Hodge on the Teaching Office of the Church
In 1848, Charles Hodge preached a sermon on “The Teaching Office of the Church” to a congregation in New York, which was published in The Missionary Chronicle. Taking Matthew 28:19-20 as his text, he reminds us that the substance of the Great Commission contains “parting instructions,”1 which of course impresses their importance upon us. More than that, in these words Jesus was “now constituting his Church” and “delivering its charter.”2 Both the express words and the nature of discipleship tell us that teaching is at the core of this command.
What is the great presupposition to the foundational place of the teaching office? It is this:
“Knowledge lies at the foundation of all religion, and therefore Christ has made it the great comprehensive duty of his Church to teach. She does nothing unless she does this, and she accomplishes all other parts of her mission just in proportion as she fulfills this, her first and greatest duty.”3
I will divide this summary of Hodge’s sermon into three of his main areas of focus and then a fourth section on application to our present context: 1. a biblical and historic case for the teaching mandate; 2. a contrast to subjectivism; 3. the need for preparation in first principles of religion; and 4. the teaching office in the “post-Christian” lands.
A Biblical and Historical Case for the Teaching Mandate
There are four evident reasons that the mission of the church can only be accomplished by the vocation of teaching: “1. From the express command of Christ. on the commission given to the disciples. 2. From the nature of that system of doctrines, the knowledge and cordial belief of which are essential to salvation. 3. From the nature, design, and constitution of the Church, as revealed in the Scriptures; and, 4. From the whole history of the Church, and especially from the whole history of missions.”4
How then does he show the primacy of teaching from Scripture? From the Old Testament, “The whole ritual service was a mode of teaching. The morning and evening sacrifice was a daily lesson on sin and atonement. Every rite was a visible form of some religious truth … Their only histories were the record of God's dealings with his Church; their poetry was devotional or didactic; their fictions were divine parables; their orators, inspired prophets.”5 Then the New Testament makes the mandate more plain, whether in the Pastoral Letters or in that foundational Great Commission passage.
As to the historical case,
“It matters not, however, where we look, wherever we find a teaching Church there we find religion prosperous; and wherever we find a ritual, an indolent, or a ranting or merely declaiming Church, there we find religion degenerated either into superstition or fanaticism.”6
In this sense, providence has been our teacher on the place of teaching in the church. He says, “it is just in proportion as she has been faithful as a teacher, she has been successful in promoting the Redeemer's kingdom,” and vice versa. Specifically, “The characteristic difference between the popish and Protestant churches is that the former is a ritual and the latter a teaching Church. In the former the minister is a priest, in the latter he is an instructor.”7
The Teaching Office Against Subjectivism
Hodge asks: “What is she to teach? Is she to teach secular knowledge? The proper answer to this question undoubtedly is that the Church is bound to teach the Bible, and other things, only so far as they are necessary or important to the right understanding of the Bible. This exception, however, covers the whole field of human knowledge.”8
From this he shows how this is the case positively (in what we might call dogmatic construction) and negatively (in demolishing the foundations of other worldviews in apologetics).
The largest battle in the emerging American religion, Hodge knew, was with subjectivism. So he insisted: “Knowledge lies at the foundation of all religion.”9 This does not exclude feeling, nor especially the necessary work of the Holy Spirit. However, the Spirit “opens the mind to perceive the excellence of the things of God, he applies them to the conscience, he writes them upon the heart; but the truth must be known before it is thus effectually applied to the sanctification and salvation of the soul.”10
Two objections against Hodge’s approach may be imagined here.
First, “In the way Hodge states things, the office of the Spirit is reduced to dependence on the primacy of the intellect or else the formulations of men!”
But a charitable reading of Hodge here would take him only to mean that “light precedes heat” (ala Edwards) in order of operations, or even that the grammar of Scripture precedes “logic on fire” (ala Lloyd-Jones). A background in Hodge's Systematic Theology would show us that he cannot mean that the intellect in the old man arrives at truth which the Holy Spirit may then infuse with something “extra” to make it spiritual.
