Highlights in Restoration History . . .

PROFANITY IN THE PULPIT AND ELSEWHERE

I suspect Alexander Campbell was referring to his father when he wrote in the 1836 Millennial Harbinger: “One of the most devout and intelligent Christians I have known, seemed always to pause before he pronounced the name of God.” This is reflective of the high esteem he had for Thomas Campbell’s piety. Elsewhere he tells of how he would enter his father’s bedroom when the old man was blind and unaware of his son’s presence, only to hear him praying to God and profusely quoting the psalms. Walter Scott said of Thomas Campbell that he was the most pious man he had ever known.

Piety certainly implies deep reverence toward God. That a person would take the name of God with such respect that he would pause before speaking it is reminiscent of the way the Jewish scribes hallowed the name Yahweh, which they would not only not pronounce but would also take a ritual bath before writing it into a manuscript. While that may impress us as fastidious, we should be impressed that some of God’s children through the centuries have taken piety seriously.

When Campbell made the above statement about his father he was writing a series on Reformation in which he set forth the goals and principles of his life’s work. While he sometimes also used the term Restoration, usually as a synonym, Reformation was his favorite term in describing his efforts. One reason for this is that he believed if the ancient order was to be restored to the life of the modern church it had to include piety and goodness in the lives of its members, reformation of life, he called it.

In this particular series he writes somewhat of preachers and the pulpit, and he is distrubed over the lack of spirituality and piety that he witnessed. While he complains of profanity in the pulpit, he is not referring to cursing or swearing but to an insensitivity toward things and persons. In one installment he says:

To see a young man who cannot do more than parse a common sentence of the King’s English, mount the stand and lampoon all the Rabbis and Doctors, all the commentators and critics of a thousand years, as a set of fools or knaves — as a pack of dunces or mercenary imposters — is infinitely more nauseating than lobelia itself, and shockingly repulsive to all the finer feelings of our nature.

It is well to have a dictionary at hand when one reads Campbell. By lobelia I think he refers to a flower that has a bad odor. So he is saying that the behavior of some preachers in the pulpit stinks! To him this is a kind of profanity. He goes on to refer to a person, young or old, who will appear in the garb of a preacher of righteousness “with the flippancy of a comedian, courting smiles instead of wooing souls to Jesus Christ.” He observes that he does not like to follow in the trail of one of these “religious mountebanks” whom he describes as sending forth more offensive odor than “Solomon’s dead fly in the anointment of the apothecary,” for they turned away the ears of the people. He did have a way with words!

This profanity in the pulpit, he believed, is also seen in the familiarity with God that the minister sometimes assumes. He puts it this way: “Such speakers seem to think, if they think at all upon the subject, that their standing before the people in the attitude of religious teachers, gives them a license to speak of God as familiarly and unceremoniously as they speak of man, or of the most common things.”

In this context Campbell makes an interesting point. The more we reverence God, he says, the less we will reverence men, and the more intimate our knowledge of God the more our reverence toward him will increase. Such a one will approach the throne of God and use his name with the most profound homage and respect.

When Campbell remembered how his father took the name of God with the deepest reverence, he was led to say: “What a contrast this, and the random and galloping flippancy of some religious teachers, whose style rather diminishes or destroys, than inspires a reverence for that great and dreadful Name which fills heaven with adoration and eternity with praise!”

Here we see that old Calvinistic, Presbyterian piety that influenced our founding fathers, an influence we have not sufficiently felt in our generation. If Americans generally can be accused of being impolite and crude, as I have heard some foreigners charge, the Christians in America can be accused of being shallow and irreverent when it comes to religion.

Take our own churches on a typical Sunday morning, and here I take Campbell’s charge of “profanity” in the pulpit a step further and include the people. We chatter about all sorts of things, whether the stock market or politics, or the Cowboys right up to the moment “Worship” starts. While there is a place for small talk, one would think that if believers are sensitive to the fact that “the gathered church” is meeting with its Lord in holy fellowship there would be a sense of awe and reverence. It is an appropriate time to speak of Christ to each other in one way or another. P. D. Welshimer, one of our great spiritual preachers a generation ago, had a delightful way of saying, “How glorious it is to be a Christian!” We ought to hear things like that when we gather in the vestibule awaiting a service rather than how the big game that day will go. There is a time to be quiet and wait upon the Lord. We know far too little about awe and reverence

I like that line in Ps. 107:2, Let the redeemed of the Lord say so! When one reads the psalm he will note that in three places the believer is urged to “Oh, that people would give thanks to the Lord for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to the children of men!” Let us say so in our homes, at work and at play, and when we assemble as the church. Let us practice the presence of God.

Our reverent pioneers, who were awed by the presence of God, might see us as “profane” when we work all day without any thought of God and then spend the evening watching TV without ever saying so. Certainly the psalmist urges us to thank God for his goodness and to praise him for his wonderful works.

When the gathered church shows such awe and reverence, and when they speak to each other of God’s goodness and his marvelous works, then there will be less shallowness and more reverence in the pulpit.

Profanity! We have a rather narrow view of it. We might be shocked at the suggestion that the cursing sailor or the swearing drunk is not nearly as profane as some Christians who show casualness, familiarity, and flippancy toward the God of heaven.

Let the redeemed say so! Let them say it and show it everywhere. —the Editor