11-Books
XI. Books No MINISTER CAN WALK ALONE AND BE A GOOD minister. He cannot afford to live only in the days of his own years, nor can he see all of life through his own eyes or know all truth through his own experience. He must travel the world around.
He must live for a while in all ages. He must know people of all lands, listen to voices long silent. His study windows must open upon all the world. Books and more books are the answer for him. He needs the friends they bring him. He needs books as his meat and drink. He needs them in his task as the carpenter needs his tools.
Books mean nothing at all to some people. A minister friend of mine told me that, sitting in a barber chair, he was asked about his son who had been a customer too, but had not been in the shop for some time.
“How is your boy!” said the barber. “I have not seen him this year.”
“He is away at school.”
“Why, I thought that he had finished college,” said the barber.
“Yes, he has; but he is at the University of Chicago now,” said the minister.
“What is he studying there?”
“He is taking a course in literature, and most of his study is in reading many books,” the minister explained.
Then said the barber, “Four years at college, and then he goes to the university just to read books! My Lord, I never read a book in my life! ’ ’
Few of us, perhaps, require any reminder that a minister without books can be neither a worthy preacher nor a good pastor. Most of us are quite aware of the relation between our library shelves and our equipment in both mind and heart for our work. Our difficulty is not that we feel no need of books and reading, but that we hardly know which books to read, and which to buy, and how to buy them. A careful regard for all the various fields of reading will help us in our choice of what to read and what books to buy.
There are the fields of philosophy, theology, and biblical studies. We must keep alive to these.
They cover our own field of knowledge. We cannot afford to be ignorant here.
Some knowledge of history is essential. We are now living in the present, and religion is a matter of everyday living, but often there is truth in this criticism which an English clergyman made on American preaching “so much as though nothing had happened before last Saturday night.”
We will want to know something of the lives of men. Biography will therefore be included in our reading. Every preacher will find suggestions and help in the life stories of men like Phillips Brooks, John Wesley, or Alexander Whyte. There has been a great increase in biographical writing in recent years. We have the lives of many men in many areas of life opened before us.
Sociology and economics must not be neglected.
We are preaching to, and living with, men and women in a world of changing social patterns and economic problems. Our message is changeless. It is the same for every day and every time. But new terms and new approaches must bring the eternal, changless truth to apply in new situations.
Science too must be taken into account in our reading. We can never be experts here and should not try to be. We ought, however, to know something of what is happening in the scientific world. And we must be wise and sensible above all else in our use of what we learn here. The pulpit has been used to debate and attack scientific theories. Our present danger is that we may go to the other extreme and take them for our texts. Carl Wallace Petty said, There are those committed to the ministry of the altar who find their highest glory in acting as acolytes to the priests of the laboratory. Apostles of the atom, evangelists of the electron, in their anxiety to be interpreters of the latest vogue in science, they forget that, after all, at the center of religion is^a cross and not a crucible We are not confronted with the task of convincing skeptical minds that the religion of Jesus is reasonable. We are up against the more stupendous enterprise of convincing pagan hearts that it is desirable. 1
Temptations, we know, come to us in very subtle ways. If evil were always recognized for what it is there would not be so much of it. There are lurking dangers in the most admirable reading program. One of them is in reading only for the immediate requirement for sermon material and ministerial needs. Another is in the lure of sheer intellectualism. We must not be led into a world apart from the people we are committed to serve.
We have to read and know many things, but we cannot be content with just possessing a superior knowledge. Sometimes we can find that we have come a long way from the knowledge of our fathers, only to discover that we have come in the wrong direction. When Grandma, and Grandpa, had a guest over night, They gave him at ten o’clock a kerosene light; Then the poor victim, shivering, repaired To an icy spare room that never was aired; Gooseflesh all over as he washed in a bowl; Very brief commune with God about his soul Then he dove hastily into the bed, And reached for the solace on the stand by its head;
1 From Today’s Jesus. Copyright, The Judaon Press, Philadelphia. Used by permission.
There he found always the excellent books Of Talmage, Martineau, Beecher, and Brooks.
Grandma, and Grandpa, my great-aunts are dead, But still stands the table by the guest-room bed; Steam heat, electric light, flowers and fresh air Make the job of going up not so hard to bear; Hot bath, shower bath, needle bath and spray Give you such comfort that you don’t need to pray; Sink on the box springs and reach for a book; Don’t you want that one? Have another look; Culture our watchword, and this is what it means Einstein, Eddington, Millikan, and Jeans. 2 And “that’s the world today” for too many ministers. The scope of our reading will, of course, include fiction. This is the limit of the average church member’s indulgence in books. We need not be ashamed of reading fiction for its own sake. And certainly we ought to know something of what our people are reading. It is not necessary to read every best seller. Just a “look see” at the book, or a review, will serve for some. A good detective story may often be what we need for relaxation. Then, too, a novelist has to be interesting. Maybe a preacher can learn something from him on that score. Some works of fiction should be on our book list. Our bookcases should have one shelf or more for poetry and drama. There are dramatic qualia- Walter Prichard Baton. Used by permission. ties in abundance in the gospel story. Poetry and drama will help us to appreciate these and use them.
