The Preacher and His Models: The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891Stalker, James
Religion
The Preacher and His Models: The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891
Stalker, James
Preaching
Having himself received Christianity as an intellectual system, he
very specially addressed himself to the intellect of others. The door
of the kingdom of heaven, it has been beautifully said, can only be
opened from the inside; but to that observation this other may be
added, that in a sense there are many doors, but each man can only
open to others the one by which he has entered himself. Christianity
had come to St. Paul as the truth about God and the world and himself.
There was plenty of emotion besides; but the emotion for him came
after the clear intellectual conviction and sprang out of it. And he
expected that others would receive Christianity in the same way.
Therefore he never spared the minds of those he addressed; he expected
them to think; and he would have said that, if they would not open and
exert their minds, they could not receive Christianity.
I hardly know anything more puzzling than the audacity with which he
cast himself on the minds of his hearers and trusted them to
understand him, when he was thinking his strongest and his deepest.
Imagine an epistle of his arriving in Rome or Ephesus, and read out
in the audience of the church for the first time. Who were the
hearers? The majority of them were slaves; many had till a short time
before been unconcerned about religion; in all probability not a tithe
of them could read or write. Yet what did Paul give them? Not milk for
babes; not a compost of stories and practical remarks; but the Epistle
to the Romans, with its strict logic and grand ideas, or the Epistle
to the Ephesians, with its involved sentences and profound mysticism.
He must have believed that they would understand what he wrote, though
scholarship has considered it necessary to pile up a mountain of
commentaries on these epistles. Christianity, as it went through the
cities of the world in St. Paul's person, must have gone as a great
intellectual awakening, which taught men to use their minds in
investigating the profoundest problems of life.
How deeply he was interested in the intellectual reception of the
Gospel is shown by the earnestness with which he prays that his
converts may excel in mental grasp of the truth. "I pray," he says,
"that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all
judgment." And again he says, "Making mention of you in my prayers,
that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give
unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him,
the eyes of your understanding being enlightened," etc.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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