Contact
SubscribeA snow storm was falling around us. The snow storm was real, the preacher merely spectral, the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him into the beautiful meteors of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital secret of his profession, namely to convert life into truth, he had not learned. Not one fact in all his experience had he yet imported into his doctrine. This man had ploughed and planted and talked and bought and sold; he had read books, he had eaten and drunken…yet there was not a surmise, a hint…that he had lived at all. The true preacher can be known by this, that he offers to the people his life - life passed through the fire of his thought.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harvard Divinity School, 1838.
I must comment here that, although Emerson is not the best place to go for sound biblical theology, there is something valuable in what he says here. While I disagree with what he claims to be the most central thing to being a preacher, the force of this quote is his keen observation of the way preachers may sometimes divorce theological doctrines from the personal impact the gospel has had upon their lives. I realize that a trend in the opposite direction is more common today, still, it seems that some try to counteract this by preaching doctrines which have been divorced from their lives, much to the loss of their hearers.