1928

Here is a pastor singing himself to sleep. He writes: “Business men who attend church have sense enough to go out and run their business as Christians without the minister interfering with the technique. Many of the most spiritual and influential ministers I know never deal directly with politics, industry or reform.” It is true of course that a minister can’t offer expert advice on the detailed application of Christian principles to specific fields. But neither can he assume that principles get themselves automatically applied in the world’s complexities.

One of the most fruitful sources of self-deception in the ministry is the proclamation of great ideals and principles without any clue to their relation to the controversial issues of the day. The minister feels very heroic in uttering the ideals because he knows that some rather dangerous immediate consequences are involved in their application. But he doesn’t make the application clear, and those who hear his words are either unable to see the immediate issue involved or they are unconsciously grateful to the preacher for not belaboring a contemporaneous issue which they know to be involved but would rather not face.

I have myself too frequently avoided the specific application of general principles to controversial situations to be able to deny what really goes on in the mind of the preacher when he is doing this. I don’t think I have always avoided it, and when I haven’t I have invariably gotten into some difficulty. Nobody challenges principles.

Like the diplomats, the average man always accepts the gospel “in principle,” and then proceeds to emasculate it by a thousand reservations. I know we can’t be expert on every technical problem involved in modern industrial and national civilization. But the ministers who make a virtue of their pious generalities are either self-deceived or conscious deceivers.