Canter Bridge

We need thoughtful people in the pulpit.

Around the dinner table, a friend and his wife decry the insipid aridity of much that passes for Christian proclamation. These are not cultured despisers, these hosts of mine. They are decades-old friends who have been around the block and around the world, have celebrated life and been beaten up by it, have served and been served in proportions that overweight the first of the two.

They are veterans. All of their life together has been lived out under the sound of a voice from a pulpit. Whether in San José or Aberdeen or Wheaton or Cambridge, Christian preaching has been a contextual envelope for the grit of getting on with things. They have always lived within range of the pulpit’s voice.

Much of it has been very bad.

If I’m not mistaken, their experience matches that of many thousands or millions of Christian laypeople, who long for a bit of red meat from the pulpit or at least a chicken finger or two. Instead we are fed M&Ms and carrot-flavored baby puree. We are told—preachers in fact are themselves solemnly instructed—that people don’t want thoughtful biblical interpretation on a Sunday morning. We stumble into the church—so the dominant mythology insists—beaten up, harrassed, over-tired, and impatient. We have no stomach for thinking, no time to engage. Give us fast food and let us get our collective butt out of these chairs and into the highways and byways (that much archaic language is permitted because it serves the pragmatic, now-intoxicated purpose) of life.

What a crock!

We do in fact rejoin the community of fellow travelers at roughly weekly intervals bruised and beaten. This much of the story is true and this, perhaps, give to the lie the ring of truth that makes it so unquestioned and unquestionable.

Yet we need to have, as one friend spoke approvingly of her own experience under the preaching of Boston’s Park Street Church, our hearts enlarged and our minds elevated. This is not some dilettante aesthetic preference. To the contrary, it is the need of human beings who live out their days on the steady IV-drip of a self-serving, soul-wasting careerist and commercial racetrack. The odds of surviving intact as human beings aligned with our calling and destiny are resolutely and enormously against us. We do not merely need to be entertained and encouraged. We need to be nourished, fed, worked out, put through our paces. We need substance and solidity and something that keeps us up at night when it does not make us sing.

‘The problem’, my friend’s wife offers as we attempt to probe beneath symptoms to the besetting ailment, ‘is that people don’t take the pulpit seriously. They have no fear of God.’

Hmm.

A half hour ago we had spoken of the brilliant young graduates in biblical studies and theology and the like who are streaming out of the world’s great universities. Recently minted PhDs with credentials that would have seemed unthinkable to my ilk two generations ago now compete for a handful of jobs in the academy. Sadly, they develop a fixed dialect for lamenting that there are ‘no jobs’.

No jobs? Pulpits are empty, others are garrisoned by the Batallions of the Clueless. The model of the Christian preacher with a finely-tuned intellect and a deeply embedded human-ness, his or her soul lingering delightedly over the pages of Scripture and tradition, his finger on the pulse of the culture still beckons. Few are listening.

What could be more worthy than the conventional academic post that provides its incumbent the deep privilege of instructing minds and shaping lives 24/7 in that stupendous mix of thoughtful research, classroom presentation, and private mentoring? Perhaps only that of the pastor with his or her PhD who has chosen the church as his main venue without lament and without regret, giving himself and his energies and his intellect to the care and feeding of a community of Jesus-followers that is prepared to denude itself of pretense and to stand before the Word he opens week in and week out. The nearby seminary or divinity school or classics faculty might still consider the one class per term he teaches as an asset worthy of the greediest institutional covetousness, providing an outlet for the conventional academic in him.

Is this not the best of two worlds?

While our culture and most Christians who are being shaped by it sink each week more deeply into the self-inflicted paralysis of anti-intellectualism, the community of Jesus’ pilgrims continues to produce pockets of people who have learned to know better, to prefer protein to saccharine, to seek truth where it may be found in its most undiluted, invigorating form.

Paradoxically, there has never been a moment when more highly prepared potential Christian thought leaders are graduating in droves without ever having known the psycho-schismatic poison of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversies. Two hundred of them compete for every academic post.

The pulpit languishes and those who depend upon its potency scavenge elsewhere for crumbs.

Here is the pulpit, empty and promising. Where are the preaching PhDs? Where the Doctors of the Church?

It need not be like this.