ocess. Over such lives the things of this world
have no power. They are kept secretly from them all in His pavilion
where there is no strife of tongues.

CHAPTER EIGHT

WORSHIP AND THE DISCIPLINE OF DOCTRINE

If one were to ask any sermon-taster of our generation what is the
prevailing type of discourse among the better-known preachers of the
day, he would probably answer, "The expository." Expository preaching
has had a notable revival in the last three decades, especially
among liberal preachers; that is, among those who like ourselves have
discarded scholastic theologies, turned to the ethical aspects of
religion for our chief interests and accepted the modern view of the
Bible. To be sure, it is not the same sort of expository preaching
which made the Scottish pulpit of the nineteenth century famous. It
is not the detailed exposition of each word and clause, almost of each
comma, which marks the mingled insight and literalism of a Chalmers,
an Alexander Maclaren, a Taylor of the Broadway Tabernacle. For that
assumed a verbally inspired and hence an inerrant Scripture; it dealt
with the literature of the Old and New Testaments as being divine
revelations. The new expository preaching proceeds from almost an
opposite point of view. It deals with this literature as being a
transcript of human experience. Its method is direct and simple and,
within sharp limits, very effective. The introduction to one of these
modern expository sermons would run about as follows:

"I suppose that what has given to the Old and New Testament Scriptures
their enduring hold over the minds and consciences of men has been
their extraordinary humanity. They contain so many vivid and accurate
recitals of typical human experience, portrayed with self-verifying
insight and interpreted with consummate understanding of the issues of
the heart. And since it is true, as Goethe said, 'That while mankind
is always progressing man himself remains ever the same,' and we
are not essentially different from the folk who lived a hundred
generations ago under the sunny Palestinian sky, we read these ancient
tales and find in them a mirror which reflects the lineaments of our
own time. For instance,..."

Then the sermonizer proceeds to relate some famous Bible story,
resolving its naive Semitic theophanies, its pictorial narration,
its primitive morality, into the terms of contemporary ethical or
political or economic principles. Take, for instan