As the "new theology" repudiated much of the liberalism from which it emerged, Scherer repudiated many of his earlier ideas about God and man. In his third book of sermons the biblical content is handled more firmly than in the earlier volumes and the dictum that the biblical situation is our situation is beginning to assume its central role in his thinking. As one student of his writings has observed: "The sharp change in theological thought in America which Dr. Scherer reveals was a reaction to the preaching of the 20s and 30s which centered in the ethical and social but avoided the theological. The old emphasis was essentially humanist and sermons were topical rather than textual. The new trend in preaching was toward theology and biblical content. The pulpit pendulum which had swung in some instances far to the left in social justice swung back toward the right nearer the center and also nearer that distinctive basis which alone can make a sermon Christian."
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Scherer's Beecher Lectures are considered as one of the chief influences in the trend toward biblical preaching of the American pulpit since that time. He pointed out the weakness of both Modernism and Fundamentalism -- the one seeking to discover in reason the seat and source of the only unchallenged authority that is available, trimming the sails of Christianity to every passing wind of science, the other being a slave to the letter, and stopping the soul of the Bible dead in its tracks.
He pleaded for a return to the Bible as bearing on it the witness of our own experience and carrying written on its back what Paul calls the Divine "Yes" in Christ. Those who directed their efforts solely in the direction of situational changes he considers "superficial optimists in our pulpits, however devoted and able, who go all out for building a new world first, and having somewhat to do privately with Jesus of Nazareth a little later."
He sought not to change social conditions with the gospel, for to him there was no such thing as a social gospel but a gospel with social implications. He sought not to further a society of justice and righteousness but to enable individual men and women who had been redeemed to give themselves to the task of building such a society out of the ruins of the time.
In a sermon on Protestantism, its liabilities and its assets, Scherer said this at the close: "You cannot deplete human existence morally and spiritually as the last four centuries have depleted it, to the point not of high tragedy but of dismal triviality and farce, and then expect to transform it with a United Nations. You cannot transform it with anything less than a faith that has a cross in the middle, and the kind of people gathered round that God Himself will underwrite."
With his mastery of words and language Paul Scherer could have been a great novelist. Instead, he used his genius for great preaching, expressing religious truths in new, fresh language to capture and hold the interest of his hearers. His sermons are close to life, close to God, close to the needs of modern man as well as being close to the Bible. They represent a strenuous grappling with the real problems of thought and life, to the facing of which a high intelligence is brought.
Martin E. Marty has stated that "the mid-20th century has experienced a profound theological recovery which makes it the most theologically conscious era since the Reformation." To that recovery Paul Scherer made one of the most important and significant contributions.
