The Posture of Listening to God's Word - Part 3

In The Meaning of Revelation, H. Richard Niebuhr points out that by “revelation,” we must mean more than just the “historic Jesus” (Barth) or the egocentric “self” (Descartes). We must mean the centrally radiating reality of a revealing, eternal God. Niebuhr wrote, "When we say revelation we point to something in the historic event more fundamental and more certain than Jesus or than self. Revelation means God, God who discloses himself to us through history as our knower, our author, our judge and our only saviour. “All revelation,” Professor Herrman writes, ‘is the self-revelation of God’ (Der Begriff der offenbarung, 1887)…it is the peculiar activity of God, the unveiling of his hiddenness, his giving of himself in communion.”  

Eugene Peterson writes that two of the greatest enemies of the Christian faith are (and always have been) moralism: “dishonoring the Son” (or legalism) and gnosticism: “dishonoring the Father” (or “spiritualism”). The third enemy that he identified was sectarianism: “dishonoring the Spirit” in Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places he writes, “Gnosticism is a virus in the bloodstream of religion and keeps resurfacing every generation or so advertised as brand new, replete with a new brand name. On examination, though, it turns out to be the same old thing but with a new public relations agency”. And later, “moralism works from a base of human ability and arranges life in such a way that my good behavior will guarantee protection from punishment or disaster. Moralism works from strength, not weakness. Moralism uses God (or the revelation of God) in order not to need God any longer. Moral codes are used as stepping stones to independence from God” 

When Susan Wise Bauer wrote her June 16, 1997 Christianity Today review of the two new books on the life of King David by Eugene Peterson (Leap Over A Wall: Earthy Spirituality for Everyday Christians, San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997) and Chuck Swindoll (David: A Man of Passion and Destiny, Waco, TX: Word Books Publishers, 1997), she made note that the major difference between the two books was that Peterson took the story of David seriously as Scriptural narrative, while Swindoll reduced the story (and the Scriptures) to a set of moralisms. She writes, “topology creeps into Swindoll’s stories: David’s life is a series of moral lessons...to flatten story into principle takes away a vital dimension of revelation.”

The Posture of Listening to God's Word - Part 2

God has shown himself to be a God of revelation. This does not mean that he has revealed all knowledge, but merely that he has chosen to initiate the revelation of his nature and his will himself, by initiating revelatory speech. God initiates and his people respond. God speaks; his people listen. As Alister McGrath points out, “Revelation” does not mean merely the transmission of a body of knowledge, but the personal self-disclosure of God within history. God has taken the initiative through a process of self-disclosure, which reaches its climax and fulfillment in the history of Jesus of Nazareth.

God’s self-revelation is his Word. His Word created everything. His Word came to his chosen people, through his chosen leaders. His Word to and through his chosen prophets was recorded and regarded as Scripture. Later, his Word became flesh and lived for a while among us. This Word was witnessed and proclaimed by the apostles. The people of God are the people who come together to listen to the Word of God. God’s Word defines them. It draws God’s people into relationship with him. As Eugene Peterson writes, "The very essence of “word” is personal. It is the means by which what is within one person is shared with another person. Words link spirits...when a word is spoken and heard, it joins speaker and hearer into a whole relationship...The intent of revelation is not to inform us about God but to involve us in God."

The primary role of the Christian leader, then, ought to be to lead people to pay attention to God’s initiating revelatory speech. The leader must position God’s people to a place and posture of receiving God’s Word. Paul Barnett points out that the role of God’s leader is often described as that of a “shepherd” who leads God’s flock (Num. 27:15-18, 2 Sam. 5:1-4, Jer. 3:15, 23:4, Jer. 50:6-7, Eze. 34:23, Zec. 10:2-3, Jn. 21:17, Act. 20:28, 1Pet. 5:2 NIV).

            

God is not in some faraway country, to which leaders must take the flock of the people of God. Rather, he is the radiating center of all existence. God is ever present and ever revealing. The Christian leader’s task is to help people pay attention to God’s self-revelation. This is not a matter of humans initiating searches or opinions about God, but an active leading of God’s people to listen to God’s personally initiated revelation to his people and his Word. A leader does not gather God’s people to listen to his ideas about God, but to listen to God revealing himself.

            

It is essential that leaders begin by being formed themselves by listening to God’s Word through careful exegesis and study, and that they publicly direct their congregations in such a way that the Word is heard regularly and clearly. The act of preaching cannot merely be a lecture of human opinion. It must be more than a talk from a topical series on people’s perceived needs. It surely moves beyond the repetition of introductory evangelism or apologetics. It ought never to be the simplistic reciting of legalistic platitudes that uses God’s Word as merely an encyclopedia of morality. Nor ought it ever be an Ouija board-like use of Scripture for the spiritualistic practice of personal, esoteric experience. The first and most important principle must be the fundamental posture of any leader of God’s people, to see himself, above anything else, as leading God’s people to pay attention to God’s radiating revelation. God’s revelation must be set as the center of attention, rather than all of the competing human centers, which call for attention, both inside and outside the Church.

