You have come here to prepare yourselves for the gospel ministry. And if you look for a moment with me at the world round about us, you will see how badly, how sorely, that gospel is needed. Ask for a moment, if you will, what that world thinks of itself, and of its own predicament. The predicament of men and of nations will fill your hearts with deepest sympathy, and with earnest desire that God's glory through them may be accomplished.
Let Ernest Hemingway, the novelist, first tell you briefly, as he speaks to you in his new story, The Old Man and the Sea. You've read it in the recent issue of Life, perhaps.
An old, old man goes out in a skiff all alone. For eighty-four days he has been fishing, and has caught nothing at all. But on this eighty-fifth day he is going to have good luck. And good luck he gets. A big fish takes his bait at last. Victory seems to have come. "He made the fish fast to bow and stern and to the middle thwart." And on his way home he goes.
But the sharks come. The first shark takes forty pounds out of his big fish. And the old man now has sympathy with the fish that he has caught. The fish has become his friend. The sharks are now his enemies. One after another they come. The last shark takes the last bite. There is nothing left but the tail at the stern, the head at the bow, and that bare backbone, altogether naked, in between.
Therein is the picture of what the modern novelist thinks of the accomplishments of human civilization. Therein bespeaks the pessimism, the utter pessimism, of the men of this world. They know they are licked. The universe, hostile to man—man, as the Greek tragedians pictured him—always conquered at last. When the old man, with the last ounce of his strength, steps out of the skiff, he sees in the reflection of the light that bare skeleton of all his accomplishments. And he goes out to "dream of the lions" and then to die.
But, you say, that's the novelist. Let’s hear from the scientist.
Well may you hear him. He speaks of facts, does he not? Not merely by means of imagination does he try to interpret the world. Let him speak of facts. What does he say? An old man went out to fish. He fished eighty-four days and didn't catch anything. The eighty-fifth day he had good luck. He lost his catch, came home to dream of the lions, and then to die.
The scientist speaks only, he says, of phenomena. He doesn't know what’s behind the world. He knows that some forces are somehow there. He knows that these forces eat up the accomplishments, the culture, of man, and condemn him to utter futility. But outside of that, he says, science has no pronouncement to make.
You tell me to pass on hastily then to the philosopher, for he does not speak by imagination, nor merely of facts, but in terms of reason. He does speak of ultimate reality, of what lies beyond. But the philosopher himself today tells us that, when he speaks, of necessity he speaks in terms of utter contradiction. Self-consciousness, he says, is itself composed from the beginning of contradiction, and there is no hope for escape. For in terms of contradiction you can say nothing that means anything at all. And so philosophy too gives up all hope of giving any meaning to life.
Ernest Hocking tells us what he thinks philosophy can do in the story of Merlin, the magician of King Arthur's court. One day Merlin suddenly disappeared. Out went a traveller, a weary traveller, alone into the desert. And he heard, when he was stricken, worn out and tired, a voice purporting to be that of Merlin the magician. He understood from this voice that if many travellers, coming seven years after one another, over an infinite period of time, would put all their fragments, all they had said, together, Merlin might at last, possibly, walk the earth again. But Merlin will not walk the earth again, no more than the marlin of Hemingway's story will ever leave the sea. Literature, art, science and philosophy predict their own doom, and offer no hope whatever for man.
One more voice there is, the voice of religion in our day, to which men turn for hope. Richard Kroner, of Union Seminary, informs us that in religion men seek for the solution of their problem of self-contradiction, in imagination once more. The truth of Christianity, he says, is imaginary, not factual. It supersedes the contradiction of reason, but in terms of imagination. “The antinomies of experience are thus solved, not intellectually, but spiritually.” Thus the man of religion, the theologian, hopes against hope that imagination may ultimately lead man out of his distress.
But the worst has not been told. Because in this self-professed ignorance with respect to what man is, what he’s here for, and what his accomplishments mean, these self-same people, the man of literature, the man of science, the man of philosophy and religion, nevertheless by implication assert that God does not exist, that He has not spoken, that there is no truth, that Christianity is a lie. "Creation is not a fact, and taken as a fact it is simply not true.” (R. Kroner: Culture and Faith, p. 249.)
It is in preparation for the preaching of the gospel to such a world as this, that you have come here to prepare yourselves. We welcome you, because we are not pessimistic. We're not hopeless. God's power is strong enough to overcome the resistance of the world. You know that God has revealed Himself, that He has spoken to man originally in paradise, that man has become a sinner, that now in grace God through Christ has sought him out. Men will hear that gospel. By the Spirit's power they will be raised from the dead. Whether men hear or whether they forbear, they will have heard the word of the Lord. It is your duty, your task, your privilege, with ours, to join in preparation for the preaching of that gospel.
We welcome you most heartily for this earnest task which God by His grace has assigned to you.