September, 1935
328
T H E K I N G ' S B U S I N E S S
Much
Minister’s Danger o f Too Secular leading
The Christian
1 ¡81
/)
B y WILBUR M. SMITH Coatesville, Pennsylvania
of such men as H. G. Wells, Professor John Dewey, Julian S. Huxley, our humanists, our pagan philosophers, our unmoral essayists, and even, at times, our socialistic think ers ! One of the saddest things I have experienced in years was to discover, in a library of a famous theological seminary in the East (not, I am glad to say, one of my own denomination) where I was spending an hour, the students preparing papers for their classes, surrounded by volumes of the New York Times Current History, the Annalist, the Christian Century, and volumes on modern theories of education. There is not room for both in the student mind: Either he will graduate from the seminary
[Far from being prejudiced against wide reading as a valu able background for the Christian minister, the author of this article has a love for books and reading that has led to the accu mulation of a rich library of more than 6,800 volumes and has prepared him for his responsibility as editor of the annual volume of Peloubet’s Select Notes on the International Sunday-school Lessons. But he sounds a warning that will be welcomed with gratitude by many of the Lord’s people. In the previous install ment of this article, published in the August K ing ’ s B usiness , Dr. Smith discussed the circumstances which contribute to the min ister’s temptation to overemphasize secular reading. In this pres ent issue, he deals with the reasons for placing the primary stress upon the Word of God. —E ditor .] W hen we allow ourselves to be too much occupied with secular literature, we begin to preach on sub jects, rather t h a n
with a fundamental know ledge of th e Scriptures, or he will g r a d u a t e with a smattering of polit ical economy, educa tion , psycho logy , modern history, and a little bit of philoso phy-H bew ildered , confused, not know ing what G o d h a s said, and continually wondering what man is trying to say. S ome R easons W h y t h e B ible I s S uperior to A ll O th er B ooks The Bible is the most contemporary of all b o o k s . As Joseph P a r k e r said fifty y e a rs ago, in preaching in the City Temple, L o n d o n , when he began his great expository lec tures^, wh ich la te r
from the great pas sages of the Word of God. Our preaching becomes topical ra ther than expository. I have heard many ministers say that the reason they do not preach expo s ito ry sermons is that such messages demand too much time for prep aration, by w h i c h they meant that such preaching demands too much time given to the Scriptures and to volumes that in t e r p r e t the S c rip tures. They do not m i n d long hours of r e a d i n g and study, but they want to devo te them to secular subjects and not to Biblical ones.
S ermons tha t B reathe “T h e W isdom of M en
A t work in his study in Coatesville, Pa., Dr. Smith finds that for the greatest pleasure and profit no amount of secular reading can take the place of the study of the Book of books.
were published as The Speaker’s Bible: “My conviction deepens that the Bible is the most modern book. It is the newest book, just published, just out from heaven and from God’s heart. Our biography is in it. I have thought of taking this as a permanent tex t: ‘Is it not written in the Book of Chronicles?’ The modern newspaper is nothing but Moses and the Prophets reproduced. The Book is not a mere record of things that have been, but of things that are happening and must always happen. It was written be fore the world began. It is the anticipation of events. The Bible is mysteriously divine, because it is mysteriously
When a man has spent most of the week in reading history, philosophy, science, art, and the latest theories in economics or sociology,, he is bound to bring to his people, on Sunday, one of these subjects, which he attaches to some text which then becomes for him a pretext. How many hundreds of published sermons today have absolutely no connection with the Word of God, but are only the echoes of the latest verdicts of some of the leading secular minds of our age! What a shame for men who have the Word of God in their hands to allow themselves to be the channels for the promoting of the ideas, many of them de structive and anti-Biblical, and some of them blasphemous,
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker