THE AUTHORITY OF THE PULPIT IN A TIME OF CRITICAL RESEARCH AND SOCIAL CONFUSION.1

I CONGRATULATE you, gentlemen, upon your devotion, in this time of intellectual distraction, to the study of theology, and upon your consecration, in the midst of the present opportunities for material advancement, to the service of Christ in the church. Your presence here in increasing numbers, and the general growth of our theological schools in numbers and influence, are a rebuke to those who prophesy the mental and spiritual declension of the ministry.

The times in which the service of the church has proved most attractive to men have not been times of intellectual ease and safety. Certainly the call to the ministry has been most effective when it has come as a challenge, rather than as an invitation, or even as an appeal. At such times it has caught the ear of all who have been willing to think, to work, and, if need be, to suffer. I believe that the times upon which we have fallen times of intense and peculiar intellectual and social strain upon the ministry— will prove no exception to this rule. I have no hesitancy in predicting that what have now come to be the less difficult, the less perplexing, if you will, the less hazardous intellectual and moral callings, will not long content the better minds amongst us. I anticipate an increase to the ministry, in quality and in numbers, in direct proportion to the seriousness of the problems which confront it.

Your interest, however, in the things for which religion preeminently stands to-day, is a part of the general interest, so general that it may be said to be the one interest in reserve among all thinking men. In a recent after-dinner speech by one of the judges of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, he quoted the remark of a friend, to the effect that," after all, the only interesting thing is religion;" and then added, for himself: "I think it is true, if you take the word a little broadly, and include under it the passionate curiosity as well as the passionate awe which we feel in face of the mystery of the universe. This curiosity is the most human appetite we have." Now, if to this "most human appetite we have," which though latent in many is constant in all, you add the incitement of great disturbing questions, questions of authority

1 The Opening Address at Andover Theological Seminary, September 16, 1891.

and destiny and human welfare, if you stimulate religion on the intellectual side by critical inquiry, and on the sympathetic side by contact with misery; if you call upon Christianity as an historical religion to verify its history, and as a religion of humanity to accomplish the brotherhood of man; if, I say, you increase and stimulate the common religious instinct, or "appetite," by these extraordinary incitements and demands, you have brought about the exact state of religious thought and life which now exists. Without a doubt religion is to-day the most "interesting thing."

And this being the fact, for which we ought to be profoundly grateful, we may pass directly to a much more serious matter, namely, the present authority of religion, as embodied in the religious teaching of our time. It is this subject which I now propose to consider, and for which I desire the aid of your careful thought.

Reducing the question to its lowest terms, I ask: How are we to maintain the authority of the pulpit in a time like our own of critical research and of social confusion?

Evidently the authority of the pulpit as the great distributing agency of Christian truth rests, and about equally, upon the certainty of the truth communicated and upon the certainty of its application. The uncertain truth, whether the uncertainty is in the truth itself (that is, in its sources), or in the personal apprehension of it, cannot be authoritative. And the certain truth, held in assured faith, cannot be authoritative or commanding if it misses its mark and is not really applied. Now at both these points, though at present, I think, chiefly at the latter, the authority of the pulpit has been reduced or impaired. Historical criticism is creating its own uncertainties in respect to the sources and methods of revealed truth. And the social confusion is becoming so great as to seriously disturb the aim of the pulpit, and throw a vast deal of truth afield which never finds men. Something of the old precision in the handling of truth seems to be lacking. Truth has not been carefully reorganized, and readjusted to the new social condition. Preachers are still individualizing, while the souls of men are bound up in institutions, in corporations, in unions, in the complicated machinery, industrial, political, and religious, of modern society.

The two causes which are now at work to weaken the immediate authority of the pulpit are so distinct as to require separate thought.

We will first ask for the true method of maintaining the authority of the pulpit pending the full results of historical criticism as applied to the Bible. I need not argue in this presence that criticism must and ought to go on, nor offer before you any plea for liberty. And it would seem as if it should go anywhere without saying that Christian scholars should be the last scholars to be forbidden to inquire into the sources and ground of faith. It would seem as if by common consent the church, which rejoices in the promise of the Spirit to be led by it into all truth, should stand, not simply for the defense of truth, but equally for its increase and enlargement. And it would seem to be beyond dispute that it were better for the church to owe the larger and freer truth, which in time it is always sure to accept, to its friends rather than to its enemies.

I will not pause to speak of the effect of trying to ignore or evade present issues, nor of the attempt to meet inquiry with dogmatism. Time deals very quickly, and none too gently, with all those who for any reason mistake the true attitude toward religious liberty and progress. Our inquiry at this point is direct and simple, how are we to carry on the teaching function of the ministry steadily and confidently, without fear and without loss, under the critical investigations which involve to greater or less degree a reconstruction of popular opinion respecting the Scriptures?

