by Steve | Aug 11, 1996 | Uncategorized
Forward to Our Methodist Heritage (By Charles Keysor)
By Bishop Earl G. Hunt
1996
AFTER DR. JAMES S. STEWART of Edinburgh had preached a few years ago to a large audience of United Methodist ministers and their wives in Charlotte, North Carolina, a young minister (suffering, I fear, from creedal poverty in his own mind and life) said with devastating honesty, “We were embarrassed by the immensity of his faith!”
This candid comment serves to remind us that the Christian community has come dangerously close to losing its gospel in recent years. The reasons are too complex for easy analysis, and are related to the secularization and the affluence of contemporary life as well as to philosophy and theology. In many instances we clothed what amounted to a fundamentally humanistic perspective in the historic vestments of the Church and its ministry. Diminishing church attendance and waning effectiveness in evangelism undeniably are traceable to this grave malady of diluted conviction. In fact, the total problem of the contemporary Church, in my opinion, is the various manifestations of Christian agnosticism that have confronted believers in the last few decades .
But, praise God, there are startling and encouraging evidences of a renaissance of faith around the world today. We seem to be engaged deliberately in the gradual recovery of those cardinal beliefs that compose our faith. The days of creedal drought are surely in twilight. This is an obvious return to our Wesleyan position, for the little Oxford don to whose insights we owe our sectarian origin was never in doubt about what he believed regarding God, Christ, sin, forgiveness, prayer, and the holy life! His theology, always firmly based in the Scriptures, was doxology, and his trumpet never gave an uncertain sound.
It has been my observation that significant and lasting social action by the Christian community always and forever rests upon deep and authentic conviction about the great doctrines of the gospel. There is a historic sequence of idea and deed, conviction and mission, faith and action. Before the imperative of the Great Commission came the indicative of God at work through Jesus Christ in his incarnation, his death on the cross, and his resurrection.
But this has been, in recent decades, the lost movement of the symphony. Now, at long last, we seem about to hear again, in all of its surging power, the whole score of the gospel’s music. If this prognosis is correct, it constitutes the best authentic hope from an earthly standpoint for the survival of the Church.
This renaissance of evangelical Christianity has many faces in our time, but the movement itself is far broader and larger than any one of them. It has already permeated the grass roots of the Church around the earth and is now invading all but the most reluctant of ecclesiastical leadership levels. The Good News movement in the United Methodist Church is one aspect of this development and has articulated effectively its emphasis to our entire denomination. As one who is himself wholly committed to the historical evangelical doctrines of our faith, with appropriate and courageous social implementation, I am pleased to write this brief foreword for Dr. Keysor’s little volume. His skill as a writer and his deep dedication as a United Methodist Christian are everywhere apparent in the pages that follow. I confidently pray that the message of Our Methodist Heritage may find lodging in many lives, and may result, through God’s Spirit, in an awakened interest in the basic truths of our holy religion.
EARL G. HUNT, JR.
Presiding Bishop Nashville (Tenn.) Episcopal Area
United Methodist Church
by Steve | Mar 9, 1994 | Uncategorized
The Cult of Sophia
By William R. Cannon
March/April 1994
The cult of Sophia is the strangest phenomenon to arise in the church in this generation. In many ways it is reminiscent of the “God is Dead” movement of 30 or more years ago. There is, however, one major difference between the two. The “God is Dead” movement was confined to the works of less than half a dozen religious philosophers and was limited to academic circles. It never got off college and university campuses. It had no influence whatsoever in the life of the church or society in general. It was short-lived, lasting little more than a year, so that one might say it was dead almost as soon as it was born. In contrast, the cult of Sophia is more general in its manner of expression, appealing to the popular rather than to the academic mind. It is not limited to literary and oral exposition but is accompanied by rites and ceremonies, bringing with it an agenda for worship, a program for action, and its own ministry and mission. Its purpose is enhance the value of women in society, and its manner of doing this is to project feminism onto ultimate reality or to enshrine womanhood as such in the very nature of the Godhead itself.
The Sophia cult gained attention through Wisdom’s Feast: Sophia in Study and Celebration, a book written by two United Methodist ministers and a Roman Catholic in 1988. It provides liturgies and services of worship to Sophia. One such service was conducted in the chapel of the Theology School of Drew University, as a substitute – so we have read in news reports – for Holy Communion. It would appear, therefore, that the present day Sophia cult is prominently promulgated by some pastors of the United Methodist Church.
