THE ‘FOOLISHNESS’ OF PREACHING
‘Unto the Greeks foolishness.’
It is a good many years since St. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, spoke of the foolishness of preaching, and then he did not mean by that expression what the words in their modern sense would imply. All through the centuries this has been a popular theme and will always remain so. St. Paul did not mean what later critics usually mean: that the preacher’s precepts are foolish, his knowledge insufficient, his logic weak, his choice of language feeble, his exhortations insincere. What he meant was that to the cultivated Greeks the actual message which Christianity brought into the world was foolish. It was the story of the crucified Redeemer that was foolishness. Now, I think, it is rather the general teaching of the ordained ministers of Christ which is counted foolish. Is that just? Let us see.
I. Preaching is still the ordinary and recognised way by which the knowledge of the Gospel message is brought home to men.—Faith cometh by hearing, not by reading, and how can they hear without a preacher? Viewed in this aspect, then, preaching would seem to be not at all foolishness, but a matter of first-class importance. Yet so it is that nowadays sermons are for the most part accounted a bore, and though men will occasionally crowd to hear a few distinguished preachers, they are less disposed to listen to sermons habitually than their fathers were. But preaching is an indispensable factor in any living religion, and if it be true that preachers are dull and hearers bored, that humiliating state of things can be escaped if we will both shake ourselves out of the groove into which we have fallen.
II. Men may think too little or too much of preaching, and in either way they may lose all the benefit they might otherwise have derived from it.
(a) To think too little is naturally the fault of the average conventional attendant at church, who is there because he is expected to be there, who comes there patiently enough but with little or no interest. Such a hearer as that expects nothing, and as a consequence receives nothing. His languid acquiescence results in a sort of moral dullness, perhaps also in the unexpressed cynicism ‘Who shall show us any good?’ and to him preaching is, almost of necessity, foolishness.
(b) To think too much. The other fault of asking too much of the preacher seems to lie in this, that many church congregations are apt to attribute to what they hear from the pulpit a kind of authority which the preacher really has no right whatever to claim, and with this impression in their minds, they are further apt to resent what they hear as if they were being forced into agreement while the circumstances under which sermons are preached preclude them from making any reply to what is said. The distinction which St. Paul makes in 1 Corinthians 7. suffices to explain this error.
—Rev. A. W. Hutton.
Illustration
‘While the preacher must speak, and ought to speak, with authority, when as a minister of Christ he proclaims the message of salvation, and it is his first duty to deliver it, this authority does not cover the thousand cognate topics, questions of morals, questions of interpretation, questions of order, questions of expediency, on which also from time to time he must speak if he is to fulfil his mission usefully. In these things he has no final message to deliver, he can only contribute, as it were, to the common stock. You are not bound to accept as gospel, as the phrase is, what he thus sets before you. You would rightly resent and dislike all preaching if you thought you were thus bound, but if you listen to a man fairly and considerately you will find yourselves able to learn something from him.’