A partial answer to the question is to be found in the opportunity which is now given to utilize those intermediate sources of authority which may have been neglected. This answer applies particularly to the pulpit of the most Protestant among the Protestant bodies, to those which have laid the largest stress upon the direct and immediate authority of the Bible. The providential value of the divisions in Protestantism appears chiefly in times of theological controversy. It is seldom that a theological controversy rages with equal intensity all along the line. While some parts of the church are profoundly agitated upon a given question, the other parts may be in comparative repose; the explanation of the fact being that the theological emphasis is not placed by all at the same point. The contention, of course, is strongest at the most emphatic point in the spiritual life of a denomination, at the point where it bears its peculiar testimony to the common faith, and where it makes its immediate appeal if the faith is supposed to be endangered. It is evident at a glance that the present critical controversy is most serious in the Presbyterian and Con

gregational communions (including the Baptist), for in these the Scriptures have had the place of greatest evidential value. While the Scriptures occupy throughout Protestantism the place of final authority, they hold in these communions a comparatively solitary and isolated place, supported chiefly by the authority of reason. The Episcopal communion, on the other hand, finds its great supporting authority in the doctrine of the church; and the Methodist communion in the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The Scriptures are not there put to the same use as with us, in argument or in evidence. The appeal is more easily and naturally taken to the Christian experience or the testimony of the church. It may prove to be greatly to our advantage, upon whom the stress of the critical controversy has fallen, if we are led by it to a deeper appreciation of these intermediate sources of authority. I can conceive of a vast increase of spiritual power to the ordinary Christian believer amongst us, to whom the appeal is made for the first time in downright earnest to his own experience, who is really challenged to find within himself the ground and reason of the hope that is in him. I have no fear that personal piety will shrink away and grow morbid and introspective under this test. I should expect rather a new confidence and courage born out of this revaluation of one's personal holdings in Christianity; and that the evidential worth of the process would extend beyond the believer himself, and make his life stand forth more conspicuously as an external argument for his faith. I therefore welcome every legitimate endeavor which is being made, like the admirable work of Professor Stearns in this direction, to recover and reëstablish the evidence of the Christian experience.

But one may go further than this and urge the present utility of an evidence of which we have been much more suspiciousthe testimony of the church. I grant the reason of the suspicion. But in our resistance to what we may believe to be false assumptions in behalf of the church, or of any given church, let us not deny at our cost any true and sufficient conception of it. If we cannot feel the security of a church which seems to us to hang by the brittle thread of tradition to a divine origin, if we cannot accept an authority communicated by outward and formal succession, let us not ignore or underestimate that glorious continuity of life which from the beginning until now has marked the power and progress of the indwelling Spirit. In fact, the less the insistence placed upon the claims of the church to authority, the readier the acknowledgment of such authority as inheres in

its very existence and growth. In the one case we must prove the authority; in the other the authority is self-revealing, and becomes the proof of that for which it stands. And the simpler and more spiritual the conception of the church, the more available its uses in the present emergency. I have nowhere seen this view presented with so much clearness and pertinence as by Dr. Dale in his address at the recent Congregational Council. I quote his words:

"I should like to ask whether, in our relations to the controversies of our times, the Congregational idea of the church has exerted its proper and acknowledged influence? and acknowledged influence? We believe that a church is a society of men, possessing the life of the actual Son of God, and having a direct access through Him in the power of the Spirit to the Father; of men knowing for themselves, at first hand, the reality and glory of the Christian redemption; of men to whom the truth of the Christian gospel is authenticated by a most certain experience, the experience, not of the individual life merely, but of a society. Is this consistent with the agitation, the heat, the panic, created by the assaults of critics on the historic records of the Jewish and Christian revelations? We, of all men, should keep calm. These controversies leave untouched the strong guaranties of our faith. For us every church is a society of original and independent witnesses of the grace and power of Christ. For us the immediate manifestations of the eternal life which dwells in Christ are found, not merely in the words. and deeds and sufferings recorded in the four Gospels, but in the company of the faithful. We know that Christ is alive from the dead, for He lives in them. The divine life in man, this is a truth to which, in common with the Holy Catholic Church throughout the world, we bear our testimony."

In advocating, as I now do, the recovery of the Christian experience and the testimony of the church as sources of authority of peculiar value at the present time, I interpose this caution: Let them be used sincerely, and according to their absolute and abiding worth, not as a temporary expedient, or because they offer a convenient retreat from the controversy now centring around the Scriptures. There can be no moral power in a theological position assumed by evasion of personal responsibility. That which has been secondary in one's mental and spiritual training cannot suddenly be made first simply because that which has been first is for the time in dispute. One is bound by the circumstance of his place in the kingdom of God, by the traditions of his faith, by