A practical symphony for preachers of the Word of God

Containing, in alphabetical order, sets of biblical texts on various dogmatic, moral and church-practical truths Application. Section I. Stories Application. Division II. Comparisons and similarities This book represents the first experience of a practical symphony for Orthodox pastor-preachers. As the reader will see, it consists of the symphony itself and two sections of the appendix to it, closely connected by the goal that the compiler had in mind: to put into the hands of the preacher a practical manual like symphonies, which, in a convenient alphabetical order for reference, would contain all the most necessary material for all types of church preaching and outside of liturgical conversations with the people about the most diverse subjects of Christian faith and morals 1. In the symphony itself, the reader will find systematic collections of biblical texts, written out in full and grouped into sections - concepts (there are 184 such concepts in the book) - according to the unity of thought and content and arranged in alphabetical order 2. Each concept contains, if possible, the entire Old and New Testament teaching about this or that dogmatic, moralizing or ecclesiastical-practical truth, and we, as stated above, do not limit ourselves to simply indicating quotes or citing the initial words of texts, but we mainly cite the texts themselves from the Russian Synodal Bible. It seems that this method of bringing biblical texts not only represents an enormous convenience, reducing the time spent searching for them, which is precious for a pastor who, in addition to preaching, is busy with many other duties in the administration of church services, requirements, church writing and reporting, teaching the law in a parish school, not to mention the necessary housework and housekeeping, but also gives him the opportunity to use, as perfectly as possible, the entire treasury the word of God, this irreplaceable, precious source of every pastoral preaching, which receives all its persuasiveness, edification and all its authority from biblical illumination. To retain in memory the entire contents of the Bible, to give an answer on the basis of the word of God to anyone who asks about this or that particular case is hardly possible for any clergyman without a proper reference guide. Meanwhile, the lack of biblical justification cannot be rewarded in any way for a sermon, which - we repeat again - receives its power only from the word of God, and not from human wisdom and eloquence. Moreover, the discussion and solution of almost every preaching issue can best be carried out not only according to the manual, but also according to the plan of the biblical symphony. That is why such a great modern church leader as the Right Reverend Ambrose, Archbishop of Kharkov, persistently advises all preachers to use biblical symphonies 3 . Let us also allow ourselves to say that for every pious layman who examines himself in his views and opinions of a dogmatic and ethical nature, according to the guidance of the word of God, this book can be useful, being, as it were, some kind of aid in using the sacred biblical books. To what has been said, we must add the fact that, bearing in mind the tasks of the missionary struggle against the fabricated “new Christianity”, schism, unbelief and sectarianism of a mystical and rationalistic nature, put forward in our troubled time for faith and the church, we made all our efforts to ensure that in our biblical practical symphony were placed, in addition to the general exegetical-homiletical biblical material dogmatic, moral and church-practical nature, all, if possible, texts from the sacred biblical books, which serve to completely refute false teachings and sectarianism of all kinds. In the appendix, section one, we have placed a number of short spiritual and edifying stories in alphabetical order of concepts. Their goal is to enliven preaching speech, to make it lively, entertaining, visual and accessible to all. It is a well-known fact that a pastor’s sermon, if he accompanies it with living examples of faith and piety - if he directs his word from sensations to ideas, from ideas to concepts, from concepts to judgments, from judgments to conclusions (and not vice versa) - will be much more interesting, more accessible and easier to understand than if it consists of only dry judgments and abstract conclusions. In view of this, the definition of the Holy Synod, held in 1890, on the properties of modern pastoral preaching and outside of liturgical conversations with the people 4 offers a guiding rule for pastor-preachers: to confirm their word or conversation “by pointing to the example of good people who have pleased God.” Of course, examples of piety or spiritual and moral stories of this kind must be borrowed from completely reliable sources, distinguished by liveliness, interest, power of persuasiveness and, especially, brevity. Long stories, interrupting the thread of thoughts and distracting from the main goal of pastoral edification, are not suitable here. Finding suitable examples of piety every time is not convenient for every pastor-preacher: sometimes there are no appropriate aids, other times there is no time to find those stories that meet their purpose 5 . We leave it to those who will use them to judge the suitability of the short stories we offer as preaching material. In our personal preaching activities, we find enormous convenience and visible benefit from their meeting. As for the second section of the application, it consists of several hundred (800), which we have selected under 157 concepts, the so-called comparisons and similarities, the purpose of which is by comparing abstract truths of a dogmatic or ethical nature with similar objects or phenomena from the external world, accessible to our senses, to make these truths visual and understandable even for unprepared listeners. Of course, comparison is not proof and in no case can it replace it 6 . But experience shows us that if a preacher or speaker, convinced with