It is further assumed that they got their justification for the worship of Sophia from a series of ancient gnostic manuscripts discovered in upper Egypt in 1945. We have known of Gnosticism long before this discovery was ever made through the writings of the Fathers of the Church, as early as the Second Century, when Gnosticism was declared a heresy and its adherents were expelled from the Church. These manuscripts provide no new information, though one of them may well be the writings of Valentinus, the most important of the gnostics.
The promulgators of present-day Sophia worship claim that they are using Sophia as just another name for God, and they do this in order to show that there is a female side to God and that God must no longer be referred to by male names and images alone. From a historical point of view, the name Sophia is a very unfortunate choice. Ancient Gnosticism did not depict wisdom in either the Greek or the Hebrew meaning of the word, or as we understand wisdom today. Sophia was a clever, mischievous, misguided, and misplaced entity at the very end of the chain of emanations. She produced the demiurge, who at her behest, created a world so evil that God had to send help in the form of another emanation named Jesus to rescue us from it and return us through knowledge (gnosis) to an ordered existence. The whole gnostic system was a tapestry of speculation, fantasy, and mythology, with no basis in fact and history. And the same seems to be true of present-day Sophia worship. Those who promote it offer their own thoughts and theories as truth and, as did the gnostics of old, substitute their beliefs for the New Testament account of the nature of Christianity.
In contrast to all other religions which advance teachings or the thoughts and opinions of their founders, Christianity rests on the mighty acts of God in history. It is a religion of fact which antedates and creates faith. It begins with a babe in a manger in Bethlehem, focuses on a teacher and performer of miracles in Galilee, points to an old rugged cross, and a man dying on it, and culminates with an empty tomb in a garden outside Jerusalem and a Savior risen from the dead. Christianity rests on history, not ideology.
It is pitiable that a group of feminist enthusiasts within the church find that the only way they can advance the cause of women in this “Ecumenical Decade: Churches in Solidarity with Women” is to modify the doctrine of God to the degree that the feminine principle is made a part of the Godhead. If they only thought through carefully the teachings of Christianity, they would realize that this is unnecessary, even redundant. There is more than enough in the Bible that affirms the importance of women and gives them their opportunity of leadership and creativity in society alongside and equal to that of men. In the Old Testament there are Miriam, Deborah, Naomi, Ruth, and Queen Esther, who serve as role models along with David, Solomon, and the prophets. In the New Testament there are Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, Mary and Martha, Mary Magdalene, Lydia, and Priscilla, all of whom either played an important role in the earthly ministry of Jesus or else joined and supported the apostle Paul in the formation of the Church. Except for our divine Lord himself, there is no person in the Bible more significant than the Virgin Mary. It was through her, a woman, that the incarnation took place. It was Mary, a woman, who was the mother of the Incarnate God. Mary said of herself in the Magnificat, .. All generations will call me blessed, for the mighty one has done great things for me” (Luke 1:48-49). It is not possible to conceive a position more noble than that of the Virgin Mary – a woman – mother of Christ.
There is not a single instance to be found in the Bible where the name Sophia is used as a female name for God. To be sure, Wisdom is personified by the use of the feminine gender in chapters 7-10 of the Book of Proverbs, but this is purely a literary device used to enhance the value of wisdom and its importance in the conduct of life. Never is wisdom in those passages equated with God. On the contrary, wisdom is equated with us. Our marriage to wisdom and her marriage to us is essential to our success and happiness in life.
Since this Sophia cult appears to offer a service to Sophia as a substitute for Holy Communion, in which milk and honey take the place of bread and wine, this act contradicts history. When God became human in Jesus of Nazareth, he took the form of a man, not a woman. No matter how one feels or how intensely one wishes it might have been otherwise, it is impossible to alter history. Historically speaking, we cannot transpose the principle work of Jesus on to someone else. We cannot change Jesus of Nazareth into Sophia.
When any person or group of persons, male or female, exalts its own interests and values above everything else, especially to the extent of trying to alter the concept of reality to suit its own aims – then that person or group of persons collapses into idolatry, worshipping self and class rather than God. They are described correctly by the pre-Socratic philosopher who said, “If horses and oxen had hands, they would make God in their own image.” This is precisely what the adherents of Sophia have done. These extreme feminists have made for themselves an idol and they call that idol God. Without knowing it, they are worshipping themselves.