Second, it may be objected, “Hodge is as naturalistic as Finney, replacing only the form of experience with the form of teaching in his agricultural metaphor!”
It is true that the same metaphor is used for a method: a farmer utilizing natural means for the production of a harvest. However, the difference is that Hodge’s imagery matches the Bible’s. Note that “the seed of truth” shows that “the power is of God, and not of man.”11 This is in keeping with the Parable of the Sower. If anyone should say that Finney’s metaphor said the same, we answer that for Finney, the preparation of the soils was akin to the working on the inner-sense, and specifically the emotional response, of the hearers. Moreover, for Hodge the work takes time, whereas for Finney the whole course from seed to harvest was a single hearing, or a small set of revival events.
Hodge wanted to push back against those who insist “that the work of the Holy Spirit in some way supersedes the necessity of the ordinary methods of instruction.” On the contrary, “He has revealed it in the word. It is the business of the church to make it known.”12 So Hodge must make a case similar to his contemporary John Williamson Nevin, who positioned the catechism and the “anxious bench” as opposite methods of receiving from God.
The Need For Preparation in First Principles of Religion
A good amount of this essay focuses on foreign missions. It begins in a neglected piece of common sense: “"We have no adequate conception of the magnitude or difficulty of the task. We forget that we have been slowly acquiring this knowledge all our lives; that our mothers gave us our first lessons in this divine science before we could speak.”13
Not only that, but if we look back to the Bible for a pattern, we are unaware of other differences. The Apostles inherited a three-century-long preparatory stage in which the rudiments of monotheism made way for Christian truth; but outside the West this is hardly the case. This consideration requires that we think deeply about how to relate the immutable truth with flexibility in method.
Here one must revisit the most basic questions. What are the definition, end, and main methods of church teaching? Whatever they are, we would not expect them to be fundamentally different from one era to another, nor even much from one place to another. Hodge answers that teaching “is that process by which men are brought really to know what the Bible reveals. The end to be attained is the actual communication of this divine knowledge ... The principal agencies which God has put into our hands for this purpose are the pulpit, the school-room, and the press.”14
Of the three main forms, Hodge gives three reasons why we often inflate the role of the pulpit at the expense of the school-room and press: 1. the word-concept of preaching in the Bible is more diverse than we give it credit for; 2. insufficient allowance for readiness of those in Christian lands for public discourse, as opposed to preparation required in heathen lands; 3. granting the importance of truth-summarization, we still short-change the Holy Spirit's operation with smaller units of the Word.15
Hodge calls attention to the profound nature of the doctrine of God — his existence, attributes, triunity, and relation to the world — as a clear reason why, “Even in a Christian country it requires early and long continued instruction to imbue the mind with any correct apprehension of the nature of God as he is revealed in the Bible. Among the heathen nations the task must be an hundred fold more difficult.”16 For this reason, when Hodge is discussing those three main methods, he tells the tale of a missionary who had learned the lesson after years of his preaching having no effect: “We were literally forced to adopt the method of regular teaching; and you see the result. A Christian nation is rising up around us.”17
Application to the Teaching Office in the “Post-Christian Lands”
There have been really “only three methods” the church has ever been set up among the heathen, and so we have a choice. The first way was to establish churches where a culture had already prepared the way with categories foundational to the gospel; the second, by “force or fraud,” to subject populations to external rights while they remain nominal; and the third, to teach from the ground up. The first was the way of the Apostles, the second of the Franks to the Saxons, and the third of the missionaries to the non-West.18
Hodge says, “The heathen have a great deal to unlearn before they can learn anything aright.”19 Even if words are translated well enough, whole concepts and lines of reasoning form obstacles and are taken in different ways. It should be obvious that this principle is operative on a spectrum and therefore must be remembered when we are speaking to what Flannery O'Connor called "the Christ-haunted" culture. Our own neighbors will have hardened distortions that can only choke the word at the root.