all the strength of his soul in what he is saying, is able to present the truth in all the splendor of its greatness, with the help of comparisons, similarities, contrasts and examples, then very often there is no longer any need for evidence to convince listeners; the truth, as such, due to its irresistible and divine beauty, is revealed to them by itself and accepted by them with all their hearts - this center of a person’s spiritual and moral life, dominating the mind and will. Indeed, examining the works of the best secular and spiritual speakers of all times and peoples, we notice that comparisons and likenings, parables, stories, contrasts, etc., were always used by them with undoubted and constant success. And again we will say that the work of finding successful comparisons and similarities, not with the goal of showing off some eloquent phrase, but solely in order to bring closer to the consciousness of your listeners, often infants in faith and mental development, the necessary truth of faith and piety of a more or less abstract nature - such work is far from easy for any pastor, especially a rural, poor one, who does not own an extensive library. Therefore, we think that our experience of collecting comparisons arranged in alphabetical order will not be superfluous in homiletical literature. This is the content of our book. It seems to us that she is meeting the recently growing need for constant, lively, publicly accessible preaching. Our time, characterized by an extraordinary increase in religious free-thinking and even unbelief, a decline in good morals and a noticeable disintegration of private, family and public life due to deviation from the ideal of the Gospel teaching, everywhere, in all spheres of human life bringing the light of truth, consolation, joy, well-being and health, requires extraordinary energy from the pastor in the holy work of preaching the word of God. The Most Reverend Metropolitan Vladimir of Moscow, in his speech when presenting the staff to Bishop Tryphon (July 1, 1901), characterizes the current situation of the Church with the following significant words, with which one cannot but agree: “Who doesn’t know what a difficult, what a troubled time our Church is going through now! Never have there been so many tares in Christ’s field as there are now. Never has the enemy of human salvation—the devil—used so much effort to destroy the kingdom of God on earth as now. Never have the enemies of the Church taken up arms against her with such bitterness as now. Fighting against it with the most dangerous of weapons - the weapon of developed thought and the word corresponding to it, they dug up the area of ​​​​the Christian faith in all directions, leaving not a single one of its truths untouched. Now, at once, we have before us all the errors that have ever existed, and several that, at least in their present development, have never existed before. And this all-denying, all-shaking, all-destroying spirit of unbelief and free-thinking, like an ulcer, like death (Jer. 9:21), - let's say in the words of the prophet, - is intensifying to penetrate not only through our doors, but also through windows and cracks, and wants, at all costs, to redo everything with us in its own way" (see "Moscow Church Gazette", 1901, No. 28). To these formidable and at the same time absolutely truthful words of the high priest of the Moscow church, indicating that all ministers of the word of God must immediately arm themselves with the spiritual sword - preaching and rise to the height and responsibility of their great calling, we must add that if pastoral preaching is abstract, inaccessible, bookish - if it does not follow the phenomena of life and respond fully armed to the word of God in a timely manner to the demands of the time - if it is carried out according to book or notebook, as if thereby indicating that the preacher takes his word not from the heart 7, but from the book - if the sermon is dry, sluggish, ordered, and not inspired, fiery, living, heartfelt, capable of shaking the hearts of the listeners and moving their will to everything that is holy, true, great and beautiful - if the preacher’s word is at odds with his life - then there will be very little benefit from any aids to preaching and from the sermon itself. This is because religious knowledge and especially religious life develop according to different laws than any other knowledge. For the latter, only fidelity, clarity, and accuracy of messages are required; For the success of a preacher of faith, the presence in him of the most sincere, heartfelt faith and, as evidence of it, a good life, if possible, is absolutely necessary. “Incomparably less,” let’s say in the words of one spiritual magazine, “than any other religious teaching is reconciled with its transmission with a cold heart and, so to speak, in a chilled state. Let everyone think about this, putting on the teacher’s robe and not having an inner disposition towards the preached teaching! It would be in vain to imagine that one can teach religion. Even if he most thoroughly mastered the content of Christian teaching and even if he expounded it with the skill of a first-class orator, for all that he will do more harm than good. Of course, it would be an injustice to completely deny that through one teaching, here and there, especially in receptive hearts, a spark of life can be kindled or such material accumulated that, under favorable circumstances, it will flare up into a bright flame. But it will still do more harm than good. Very many proselytes will become infected with the religious indifference of their teacher, and those who hungered and thirsted more than others for God’s truth will the more decisively turn away from such a teaching, which appeared to their mental gaze in the form of a lifeless corpse.” (See in “Christian Reading”, issue 7, July 1901, pp. 7–8, article by Professor Fr. Akvilonov). But the grace of God is strong, great is the mercy towards the Orthodox Church on St. Rus': the inspired preachers of the word of God, strong in deed and word, shaking