When my heart is low Mozart nearly always lifts it; when my body is tired two things always help, chocolate and exercise; when my mind is complacent and bored looking at some of my favourite paintings rekindles imagination and vision; when my emotions are jaded or tense, either cooking or tapestry help to nourish them or weave them into new patterns of wholeness. And if all of these fail I read theology! Not just any theology, chosen theologians, a medicine cabinet for the soul, a store of prescriptions which have proved effective in the past.On the bottom shelf within easy reach is P T Forsyth.
I was looking for something else and rediscovered this address by Forsyth, given over a hundred years ago. It's titled "The Place of Spiritual Experience in the Making of Theology". The last section touches into some things I feel deeply and approve strongly – the place of serious, continuous theological and biblical study in the equipping of preachers. Update the language, remove terms of gender exclusion, and I can read this and think – Yes, the point is still relevant, a century later.
AN
EDUCATED MINISTRY
But I must leave many points alone in order to touch on two in particular
as I close. If experience is an insufficient basis for either Gospel
or theology,
if the base must be some-thing more objective, then, in the first
place, we may be more convinced than ever of the absolute necessity for
the Church
of
an educated ministry. If the burden of our preaching be our experience
any fluent and facile religionist may claim his place in the ministry.
But if our
burden be an objective gospel, which descends on our experience
both to kindle and to correct it, then we need that those set apart to be
bearers of the Gospel
should undergo the discipline of mastering their master, and becoming
at home in the nature and history of that which can never be given
by any experience,
but is given to it.
And
in the second place the preachers so educated should withdraw much of their
attention not only from their own experience, but
from the books,
booklets,
and prints that contain but the experience of others; and they
should bestow themselves upon the serious and resolute study of the Bible
in the best and
fullest light as the standing creator of Christian experience.
They should guard against the fantastic treatment of the Bible which so
easily besets
the preacher, and they so should devote themselves to the historical,
and not to
the historical alone, but to its objective spiritual message,
equally valid for every age and experience. The Bible is not our standard
simply but our
source. It is not there to prove doctrine, but to create the
faith
that produces doctrine. The trophies of a true minister of the
Gospel are
not only the precious
souls he has saved, but they should include his interleaved Greek
Testament packed with notes.
It
is not the Bible we preach; but what we have to preach is to be found nowhere
but in the Bible. And it is hid in that
field, which
must be
bought at much
cost and dug with much toil. Do not let us preach our experience,
but a Christ and a Gospel familiar to our experience. We
preach our experience
best when
people infer it.
Christianity
is nothing if it do not end in experience. But it is also nothing if it only
begin there. Experience is
its medium
and
its product,
but it is
neither its base nor its limit. It is its form, but not
its matter. And the experience even of an objective Gospel will
fade and
die if it remain
mere
impression and sensibility. It must wake our judgment and
compel our obedience. And whatever will do that will change the note
of popular
religion as well
as regenerate unpopular theology. Nothing but some such
change can give us the power to sway to God's will the new democracy.
