2. What is bad teaching ?
(1) A man may interpret Scripture, and yet not bring Christ out of it. He may delight himself in the study; he may be skilful in comparing Scripture with Scripture ; he may perceive with a marvellous insight the doctrinal contrasts and harmonies which fill the Bible ; he may be wise in combining and reconciling where careless readers see only contradiction and confusion ; he may attract listeners by the clearness of his exposition and the variety of his illustration ; and yet in all this there may be no savour of Christ and no unction of the Spirit. Men may come and go, depart and return, week by week, where he ministers ; they may find information, find instruction, but not find edification, because they find not Christ.
1 W. Boyd Carpenter, Some Pages of my Life, 324.
io4 THE TEACHER'S GREAT TEXT
(2) Again, a man may be a sincere Christian, and even in a sense preach Christ, and yet his work may be but as the wood or the stubble because in the Divine he has lost the human; because, in other words, though he knows theology, he knows not man, and, though he understands something of the glory of the Saviour, he is ignorant of the application of that Gospel to the hearts and lives of men. His doctrinal statements are correct and ample ; he can discourse with feeling and beauty upon the great revelations of grace ; but there is no connecting link, in his preaching, between heaven and earth, between truth and life, between the Saviour of sinners and the sinner whom He came to save. Therefore the Gospel which he enforces floats above his hearers in a region cloudy and inaccessible; they hear the sound thereof, but the voice they hear not; the revelation of Christ is become again in his hands as the letter which kills, rather than as the spirit which gives life.
(3) It may be that all the energies of a ministry have been turned upon controversy ; that a congregation which came together to be fed with " the sincere milk of the word " that it u might grow thereby," has been occupied week by week and year after year with vehement declamation or laborious argument against some form of error, supposed to be the peril of the times, upon which the preacher would concentrate all the anxieties and all the efforts of souls given him to guide and lives entrusted to him to regulate.
If We naturally look to our symbolical documents — the Creeds, Catechisms, and other standards of our several Churches, for guidance as to what constitutes the main matter or substance of the Christian religion. But we find upon inspection that the subjects which those books treat of are neither those which are in themselves most necessary and important, nor those which our Lord and His Apostles chiefly insisted on ; but they are for the most part the points disputed between different Churches — between Komanists and Protestants, between Calvinists and Arminians, and between Trinitarians and Unitarians. So that the books in question set forth the differences which exist among Christians, not their agreements. Now, as a general rule, their agreement is both far greater and far more momentous than their disagreement. I say the things they agree about are far more numerous, and far more essential, than the things they disagree about. These last have often swelled out into magnitude simply
i CORINTHIANS in. 11-13 105
by reason of the quarrels respecting them, as a barren island or a sandy waste has sometimes grown into a mighty matter by reason of the struggles of great nations respecting it. In itself it is worth little or nothing; it is great only because of the contest which is carried on.1
(4) There is a fourth case in which a fatal deadness has fallen upon a ministry in the very attempt to communicate to it a vigorous life. The preacher gives himself to the one aim of making his sermons lively. He counts nothing below the level of pulpit gravity; nothing too secular or too mundane to be made the starting-point of Sunday exhortation. He speaks of giving " a healthy tone to common life," and this, not by raising earth to heaven, but by bringing down the heavenly to the level of the earthly. He forgets that the Christian politician and the Christian student and the Christian man of business do not come together in the Lord's house to hear their own subjects discussed by one far less fitted to do so than themselves, but rather to be reminded of a subject higher and nobler than their own, a subject in which they may rest altogether from week-day toils and cares, and realize a loftier aim and a deeper unity in things unseen, things heavenly, things Divine.
*[J It is no part of my business to condemn this, that, and the other kind of teaching, but I will tell you what is evidently wood and hay and stubble. Misplaced learning; misplaced speculation ; misplaced eloquence ; sham philosophy ; preaching one's self ; talking about temporary, trivial things ; dealing with the externals of Christianity, its ceremonial and its ritual; dealing with the morals of Christianity apart from that one motive of love to a dying Saviour which makes morality a reality in human life. All that kind of Christian teaching, remote from daily life and from men's deepest needs, however it may be admired, and thought to be " eloquent," " original," and " on a level with the growing culture of the age," and so on, is flimsy stuff to build upon the foundation of a crucified Saviour. There is no solidity in such work. It will not stand the stress of a gale of wind while it is being built, or keep out the weather for those who house in it ; and it will blaze at last like a thatched roof when " that day " puts a match to it.2