THE PASTOR AS A TEACHER

PHILIP STAFFORD MOXOM, D. D.

PASTOR SOUTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, SPRINGFIELD, MASS.

"Educational Materials which only Pastoral Experience can Discover and Use." This is the subject which really underlies the brief and simple caption of this paper, "The Pastor as a Teacher." The pastor is a teacher of religion, not primarily as a science or a history, but as an art and an experience. Both the science and the history of religion. may serve him by enlightening and enriching his thought and giving it accuracy and scope. Indeed, if he would expound the sacred Scriptures accurately and adequately, he must know the work of scientific men, if he be not himself a scholar, and he ought to know the largest and latest results of inquiry into the religious history of mankind. All branches of the human race have some kind of religion. As Sabatier said, humanity is "incurably religious." To know thoroughly either the Hebrew or the Christian religion, one must know the religious nature of man in its various manifestations, from the most primitive fetish worship to the purest and most spiritual expression of religious ideas and emotions. Christianity is not an isolated phenomenon in the history of the world. It is not even unique, save in spiritual eminence; and it is bound by many interior ties to the religions of Egypt and Chaldea and Palestine, and Greece and Rome, and India and Japan.

The pastor may be religious without any knowledge of this wide and fertile field, but he cannot intelligently interpret religion to the understanding of his people.

But the pastor's main concern is with religion as an art and an experience. Religion is an art because it is the expression of perceptions and emotions of the moral sensibility, and this expression has an æsthetic quality. Religion has a natural and close relation with poetry and music and painting and sculpture and architecture. All these arts first developed in connection with religion. But religion is an art also because it is a spring of motive to action; in the case of the Christian religion, it is pre-eminently this. In terms of conduct it is righteousness. Righteous conduct is a fine art the finest of arts. Paul called it beautiful conduct - kallo poiown; it is the perfect art, for it is the complete expression of ideas and emotions which belong to the highest realm of the beautiful. In the last analysis, the terms "the true," "the beautiful," and "the good" are synonymous. The pastor teaches

religion as an art because he teaches the principles of beautiful conduct. Religion is also, and primarily, an experience. Men do not think their way into religion; they are religious, and think their way into the reasons and implications of religion. The thought-process or its result reacts on the religion, rationalizing and refining it, or, rarely, perhaps, by some curious inversion, coarsening and degrading it. Fundamentally, men feel the reality of God and the soul and their own dependence and obligation; and they learn through the response of the will to the impulse of feeling.

There is, undoubtedly, a distinction between religion and ethics; yet religion, as it develops, tends to produce ethics, and ethics without religion lacks the vital force which makes principles practical and productive of conduct. To teach religion, in the Christian sense, is to teach moral principles and to waken impulse toward right action. But conduct is never simply the result of intellectual perception; it is the expression of character, and character is molded by the dominant and enduring emotions, moods, and affinities. "Out of the heart are the issues of life." The experience of religion, as a vital, inward communion with God, makes it a spring of motives to God-likeness-that is, to godliness. It quickens thought, clarifies moral perception, and impels to action which is accordant with the will of God.

The pastor, then, seeks to produce in his people an experience of religion as interpreted by Jesus, because out of that experience come the virtues of good-will, justice, sympathy, compassion, helpfulness, purity - in a word, righteousness. He aims at the betterment of life. That involves increased enlightenment, more sensitive conscience, sounder judgment, stronger determination toward the good, and closer conformity to the principles which Jesus taught and illustrated..

Now, what, if any, materials having educational value may the pastor discover and use in his contact with his people in his intimate acquaintance with their characteristics and conduct and the trials, sorrows, joys, triumphs, failures, and successes through which they pass ?

This varied experience casts many searching lights on the theory by which he explains and justifies his faith in the realm of the understanding. Life is the supreme test of doctrine. Whatever in theology does not stand this test is discredited, or at least thrown in doubt. So true is this that often the pastor's intellectual experience is a process of modification and readjustment, forced upon him even more by life than by study. Many a student has gone from the seminary with an admirably ordered and articulated system of theology which, in a few years, is thrown into hopeless confusion by the shocks of actual life among men.

Few keep till late in life the theology with which they began, and those are scarcely to be envied or congratulated. Where there is life there is change, for growth is change. Where there is no change it is fair to assume that there life is wanting. Of course, such change in doctrine as experience compels appears in the teaching. The teaching becomes more reasonable, more practical, and more impressive. It gains in reality, for it comes out of a heart in close touch with life as well as in close communion with God, and it is from the heart in such relations that revelation comes not as a reminiscence of history, but as a contemporaneous word of God.

Next to the poets, the best theologians, with very few exceptions, are pastors of wide and profound experience; though, until very recently, they would hardly meet the requirements for a chair in systematic theology.

