'More Dogma, Please'
I
THE teaching of doctrine occupies a very small place indeed in contemporary Christian preaching. This is true, at least, of the preaching from most Protestant pulpits. Roman Catholic sermons are still chiefly concerned with expounding the teaching agreed upon by that Church, and in pointing out to the people the devotional and moral implications of the same. This may be said, also, of the sermons of most Lutherans and of many Anglo-Catholics. Of Eastern Orthodox practice it is a little difficult to speak, because a sermon, of the sort usual in modern Western services, is exceptional in the Oriental bodies. But in the so-called Evangelical Churches, and in much of Anglicanism, talks on morals, manners, literature, politics, and a host of varied subjects, have all but completely supplanted doctrinal discourses at sermon time.
One has only to read the Harper’s Monthly Sermon Library, to which fifty contemporary preachers have contributed each a volume of ten spiritual discourses, to see how few sermons there are which deal with fundamental Christian teaching. A layman friend of mine, after browsing through several of these volumes, said, ‘They are almost all concerned, these reverend gentlemen, in urging their hearers to apply Christianity to this or that problem, individual or social; but no stranger to Christianity, hearing their sermons, would gain a glimmer of an idea as to what that Christianity is which they wish to see applied. Do you suppose their congregations really know?’
My answer to that question was unhesitatingly in the negative; nor in so replying was I depending on guesswork. For over a quarter century I have been one preacher who has been intimately and non-professionally in touch with those who sit in the pews and listen. First in the navy, then in education, these last few years in a variety of pursuits, I have been thrown among lay people in such ways as made them talk with me not so much in the parson’s manner as in that of the man in the street. These many brethren — at least such of them as were brought up in Protestant Sunday schools and have been preached to from Protestant pulpits — seem to have next to no knowledge of what Christianity is, of what it teaches about life or death or sin or redemption or God Almighty, or of what, if anything, they are supposed to do about it.
For instance, I was once called on to devise and teach a course for freshmen in a university, a course designed to help them correlate religion with those new truths to which they were being introduced, day by day, in science and philosophy. Experience, over a period of two years, showed that such a course of study was ridiculous, not because it is impossible, or even very difficult, to correlate religion with science and philosophy, but because the young men — almost all of them the products of Christian Sunday schools, many of them church members and used to receiving pulpit admonitions — had no religion that was sufficiently choate to be related to anything at all.
They had, perhaps, a few memories of disconnected Bible stories, a vague notion that certain rather obvious and disreputable sins were wrong, an impression or two about religion as related to social justice (either that Christianity had something to say about it, though they could not tell exactly what; or, much more often, that parsons ought to let economics and politics alone and ‘mind their own business,’ though what that proper concern of clergymen might be they did not seem to know). They possessed a good many prejudices against other varieties of Christianity than their own. A few of them could sometimes recall scraps of information given them ‘before Confirmation’ or when they ‘joined the church ’—badly given, to immature people, hurriedly, and never followed up. They had, sometimes, a personal loyalty or two — often to parents, sometimes to a minister back home. They had vestigial remnants of habits — rarely more than that — of churchgoing and private praying. They had rarely any notion of prayer except as involving the most crude and semi-magical sort of petition. And they had almost invariably an opinion, one might almost say a conviction, that religion is intellectually uninteresting and, to be blunt, an awful bore.
That was the sort of thing I was supposed to be connecting up, or helping them to connect up, in a synthesis with science and philosophy. On the one hand were precise, definite science and logical, thought-provoking philosophy; on the other, only a vague emotionality, or, it might be, the half-forgotten memory of a former emotionality. The course had to be abandoned. It would have been equally impossible to correlate such gruel with ethics, or politics, or social science. What I had to do, instead, was to take those charming but spiritually illiterate undergraduates and put them through a brief but competent course in fundamental theology. They were immensely interested in it, for it was all new to them; and they found, and I found, that when they knew what Christianity actually is and does teach they were able to make their own correlations, without much help from others.
Nor have my many and delightful contacts with university professors revealed that the situation with them is different from that among their students. Why should it be? The faculty are only the undergraduates ‘a little later on.’ If they knew next to nothing about Christianity when they were candidates for the primary degree, and if they have received no adequate instruction in religion as their scholarly studies progressed, they are sure at the last to be, though learned doctors in this or that, as ignorant as babies about religion.
