In short, in calling the preacher a prophet we mean that preaching is an art and the preacher is an artist; for all great art has the prophetic quality.  Many men object to this definition of the preacher as being profane.  It appears to make secular or mechanicalize their profession, to rob preaching of its sacrosanctity, leave it less authority by making it more intelligible, remove it from the realm of the mystical and unique.  This objection seems to me sometimes an expression of spiritual arrogance and sometimes a subtle form of skepticism.  It assumes a special privilege for our profession or a not-get-at-able defense and sanction by insisting that it differs in origin and hence in kind from similar expressions of the human spirit.  It hesitates to rely on the normal and the intelligible sources of ministerial power, to confess the relatively definable origin and understandable methods of our work.  It fears to trust to these alone.

But all these must be trusted.  We may safely assert that the preacher deals with absolute values, for all art does that.  But we may not assert that he is the only person that does so or that his is the only or the unapproachable way.  No; he, too, is an artist.  Hence, a sermon is not a contribution to, but an interpretation of, knowledge, made in terms of the religious experience.  It is taking truth out of its compressed and abstract form, its impersonal and scientific language, and returning it to life in the terms of the ethical and spiritual experience of mankind, thus giving it such concrete and pictorial expression that it stimulates the imagination and moves the will.

It will be clear then why I have said that the task of appraising the heart and mind of our generation, to which we address ourselves, is appropriate to the preaching genius.  For only they could attempt such a task who possess an informed and disciplined yet essentially intuitive spirit with its scale of values; who by instinct can see their age as a whole and indicate its chief emphases, its controlling tendencies, its significant expressions.  It is not the scientist but the seer who thus attempts the precious but perilous task of making the great generalizations.  This is what Aristotle means when he says, “The poet ranks higher than the historian because he achieves a more general truth.”  This is, I suppose, what Houston Stewart Chamberlain means when he says, in the introduction to the Foundations of the Nineteenth Century:  “our modern world represents an immeasurable array of facts.  The mastery of such a task as recording and interpreting them scientifically is impossible.  It is only the genius of the artist, which feels the secret parallels that exist between the world of vision and of thought, that can, if fortune be favorable, reveal the unity beneath the immeasurable complexities and diversities of the present order.”  Or as Professor Hocking says:  “The prophet must find in the current of history a unity corresponding to the unity of the physical universe, or else he must create it.  It is this conscious unification of history that the religious will spontaneously tends to bring about."[2]