Locked in a Room With Open Doors

Theology Today - Vol. 31, No. 4 - January 1975
http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/jan1975/
v31-4-bookreview9.htm

book review:

Locked in a Room With Open Doors
By Ernest T. Campbell
Waco, Texas, Word Books, 1974. 180 pp. $5.95.

The title of the book is one of the twenty sermons compiled by the distinguished minister of the Riverside Church in New York City who addresses one of the most cosmopolitan audiences in America. His theme indicates that people can still be prisoners within when all the doors without have been opened. No reduction of constraint on the outside of life can guarantee freedom within the individual. The volume will be inspirational to laypeople seeking to develop a confident Christian conviction. Professional leaders will enjoy analyzing what one of the best known preachers in the United States has to say in a turbulent period when preaching is discounted.

In the sweep of a year's messages, Campbell applies the gospel to the amplitude of crucial situations. The subjects range over fear, rejection, the paradoxes of conscience, the problem of evil that will not play dead, racial tension, God, the blight and plight of the churches, reconciliation, charismatics, and the cities' jungles. In the warp of abrasive social questions he weaves the hopes and promises of Christ's renewal and the prospect that we shall overcome. He says, "God has the means to win and God means to win. We are called to nothing less than participation in 'The Invincible Kingdom of God.' "

Campbell's sermons prod and probe. They draw blood. They drag the pew-sitter into the street fight. He has to take sides. These messages command a healthy response because they have depth. Their substance is involved with the feelings of people about issues they talk about every place but in the church. The preacher's common sense and Christian witness are sound. He opens his facts, reasons, and observations like a street-corner merchant so the reader can handle the merchandise and see if it is phony. All the time this dialogue is going on there are reliefs of tension by little whimsies and autobiographical materials that make these messages personal.

Those of us who have long admired Ernest Campbell know that he is skillful with words and sentences. He knows how to write a punch line. "Trying to help history along is about as futile as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic!" "Some people never feel tall enough unless they have other people under them." "Our estrangement from each other is the clearest indication of our fallenness." "Woe to the man too ambitious for his resources!"

All the striking phrases are not from the preacher alone. His references and allusions are wide and responsible. He knows Jurgen Moltmann as well as Eric Hoffer and Karl Menninger besides Vonnegut, Novak, Marney, and Glasser. The Riverside preacher knows what is going on in the minds of thinkers and the readers, as well as in the Daily News. And the man in his pew knows what is going on in his preacher's heart.

Campbell's sermons would be hard to preach in some small church under the sway of main contributors. He tells what is good about the movements, and he points out the hollow soft spots in the old positions, without gloating over either. His messages pull back the curtains to show all the wires that hold truth together, and he shows some of the patching tapes where it has been torn.

No one could preach these sermons without the validity of his own participation in the struggle. When Campbell talks about prison reform, the words show his natural feelings after having talked with thirty men at Sing Sing. His messages reveal a personal conviction of faith in Jesus Christ and the courage of involvement in social action that suggests "follow me and see for yourself." His words are more daring as an evangelical man of social action than are those of some who stand only on one side or the other. But the price for holding the two together is obviously high as well as rewarding.

These messages suggested that one also peruse again a volume by Harry E. Fosdick and one by Robert J. McCracken, both of whom preceded Ernest Campbell. One is struck by the, fact that this generation of listeners is more media-oriented, fad-fashioned, slogan-centered, issue-oriented, and illiterate as to great Christian words and principles. No wonder the preacher has to earn the right to be heard and to work harder to have something lasting to say.

All three men speak to the needs of their generations with insight from the Scripture's universals. They preach to the moral and the social consciousness as well as to the center of each personality. Each of these great preachers senses the need to have a vision and a version of the Eternal which will appeal to the present but will outlast our governance by the latest opinion poll, especially when it can reverse itself while life's struggle remains as it was.

Bryant M. Kirkland
The Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church
New York, New York