Christianity rests on God’s own disclosure to us. It cannot tolerate our projection of ourselves on to God. We are bound, body and soul, to the teachings of the Bible. One dares not add to or subtract anything from those teachings. St. Augustine deals succinctly with this matter when he writes: “If you believe what you like, and reject what you dislike in the Gospel, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourselves.”
William R. Cannon is a retired bishop of the United Methodist Church, former dean of Candler School of Theology, former chairman of the executive committee of the World Methodist Council, and author of 14 books.
Bishop Hunt Addresses Sophia
UMNS
Recent efforts by some Christians to fuse worship of “Sophia” with Christianity is nothing more than an “attempt to reconstitute the godhead,” a heresy that “staggers the religious mind,” said UM Bishop Earl G. Hunt at the January meeting of the Congress on Evangelism.
“No comparable heresy has appeared in the church in the last 15 centuries,” observed the retired bishop from Lake Junaluska, North Carolina.
“When the church seems to be losing its struggle with powers and principalities, weird things begin to happen,” he told the convention of more than 1,000 lay people and clergy.
Bishop Hunt called the current interest in Sophia ” a weird prostitution of the Eastern Orthodox idea of Saint Sophia” and said that “this is material which must be eradicated from Christian thinking now.” He called upon his fellow bishops to deal with the heresy “forthrightly and firmly.”
In a list In a list of steps that could be taken to renew the denomination, Hunt said that the church must be “cleansed of heresies old and new.”
He warned that “one of the danger signs is that church leaders, in effect, have declared ours to be a post-heresy age” in which almost anything can be construed as “Christian.”
Hunt said emergence of such trends signals a need for a “deep and sweeping change, a radical transformation” across the denomination.
Bishop Hunt is president of the Foundation for Evangelism, which raises money to fund evangelism professorships at United Methodist seminaries.
Adapted from United Methodist News Service.
by Steve | May 11, 1993 | Archive - 1993
John Wesley for Today
By Earl G. Hunt Jr.
May/June 1993
Certain fundamental needs of our modern United Methodist Church can be met more satisfactorily by a contemporary reproduction of John Wesley’s emphases than by any other means available. The brief development of the idea I offer here is intended to be merely suggestive of further possibilities not mentioned.
A high doctrine of the Bible
It is the studied conviction of this writer that many maladies which characterize our denomination in this present day are traceable to the plain, simple, and extremely unfortunate fact that across the years, we have gradually compromised our original understanding of the Bible as God’s Word.
I am constantly grateful for the insights which reverent critics have brought to our understanding of the Bible since the end of the nineteenth century: Sir George Adam Smith, Professor S. R. Driver, Dr. James S. Stewart, and Professor Hugh Anderson. These scholars have been able, without intellectual dishonesty, to accept the gifts of sound biblical scholarship, and still embrace Scripture as being something infinitely higher than mere human writing.
An examination of the position of Mr. Wesley at this point would constitute overdue therapy for our church. Let me quote a single paragraph from him:
“I have thought, I am a creature of a day, passing through life, as an arrow through the air…. I want to know one thing, the way to Heaven: how to land safe on that happy shore. God himself has condescended to teach the way; for this very end He came from Heaven. He hath written it down in a book! O give me that book! At any price, give me the book of God! I have it: here is knowledge enough for me.”
Wesley was always homo unius libri (a man of one book). I unquestionably agree, and believe that it is time for his church today to become again a church of one Book.
Sound Arminian theology
John Wesley had no patience with theological aberrations, even when offered in the guise of academic respectability. The great doctrines generally associated with his preaching and teaching include prevenient grace, repentance and justification by faith, the atonement, the work of the Holy Spirit in the new birth and in assurance, the doctrine of the church, Christian perfection, and eschatological redemption. This is the catalogue of beliefs belonging uniquely in the Wesleyan tradition which former Yale Dean Colin W. Williams proposes in his book John Wesley’s Theology Today. Those beliefs offer an abundance of preaching material to last the lifetime of any faithful Wesleyan pulpiteer; and they constitute the kind of solid theological substance which, when served up intelligently and vividly, would surely inform the membership of our denomination, with new inspiration and commitment.
