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| arrived at the church
in the uniform of a Captain of the Communist Maquis. They
fired him on the spot. Pastor Ponsoye, six feet five inches tall,
a giant with a stentorian voice, who could preach a forty-five-minute sermon
about World War I, came briefly out of retirement to replace him.
The president of the jury which heard my first practice sermon at the seminary was Jean Cadier. The sermon was abominable. It was neither constructed nor to the point; it rambled and it was poorly delivered. My teachers and my fellow students did not want to destroy me. They tried to be positive and, above all, kind. Cadier, who was opening the fire, was grasping for a single kind word about the catastrophe, could not find one, and thus told us the following story: "When Wilfred Monrod, one of the greatest Protestant preachers of the 19th century, delivered his first sermon at the seminary, his professor of Practical Theology told him: 'Wilfred, you will never be a preacher.'" At this the whole auditorium exploded in laughter. Cadier had tried to soften the truth, and failed. Ironically enough, only two years later, in 1945, after the sudden demise of Pastor Ponsoye, Cadier's church had to find a minister and called me, the freshly graduated student from the seminary. With fear and trembling did I step into the pulpit of Jean Cadier for a whole year. My sermons were vastly improved, as I worked on them like a demon. The most successful ones I adapted from the World War I sermons of Pastor Niemöller. Nobody, I was sure, had ever read them, since I owned the only available copy in the original German. One day, during the time I was serving at Cadier's former church, I was invited to a Pastoral Consecration at which he was presiding. I arrived late at the dinner which he, being seated at the head table, had already finished. Recognizing me at the other end, Cadier came over to me, put his arms around my shoulder, and said affectionately, "Didn't I tell you the truth when I compared your first sermon to the one of Wilfred Monrod?" I was not so sure about being as good a preacher as Wilfred Monrod, but I had to admit that I had certainly improved in the two years since the first debacle. "But this was the reason," I told him, "why students go to seminary and attend classes in Practical Theology." The most valid teacher
of them all and the one who influenced me most during my four years in
seminary was Théo Preiss who taught New Testament. He died,
much too young, in 1950. Alsatian from Riquewiehr, where his family
produced, for centuries, an excellent Riesling, he had come to us after
escaping from a German prisoner-of-war camp. He had just walked away,
and made his way back to France. His impeccable German had allowed
him to pass through without arousing any suspicion. His teaching
was based on all kinds of German Grand Masters of theology, which my fellow
students could not even spell, and whom they regarded with suspicion as
intruders into their tranquil domain of ignorance. My reaction was
opposite. I read feverishly all the books Preiss indicated, of which
I found quite a few in the library. It was a high-protein diet, which
I was not always able to digest properly. But at least I tried.
Since I was the only student who could |
