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“Don’t ever step d-o-w-w-w-n-n, from the pulpit … dramatic pause … to become Prime Minister.”
I was an impressionable student pastor attending my first denominational conference. The speaker was a renowned leader, respected for his passionate preaching. He was particularly convincing when he pointed his finger and shook his jowls. I wanted to be impressed with the comment but I wasn’t sure that I could be. After all, Prime Minister, is the highest elected office in the land. Imagine the influence one could have for the gospel from such a lofty position. The older I get, however, the more I think I agree with the man. It is not just that I am losing respect for the ability of politicians to effect lasting change. It is that I am growing in confidence in the Word of God preached.
A Theology of Preaching
Paul, in his second letter to Timothy (chapters 3 and 4) describes a culture where people love their money as much as they love themselves, where people are boastful, proud, and abusive. This is a place where people do not know how to love or to forgive and where people slander one another, acting brutally and without self-control. These people, rash and conceited, love pleasure rather than God. They have a form of godliness, but they know nothing of the power of God. Paul encourages Timothy in the face of all this, to continue in the Scriptures which are inspired of God and which provide all the equipment a person needs to do everything that God could expect. “In view of the fact that Jesus is coming,” Paul says, “and that he will judge the living and the dead, we have this charge, ‘Preach the Word!’”
The mandate remains in place for all who care about God’s Kingdom. Whether it is convenient or inconvenient, whether we feel like it or do not feel like it, whether we think they want to hear what we have to say or we are pretty sure that they don’t want to hear what we have to say, the call applies: Preach the Word. The fact that preaching may be despised or undervalued does not diminish the intensity of the command. The Word must be proclaimed and we all are called to the task.
Possibility of Preaching
People need to hear from God and preachers need to help them. Helping people hear from God may seem naive or unrealistic. That humans locked within the limits of their perspective could hear God’s voice seems presumptuous. Yet, preaching is possible because God has spoken. Our confidence is not in our own ability to discern a binding and objective truth. We’re not that bright. Our confidence is in the fact that God works to make himself known in remarkable ways. William Placher said,
Human reason cannot figure its way to such a God since a God we could figure out, a God fitted to the categories of our understanding, would therefore not be transcendent in an appropriately radical sense. We can know the transcendent God not as an object within our intellectual grasp but only as a self-revealing subject, and even our knowledge of divine revelation must be God’s doing (Placher 182).
God makes himself known in several ways:
Initiation reminds us that we have been created in the image of God. That is to say that we have been hardwired to hear from God. As Jesus said, “my sheep know my voice.”
Incarnation describes God’s willingness to take on flesh and blood, coming to live among us, literally showing God to us. The incarnation, may in fact, be the truest model of preaching because it was God’s ultimate act of communication (Fant 70). In the incarnation the objective God came to live in the contemporary world. The Word literally became flesh.
Inspiration speaks to the Bible itself as the expression of God’s will and character, literally “breathed out” for contemporary appropriation. The Bible is direct communication from God to his children, making it the required text for life and preaching.
Illumination acknowledges the human tendency to misunderstand. Illumination is the work of the Spirit, explaining and bringing light to what God has said in his word. It is critical to the task of preaching.
Preaching, remarkably, is the point of convergence for all four, where a human being, created in the image of God (initiation), speaking of the incarnate Christ, from the inspired Scripture operates in the power of the illuminating Spirit. Helping people hear from God is possible.
Objectives of Preaching
Preaching intends a variety of potential objectives. Reviewing the biblical words used in connection with the task of preaching reveals a surprising range of aims (Chapell 89-91). Preaching could exist to distinguish meaning, to cause to understand, to announce, to call, to herald or proclaim, to teach, to unfold, to open up, to reason or converse… Clearly, the Bible doesn’t limit the practice of preaching to a particular form or location. We may have understood preaching to be that thing that happens behind large oak pulpits on Sunday mornings in church. The Bible would view such a limited understanding as a reduction.
Preaching today intends whatever God in his Word directs. A sermon could lead us to a fuller understanding or to a specified response. It could stimulate worship or it could command a tearful repentance. The priority is to let God have his way with his word. When we help people hear from God we create opportunity for people to respond to his word.
Nature of Preaching
Traditionally people have understood biblical preaching from within a variety of categories. Textual preaching, topical preaching, narrative preaching, expository preaching, and other such pigeonholes allowed homileticians to distinguish between approaches to the task. Hard-core expositors, for example, were fond of criticizing topical preachers. “If you preach one topical sermon out of 100, it’s too many,” was the attitude. The idea was that sermons that were faithful to God’s purpose must be fully derived from the text of Scripture in form and content. Beginning with a listener-friendly topic was viewed as leading inevitably to textual compromise.
Perhaps, it is time to realize, however, that these categories are deceptive. Expository preaching need not be at war with a topical approach. The Bible is, after all, essentially topical. The question, more properly, is a matter of authority. How directly do the arguments offered reflect the presentation of Scripture? A presentation that allows the “big A” Author to direct the sermon grants the preacher greater confidence. This approach does not dictate any particular sermon form. The concept allows that God’s voice be heard as clearly as possible by resting the authority of the sermon as squarely as possible upon the Word of God.
A Theory of Preaching
The preacher’s challenge is to present sermons that are as serious about what God has to say as what the listener needs to hear. That is to say, that the preacher’s task is to integrate expository concern with topical concern. This integration needs to be applied to the two primary concerns of homiletics: authority and apprehension.