Wesley was not a systematic theologian. Dr. Albert Outler refers to him as an Anglican folk-theologian, “whose theological competence and creativity were dedicated to popular evangelism, Christian nurture, and reform, so that his theology could be evaluated more directly by his own stated (Anglican) norms: Scripture, reason, and Christian antiquity.” The plain fact is that many of our pulpits are offering an unfortunate and indefensible blend of Wesley with Karl Barth, Jurgen Moltmann, and the liberationists of Latin America. While it is always helpful to learn from other theological positions, the blending of these with the Wesleyan perspective only causes that perspective to lose its uniqueness and power. I am suggesting, without apology, that the modern United Methodist Church needs to accept again the components of sound Arminianism as the agenda for its theology.
Methodological flexibility
One of the thrilling practices of Wesley was his adoption of field preaching, which while actually abhorrent to him personally, he discovered to be effective in reaching the multitudes with the gospel. Wesley was able and willing to bend his own preferences to fit the demonstrated circumstances of his times. I am convinced he would do the same thing were he alive today. And so must we who are alive today. New methods, fresh, sometimes daring and bold, must be found to communicate the message of the Christian gospel. Times have changed; and the old approaches, successful in other days, may need to be honorably retired to make room for new approaches to be implemented.
Preaching
John Wesley was, indeed, a preacher. His plain preaching of plain truth captured the multitudes and resulted in countless conversions to Jesus Christ. It was fundamentally biblical in its construction, and depended entirely upon the work of the Holy Spirit to produce miracles of transformation in the lives of those who heard it. Contemporary United Methodism needs to recover once again its conviction about the centrality of the proclamation of the Word; and to realize anew that God’s Spirit does indeed work through faithful preaching, bringing to pass that which cannot otherwise occur. Our seminaries need to understand this, and communicate it to their students who will go forth into their annual conferences comprehending what preaching is all about, committing themselves to master its craft and art. The preaching event needs to loom large on the Christian horizon once more, and never again be relegated to a 10-to-12 minute slot in an intricately conceived liturgical pattern.
Strangely enough, John Wesley seemed to comprehend something of the importance of dialogical preaching as opposed to hortatory preaching. The deep and intense feeling with which he delivered his sermons and moved multitudes was never communicated by elevated voice and irresponsible declamation, but rather by impeccable logic, clear exposition, and a conscious effort to bring Divine resources to bear upon specific human problems. As a preacher, he was as modern as tomorrow morning. What a renaissance of vigor and vitality would visit United Methodism today if his quality of preaching could return to our pulpits!
Hope
Throughout the preaching of Mr. Wesley there resounds a message of undiminished hope. “His theology ends as it begins, with the optimism of grace triumphing over the pessimism of nature,” writes Colin Williams. He admonished his preachers never to proclaim sanctification in a way that would discourage those who had not attained that level of perfection. Moreover, throughout his preaching, there is a clear note about heaven and hell. He believed that the quality of life which a Christian may attain upon earth is a foretaste of the reality of another world. Jesus Christ will come again to judge both the quick and the dead, gathering believers into his perfect kingdom and completing the great salvation by his gift of a new heaven and a new earth. The dimension of eternity was constantly present in the sermons of Mr. Wesley, and Methodism was literally built upon both the assurance and the significance of that truth.
In a world of turmoil, it is inexcusable to enter the pulpit without a message of hope. The moral revolution, with its incredible devastation, can only be controlled when people recapture the conviction that life does not end with death, and that a human being, in the end, is responsible to Almighty God for his or her deeds in the flesh. More than any other lost ingredient of the gospel, our belief in the eternal dimension needs to be recovered. The eschatology of hope is a part of our Christian birthright, and we need it to restore glory and spiritual power to the contemporary church. John Wesley has much to teach us about this, which we would be wise to apply in the dangerous 1990s.
Among the prophets
Is it any wonder that the prestige of Wesley grows more dazzling with the passing years? He has broken out of the narrow, sectarian confines of a single denomination, and has been appropriated into a world view which ranks him with the major prophets, apostles, and saints of all time. In John Wesley’s Awakening, Dr. James Joy reminds us that “his tablet is in Westminster Abbey, with the memorials of monarchs, statesmen, empire-builders, philanthropists, and men of letters. The scholars of two continents have begun to recognize him as belonging in the grand succession of Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Martin Luther, and John Wesley – the great awakeners of the human soul-themselves awakened by the touch of God.”