the hearts of their listeners and leading them from darkness and lies to the light of Christ's truth and righteousness, have never become scarce in it and, we dare to think, will never become scarce. We believe and hope that now, as many times before, the attacks of the enemy of salvation on the verbal flock of Christ’s sheep will be faithful and victorious, although not immediately, without noise and splendor, repelled by the archpastors and shepherds of Christ’s Church. A temporary weakening of energy, for which the shepherds are not always to blame, does not mean its loss—temporary sleep does not mean death. The great awakening is coming and has already come, at the call of the archpastors, a large host of Orthodox pastor-preachers. In all dioceses, cities and many villages of St. Rus' is already hearing the persistent, living, inspired word of the servants of the Word; Conversations about St. are actively conducted during the service and outside of it. faith and morality, pastoral improvisation is heard, and public theological readings are held. In view of this, we repeat that any practical aid for preachers of the word of God, like the Practical Symphony 8, is now timely and desirable. We leave the judgment of the merits of this manual to our co-workers, who, in the spirit of Christ's love, will forgive the oversights of its compiler in the hope of correcting them in the next edition, if the Lord destined us to live to see it. Moscow, August 16, 1901 Archpriest Grigory Dyachenko. The compiler of this symphony had the following on hand as aids. books: 1) Biblischos Kasual – Text-Lexicon. K. Haupt. 3 Auflage. Leipzig. 1893. 2) Dictionnaire des parallèles concordances et analogies bibliques par Lambert. Paris. 1862. 2-ed. 3) Symphony on v. and new testament, book Baryatinskaya. 4) Symphony ed. and. "Wanderer" 5) Journal articles. “Missionary. review". 6) “Shower conversation.” 7) Our work: “Lessons and examples of Christian faith, hope and love”, etc. This property distinguishes this book from all other symphonies, in which the texts are placed in alphabetical order, based on the simple sound of the initial syllables in the word - without any internal connection or logical proximity between them, and only the initial words of the verse are given, and not the entire verse, or even only a reference is made to chapters and verses without the texts themselves. See Church Gazette, ed. at the Holy Synod for 1890, No. 26. Only a small part (1/10) of our books, entitled: “Lessons and examples of Christian faith, hope and love”, and then mostly in abbreviation, is included in the composition of these spiritual and edifying stories - a much larger part of them is printed here from new sources: prologues, patericon, chety-menaion and other similar books. There are about 700 stories for 245 concepts. The sources for drawing up these comparisons, which were not easy for us to find, were mainly the works of St. father and especially St. John Chrysostom, Macarius of Egypt, Gregory the Theologian, Simeon the New Theologian; of our domestic teachers of the Church of Creation, St. Tikhon of Zadonsk, Demetrius of Rostov and others were also useful for our purpose. Then, we found a significant number of successful and strong comparisons in the sermons of Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow, Innocent of Chersonesus, Archpriest. Nordova and others. We borrowed some comparisons from the “Spiritual Flower Garden” and other collections of spiritual and moral reading. If a quotation is not indicated somewhere in the comparison, this means that we cited it either from memory from what we read, or compiled it ourselves. It goes without saying that free improvisation cannot be required of novice preachers in the first years of their preaching activity. It is enough for them if at this time they diligently preach the word of God according to the guidance of the best preaching collections. Over time, they will move on to the free pronunciation of their teachings, first speaking by heart, or without a notebook at all, ready-made teachings, learning them, of course, not from the letters, with precision, and then moving on to improvisation, guided here at first by ready-made sermon notes. For this purpose, we have compiled the books: “Daily Teachings, Full Yearly Circle of Teachings, etc.” (first stage); “The Preaching Encyclopedia, or the Shepherd’s Preacher’s Companion,” containing detailed plans (second stage); “Friend of the Church Improviser”, containing brief notes (third stage). The compilers of our ancient symphonies, speaking about the benefits and necessity of their works, wrote that “when reading the books of Holy Scripture, although repeatedly and with great attention, it is difficult, even completely impossible, to retain in memory all the texts related to a known concept.” “But all the books of the Holy Scriptures, the chapters in which they are contained, or, more especially, every text of the Holy Scriptures, the books and chapters in which they are contained, and the verses in which they are contained, are beyond human power to remember.” It is even more difficult, of course, to remember and, if necessary, find St. sayings for one or another. Scripture parallel or completely corresponding to it in thought and word expression is a saying from other books or places of the same St. Scriptures. Meanwhile, both are essential and necessary for every Christian. “There is a need for the nobility of the Holy Scriptures, for we have an eternal life,” says the compiler of another ancient symphony, referring to the well-known words of the Savior: try the Scriptures, for you believe that in them you have an eternal life, and that is what bears witness to Me (John 5:39). Even more necessary is both, according to the same compiler of the symphony, John Ilinsky, for preachers of the word of God, who “need to confirm their instructive words with the arguments of the sacred scriptures, naming the book and the chapter in which this scripture is found.” With particular clarity, depth and convincingness, the importance of such