. The other was a lady hospital worker, a graduate in chemistry with a diploma in social administration, who had been passionately committed to the cancer and disabled patients she served, but, despite assurances to the contrary, was made redundant with only two weeks’ notice. Since then she had applied for forty-three jobs, had been granted only six interviews, and was still unemployed. These two friends enabled me to see unemployment in personal rather than statistical terms. They helped me to feel what they felt—the shock, the rejection, the hurt, the humiliation, and the sense of helplessness which are all caused by unemployment.
Before each group assembled, it was essential for me to do a bit of preparatory homework myself, so that I could identify some key issues and formulate the questions I wanted to put to them. The discussion was invariably lively, and on a number of occasions I found myself sitting back and listening to the debate as it developed between different opinions. Eavesdropping in this way proved extremely stimulating and enlightening. In fact, the whole experience was creative as we struggled to relate biblical principles and contemporary contexts to one another.
Let me try now to face head on the critical reaction which my suggestion of resource groups is likely to provoke in some clergy. Here is an overworked pastor in an inner city or industrial area, who is already stretched to capacity. He could not possibly contemplate adding to his work load, he says. Besides, his congregation consists of only twenty-five people, none of whom is a specialist in any field. In a situation like this a resource group would be out of the question: he lacks the time, and they the expertise for such a thing.
In response, I certainly recognize that large urban and suburban congregations are in a much better position to recruit resource groups. Yet I am very reluctant to concede that even the small inner city church and its hard-pressed pastor can manage nothing. If a carefully considered sermon on a current issue is impossible quarterly, is it really impossible annually? And if a congregation cannot produce from its own membership mature Christians who are specialists in their field, there must surely be some within reach who belong to other churches, but who would be willing to contribute their expertise to an occasional discussion group, and would even be surprised and gratified to be asked to do so?
At all events, I am convinced that there ought to be more co-operation between clergy and laity in the process of sermon-making, and that this is required by the New Testament picture of the church as the multi-gifted body of Christ.
As Michael Ramsey, formerly Archbishop of Canterbury, put it in a lecture in New York:
The priest (i.e. the presbyter or pastor) is one who learns theology and teaches it. His study is deep and constant. . . His teaching of theology is not done de haut en bas for, while he teaches the laity what they do not know without his help, he must all the while be learning from them about the questions to which theology is applied. In this partnership of priest and laity, the authority of the priest to teach in Christ’s name is a real authority, but it will be exercized with the humility of Christ and in the spirit of one who learns.
Personally, I would go further than Dr. Ramsey in seeking to develop “this partnership of priest and laity” and to express “the humility of Christ.” It is not just that the laity ask the questions and we answer them, since we too have to ask our questions for them to answer. It is rather that, by asking each other questions, we from the biblical perspective and they from the contemporary, we may together discern what answers should be given if the Word is to be contextualized in the world.
I have enlarged on the need to focus our studies on the two sides of the deep divide. We have to study both the ancient text and the modern scene, both Scripture and culture, both the Word and the world. So, alongside our systematic, comprehensive, open, and expectant reflection upon the Bible, we shall listen, look and read, watch plays, films and television, and summon groups to our aid in our endeavor to understand the human society in which and to which we are called to expound God’s Word. It is a mammoth task. It demands a lifetime of study. How can it be done?
Our forebears managed it mostly by the studied neglect of distracting duties. Take Joseph Parker, the first minister of the City Temple in London. He began his studies at seven-thirty every morning. Moreover, he refused to get involved in public life or business. “I have lived for my work,” he explained. “That is all. If I had talked all the week, I could not have preached on Sunday. That is all. If I had attended committee meetings, immersed myself in politics and undertaken the general care of the Empire, my strength would have been consumed. That is all. Mystery there is none.” Campbell Morgan, who had received no seminary education and obtained no university degree, was in his study by six o’clock every morning.
Alexander MacLaren, the eloquent Baptist preacher in Manchester, who died in 1903, also declined many social and speaking engagements in order to concentrate on his study and preparation. But he added another explanation of his massive learning. It was that he was content to spend the early years of his pastorate in an isolated countryside situation. “I thank God,” he said, “that I was stuck down in a quiet, little, obscure place to begin my ministry.” In that relative seclusion he was able to store up material for his future years which were spent in the busy limelight of Manchester.