When Wesley died in 1791, he had arranged for six poor men to carry him to his grave in the unconsecrated ground behind London’s City Chapel. Soon thereafter a well-intentioned, but innocently thoughtless preacher named John Pawson, burned a great portion of the Wesley papers in the fireplace of Mr. Wesley’s home. The smoke that curled out of the chimney bore with it treasures of knowledge the world will never have about the little Oxford don who flung his leg across the back of a horse and rode out to save Old England. But more important than this, we may only conjecture what he might have said about all that we who are his followers have done to the movement which he began.
Earl G. Hunt Jr., a retired United Methodist bishop, is the president of the Foundation for Evangelism, affiliate organization of the General Board of Discipleship, in Lake Junaluska, North Carolina.
This article was excerpted from Recovering the Sacred: Papers from the Sanctuary and the Academy (Jonathan Creek Press), a collection of sermons, speeches, and other writings of Bishop Earl G. Hunt Jr. The portion used above was taken by permission from the chapter entitled, “John Wesley: Our Historical Contemporary.”
by Steve | May 21, 1979 | Archive - 1979
Archive: If morning is to come
By Earl G. Hunt Jr. (1918-2005)
Good News
May/June 1979
The Tennessee Annual Conference, after careful review and evaluation of statistics submitted from the six districts, will show a very substantial membership loss for last conference year, continuing a tragic trend which began at least 14 years ago and has projected itself across two episcopal administrations…. We have now shown a net loss, since 1964, of enough people to compose four congregations the size of the largest United Methodist church in the state of Tennessee. No annual conference can stand such very long. … What is the explanation of our predicament?
We may have allowed the deep, historic meaning of most of our big words in religion to become so tragically eroded that they are little more than what William James used to call “bloated absolutes.” One of these, by our own deliberate willfulness, is “evangelism.” Others – more important – are its components: “sin,” “salvation,” “faith,” etc.
Our allusions to these fundamental terms of the gospel, at best, are usually abstractly theological or innocently literary – rarely probingly personal. This is surely one reason why the eleven o’clock worship service, as the late Samuel Miller put it, is almost supremely “a place where the bankruptcy of modern ecclesiasticism is apparent.” One can scarcely imagine any individual receiving what Paul Tillich called an “ontological shock” in a church service. Oftentimes its content and impact are more akin to what Soren Kierkegaard once described as “twaddle.” The raw naked power of a gospel, so revolutionary that its transcendent force is unpredictable and uncontrollable, is simply absent at the eleven o’clock hour on Sunday morning in most of our churches. It is a tragic thing when a man or woman can be more deeply moved spiritually by an occasional book or motion picture than by a service of worship.
When Time magazine, a few years ago, commented upon the nomination of Dr. Donald Coggan, famous preacher and evangelical, to be the 101st Archbishop of Canterbury, it reminded readers that Dr. Michael Ramsey, the incumbent Primate who was soon to retire, had been an ecumenist and theologian but never, under any circumstances, an evangelist. My only contact with Archbishop Ramsey was an accidental conversation in the Westminster Abbey bookshop in London two years ago, and I would not judge him. But, my God, how could a responsible minister fail to compel himself to be an evangelist in a land where the whole of society seems to be moving persistently and proudly away from God and Christianity?
In an address which I was privileged to deliver some time ago at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., I undertook to gather up the present situation in the Christian community under four headings: pendulum trouble, charismatic confusion, principalities and powers, and apocalyptic apoplexy.
I do not mean to revise my thought about these problem areas when I insist that there may be an overarching prior difficulty in the Christian Church today. I refer to the devastating possibility that many of us, ordained and unordained, have been unable to retain enough of the gospel in our own secularized minds and spirits to have anything significant to share with others in a world of lost human beings.
Neither humanism nor a humanistic view of Jesus Christ and the gospel will save a sinful person. Careful theological footwork designed to skirt the rational perils of unabashed supernaturalism can result only in the proclamation of philosophical and ethical platitudes instead of the preaching of the Everlasting Mercy.
The real reason why people do not find God in our churches may well be that those of us who lead in the congregations, both from the pulpit and the pew, have not ourselves surrendered wholly to the redemptive wonder of the Christian message and the control of the Holy Spirit!
It may be time for us to recognize again, as Dr. George Docherty pointed out in his book One Way of Living, that “The Bible itself becomes immediately meaningful to committed people however untutored and unlettered, while the uncommitted who are wise in their wisdom tragically fail to understand God’s Word.” The Scriptures and the mysteries of the gospel are intelligible only to those who know God, for these matters have to do with believers, and only believers can comprehend them.
