Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 58:230 (Apr 1901)
Article: The Sophistical Element In Christian Preaching
Author: Charles Sumner Nash

BSac 58:230 (April 1901) p. 242

The Sophistical Element In Christian Preaching

Prof. Charles Sumner Nash

The name “Sophist,” first applied in a good sense to the Seven Sages, was especially given “to the educated men of ready speech who from about the year 450 b. c. used to travel through Greece from place to place and imparted what they knew for money.” The leaders of the class were honorable and honored men. They were sincere, as even Plato concedes. They were highly educated. They were skilled instructors of youth. They rendered good service to literature and oratory. They were stylists, winning their success by skillful and effective exposition and having great influence in forming the style of their time. When they began, prose composition was hardly practiced in central Greece. They were leaders in literature and oratory when Plato wrote the “Republic,” and had not lost their position and influence when Demosthenes spoke. “In fact,” writes one concerning them, “it is not too much to say that it was the Sophists who provided these great masters with their consummate instrument” “It must not be forgotten,” writes another, “that it was Gorgias who transplanted rhetoric to Greece, its proper soil, and who helped to diffuse the Attic dialect as the literary language of prose.”

And yet, despite their educational value, the Sophists early fell into disrepute. There were false notes in their work, which, gradually becoming dominant, justified the censure still standing against them. A life devoted to

BSac 58:230 (April 1901) p. 243

rhetoric, oratory, and dialectic is fraught with danger to both intellect and heart. The pursuit of form is fascinating; it is guilty and disastrous, when it usurps the throne which belongs to the pursuit of truth. The practice of persuasion may be as ennobling as it is captivating; but it is degrading, when, regardless of truth and righteousness, it drives at conquest and power. Into this pit the Sophists fell at the beginning of their class career. Their plight is described as follows: The sophistry of rhetoric led to that of politics. The sophistry of culture led to that of disputation. Hippias professed to teach all learning, to the end of culture. His successors “claimed to possess and to communicate not the knowledge of all branches of learning, but an aptitude for dealing with all subjects, which aptitude should make the knowledge of any subject superfluous. In other words, they cultivated skill in disputation. Now skill in disputation is plainly a valuable accomplishment. But when men set themselves to cultivate skill in disputation irrespective of the matter debated, when men regard the matter discussed, not as a serious issue, but as a thesis on which to practice their powers of ...