Whatever the counsel about books of sermons, every minister is sure to read some of them. And why not? None of us knows so much about how to preach that he cannot be helped by seeing how the other fellow does it. And it is not without possibility that sometimes this may be fruitful in learning how not to do it. We all need the inspiration and uplift that can come to us from another’s ministry. When I was beginning my ministry, I lived in New York City and took every occasion to hear Dr. John H. Jowett in the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. Instead of making me, a neophyte in the ministry, feel my woeful shortcomings as a preacher, I always came away from hearing Dr. Jowett thrilled and enthusiastic at the privilege of having some part in a ministry so great. I am quite sure that I would starve to death spiritually if the only sermons I ever heard or read were my own.
We must have some place on our study desk for church papers and magazines. Some of them will acquaint us with plans for church management. They will help us to evaluate and adapt methods, enable us to check our own, and sometimes may encourage us as we find that we are on the right track. In our reading we will naturally gather material for future use. “We will make notations in the books themselves or otherwise keep some reference to the things we have read. But how to find them again when we want them I do not know.
I have heard of men who had devised some method of cross references and filing of reading notes; but after fruitless efforts to do it myself, I am convinced that the proverbial needle in a haystack is not harder to find than something I have filed away. Most of us just have to put our book on the shelf, and sometimes find the thing we want again when we want it, and sometimes not.
Much of our material naturally serves its purpose of inspiration and illustration quickly because both Sunday and Wednesday happen along every week.
There are books which may be considered very definitely our working tools. They are an encyclopedia, commentaries, a concordance, and a thesaurus. Use of them will vary with different men.
Sets of books and commentaries in many volumes are not too profitable because frequently one or two authors are featured, and the rest are just filling. A good concordance is a necessity. I personally could not get along without my thesaurus. As to commentaries, it is every man for himself. The tendency is undoubtedly in the direction of a lesser use of them. Single volumes by different authors who are especially equipped, for comment on special books are preferable to sets. No man can be an authority on every book in the Bible.
Books of illustrations are rarely worth, their price. Their use illustrates nothing but a sense of unreality in religious experience. Choice of illustrations from our general reading, or our own experience, may be less pretty, but they will be more vital.
Sometimes we forget to include the Bible in our reading list. In all our reading the comment of one minister’s daughter is suggestive. One Sunday afternoon her father was preparing for a special Sunday-evening engagement after having been away from his study for most of the week. He had his papers before him at home, with books on a chair near by, and some on the floor. The children were making considerable noise; so he asked them to try to be quiet. And one of them, unaccustomed to seeing her daddy doing his sermon work at home, asked, “What are you doing, Daddy?”
He replied, “I am trying to write a sermon.”
Then the little one, looking at the books and papers strewn about, said, “Why don’t you fool ’em, Daddy, and give ’em one out of the Bible?” The problem of what to read, and how to use what we read, is great enough, but for most of us it shrinks beside the question of how to buy the books to read. The average church member does not realize that the minister pays for gasoline for several thousand miles’ use of his car for church purposes, and that he must buy from thirty-five to one hundred books a year. One minister said to me the other day, “I never buy ten gallons of gasoline but what I say to myself, (There go a couple of books.’ “ It would seem that churches ought to help their ministers here. But they don’t, and that’s that. We just have to do the best we can about it. Our limitation of funds will, at least, help us to buy wisely. The family objection to our too great expenditure for books may well be heeded.
We must be fair to them here. One of my seminary professors said that he was helped to keep peace with his wife about book expenditures, and to get fuller value from his books too, by leaving every new book on his desk until it was read, making this rule for himself: “No new books until these are read.”
Some fees received may be most properly added to one’s book budget. I have received fees at times for funerals when accepting them was an embarrassment to me, and the refusal of which would be most embarrassing to the donors. It is difficult to know what to do about it. One solution is to use such a gift for books, perhaps informing the family that you will use the money for that purpose, and inscribing the name of their loved one in the books as a memorial.
I have always found a visit to a book store both a delight and a disturbing experience. There are so many books that I would like to read and ought to read. Yet I am limited as to time and money.
It is a delight to browse among the books, but it is also discomforting to know how much I am compelled to miss of all that I would like to make my own. “Well, we cannot read all the books we would like, much less afford to buy any more than a small proportion of those we want for our own bookshelves. The first thing to do is to be philosophical about it. If we had the money we could not,possibly read all the books we would like to buy. Many of them, therefore, would necessarily have to remain closed to us. The second thing is that, after we have carefully and wisely made our limited choice, we have a full and grateful appreciation for the vast stores of knowledge that exist for us to explore as we are able to do so.