What I am saying is blunt and elemental – and perhaps certain to arouse the ire of those who do not wish to hear it: for God’s sake, get your own life and heart right with your Redeemer! Go back to the springs of your faith and drink deeply of their refreshing and renewing waters. Review the fundamentals; preach and testify about them. Then will something thrilling happen in your Sunday morning church service. Then will troubled, frightened, lost people – faltering and stumbling in the sophisticated darkness of the 70s – see a great Light and know the salvation of their Lord!
I dare to ask it again: do you really have a gospel to share? Getting one is the only effective answer to the evangelistic problem.
Regarding preaching, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, writing in the July, 1928 issue of Harper’s Magazine, said a basic thing in a manner which the passing of the years has not changed: “Preaching is wrestling with individuals over questions of life and death, and until that idea of it commands a preacher’s mind and method, eloquence will avail him little and theology not at all. I suggest five prerequisites to effective preaching in pulpits large or small:
- A personal knowledge of the living God and his gospel.
- Love for human beings – even the unlovely.
- Hard, grueling work.
- A terrible, frightening urgency.
- Believing prayer.”
More than anything else, lay people in this annual conference have said to me that they want preachers. I have observed that where I have been able to send a person with an exciting spiritual message into a local situation, there the people still attend church with remarkable fidelity. And, as Bishop Armstrong likes to say, they “pay the rent” with gladness and generosity.
The late great Yale historian, Dr. Kenneth Scott Latourette, one of the authentic Christian saints of the 20th century, used to speak of the manner in which God “sent his whisper” through him. This sums up, for me at least, much of the thrill of the call I felt from my Lord more than three-and-a-half decades ago. And I am confident that most of the ministers here would share the same sensitive response to Dr. Latourette’s poetic clause.
What I am really pleading for is a recovery of faith among those of us who are ordained. For I believe that the renewal of the church and its ministry has to begin with you and me. We have to know the living Lord in the freshness of a new experience and assurance before we possess the fundamental credential for preaching.
Peter, the simple fisherman, cried out: “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Luke 5:8). As Dr Leslie Weatherhead said in his book Time For God, “When that strange, awesome sense of the numinous does fall upon the spirit, it is far more compelling and convincing about the reality of God’s existence than are any intellectual arguments, valuable though these may be. It is as though one glimpsed on a Swiss holiday, for only a few moments, the shining, snowclad peaks. Days of rain and mist may follow and the weather make the view as depressing as Bloomsbury in a November fog. But one knows the peaks are there!”
God help this indispensable inner certainty to come to us again and afresh. And then God help us to share it excitingly. George Ade, the famous humorist, said one time, ‘‘The music teacher came twice each week to bridge the awful gap between Dorothy and Chopin!” So the whole event of preaching is designed to be a vehicle through which the Spirit of God may bridge a greater gap between the natural person and the spiritual person.
If the content of our faith is flimsy and unsure, then we have little to preach and it is mockery to ask the Holy Spirit to bless our shallow homilies. If we allow ourselves to be lured away from safe harbors by every new and novel wind of doctrine, then surely we are unfit to serve as spiritual guides for others.
To preach in this age calls for discriminating and discerning knowledgeableness: the will to grasp the meaning of new theological thought and to comprehend what the consequences of such thought may prove to be. It means sorting out a little wheat from a lot of chaff in today’s funny-looking theological granary, and being willing to rephrase the Church’s gospel and restyle its strategy without abandoning its message or compromising its mission.
To preach today means constructing with persistent sensitivity an image of the minister which can survive the ruthless scrutiny of a new and cynical age – an image based on impeccable integrity instead of superficial piety, on candid awareness rather than what someone has called naive “nincompoopery,” on sureness of God and not clever intellectual gymnastics.
The minister who needlessly violates hospital visiting regulations, who invades a family rather than visits it, who feels an audible prayer coming on at some terribly inappropriate moment, who asks for a discount and hints for poundings [a voluntary shower of food gifts traditionally offered to parsonage families in some parts of the country], who faces his daily task with a frockcoated pomposity which is little more than ordained hypocrisy, who tries with conspicuous indirection to inflate his own salary, who has the flagrant dishonesty to parade his personal peeves across the sacred terrain of a pulpit and under the banner of a biblical text – his name is anathema! He is one eloquent reason why the Church perishes for want of renewal in our time!