This, in point of fact, almost all of them are. I have heard more astonishing absurdities about Christianity from grave dons in faculty clubs than in any other place where men and women of intelligence meet together. They were not with malice attacking Christianity. They were only talking ignorant nonsense about it. I do not blame them, any more than I blame the scores of other equally uninformed ‘ leading minds ’ who have expressed themselves about Christianity in my presence with equal ignorance, where were gathered men of the law, or medicine, or politics, or high finance, or labor, skilled and otherwise. I blame the teachers and pastors in religion, who never, when they had the chance, taught these good people the A B C’s of faith.
These same folk make up the usual congregation, and even the unusual one. A preacher to-day ought always to say to himself, as he looks the people over: ‘These who are before me know, perhaps, much about many and curious things; but about the Christian religion almost none of them knows anything worth mentioning. I must, therefore, without talking down to them, teach them the elements, one by one.’ Congregations are usually intelligent enough to understand, if only they are properly instructed. More than half the time, moreover, they are competent to make their own applications of the Christian doctrines, with little homiletic aid, to the problems of their own lives and the problems of society; but, be it repeated, they do not know what those doctrines are.
Those in the pews are, moreover, almost always deeply interested when once they are instructed. People may say they are not interested in doctrine; but that usually means merely that they do not know what doctrine is. Give them the thing itself and they eat it up, particularly the ones who are not soft and sentimental. They not only devour it; a surprising number begin to digest it. Even if they did not like it, it would be the preacher’s duty to give it to them. As Canon Newbolt has lately remarked, ‘No teacher of a serious subject gives people what they like, but something much better which they will learn to like.’ That, however, is an academic consideration. They do like it.
A preacher, if he is fortunate enough (or unfortunate enough) to have a pulpit set up where many roads meet, sometimes can get large congregations to listen to him as he utters easy platitudes, especially if he does it with earnestness, emphasis, unction, and clever turns of speech; but it is a peripatetic congregation to which he preaches, a stream of folk who come to sample sensations, come for a time or two or three and then, almost all of them, move on. To hold a continuous congregation, the preacher must teach. Teaching means doctrine. The dictionary tells us that doctrine is ‘a principle, or the body of principles, in any branch of knowledge.’ Doctrinal preaching has to do with the theory, the beliefs, the principles, the chief tenets, on which is built that branch of knowledge which is the Christian religion: the knowledge, that is to say, of God, of man in the light of God, of God and man in the light of Jesus Christ.
It is no more proper for preachers to give out their own bright guesses about God or man than it would be fitting for a chemist, in his teaching of a class, to substitute his own speculations, however brilliant, for the principles of the science; or than it would be right for a professor of rhetoric to neglect the foundations of a skillful use of speech in order to indulge himself before his pupils in rodomontade, however entertaining. Bossuet once said, ‘Any priest who would give from the Altar unblessed bread, instead of the Holy Sacrament, would be guilty of sacrilege. So also any preacher who from the pulpit gives to the faithful, not the word of God, but his own speculations, is guilty of nothing less than sacrilege.’
He is also guilty of self-punishing folly, since no man, however clever, has the wit to think up enough bright ideas to carry him through a year’s routine of preaching, much less that of a lifetime. He either repeats himself, as certain of our popular preachers do ad nauseam, or goes hunting about in search of other people’s clever ideas, to be used without acknowledgment; or else, if he be both dry and too honest to crib, he stops preaching about religion, having no more to say on that subject, and looks within for clever ideas on all sorts of other topics: politics, literature, the drama, novels, poetry, and so on, which he dresses up, each with a few tags of religious verbiage, and delivers for the entertainment of the customers. And if he does this last he is all too apt further to stultify himself by rationalizing his action, assuring himself that he is illustrating the ‘wide scope of religion’ by the breadth of his sermon topics and the variety of his treatment of them.
It is, then, both wicked and silly for a preacher to give out his own bright thoughts about God and man in the place of Christian doctrine. People do not come to church any more to be entertained. They can get a better show at the cinema or over the radio. They come, when still they do come, to worship, and to learn, if possible, about that access to knowledge about themselves and their destiny, themselves and God, which they feel must be, or ought to be, involved in the racial technique called religion. Woe be to the preacher that gives them something else!