Authority in Preaching
Anyone who wishes to persuade must provide warrant for his or her claim. It may have been in distant times that listeners would attend sermons in an agreeable and docile frame of mind, unquestioningly receiving whatever the preacher cared to suggest. Those listeners have long since been replaced by a newer more skeptical group who listen with one finger on their mental remote control, challenging the preacher to prove that this sermon is worth the investment of their time and energy.
“Love one another,” the preacher says, “be good to your enemies.”
“Oh yeah,” the listener responds, “Who says?”
The preacher has two stock answers to the question. “God says,” the preacher could answer. It is a good answer. It is hard to argue with the one who created you and who continues to hold the controls. “God decreed that his people not go into battle with others. Love is the key to effective human relationship because that is how God decreed it. Love one another. God says.” This is an appeal to objective authority. Homiletically, it is an appeal to the text. It is the attempt to hold people accountable to the eternal truth as God has established it.
But for many, that may not be enough. Listeners today come ready-built with their own authority. They could choose to daydream or close their mind. They could get up and walk noisily out, shaking their fist as they do. The listener has power in the transaction known as preaching and they are not afraid to use it. The preacher, then, could offer his second stock answer, “You say.” “Think about your life experience,” he or she could say. “You would know, if you thought about it, that this message makes good sense. Everyone knows that love provides the greatest footing for peace and prosperity among people. Wouldn’t you rather be loved? Wouldn’t you rather give love?” Here the preacher uses the listener’s own assumptions and presuppositions to establish the case. Homiletically, it is an appeal to today.
The homiletic struggle over authority, then, comes down to the choice between text and today, between divine authority and human authority.
Traditional homiletics has described the task of preaching as the attempt to bridge the distance between text and today. That is a worthy approach, giventhat God speaks through the text to influence today. Perhaps, however, we could more helpfully suggest that the text is today. The distance between the ancient text and the contemporary situation is probably not as great as we sometimes want to maintain. Theologically we would want to be careful about saying that God did all his speaking in the past. God continues to speak in the present tense through his Word to the needs and people of today. The Bible is alive and dynamic. The preacher integrates the objective authority of text with the subjective authority of today to present a message that is powerful and compelling.
Apprehension in Preaching
The second primary concern for the preacher is to discover the most effective means of helping the listener grasp the truth. Apprehension, is the taking hold of a truth, like a constable apprehending a suspect, or a student picking up a book. Apprehension acknowledges that people are shaped in various ways and have different preferences for hearing and appropriating truth.
“This ‘love your enemies’ thing,” the listener says, “is confusing to me.”
“OK,” the preacher responds, “How can I help you? What can I do to present the message so that you will grasp it and appreciate it?”
The listener has two stock responses to the preacher. “Give me an explanation,” he or she might say. Lay out the logic. Help me understand your reasons. Show me how it makes sense that I should love someone who is working against my good. Explain it to me.” This is an appeal to cognitive apprehension. It emphasizes explanation and it describes the dominant approach to homiletics for centuries.
On the other hand, not every listener is tuned toward propositions and logic. Preacher’s ought not underestimate the limited literacy of many within our communities. Television and technology has created an insatiable appetite for narrative and orality. “Give me an experience,” these listeners say to the preacher. Don’t just tell me truth. Motivate me. Help me feel the truth. Help me care about what you have to say. This is an appeal to intuitive apprehension. It is a move toward experience.
The preacher’s attempt to encourage apprehension focuses upon the choice between explanation and experience, the distinction between reason and faith.
Traditionally, preachers have emphasized the cognitive path, explaining the propositions of the text and sermon, making things clear and setting things in order. The idea is that if the truth is made comprehensible to the mind, the listener will be compelled to respond and the preacher will have done his or her job. In fact, preachers need to expand their view of their task. Knowing the truth, even believing the truth, does not necessitate that the listener will behave in accordance with the truth. More recently, preachers have been rediscovering intuitive experience as an avenue to listener apprehension. Gripping stories and emotional appeal have been shown to compel listeners to want to respond to the message on offer, whether or not the propositions are clearly explained.
The Integration of Preaching
The recent history of homiletics has tended to describe a spasmodic lurching from pole to pole in the struggle between text and today, explanation and experience. Cognitive forms of exposition square off against more intuitive narrative sermon forms. Text based authority structures stand against listener based “seeker” forms or preaching. In the end, however, such polarized approaches might not be helpful. Integration describes the oxymoronic unifying of seemingly contrary options in such a way that the integrity of each substance remains uncompromised. Such preachers refuse to choose!
Overlaying the two continuums, authority and apprehension, creates the opportunity for preachers to integrate these seemingly opposing concerns.
Move 1: experience (apprehension) of the text (authority)
Move 2: explanation (apprehension) of the text (authority)
Move 3: explanation (apprehension) of today (authority)
Move 4: experience (apprehension) of today (authority)
God endorsed integration as a means of communication in the incarnation of his son, Jesus Christ. The Word become flesh is more than just an analogy of the preaching task. It is the substance of the preacher’s message.
People still need preachers, because people still need to hear from God. Preaching still matters because God still speaks. The world needs preachers, perhaps even more than the world needs politicians.
Works Cited
_Chapell, Bryan. Christ-Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1994.
Greidanus, Sidney. The Modern Preacher and the Ancient Text: Interpreting and Preaching Biblical Literature. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1988; Leicester, England: Inter-Varsity Press, 1988.
Placher, William. The Domestication of Transcendance: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1996.
Robinson, Haddon W. Biblical Preaching: The Development and Delivery of Expository Messages. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1980._