We seem to live in a very different world, however. True, students were still being taught in the theological college I attended that the diligent pastor spends his mornings with his books and his afternoons in visiting. Some, I know, still succeed. But for myself, I found from the beginning that this was an impossible ideal to attain. I made valiant efforts, but I failed. Mornings? Why, on Sunday morning I was at public worship in church; on Monday morning there was a staff meeting; Tuesday was my day off; by Wednesday there were urgent letters to write; on Thursday morning I taught in our church day school; on Friday morning there was sure to be a funeral; and Saturday morning I had to reserve for actual sermon preparation. Thus the week went by without a single morning being free for those books which I was supposed to be reading. So I found myself obliged to lower my expectations and set myself more realistic goals. I have come to believe in the cumulative value of shorter periods of study. Thus, I doubt if any pastor is so busy that he cannot manage one hour a day for reading, in addition to his personal Bible study and prayer-time. Most will also find it possible to keep one four-hour period a week—whether a morning, an afternoon, or an evening—for more prolonged study. It only needs the discipline of blocking off such a weekly period in one’s engagement book, and refusing to allow it to be invaded, except by an emergency.
Next, I have discovered the immense profit of a quiet day at least once a month. I learned this from the Rev. L. F. E. Wilkinson during an address he gave at the Islington Clerical Conference in about 1951. It is the only thing I remember from the whole conference. But it came to me as a message from God. I had been precipitated into being rector of All Souls at the age of twenty-nine, when I was much too young and inexperienced for such a responsibility. I began living from hand to mouth. Everything piled up and got on top of me. I felt crushed by the heavy administrative load. I started having the typical clerical nightmare: I was half-way up the pulpit steps when I suddenly realized that I had forgotten to prepare a sermon. Then came L. F. E. Wilkinson’s address. “Take a quiet day once a month,” he said, or words to that effect. “Go away into the country, if you can, where you can be sure of being undisturbed. Stand back, look ahead, and consider where you are going. Allow yourself to be drawn up into the mind and perspective of God. Try to see things as he sees them. Relax!” I did. I went home, and immediately marked one day a month in my engagement book with the letter “Q” for Quiet. And as I began to enjoy these days, the intolerable burden lifted and has never returned. In fact, so valuable did these days prove to be, that for many years now I have tried to manage one a week instead of only one a month. I keep for them those items which need unhurried and uninterrupted time—some long-term planning, some problem to think and pray over, some difficult letters to draft, some preparation, reading, and writing. I could not exaggerate the blessing which these quiet days have brought to my life and ministry.
Now let me come to the question of our annual holiday. The famous preachers of the nineteenth century, so far as I can tell, used to take two months for their summer vacation, and during this lengthy period would sketch out their whole year’s preaching and do a great deal of the initial preparation. Alexander Whyte of Edinburgh, for example, took “never less than two, and in later years three, summer months” away from the city, “and shorter times at Christmas and Easter.” He was working, not relaxing, however. These periods were “closely packed with reading, meditation, and sometimes writing.” Nowadays, a clergyman’s holiday is considerably shorter. Yet in the course of it he should be able to read several books. Even a married man with a quiverful of children should be able to find some time each day for quiet reading and study.
Dr. Lloyd-Jones tells us in Preaching and Preachers not only that he usually took the latest Bampton Lectures or Hibbert Lectures with him on holiday, but also that he struck a kind of bargain with his wife and children. “They gave me the mornings to myself that I might do this (sc. some serious reading); then, having done that, I was prepared to do anything they proposed.” The council of All Souls Church agreed many years ago that the pastoral staff should be encouraged to take off at least an annual week in addition to their vacation, either to attend an education course or conference of some kind or simply for a bona fide reading week. Ought not every church to make a similar provision for its pastors, and thus recognize their indispensable need for time to study?
What I have suggested in the previous paragraphs seems to me to be an absolute minimum of time for study, which even the busiest pastors should be able to manage. Many will achieve more. But the minimum would amount to this: every day at least one hour; every week one morning, afternoon, or evening; every month a full day; every year a week. Set out like this, it sounds very little. Indeed, it is too little. Yet everybody who tries it is surprised to discover how much reading can be done within such a disciplined framework. It tots up to nearly 600 hours in the course of a year.