To speak more precisely, what people nowadays go to church to hear is not merely doctrine, but dogma. We need not call it that, perhaps, in public, for most people seem misled as to what dogma is and so have an irrational hatred of the word. They think that dogma is an arrogant attempt by somebody in power to ram his opinion down the throat of unwilling victims. They call a man ‘dogmatic’ when he is really only ‘opinionated.’ To be dogmatic is the very antithesis of being opinionated. Dogma is a word which means ' that which is agreed upon.’ The preacher of dogma endeavors to teach that which Christian men have come to agree upon as true about God and themselves, not his own likes and prejudices.
Christians are quite certain that man’s search for God culminated in a perfect revelation by God of Himself in Jesus Christ. The record of what Jesus said and did is in the Gospels. The record of what He has meant in the centuries since adds invaluable illumination to the original deposit, the Scriptural deposit; not replacing it, but explaining it and amplifying it and systematically arranging it. The preacher must go for knowledge of his principles to an agelong human experiment answered by God in the Incarnation, and to that answer as tested and increasingly understood because of the lives, the loves, and the hard thinking of the faithful for nineteen centuries. Out of all this have come certain overwhelming agreements. These are the chief subject matter of sound, useful, helpful Christian preaching : the ‘ dogmas ’ — the things agreed upon.
II
The question at once arises in one’s mind: ‘ Why is there so little preaching of such doctrine?’ There are at least two answers to that question, each of which explains a good deal of the neglect. Together, they explain most of it.
First of all, the whole Protestant world and much of Anglicanism are still under the spell of Matthew Arnold’s definition of religion as ‘morality tinged with emotion.’
As Mr. A. C. Toyne has said, in that penetrating little book which he wrote a few years ago, Theology in the Schools, the definition was perhaps not so bad for the contemporaries of Mr. Arnold, because to them religion implied belief as the source of morality and religious emotion. It seemed to them unnecessary, therefore, to insist that in a respectable religion both those things arose from a dogmatic faith, and were properly to be controlled by it. But nowadays, when the mass of people, fortunately, accept no religious truth except after skeptical examination, if we say, or assume, that religion is ‘morality tinged with emotion,’ we seem to the world to be admitting that religion is only sentimental rubbish.
Communism, Fascism, Secularism, are all based on profound acts of faith — faith in Nationalism or in Mass-man or in the dominance of Material over Mind. These rivals of Christianity have moralities, and they are all tinged with emotion; but in themselves they are much more than moralities tinged with emotion. They are founded on intellectual principles — false ones, it may be, contrary to fact or illogical, or both; but they are no mere matters of feeling. Neither is Christianity, in point of historic fact. Christianity is a doctrine, to be believed, concerning a God, to be believed in; or it is not worth bothering about. The general public, finding next to no doctrine taught from Christian pulpits, and weary of beautiful ideas and sentiments spun out of the void, has simply stopped going to church.
A second reason why there is so little preaching of doctrine is that a great many preachers themselves do not know what the great, agreed teachings of Christianity actually are.
That is partly the fault of the institutions which prepare preachers for their job. I recall the remark made not long ago by a distinguished European scholar who had traveled observantly in this country. ‘The American theological college,’ he said, ‘pays little attention to theology. Instead, it gives a disproportionate deal of time to two things: “religious education” and “Christian social service.” With some difficulty, I have managed to find out what these are. “Religious education” seems to be the art of imparting to others the moral and devotional implications of a dogmatic religion no longer existent. “ Social service” seems to be the advocated application to society at large of ethical principles the validity of which is not of necessity to be acknowledged in one’s private life.’ There is no fault to be found with religious education, provided one has a religion in terms of which to educate. Nor is Christian social service a thing to be neglected, provided one has a Christian philosophy on the basis of which one desires to construct and manage society. As derivatives of theology, both have meaning; as substitutes for theology, they are empty wind.’
Be that as it may, a vast number of clergymen do not know what are the accepted principles of the Christian religion. If they are persuaded that they should preach doctrine, they do not even know where or how to begin doing it.