My challenge to all of us who break “the bread of life” is that we shall be willing, next conference year, to pay the terrible price involved in becoming better preachers than we have ever been before! Then will our churches be filled to overflowing with hungry people; then will the Holy Spirit visit our preaching with redeeming power; then will “Heaven come down our souls to greet, And glory crown the mercy seat.”
“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead and Christ shall give thee light!” As a boy preacher, I used this thrilling text from Ephesians the first time I ever spoke before a district conference. My dreams were young and my visions fresh in those days. The Church was not an earthly organization to me, but the far-flung fellowship of the Lord’s Redeemed. I had known the pardon of my own sin, and the gospel held my soul in enraptured wonder. Everything, everything was to know God’s will – and I doubted not that my frail human effort to do that will would be touched with heaven’s power and so become a modern miracle in the world where I was a pilgrim.
My faith was childlike, and some will say altogether too simplistic. But the lengthening trail of the years with its educational opportunity and exciting ministries has never revealed an adequate motivational substitute for the spiritual ecstasy of that sunrise period of my life. If morning is to come, perhaps you and I need to approach again the altars of our hearts and ask for the restoration of the “blessedness we knew when first we saw the Lord.”
The future of the Tennessee Conference, under God, is as bright as the dawning and as hopeful as the message of Jesus Christ. The gospel is inexhaustible. Arthur John Gossip was constantly reminding young ministers that the Christian faith is not a little pond around which they may stroll for half an hour and then say, ‘‘There it is, you see.” Instead, it is a tremendous shoreless sea, reaching far beyond our poor human capacity ever to search it all out.
God forgive us that we enter so hesitantly into the mystery and glory of the Christian promises, and thus fail to appropriate the limitless power which the Lord God Almighty has placed at the disposal of those who will believe in him and accept his son as Savior.
Someone asked a preacher, “Which way is progress?” The preacher replied, “Sometimes it is backwards.” The man persisted, “When is progress backwards?” He received the answer, “Progress is backwards when you have wandered away from home.”
I invite you, my brothers and sisters in Christ, to join me in a pilgrimage back to our spiritual hearthside and then into the morning of new labors in God’s vineyard, remembering the relationship to which Charles Wesley referred long ago:
Arise, my soul, arise;
Shake off thy guilty fears;
The bleeding sacrifice
In my behalf appears;
Before the throne my surety stands,
Before the throne my surety stands,
My name is written on His hands.
Earl G. Hunt (1918-2005) was a United Methodist bishop for 245 years before retiring in 1988. He was the keynote speaker at the 1976 World Methodist Conference in Dublin, Ireland in 1976. In retirement, Hunt served as president of the Foundation for Evangelism.
This sermon was preached to the Tennessee Annual Conference and is published here with permission.
by Steve | Sep 11, 1973 | Uncategorized
Many Hearts are with You: A warm episcopal welcome
September 1973
By Earl G. Hunt, Jr., Resident Bishop
Charlotte (NC) Area, United Methodist Church
We are honored and privileged and delighted to have you meeting within the boundaries of the Charlotte Area, the Western North Carolina Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. I bring greetings not only as the Resident Bishop of this area, but also as the president of the College of Bishops of the Southeastern Jurisdiction.
When I pastored in the city of Atlanta many, many years ago, I had a dear old parishioner who was a widower. Every time I went to visit, he served me a memorable refreshment: a collard greens sandwich, without relief of mayonnaise. It was a sore trial, imposed on the fidelity of the pastoral spirit of a Christian minister. But the reason I remember this dear old gentleman is because of something that he said to me again and again: “I knowed you was coming because you was so long about it.”
Anybody who is even vaguely familiar with the trends within the Christian community ought to have known that a resurgence of interest in evangelical religion was coming—because it was so long about it.
I have already told you how welcome you are: now as a bishop of the church, I want to make three very simple observations. I trust these will find their way appropriately into the context of this high and holy and significant Convocation week.
First, our plight (that is, the plight of the Christian Church) is in many ways a plight for which we, ourselves, are primarily responsible. I’m aware that there is a kind of apocalyptic secularism round about us. This has created a climate in which it is difficult to think spiritual thoughts or to do spiritual things, but there are some other factors, not as far removed from the preachers as the lay people of the church. For example, there has been an overemphasis on organizational structure. Organization is essential, but it ought always to be kept to a silent minimum.