Whatever habits of study we develop, it is obviously important to garner its fruits. “A preacher has to be like a squirrel and has to learn to collect and store matter for the future days of winter.” Every reader of books develops his own practice of marking, underlining, or note-taking. As one passes through middle age into old age, and one’s powers of recall abate, some means of aiding and jogging the memory become essential. I have found it helpful, while the theme of an important book is fresh in my mind, to make a brief synopsis of its argument. After finishing each book I also try not to begin another until I have written out, or asked my secretary to type out, a few of its striking quotations. For many years now these summaries and quotations have been preserved on five- by three-inch cards, which can be both stored in a cabinet and (being punched with two holes) fitted into a loose-leaf book. We all know the American definition of a filing system as “a device for losing things alphabetically.” So I keep two files, the one running from Genesis to Revelation, and the other from A to Z, and file each card where I think I am most likely to find it again, or at any rate least likely to lose it. This system has served me well. It is both simple and flexible. I find I can get the notes of an average sermon on to four cards, and can then add other cards containing appropriate quotations or illustrations. If I were to begin my ministry again, I would adopt the same system. The only change I would make would be to up-grade the cards from five- by three-inch to six- by four-inch, as a concession to my deteriorating eyesight.
Some readers may find themselves in disagreement even with the minimum suggestions I have made as a framework for study. “I am far too busy,” someone may say. “Your program is hopelessly unrealistic for my situation. You refer to a pastoral team, a secretary, and resource groups. But you don’t realize how favored you are. I have none of these luxuries. I’m entirely on my own.” Well, I cannot deny that I have been and am extremely favored. Indeed, I cannot speak too strongly of the benefits of working in a team. Nevertheless, I must deny that being overworked and understaffed can properly be made an excuse for having no time to study. Almost always what lies behind this contention is a false or “clericalist” image of the church. If the pastor holds all the ecclesiastical reins in his own hands, and has no concept of a shared responsibility which involves lay leaders, then of course he has no time to study. But if he has grasped the New Testament image of the church as the body of Christ, every member of which has been gifted for some form of ministry, then he will be continuously on the look-out for the gifts which God has given, in order to encourage people to recognize, develop, and exercize them. “As each has received a gift, employ it for one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace” (1 Pet. 4:10). Even “delegation” is the wrong word for this, since it suggests that the work is rightfully the pastor’s but that he rather condescendingly deigns to hand some of it over to others. “Partnership” is the more biblical concept, so that clergy and laity rejoice in the variety of gifts which God has given, and help each other to use their gifts and fulfill their callings for the building up of Christ’s body.
The church of every generation has to re-learn the lesson of Acts 6. There was nothing wrong with the apostles’ zeal for God and his church. They were busily engaged in a Christlike, compassionate ministry to needy widows. But it was not the ministry to which they, as apostles, had been called. Their vocation was “the ministry of the Word and prayer”; the social care of the widows was the responsibility of others. So the necessary adjustments were made. Today, of course, pastors are not apostles. Yet part of the apostles’ teaching ministry does belong to pastors, and it is tragic to see many making the very same mistake which the apostles made. They are extremely conscientious people. In fact, they respond to every conceivable need, and feel guilty if they are not readily available to anybody at any time. One cannot fault their dedication, their enthusiasm, or their commitment. And indeed the pastor is called to serve people, as Christ himself did. But they have forgotten that there were times when Jesus himself sent the crowds away in order to withdraw into the mountains to pray. They have also allowed themselves to be deflected from another priority task to which Christ has called them, namely the ministry of the Word. Their energies and zeal are being channeled in other directions. At the same time, usually without realizing it, they are inhibiting gifted lay leaders by denying them the opportunity to serve. Overworked clergy and frustrated laity form a dangerous combination; the body of Christ does not grow into maturity that way.
