By the Late Howard Crosby, Chancellor of the University of the City of New York.
One of the latest injunctions of the aged Paul, just before his martyrdom, was that to Timothy, which constitutes the text of my address, “Preach the Word.” Thirty years of Christian experience, fifteen years of apostolic survey, and the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, all spoke in those words. It was a command from heaven itself, not to Timothy only, but to all who fill the office of evangelists or preachers in the New Testament Church. The order, thus succinctly given, is a condensation of all that Paul had said to Timothy or to the Church on the subject of preaching.
The sound or healthy doctrine on which he lays so much stress, and the avoidance of fables and the world’s wisdom, are both included in this curt command. There has been a tendency from the very beginning to conform the doctrine of Christ to the philosophy of man, to fuse the two together, and to show that all religions have the same Divine element at their roots. This was seen in gnosticism, in the Alexandrian school of Clement and Origen, and in a score of heresies that sprang up within the later Church.
The distinctive character of Christianity has displeased the philosophic mind, and men have sought to explain away many of its features from the standpoint of the human consciousness and by an appeal to the teachings of nature. These efforts have certain marks in common. They diminish the heinousness of sin, they exaggerate the powers of man, and they suggest a uniformity of destiny. Sin is a defect, perhaps a disease. The defect can be supplied, the disease can be cured by human applications, the Divine help being valuable as encouragement to the human effort. High civilization and moral reform are what man needs, and these can be obtained by the use of general principles common to our race, of which Christianity is only one of the forms.
It is natural and inevitable that, with this teaching, the written Word of God should be neglected, if not ignored. No one can study that Word and then use it for so broad and indiscriminating a purpose. No one can study that Word and then be contented with a superficial polish of society, and a universal brotherhood founded upon such a scheme. Paul saw this tendency in his own day, and he warns the Church earnestly against it. “Beware,” is his language - “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ” (Col. 2:8). The evil principle is ever at work. Human nature is ever the same. The Church is always subject to the same efforts of human nature within itself to remove the foundations of grace and substitute the inventions of pride. Whether it appear in the form of hierarchical assumption, or in the character of rational inquiry and scientific research, the evil principle hides, mutilates, or contradicts the Holy Scripture. The Scriptures, as they are, with their Divine claim and their uncompromising teachings, it cannot endure, and the appeal to Scripture it counts as a mark of credulity and an exhibition of ignorance.
One of the saddest sights in the Church of Christ is the yielding to this spirit of pride on the part of the ordained preachers of the Word. Many modern Timothys use the pulpit for discourses on art and literature; others take the opportunity for the display of rhetoric and oratory; others proclaim an ethics of expediency; while still others seek only to tickle the ears of an audience that desires to be amused. In all this you look in vain for the Gospel. Plato or Aristotle, and in some cases Lucian, could have said it all. Churches are filled by appealing to carnal desires and aesthetic tastes. Brilliant oratory, scientific music, sensational topics and fashionable pewholders, are the baits to lure people into the churches, and a church is called prosperous as these wretched devices succeed. The preacher delights to get himself into the newspaper and he accommodates his preaching to the newspaper level. Such churches will, of course, have worldly-minded officers and a worldly-minded membership, while godly souls either flee from them, or else mourn in secret, if they are not themselves chilled by the lack of Gospel heat.
It is directly against all this that the holy apostle utters his clarion cry down through the ages, “Preach the Word.” What is the Word? It is not man’s philosophy nor man’s rhetoric. It is the Divine revelation. It is called the Word of God, because it is not of man. As God’s it has both authority and power - authority to demand attention, and power to convert and save the soul. It is not to be pounded in man’s mortar, nor run into man’s mould. It is not to be twisted and fitted to man’s preconceived ideas. It is not to be filtered through man’s strainer, nor mixed with man’s conceits. It is God’s and as God’s let no man dare add to it, or take from it, or alter it in any way. The Lord Jesus stands by His cross, where He offered up the sacrifice for sin, and points backward to the Old Testament, and forward to the New, as alike the Word of God. Of the former He cries, “Search the Scriptures”; of the latter He tells His apostles that the Paraclete would come and teach them all things, and they should bear witness. This Old and New Testament is one revelation of God - one Bible - one unerring rule of faith. God has not given us a doubtful and deceitful light for our path. He has not given us a bundle of truth and fable tied up together. He has not left us to our weak and discordant reason, and thus made revelation superfluous. He has given His people a “sure word of prophecy” as the only reasonable guide for our weak reason and our sinful natures; and on this sure Word is His Church built. The doctrines of grace have neither human origin nor human support. They are altogether Divine, and are received only by the soul that becomes partaker of the Divine nature. To go, therefore, to human philosophy or to man’s inner consciousness for their confirmation or explanation, is to go to the sentenced criminal to understand the excellences of criminal law. The error of errors is the seeking for the truths of religion from man. It is but the adaptation of religion to the carnal heart. It is the essence of pride and rebellion against God. Thousands of tomes have been written by men who called themselves Christian scholars and Christian philosophers, which are but volumes of confusing metaphysics and specious rationalizing from the basis of natural experience, and which have undermined faith in the Word of God, and utterly perverted the Gospel of Christ. Students of Christian theology waste precious time in studying the works of these conceited thinkers, whose names are lauded as those of giants in the Church, while they are corrupting the pulpit and secularizing the pew.