The Posture of Listening to God’s Word - Part 1

It can be demonstrated that the authentic definition and approach to the content of Christian Spiritual formation for every generation has always been shaped through the public proclamation of the texts of the Holy Scriptures. Preaching can be seen throughout the panorama of the entire story of God’s redemptive history, recorded in the Scriptures, as the greatest work of the shepherds of God’s flock. Authentic Christian preaching, in every generation, has always been the act of God’s representative messenger, paying attention to logos of God’s revealed Word and proclaiming the meaning of that Word to the people in their contemporary context. 

The leaders of Christian communities must give precedence to the text of God’s Word, and defer to it for the authority and context of their messages. They must preach the Word. They must not begin with themselves. They must read the text, exegete it, understand it, and proclaim it to their gathered audience, in their language, history, and culture. They must then apply it to their existential reality.

God wants to form us, reform us and transform us. He formed all that is. He has been reforming a people for himself through all of history. He is transforming individuals to fit them into his reformed humanity. This is a Spiritual formation, and it comes through his revealed Word. 

Guard Against Conforming

The postmodern context offers us many strange and enticing ways to substitute authentic Christian worship for entertaining, exciting, selfishly fulfilling experiences. The Church must guard against conforming to the patterns of this or any era. God does not change, and his mandate for the Church remains the same. Authentic Christian Spiritual formation comes through careful listening to and proclamation of the logos of the Word of God, in the ethos of our contemporary context, with valid pathos. Dr. Stanley Grenz died suddenly in 2005. One of his last interviews contained this answer to a question about his thoughts on the next 25 years of the Church in this postmodern setting. He said,

As I look to the future I am profoundly hopeful – not because of what I believe we will accomplish, but because of the God in whom I believe. Although the problems we face are enormous, we stand under the mandate of Jesus Christ who is the Lord of Creation. We are indwelt by the Holy Spirit. And, we are children of the Creator of the universe. For this reason, I am convinced that just as the gospel has gone forth with power in every era and to every generation, so also the gospel will sound forth in the postmodern context in which we live. And the God who promises to bring creation to its divinely intended goal invites us to participate in the divine program. May we, therefore, empowered by the Spirit, be faithful to the mandate Christ has entrusted to us, to the glory of God! 

One will do well to heed these words as one endeavors to be God’s faithful steward, listening to his logos – exegeting it, believing it, and living it with authentic pathos – and truly exposing it to the genuine ethos of this postmodern generation.

Dumbing Down the Story

Ralph and Gregg Lewis wrote a helpful volume called Inductive Preaching, which emphasizes the need for good storytelling in postmodern preaching. They make an excellent case for the fact that this is the essential means of faithful biblical preaching. They stress the fact that the Scriptures come to us primarily as narrative and are, therefore, story. The Bible is basically one long story; God’s story. This is his revelation of himself through his own story about himself and his personal revelation through the lives and histories of his people. The art of good storytelling is an essential skill one must master to strike authentic pathos as a proclaimer of God’s Word. Jesus primarily asked questions and told stories. The Church today tends to give answers and lectures. In this postmodern culture, there is especially a vital need for the skills of good storytelling.

One of the sensitive issues in this contemporary climate is the popular rebellion against any kind of institutional authority. If one is perceived to be a paternalistic, archaic, hierarchical, bigoted Church spokesperson, spouting dead, theoretical rhetoric, one will have a small audience of postmodern listeners. But, if one tells a story with real contemporary pathos, one will be perceived as being captivating, real, and relevant. Then one will find a waiting audience who will listen, be fed, and come to hear the truth of God’s Word.

There are some ways that one must resist a compromise with a kind of pathos that is not biblical. Marva Dawn brings her witty and insightful mind to bear on the controversial issue of worship in today’s churches in her book, A Royal “Waste” of Time. She makes a very good case for the value and necessity of historic, traditional liturgy in Christian Spiritual formation. In this postmodern setting, there is a growing interest in tradition, mystery, and sacred space. There has been a growing distrust and distaste for the sometimes antiseptic, rationalistic, deductive, and linear approach to church life that some Evangelicals have taken during the modern era. It can be argued that, after swallowing modernism completely, the evangelical Church lost a crucial sense of sacredness.

Dawn argues for a renewed sense of being the Church in its most basic purpose: worshipping God. This worship will have no other value or purpose other than to glorify the Triune God. Though there is constant temptation and pressure to make the Church’s worship do something or be something for some sake other than purely worshipping, Christians must resist this Satanic magnetic pull and refrain from using worldly trained skills to make the worship accomplish something other than “wasting” time with God.

There is a strange yet popular idea today of making worship into an evangelistic endeavor. The theory is: invite the unconverted person into a worship service, and, as he experiences the “presence of God,” he will be converted. Dawn addresses this misguided, experientially based, gnostic-like program in her other book, Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down. Another troubling trend is to see worship as a means to the end of “bringing people into the presence of God.” This of course misses the biblical point that one is always in God’s presence, and again uses worship as a device to create a self-centered, subjective experience.

One more strange development in worship today is the emergence of the non-leading leader. In many postmodern churches, the musician at the front may be having his own little personal worship experience, which the congregation is invited to join in on if it knows the tune. There is very little “leadership” in this. It fits the postmodern, individualistic, private religious desires of those who want the common church experience that is a popular replacement today for authentic Christian worship. But it is not authentic pathos.