There has been a doctrinal dilution- a failure on the part of the Church to articulate the great truths about God, about His Son, about His Holy Spirit, about human sin, about salvation, about prayer, about judgment, about eternity. As a result we have produced a generation of spiritual pygmies instead of religious giants.
There has been an eclipse of preaching, but I thank God that it seems to be in the process of vanishing! I have never noticed that my Charlotte area churches have had serious attendance or budget problems when there was a messenger of God standing in the pulpit week after week, saying something in a language that the people could understand, about the Good News of Jesus Christ. Before we blame the times totally, for the problem in which we find ourselves, we ought, as honest men and women, to take a long look at those things for which we ourselves are responsible.
Second, the tides of the hour are with the evangelical movement. My dear friends, you have no idea how favorable the climate of the church is for those concerns in which you are interested. You have no idea how friendly the viewpoint and how great is the anxiety of the bishops about these concerns. I could go down the roster of episcopal leaders and give you name after name after name of your own bishops whose hearts are with you all the way.
However there are three perils that give me grave anxiety as I confront my own deep commitment to the evangelical cause—and as I view yours. The first of these is false doctrine. There isn’t anybody as badly mixed up in the Christian community as an evangelical Christian who is basically wrong on some of the things he believes. The charismatic movement has brought so many signs of hope to our move-in history. But it has also brought possibilities of real peril for those who misunderstand the truths of God about the Christian experience or the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
I spent yesterday in Winston Salem with one of God’s great gentlemen, Dr. John R. Church. We were having dinner together and he said to me, “In this whole business of the modern tongues movement, we have to be very very careful to discern that which is of God, as opposed to that which is of the devil.”
He went on to say something which I, personally, believe to be extremely basic and important-that our safest course in determining the truth about the Holy Spirit is to follow the classical Biblical, Wesleyan position on this great doctrine. It is a corrective for some of the contemporary misinterpretations of this truth. We have to watch false doctrine.
Also, we have to guard against having only a superficial social consciousness and conscience. The time is past (if indeed it ever existed) when real religion could flourish apart from a redemptive ministry to the great agonies of mankind. You cannot live as a Christian apart from the problems of racism, poverty, and the moral revolution in our day. Where these great issues exist, God expects His children to take stands for righteousness. My friends, the only evangelical movement that can survive and bless this generation is the evangelical movement that has, without apology and with great courage, a forthright Christian position on the great social issues of our day. We mustn’t wear it as a veneer; we must acknowledge it as a part of the timber of our faith.
And then there is the age-old peril, the religious sin of pharisaism. I live with it every day. I realize that I’m so often right on things, don’t you? It’s very hard for me not to be judgmental where you’re concerned, when you don’t see it my way. Oh, God needs to give to every born-again Christian a fresh outpouring of the gift of humility. We need to remember that judgment is the prerogative of the Almighty, and not the privilege of His child. This pharisaism, it turns off the world we want to convert, before the world ever has a chance to hear the message of the Savior.
Three perils. This is the hour of evangelical religion, but these three things haunt us.
Finally, Heaven will bless this week, and this great movement within the United Methodist Church, if there is always integrity, and if there is always a compassion in the enterprise. That means that our proper objectives are the glory of God, the good of His Church, and the salvation of human beings. That’s all. That’s all. No self-glory, no self-aggrandizement, no vengeance upon a structure or a church that somehow did us wrong, just the glory of the Heavenly Father, and the strengthening and the good of the church, and the salvation of human beings.
If our hands and our hearts are pure, we are as certain to receive Heaven’s blessing as we are sitting here tonight.
Let me close with a text. Over in the book of Judges, 5th chapter, 20th verse, there is one of those great, startling sentences of Scripture. Across the years it has spoken to me and ministered to me as a Christian man. It’s part of the triumphant chant of a woman named Deborah, the warrior prophetess of Israel.
You remember the story—Sisera was the captain of the hosts of the King of Canaan. And it was Sisera who was leading the forces against God’s people. Suddenly Deborah cried out that the very stars in their courses fought against Sisera.
This is one of the great truths of the Christian faith. There’s something in God’s universe, there’s something in the very nature of His creation, that means all of the forces that He ever made ally themselves on the side of His righteousness. And so we do not stand alone! We do not battle in solitary agony. The stars in their courses fight for us. It’s still His Church, my friends. Not yours, not mine. It’s still His Church. And the stars in their courses fight for the causes of God.