Writing thus about lay leadership, I am not only referring to social and administrative responsibilities, which in any case lay men and women usually undertake more competently than clergy, but also to a share in the pastoral oversight of the congregation, whether as elders or deacons or readers or lay preachers or leaders of fellowship groups or house churches. Just as in the beginning Paul appointed “elders” (in the plural) in every church (Acts 14:23 cf. 20:17; Phil. 1:1) and instructed Titus to do the same in every Cretan town (Titus 1:5), so today every church should be pastored not by a single shepherd but by a team. In many cases, especially where inflation is hitting the church, the team may consist largely of lay people, together perhaps with one or two non-stipendiary clergy who are exercizing a so-called “tent-making ministry,” that is, supporting themselves. But the team is there, seeking to care for the church together.
At the same time, a congregation of any size needs to have on its team at least one full-time stipendiary pastor. The New Testament seems clearly to envisage this situation. Paul not only urges that he “who is taught the word shares all good things with him who teaches” (Gal. 6:6; cf. 1 Tim. 5:17, 18), but he insists on the right of evangelists and pastors to be supported, though he had waived this right in his own case (1 Cor. 9:1–18). The reason for a full-time paid pastorate is that, freed from the need to earn his own living, he is able to devote himself exclusively to the pastoral care of the people, and particularly to “the ministry of the Word and prayer.” Such a ministry, involving individual counseling and group work, intercession and study, preparing and preaching, is extremely exacting. It cannot be satisfactorily accomplished by part-time pastors alone, although such are essential to the team. This was apparent already in Old Testament times. Thus King Hezekiah “commanded the people who lived in Jerusalem to give the portion due to the priests and the Levites, that they might give themselves to the law of the Lord” (2 Chron. 31:4). The same principle was carried over into New Testament days: “No soldier on service gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to satisfy the one who enlisted him” (2 Tim. 2:4). It is these “entanglements” which prevent a pastor from giving adequate time to his studies. A church without a full-time pastor, even when there is a team of part-timers, is bound to be impoverished. We need more full-timers who “labor in preaching and teaching” (1 Tim. 5:17).
Supposing then a pastor has this support, what else could keep him from study? Let me be frank. Only one thing: laziness. Was it not Ralph Waldo Emerson who said that “man is as lazy as he dares to be”? It is true. And we pastors can be very daring in this area, because we have no employer to supervise our work or to reproach us for our neglect of it. Besides, we have neither set tasks to do, nor set times in which to do them. We are our own master and have to organize our own schedule. So it is possible for us to fritter our days away, until our time-wasting lapses degenerate into a life of gross indiscipline. Moreover, it becomes painfully evident in our ministry. As Cyril Garbett remarked privately to a friend, while he was Bishop of Southwark (1919–32): “I can always tell when the clergy have given up any serious attempt to read or think: it becomes obvious at about the age of forty-five. If a man is an Anglo-Catholic, he becomes a bigot; if he is an Evangelical, he becomes a sentimentalist.”
Alexander Whyte spoke some stern words on this subject. He ministered for forty-seven years (1860–1907) at Free St. George’s Church in Edinburgh. In 1898 he was moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and in 1909, at the age of seventy-three, he accepted the principalship of New College Edinburgh, in addition to his other responsibilities. He disciplined himself rigorously and abominated laziness in others. “I would have all lazy students drummed out of the college,” he said in 1904, “and all lazy ministers out of the Assembly. . . . I would have laziness held to be the one unpardonable sin in all our students and in all our ministers.” Then in his closing address at the end of the 1898 General Assembly, of which he was moderator, he said:
We have plenty of time for all our work, did we husband our time and hoard it up aright. . . . Did we work as many hours every day, and as hard, as the people who support us work? As early in the morning, and as late at night, and as hard all the livelong day? Oh no! We cannot look seriously at one another’s faces and say it is want of time. It is want of intention. It is want of determination. It is want of method. It is want of motive. It is want of conscience. It is want of heart. It is want of anything and everything but time.
So we need, as I find myself, constantly to repent and to renew our resolve to discipline our lives and our schedule. Only a constantly fresh vision of Christ and of his commission can rescue us from idleness and keep our priorities correctly adjusted. Then we shall make time to read and think, and, as the fruit of our conscientious studies, our preaching will be fresh, faithful, and relevant, yet also simple enough for people to understand.
Note: Because of the indispensability of books to preachers, one of the principal projects of the Langham Partnership is the promotion of Pastors’ Book Clubs in countries of the Third World. These enable members to buy a number of books each year at greatly reduced prices. See http://uk.langham.org.