1 - Preacher, Professor, Editor

Preacher, Professor, Editor

THEY may not appreciate the comparison, but preachers and professors have much in common with editors. If that is meant as a compliment, they might reply "thanks, but no thanks." After all, editors are an endangered species as far as budding authors are concerned.

Eager pulpiteers yearn to get into print, and junior faculty tremble at the ultimatum "publish or perish." Most of the time, editors come across as blue-penciled barriers to that great waiting public out there somewhere. As one who has occupied an editor's chair for many years and who also knows something about preachers and professors, a word about the interrelation of the three professions may prove edifying. Who knows? The three parties may even learn something from each other.

I

What editors do is often reflected in stories they tell about themselves. Saxe Commins of Random House was trying to avoid the mindless chatter of a party launching a new book when the author glided toward him with a glass in one hand and a cigarillo in the other. Asked if he, too, was an author, the editor replied, "No, I'm in the cleaning and repair business." Saxe's wife, who tells the story, says the author went up to the hostess and said, "Who let that person in here?"

William Jovanovich, of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., titled his editorial memoirs Now, Barabbas. It is an allusion to Byron's line, "Now, Barabbas was a publisher." Among other things, Jovanovich notes that "editors spend the better part of their days reading and discussing books they will never publish, which makes them skeptical and jaded."

Whitney Darrow, the first director of the Princeton University Press, reflected saidly, "I don't think anyone else has seen more of the outside of books and less of the inside of books than I have."

H. L. Mencken, the longtime journalist and editor, became so cynical, not only of writers but of most of the population, that he loved to talk about "boobus Americanus." Harold Ross of The New Yorker worked over James Thurber and Bennett Cerf so thoroughly that they both wrote books about their servitude. They were able to survive, perhaps, only because they both had a marvelous sense of humor.

2 - Preacher, Professor, Editor

T.S. Eliot served for a time as manuscript editor of a London publishing house. When a budding author was told his manuscript was being rejected, the disgruntled writer said petulantly: "Isn't it true, Mr. Eliot, that most editors are failed writers?" After a moment's reflection, Eliot replied: "Perhaps. But so, too, are most writers."

Curiously, editors of religious book firms and theological journals seem more reticent and less loquacious about their profession. L. P. Jacks, the distinguished editor of The Hibbert Journal in its best years, wrote two autobiographies, one at age eighty and the other at ninety, but he said very little about himself as editor. John A. Hutton, whose editorial supervision of The British Weekly closely paralleled his reputation as a great preacher, was accorded a fine anthology of his sermons by Edgar DeWitt Jones, no mean preacher himself, but again there is almost nothing about Hutton as editor. Charles Clayton Morrison, the vigorous and versatile editor of The Christian Century in its pacifist and ecumenical days, was so excited about his own ideas that he seldom reflected on his editorial job. (Morrison, not known for professional modesty, liked to review his own books in the Century.)

The Senior Editor of THEOLOGY TODAY has written elsewhere that "authors hate editors and regard them as insufferable interlopers. Editors are always cutting out immortal prose, asking for impossible revisions, and questioning basic assumptions. They may also irritate many writers by suggesting that less is more, that inclusive language is possible if they work at it, and that readers want to know what writers themselves think rather than what they think other thinkers think."

II

Beyond the jokes and the stories, preachers and professors share several mutual methodological concerns with editors. We can list four.

First, all three are in the business of managing other people's ideas. Some of us may acquire individual trademarks that identify the way we express things, but most of us are shifting and sifting what others have said before us. And usually, this management style operates with a view to change and revision. In juggling other people's ideas, we adapt them for our own purposes.

It has been said that all wisdom is plagiarism, only stupidity is original. If preachers, professors, and editors are known for their wisdom, it is because they make judicious use of the material available to them. The preacher reads the commentaries and searches for apt illustrations; the professor's familiar method is to compare one authority with another; the editor of a journal tries to get manuscripts together to make up the best possible package.

A second common concern of our three professionals issues from the first, namely, the process of management implies selectivity. Some things must be left out because not everything can be included. The sermon cannot range over the whole Bible but must concentrate on a single passage or even a single text. Not every lecture on theology can

3 - Preacher, Professor, Editor

include all the articles of the Creed. A publishable book or a journal article need not cover the waterfront.

