Between Two Worlds by John Stott

Author:John Stott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, Co.

The Modern World

Biblical and theological studies do not by themselves make for good preaching. They are indispensable. But unless they are supplemented by contemporary studies, they can keep us disastrously isolated on one side of the cultural chasm. David Read addressed himself to this danger when, as chaplain to the University of Edinburgh, he gave the 1951 Warrack Lectures. “‘O for the wings of a dove! Far, far away would I rove’ is all too often the appropriate anthem before the sermon,” he said. For frequently our preaching sounds remote, detached from society, “untouched by its agonies, immaculate in its irrelevant ideals.”15 He went on to give a young minister’s description of what he regarded as “the ideal building-plan for church and manse.” Here it is:

The salient feature was a long straight corridor with a door at one end leading out of the manse study and a door at the other end opening into the pulpit of the church, . . . the highway for the Word of the Lord, the straight path from the mind of the preacher to the hearts of his hearers.

No interruptions, no distractions. But, David Read went on,

that theologically-cushioned, isolated study is a lethal chamber, and it is a dead word that is carried out along the corridor . . . not the living Word, spoken as it must be, from heart to heart and from life to life.16

He then added his own understanding of how sermons are born:

It remains an axiom of Christian preaching that the road from study to pulpit runs through a living, demanding interrupting manse; out into the noisy street; in and out of houses and hospitals, farms and factories, buses, trains, cinemas . . . up between rows of puzzled people to the place where you are called to preach. . . . For the living Word there is no by-pass road from study to pulpit.17

We need, then, to study on both sides of the divide. As Austin Phelps put it at the end of the last century, a thoroughly trained preacher is first a human being, at home among human beings, and then a scholar, at home in libraries: “No other profession equals that of the pulpit in its power to absorb and appropriate to its own uses the world of real life in the present and the world of the past as it lives in books.” Phelps’ whole series of lectures, published under the title Men and Books, was devoted to this theme, and to the need for preachers to exploit these two resources.18

I am glad for this emphasis that our study of the modern world begins with people, not books. The best preachers are always diligent pastors who know the people of their district and congregation and understand the human scene in all its pain and pleasure, glory and tragedy. And the quickest way to gain such an understanding is to shut our mouth (a hard task for compulsive preachers) and open our eyes and ears. It

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