It is obvious that a broad and fertile field opens to us just at this point of the reaction of experience on the theory or philosophy of religion. But lack of time forbids us to traverse it now. One or two specific results of pastoral experience are so important that I address myself to the presentation of them during the remainder of my brief time.

A truth of first importance, which immediately serves the pastor in his personal life and also enriches his teaching material, is the truth of the invincibleness of the human soul when once it has grasped the reality of God, and of His good purpose toward His creatures. As power and skill in any sphere of human achievement must be won by persistent endeavor, so real faith in God must be won by the persistent venture of the soul out on the moral probabilities of the universe. To the declarations of Scripture and the testimonies of experience and the deep native impulse of the soul must be added "the will to believe"- the personal out-reach and grasp upon God. Then faith becomes at once an achievement and a power. It passes beyond belief of propositions and becomes trust in a mind and will of perfect wisdom and goodness. The soul is consciously joined to God by living ties, and one life holds in its vital current the human and the divine. Then the soul is unconquerable The labor and battle of life may

by any force of sorrow or pain or sin.

be hard, but victory, however long delayed, is sure.

This truth cannot be learned by rote. It comes into possession only through actual experience. Until the moment of actual experience, the testimony that "this is the victory which overcometh the world, even our faith," is

Like a tale of little meaning,

Though the words are strong.

The pastor finds such experience in his intimate contacts with persons of spiritual mind in his parish, and from it he draws both personal enlightenment and invigoration, and also fresh means and power to teach the reality of divine communion and of the soul's capacity so to lay hold on God that the crucial difficulty of life is henceforth solved. To know that one can stand fast in the confidence that this world is God's world, that life means good, that evil is disciplinary and transient, and that nothing in all the range of human vicissitudes has power to overthrow him utterly, is his supreme moral achievement and victory.

Closely associated with this is the truth that the function of suffering is to refine and develop the spiritual man. It is easy to repeat the words, he was made "perfect through suffering," and he "learned obedience by the things which he suffered." It is comparatively easy to hold as a theory the proposition that character is purified and perfected by pain and sorrow. But to know this truth vitally is possible only through its actual realization in life.

Seldom does the pastor give to others so great a blessing as that which he receives from those who through suffering have won the secret of peace; unless, or until, he himself, by experience, has incorporated this truth into the very substance of his being. As the physician has his clinics in which he learns far more than he learns from books, so the pastor has his spiritual clinics in which truths, previously apprehended only as propositions, show themselves in the actual processes of the soul's life.

Thus he learns the profound meaning of the confession, "It is good for me that I have been afflicted." He cannot have a stable theodicy till this truth is clearly perceived. The mystery of life centers in the fact of pain and sorrow and multiform trial - all that varied undergoing of distressful experience which is rightly named suffering. What is the explanation of a suffering world? To make suffering an end is diabolical; to make it a means and process through which character is tempered to invincible strength and chastened to perfect grace is divine. A suffering world, then, is a world in which the divine purpose of good moves steadily toward its high end.

Similarly, the redemptive principle of vicariousness, the emancipating power of self-renunciation, the conquest of evil by unconquerable goodness and the renewing influence of forgiveness, through experience pass from the arid realm of abstract statements into the realm of feeling, action and character, and truths are sublimated into moods and qualities of being. God's method in human life grows real and intelligible to us only through the disclosures of life. Revelation must first be experi

mental, or it never could be historical. The study of life is the study of God's word in process both of communication and fulfilment.

It is along this line that the pastor acquires the most and the best of his knowledge of truth. He may learn much from other sources, especially from the sacred Scriptures and from the biographies of holy and wise men; but this knowledge will want somewhat of reality and force until it is validated and illustrated by experience. What we really know, me must learn at first-hand. One lives his way into spiritual truths, even more than he thinks his way into them; and he is able effectively to teach only what has become incorporate in himself. This is not so obviously nor so exactly the case of one who teaches the sciences or history. Yet even in these fields, the most efficient teacher is he who has so mastered his subject that it no longer lies in the cells of memory, but has gone into the blood and tissue of his mental organism. It is especially true of him who teaches truths which concern the life of the soul in its spiritual relations and moral activities. And it is true, not only of the pastor, but also of every one who exercises the function of teaching religion as an art and an experience. Religion may be taught in the schools by text-book and lecture, but it will be only as a science or a phase of man's development and history. To teach it in the deep and vital sense which makes it a force for the formation of character and the transfiguration of life demands far more than an informed and nimble intellect; it demands a heart enlightened and chastened by divine discipline. With this qualification the teacher, whether he be pastor or not, may draw on all the means and methods of science and history, of psychology and philosophy, to further his end. Without it he can be no more than the empty echo of truths, the meaning of which lies beyond his perception.