Not only does this call for a season of “first principles” education, but also for patience. It really will be a whole season: "do not let us add to all the other trials and discouragement of our missionaries the heavy burden of our impatience.”20 The notion of local churches conducting this great business without forming schools—and where they are too small to do so, to team together with other small churches to make up the deficiencies—evidences churches that do not understand the mandate. It would also demonstrate that more basic misconception among Evangelicals of what evangelism is, as if it could ever be divorced from a call to full-education-discipleship.
A Reformed Classicalist Postscript on that Application
Hodge’s framework is a useful starting point. But we may want to ask two questions of adequacy. Does Hodge’s inductivism pull him over to a mild biblicism—and will that prevent such thoughts from following through on a total teaching office? All things must be subsumed under the biblical view, he labors to show, yet he goes on to say that it must be taught in the way that the Bible teaches. That certainly sounds “biblical,” as we tend to throw around the word. But we may be forgiven for asking: How so? Must theology proper be restricted to immediate inference from narrative? Is that what we do when we explain what anthropomorphisms are? No—we engage in “contemplative theology.” Now that is just one example of why we must press this question.
Having said that, he is surely correct in saying,
“We cannot teach the doctrines of creation and providence without teaching the true theory of the universe, and the proper office of the laws of nature; we cannot teach the laws of God without teaching moral philosophy; we cannot teach the doctrines of sin and regeneration without teaching the nature and faculties of the soul. Christianity, as the highest form of knowledge, comprehends all forms of truth. Besides this, every false religion has underlying and sustaining it a false theory concerning God, concerning the world, and concerning the human soul. If you destroy these false theories, you destroy the religion."21
But then there are those details, irritating as focusing on them may be to some. In keeping with his inductivism spelled out at the outset of Systematic Theology, Volume 1, Hodge says, "The system of truth of which we have spoken cannot be taught in abstract propositions, as though it were a mere philosophy ... No man can understand the truths of the Bible without understanding the Bible itself ... If we teach Christianity, we must teach the Bible and the whole Bible. We must convey the truth to others in the very facts and forms in which God has communicated it to us."22
First of all—“mere philosophy,” you say? What precisely counts as mere philosophy, as opposed to say the application of philosophical modes of thought to test or else to display the coherence of our other theological activities? The systematic or summary aspect of this is consistent with classical Reformed theological method; but what he means by "in the very facts and forms" is unpacked in his nature metaphors in his important Volume 1. This is as far as Hodge can take us, for his inductivism leads to biblicism in several areas of theological reflection.
When Hodge presses the point about that three-century-long preparatory stage into which the Apostles were able to communicate the gospel in such a short time, the implications for natural theology are unavoidable. Either (1) Hodge is simply mistaken, or (2) these correct "general views of the nature of religion" were wholly from the Hebrew Scriptures, or (3) there was at least some body of this "preparatory knowledge" that belonged to the Hellenic strand of thought, and which therefore is to be classified as natural theology.
Though it is not Hodge's point, there is a ready application of 2 Corinthians 10:4-5 and Matthew 12:43-45 to his point about replacing error with truth. Hodge says,
"We must remember that ignorance is error, and not merely the absence of knowledge. The mind is never empty. If it has not right views, it has wrong views ... And all error is hostile to the truth. It is right, therefore, to pull up these noxious weeds, that the seeds of divine truth may the better take root and grow."23
So if all we do is either assert truths into gardens where there is no seed of antecedent premises, or else to demolish premises like the foundation to a condemned building, without putting anything in its place, what have we done? We have perhaps exorcised a demon who will return with seven stronger spirits, finding the soul cleaned up a bit, but as Jesus ends that illustration: "the last state of that person is worse than the first" (Mat. 12:45). Rather, we need to see such worldview replacement as total war, taking down the stronghold and utterly fortifying a new foundation in its place.
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1. Charles Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 3.
2. Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 3.
3. Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 4
4. Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 12
5. Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 7.
6. Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 9.
7. Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 8.
8. Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 14
9. Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 4.
10. Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 7
11. Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 12.
12. Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 7.
13. Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 5-6.
14. Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 12.
15. Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 12-13.
16. Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 10-11.
17. Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 4-5.
18. Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 14.
19. Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 5.
20. Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 12.
21. Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 14-15.
22. Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 6
23. Hodge, “The Teaching Office of the Church,” 15.