Lord Acton, the erudite editor of the massive Cambridge Modern History, when asked how anyone would know what to include in an encyclopedia, replied that "mastery is achieved by resolved limitation." That stilted dictum is as true of life as of professional excellence. The trick, of course, is to learn what goes into the sermon, the lecture, the article, and what must be ignored. Vincent Van Gogh's painting rubric contains good advice. "Exaggerate the essential," he wrote to Theo, and leave the obvious vague."

Because of the overload of information in our day, the temptation is to include too much. It's not that sermons are longer, but they are more diffuse and usually begin as far away from the main point as possible. Lectures must fit the class time-slot, but the allusions and references seem to multiply. This is one place where preachers and professors can learn from editors. The blue-pencil stands for the necessity of cutting the verbiage and tightening up the structure and argument of an author. Editors strive for a lean, spare literary style. Alas, brevity and succinctness are not often characteristics of sermons and lectures.

A third bond that unites preacher, professor, and editor is the pressure that emerges now and then to take risks and go out on a limb. Churning out the same old stuff over and over soon becomes monotonous. If the congregation and the class can anticipate what is about to be said, because it never changes that much from week to week, and if the publishing house or religious magazine gets the reputation for printing the same thing all the time-tedium and banality cannot be far behind.

All of us need to heed in our own generation William Carey's clarion missionary call, "Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God." Here is where preachers can help professors and editors, because they are always taking faith-risks and making preposterous assertions about God and the world. In the process, they lay themselves open to criticism and perhaps ridicule. It's not an easy decision to allow oneself to be vulnerable. It's safer to hide behind other people's ideas, which we become skilled at managing. Preachers, to their credit, know what it means, personally and theologically, to say with Luther, "Here I stand."

A fourth common denominator that unites preacher, professor, and editor is the conviction that the gospel makes sense. We are all involved in persuasion, in finding "a reason for the faith that is in us," and in getting things together into some sort of "chain of being" where everything is related to everything else. We may not succeed in getting all the pieces to fit into a harmonious whole, but faith's assumption that there is an ultimate unity demands all the intellectual energy we can summon.

The Great South Window in the neo-gothic Princeton University Chapel rises majestically over the text engraved in the stone: "And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32).

4 - Preacher, Professor, Editor

Pictured in various locations around the central Christ figure are Jerome, Benedict, Alcuin, John of Salisbury, Erasmus, and several others associated with the tradition of Christian learning. The window reminds us that this is not a parish church but a college chapel and that here the life of the mind is respected and celebrated.

This is where the professor can teach the preacher and the editor. We are not asked by Scripture or the tradition of rigorous theological thinking to close our minds. Spirituality and the deeply felt inner experience of divine presence are not meant to supersede but to complement reflective thought.

Preachers know they must keep faith intellectually alert, and provision for continuing education courses is now commonly included in pastoral contracts. Editors are always tempted to go with the trends and fads, allowing "every wind of doctrine" to determine editorial policy. Professors can easily become doctrinaire and scholastic, but, with all their faults, they remind us that Christian truth is something worth thinking about and that the life of the mind is one way to praise God.

When C. S. Lewis first became seriously interested in Christianity, it was, he tells us, only a commitment to theism, an intellectual assent to the existence of God. He cared nothing for the incarnation or other specific Christian doctrines; those came after he had satisfied his mind of the reality of God. Perhaps that is why, later on, he became such a persuasive defender of the faith in all its philosophical and evangelical plenitude.

III

Can we now conclude by reflecting that the various commonalities that unite preacher, professor, and editor in a shared ministry are epitomized in the person of the Christ? If we use the Gospels as resource, Jesus certainly knew how to manage other people's ideas, particularly "Moses and the prophets." He was selective not only in his use of the Hebrew Scriptures but in his emphases on forgiveness and the Kingdom. He took the risk of personifying the ultimate by declaring "I am the way, the truth, and the life." And, finally, let us not forget that contemporaries called him "teacher."

Hugh T. Kerr