III
The place to go for the basic principles of Christianity is the Bible, first of all. Both Catholics and Protestants are pledged to that. The Bible is an inspired (even if not verbally infallible) record of the development of doctrine — doctrine not in the abstract, but doctrine preceded by experience and based on experience. I quote from a little booklet by Eric Graham, published last autumn in England, called The Appeal to Scripture and Tradition: —
In the Old Testament the dogma of the universality of Israel’s God — ‘The Lord is one ’ — was reached through the apprehension and experience of His righteousness. The prophets, keenly aware of Him as righteous, were led thereby to see that there could be no other God than He in all the universe. And in the New Testament we find men’s estimate of Christ rising higher in proportion to the depth of their experience of Him; the category of ‘prophet’ proved inadequate; the title of ‘Messiah’ was changed out of recognition by being appropriated to Him; and though the Nicene formula ‘of one substance with the Father’ is not found in the New Testament, the experience of Christ which is found there cannot be explained in any lower terms.
Christ was recognized by His disciples to have ‘the value of God’; they were led by what they found in Him to adopt towards Him that attitude of worship which can only be directed towards one who is in the fullest sense divine. It took much time and much discussion to get the implications of this attitude clear, and to formulate the doctrine of the Holy Trinity; what we find in the New Testament is not an explicit set of assertions of that doctrine, but the living experience of Christ which made its formulation inevitable. The unique value of Holy Scripture, as our enduring court of appeal, is to be found in the fact that it crystallizes and enshrines forever that genuine human experience of God, and in the New Testament of God in Christ, which lies behind and necessitates the later doctrinal definitions.
Second, the appeal for doctrine is to Christian Tradition, to the teaching of the great Christians of the ages, the saintly thinkers of time past. Their words are not substitutes for the Scriptures, but living and reasoned commentaries on the Scriptures. If we wish to find out what Bible Christianity means, and what its centralizing principles are, we must look largely to the long experience of the Christian tradition. The Bible does not explain itself. As Saint Vincent of Lerins said, fifteen hundred years ago, ‘We shall follow universality if we confess that one faith to be true which the whole Church throughout the world confesses; antiquity, if we in no wise depart from those interpretations which it is manifest were notoriously held by our holy ancestors and fathers; consent, in like manner, if in antiquity itself we adhere to the consentient definitions and determinations of all, or at the least of almost all.'
To Scripture and Tradition, then, preachers must of necessity go in search of those Christian principles which alone form a basis for sound morality and decent religious emotion: the things that men live by, the God whom they know and trust.
And if a preacher says ‘No’; if he thinks himself wiser than the Christ and more profound than his ancestors, let him by all means go on preaching; but let him be honest, and not continue to do so from a Christian pulpit. Such a one, however, will not escape the doctrinal necessity, merely by thus denying Christianity overtly instead of tacitly, for men will continue to ask him, ‘In what, then, do you believe?’ He will be compelled to preach some sort of doctrine, if he hopes to hold the attention of people that matter.
The modern preacher is more and more compelled, by the pressure of public demand and by the impulsions of his own integrity, with definiteness to preach about such things as these: ‘Who, what, and where is God? What is man? How can man’s life mean anything but unrelieved tragedy in the light of sure and speedy death? What is the meaning of suffering and sorrow? What is free will? What is sin? Who and what is Jesus Christ? What are redemption, justification? What is worship? What is prayer? What is sacrifice? Who and what is the Holy Ghost? What is the Kingdom of God ? Do we bring it in, or does God? And if He does it, how does He do it? What is the Church? What is grace? What are the sacraments? What is the spiritual life? What is judgment? What is Hell? What is Heaven? What must we do to be saved?’
Such things as these make up that about which the preacher of to-day is called upon to speak if he is to receive attention from a busy and troubled people. That teaching must be put in modern words, to be sure. The preacher must use modern phrases, apply the Gospel to modern conditions; but it is the ancient faith that first he must know himself and then must teach, showing forth the rational, logical bases of Christian belief and action.
The world has no time, in these days, to listen to preaching on less vital matters. ‘Apply Christianity to modern problems!’ So the preachers cry, and rightly. The world replies, ‘All right; but first of all you will have to tell us, clearly, what the Christianity is that you wish to see applied.’