Professor Tom Torrance used to like to tell students that although he knew
that, theologically, they believed totally in justification by faith, a lot
of them would base their attitude to the ministry on justification by works.
Its an example of what the late Robert Carroll of Glasgow University used
to recognise, as much in the biblical witness as in religious people: “cognitive
dissonance”.
I came across another example not so long ago in a church I was visiting. The minister was berating the congregation for not turning up in sufficient numbers at a series of special evening praise services which were being held. He told them it was their duty to be there. I glanced at the list of popular hymns to be sung that evening, and one of them was Charles Wesley’s stirring “And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Saviour’s blood”, with its triumphant line “No condemnation now I dread”. I am sure the minister believes totally that Jesus taught that God issued invitations and did not make demands, but who could blame the congregation for sensing a degree of cognitive dissonance.
My first encounter with the cognitive dissonance, not to say crass insensitivity of a preacher came when I was, I think, in my sixth year at school. My father, who was then minister of a Glasgow parish took ill on Hogmanay, December 31st. The next day was a Sunday and eventually he found that a final year divinity student was free to stand in for him. This student was of a somewhat fiery evangelical disposition, which, it would be fair to say, was far from my father’s moderate suspicion of anything which smacked of enthusiasm. However at six o’clock on Hogmanay beggars can’t be choosers!
Overnight, four to five inches of snow fell on the west end of Glasgow, and so at eleven o’clock the following morning it was a very, very sparse congregation which gathered in church, and was treated to a long homiletic tirade about how people did not attend church nearly often enough.
I have occasionally retold that story in a pulpit on January 1st, and said that while self-righteousness is not a Christian virtue, those present were entitled to a tinge of it!
Had my father ministered fifty years or so earlier, he would have had to find a replacement, not just for the morning of January 1st but for the Watchnight Service the previous evening. In the Scotland of the early twentieth century, no-one would have gone to church to mark Christmas, but pews were packed “to see in the new year”.
In his biography of Cameron Lees, the minister of St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh then, Norman MacLean describes going to a Hogmanay Watchnight service in St Giles when he was “a solitary student in lodgings”, far from his home in the Hebrides. The congregation was made up of people from the crowded tenements in the heart of the city: “not the usual church-goers one sees in St Giles” MacLean records. The sermon obvious impressed the young student, for he reports much of it.
“It was now half a minute from twelve o’clock and Dr Cameron Lees asked the congregation to kneel and pass from one year into the other in silent prayer. The great congregation knelt; silence filled the Cathedral: the thrill of absolute self surrender seemed to pass along the pews like an electric current along the wires.. Then suddenly from the steeple came the strokes of the clock. One, two, three….they fell on the strained ear. Twelve – the year was gone and the new year come. Silence again filled the vast spaces of the Cathedral. From outside there came the dull roar of the revellers, like the beating of waves on the shore far away. Half a minute passed, and Dr Cameron Lees began to pray audibly. He invoked the blessing of God on the worshippers within and on the multitudes without, and he committed all of us and those we loved to the keeping of the Shepherd of Israel throughout this yew year of our earthly pilgrimage and all the coming years. We made the prayer our own by mingling our voices in the Amen. And then we sang ‘O God of Bethel’ as I never heard it sung before.”
There was a contrast
between “the ungodly revelry” outside and the worship inside,
which did not escape the preacher in the St Giles’ pulpit. “Not
that Dr Lees used words of condemnation. That was not his way”. But
he caused light to shine, and in its illumination the contrast was revealed.