Napoléon Roussel: How Not to Preach
Cyril
Having dealt with boring Pamphile, Napoléon Roussel addresses another pulpit culprit, Cyril, who has the habit of spiritualising Bible texts. He finds a hidden meaning behind the biblical assertions and interprets the Bible narrative as he likes.
“To him, the mud Jesus put on the blind man’s eyes refers to our sins; by preaching from a boat to people sitting on the shore, the Saviour indicates the distance between his nature and ours, and so on. This method makes the whole Bible disappear: narratives, psalms, prophecy, epistles, all is mixed up together and thrown into a chaos from which Cyril draws at random mind games that are as varied and beautiful as kaleidoscope pictures.”
In order to refute Cyril, Roussel exposes the basics of semantics and draws the conclusion that in general “all human language, even the most figurative one, has to be understood according to the meaning that first comes to the mind, or to state it more briefly, according to its natural meaning”.
Roussel anticipates the objection that things could be differently for God’s Word; he notes that all language is used “not in view of who is talking but of who listens”, i.e. in this context, man. If he wants to be understood by men, God has to use their language.
But could it not be that two meanings co-exist? Roussel denies this in very vigorous terms:
“To admit this is to make fun of God, to scoff at his Word and to deprive it of any value by wishing to add some! If the Bible can have two meanings, why not three, or four, or fifty, or one hundred? Where shall we stop? If I do not find the first ten convenient, why should I not seek for an eleventh? In other words, why should I not add my own meaning?”
What is not tolerated on behalf of an attorney-at-law or a legislator cannot be tolerated on behalf of a pulpit speaker:
“It is not because pulpit speakers have the privilege of being able to say anything they want without being interrupted, that you may abuse of this privilege, Cyril: God will hold you accountable of what your auditory will have had to accept – one day he will remind you of the words of his apostle according to which he does not say “yes” and “no” at the same time.”
Back to chapter 2 (Pamphilus) - Go to chapter 4 (Placid)
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