knowledge for the preacher of the word of God was revealed in Bose by the late Eminence Ambrose, Archbishop of Kharkov, in his famous work: “The Living Word.” Here, by the way, he writes: “due to the forgetfulness inherent in man, and with a thorough knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, especially in old age, sometimes it is necessary with some difficulty to find the required texts, and a lot of time is spent on this when composing occasionally written sermons; but when the parish priest needs to give oral teaching for every holiday, then it is not possible to spend a long time looking for the necessary sayings in the Bible. Meanwhile, when delivering a teaching, the text may not be quoted accurately from memory, or the saying of one sacred writer may be attributed to another” (“The Living Word,” v. 113). Not only church preachers, but also OOs may find themselves in such difficult and uncomfortable situations. teachers of the law, missionaries and theologian-writers, and for these latter these provisions can sometimes be even more important than for preachers, either due to the obviously critical attitude of listeners to words, for example, missionaries, or because these words, devoted to printed embossing, perpetuate the mistake made in them for many years and for many. And what undesirable consequences this kind of phenomenon can lead to can be judged with sufficient convincing by those, for example, abuses that were and are being made from unclear and inaccurate biblical quotations in patristic works, for example, by representatives of the so-called negative criticism of the sacred text. All such and similar inconveniences and difficulties in using the word of God have, of course, always been recognized, and therefore naturally “from long ago” aroused concern for their elimination. The simplest means for this was the so-called parallel passages, or parallelism, which in the preface to the Elizabethan Bible (ed. 1751) is interpreted as follows: “parallelism is defined as different passages of the Holy Scriptures that agree with each other, a relationship established at the end, so that the darkest with the clearest will be revealed, and even the doubtful is thought to be not doubtful. And this is not a new invention, but of the most ancient holy fathers.” Thus, the holy fathers and teachers of the Church, by their example and their writings, testified to the importance of this method of explaining especially difficult passages of St. Scriptures by combining them with others, clearer ones, found in the same scripture. Indications of parallel passages were made either in special editions of the Bible, equipped with quotations, or in so-called symphonies. Symphony translated into Russian means agreement, i.e. coordination, collection together, in alphabetical order, of all sayings, all words in St. Scripture, where quotations related to one or another saying are given either in a whole sentence or in a separate phrase, in the order of books, their chapters and verses. The beginning of the symphonies, as well as the parallel passages, dates back to distant antiquity and, judging by the Greek name, was probably in the east; but the first work of this kind that has survived to our time belongs to the West and appeared in the 13th century: this is the Concordantiae morales Sacrae, Scripturae of Anthony of Padun, who lived at the turn of the 12th and 13th centuries. This first experience of a reference dictionary for Holy Scripture was completed in the same 13th century. the famous Dominican Hugo de Santo Caro with the assistance of an entire army of Dominican monks, numbering up to 500 lexicographers. With the invention of printing, the number of these dictionaries and other aids for reading and studying St. Writings in the West quickly began to increase, and for a biographical list of everything that has been done in this area in Western European literature from the beginning of printing to the present day, more than one volume would be required. Here in Russia, the so-called symphonies appeared relatively late and, moreover, in fragments. The first symphony was published in 1727; it was composed on psalms by Prince Antioch Cantemir; the second symphony (Ilyinsky - on the Four Gospels and Acts) went through three editions (1737, 1767 and 1821); the third symphony (Bogdanov - on the messages and the Apocalypse) had two editions (1737 and 1821). There were also symphonies for Old Testament books, although not for all of them. So in 1823 in Moscow a symphony was published on the Mosaic Pentateuch, in 1825 on the teaching books of the Old Testament, in 1826 on the prophetic books; the remaining 19 books - historical ones - did not have symphonies at all, and even those mentioned already in half a century became a bibliographic rarity. About fifteen years ago, almost simultaneously, two symphonies on the New Testament appeared: one, a short one, compiled by Princess Baryatynskaya for the Russian Synodal translation of the New Testament, and the other, a complete one, for its Slavic text, compiled by P. Hiltebrandt and published by him under the title: “Reference and Explanatory Dictionary for the New Testament.” This is almost everything that has been done in our country based on reference and biblical literature before the “Symphony”, compiled under the editorship of Professor A. Lopukhin, famous for his numerous scientific works, editor of the spiritual magazine “Strannik”. This latter is, therefore, the first symphony in Russian, embracing the Bible in both its parts - both the Old Testament and the New Testament. Our present work, without claiming to be the completeness of this “Symphony,” differs from it in its purely church-practical nature, with its purpose mainly for preachers and missionaries, and the presentation of complete texts, and not the initial words, as in the Symphony, ed. ed. “The Wanderer”, grouping texts according to their logical affinity, and not according to the alphabet, as in the same “Symphony” - serve as the main differences between our work and others of the same kind.