That our preaching should have been profoundly influenced by it is
inevitable. Religion is not apart from the rest of life. The very
temperament of the speaker makes him peculiarly susceptible to the
intellectual and spiritual movements about him. What, then, has
humanism done to preaching? Has it worked to clarify and solidify
the essence of the religious position? Or has preaching declined and
become neutralized in religious quality under it?
First: it has profoundly affected Christian preaching about God.
The contemporary sermon on Deity minimizes or leaves out divine
transcendence; thus it starves one fundamental impulse in man--the
need and desire to look up. Instead of this transcendence modern
preaching emphasizes immanence, often to a naive and ludicrous degree.
God is the being who is like us. Under the influence of that monistic
idealism, which is a derived philosophy of the humanistic impulse,
preaching lays all the emphasis upon divine immanence in sharpest
contrast either to the deistic transcendence of the eighteenth century
or the separateness and aloofness of the God of the Hebrew Scriptures,
or of the classic Greek theologies of Christianity. God is, of course;
that is, He is the informing principle in the natural and human
universe and essentially one with it. Present preaching does not
confess this identification but it evades rather than meets the
logical pantheistic conclusion.
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