Os Guinness observes, “the only thing that is always relevant is the gospel.” Meanwhile, Chad Myers is right to warn against “reducing (the Scriptures) to morality tales for private spirituality.” Myers also writes, “Fortunately, postmodernism has exposed the fallacy of claims to either doctrinal or historic-critical objectivity.” Hopefully he does not mean what others have taken to mean that there is no such thing as “objective truth”. He hopefully means that the claim that one can reach a perfect, objective understanding of any text is a fallacy. God is objectively true. He reveals himself through his logos, the Word. This revelation comes to us as truth. It is objectively true, but received subjectively. The preacher’s task is to listen, dig, mark, learn, meditate, argue, study, memorize, obey, and then proclaim, as best he can, what it meant and what it means.
Christian preachers must be especially careful when exegeting narrative. These parts of Scripture are given to us as “stories,” but they are also the historic records of God’s revealed salvation history events; his real, historic work in the real world, not just the experience of how these stories make us feel. These are not private oracles through which individuals are meant to have their own personal religious experience. These are the corporate “stories” of the Spiritual formation of the authentic, historic faith community that worships the God who has revealed himself in and through his personally breathed-out Word. As Peter Adam writes, “Christian gospel ministry involves explaining, preaching, applying and interpreting this sufficient Word so that people may be converted and congregations may be built up in faith, godliness and usefulness.”
Another contemporary compromise with postmodern culture is the rejection of expository preaching for greater spiritualist experientialism. Some have tried to link exegetically based “expository preaching” with modernist intellectualism, in contrast with more “Spirit-led,” spontaneous, postmodern, topical messages. John Woodhouse makes a convincing argument for the absurdity of this, stressing that the reasonable and clearly exegeted text and the Spirit are inseparable. He rejects the attempt to bring a “balance” between these two extremes as heretical. He demonstrates that the illumination of the text of God’s Word is the primary work and message of the Holy Spirit. He then calls for an embracing of the authentically Christian approach to interpreting and proclaiming the Word, which involves the dynamic synergy between the Spirit of God speaking and working through the Word of God read, exegeted, and taught.
