Necessity of Preaching (Part 2)

The essence of authentic Christian preaching can be seen throughout the panorama of the entire story of God’s redemptive history, recorded in the Scriptures. The fundamental task of the spiritual leader has always and only been to listen to God’s Word, understand God’s meaning, and proclaim it to his contemporary community. The Christian leader is to lead his people to pay attention to God. In these last days, God is paid attention to through the text of his spoken Word, the Bible (Heb. 1:1-3). The primary call of the Christian leader, then, is to continue to exegete the texts of God’s Word and teach it to his community.

How could any Christian person “hate” that, sleep through it, or cheer for its absence during a Christian gathering? Either God’s Word is being talked about, but not truly preached and understood, or the message is being understood, but it is not really God’s Word. Neither scenario is what God expects of authentic preaching in his gathered covenant community. As John Stott points out, it is when the Church has neglected to execute its first duty to authentic, exegetically based, expository preaching, that it has experienced its eras of decline and weakness in strength, numbers, and vitality.

Authentic Christian preaching ought to never be long, boring, rationalistic lectures, which are propositional, authoritarian, and opinionated in nature. It does not necessarily mean three-point, deductive, dogmatic sermons. It will always be a prophetic message that exegetes God’s revealed text and expose the people of God to the Word of God. This is what expository preaching is; exposing God’s people to God’s Word. This is the “baby” that ought to be kept. The “bathwater” that ought to be tossed out will be any style that does not communicate the meaning of God’s Word, or any well-communicated message that is not God’s Word. The text must be taken very seriously and people must take themselves less seriously.

As the “bathwater” of modernist Christianity flows down the drain of history, the “baby” of authentic Christian belief and practice must be saved and cradled in new forms for a new generation. These nine important themes: Community, Humility, Inquiry, Sensuality, Text, Irreverence, Activity and Text can guide us in listening to and proclaiming the authentic Word of God in this new postmodern paradigm. These themes will also help us test the bible teaching we receive, to determine if it reaches the goal of being high logos, high ethos and high pathos. This is the true high calling of both those who proclaim and those who receive spiritual formation through that proclamation. As St. Paul wrote: “Test everything. Hold on to the good.” (1 Thessalonians 5:2)

Necessity of Preaching (Part 1)

Humbert of Romans said, “In this connection we must observe that, though preaching is necessary for the whole of creation, it is particularly useful to men”.  In genuine, postmodern Christian faith, Spiritual formation through preaching will be held up as a necessary part of any authentic and healthy church of Jesus Christ. David Buttrick stated, “Speaking is our primary task.” Douglas John Hall said, “Ministers are recalled to the teaching office.” John Stott laid out five theological arguments that “leave us without excuse” in being convinced “of the indispensable necessity” of preaching for today. These five arguments come from the five biblical doctrines of God, Scripture, the Church, the pastorate, and the nature of preaching. The apostles gave their “attention to prayer and the ministry of the word” (Acts 6:4 NIV) and Paul instructed Timothy to devote himself “to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching” (1 Tim. 4:13 NIV). Yet, somehow, in many circles, preaching has come to be considered optional.

At our church, we are attempting to communicate and demonstrate the necessity of preaching. From the beginning, there have been people who would like to drop the weekly, verbal proclamation from the program. But our leadership is convinced of the necessity of preaching for the health and legitimacy of our fellowship. We plan a menu of teaching for the coming year. We balance Old and New Testament, narrative and prophecy, epistle, topics, and issues. We incorporate the seasons of the Church, the nation, and the year. We honor local and global events. However, we never stop listening to the text of God’s Word systematically read and taught in context.

Biblical preaching is an essential means of shaping Christian spiritual formation. The public reading and interpreting and practical application of God’s recorded revelation exposes his people to the very pneuma (breath) of the living God. Nothing else can claim this; not singing, praying, working, serving, nor giving. These things are all the responses to his Spirit breathing life into his people. It is through his Word exposed to his people that they are convicted, converted, and commanded. Preaching may look and sound different in this postmodern age. But it will remain necessary for the life of the Church as it has done in every age of God’s salvation history.

Text in Preaching (Part 2)

Jesus argued in his great “Sermon on the Mount” that until heaven and earth disappear, not even an iota or a keraia will vanish from the Scriptures. And those who luse (loosen or destroy) any bit of it “will be least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches (it) will be called great in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:19 NIV). Unfortunately, in some churches, the Word of God is not only adhered to loosely, it is twisted to mean whatever people want it to mean. One could argue that contemporary Christianity is a combination of legalism and spiritualism wrapped up in Christian clichés.

Greater emphasis must be placed on the postmodern preacher’s job of doing careful exegesis, faithful practice, and proper instruction of biblical texts. This is what Paul was commending Timothy to do when he said, “What you heard from me, keep as the pattern of sound teaching, with faith and love in Christ Jesus. Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you – guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us” (2 Tim. 1:13-14 NIV). Training in the study, practice, and teaching of the Word is crucial for Christian leadership in every age, but especially in this postmodern era when texts and rational communication is deconstructed and dismissed as relative.

There is another enemy of proper Christian attention to the study, practice, and teaching of texts today; a uniquely postmodern erroneous belief in an antithesis between “head knowledge” and “spiritual knowledge.” This myth assumes that “spiritual” wisdom is something that drops out of the clear blue sky directly from God, rather than being something revealed by God to human minds and hearts. This is a great contributing evil to some of the chaos in our contemporary scene. Sincere, well-meaning men and women, chiefly because of an ignorance of basic biblical truths, teach heresy in the name of Christ. If proper exegesis of biblical texts is ignored, ignorance will be studied, practiced, and taught.

At our church, we are endeavoring to study, practice, and teach the Word of God together. The teachers are committed to faithfully exegeting the actual texts of the Scriptures. As previously mentioned, we teach through whole books of the Bible. We invite our congregation to test everything that is taught against their own understanding of the texts through personal study. The members of the team of teachers also hold one another accountable to be faithful representatives of the Word. We help one another, ask one another, commend one another, and forgive one another when we fail. The authentically Christian, postmodern preacher must be committed to be a serious student of the Word first, and then to be one who exposes the actual texts of God’s revelation to his/her congregation.

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The Emergent Church Part 2

The “emergent” metaphor is one of evolution. Are emergent churches a legitimate evolution of the authentic Church of Jesus Christ, or are they illegitimate compromises with their embedded cultural context? Vincent Donovan, Roman Catholic missionary to Africa, argued for a kind of evolution when he wrote, "In working with…people…do not try to call them back to where they were, and do not try to call them to where you are, as beautiful as that place might seem to you. You must have the courage to go with them to a place that neither you nor they have ever been before"

Are emergent church leaders going with their people to an authentically Christian place the Church has never been before? What are the implications of this to the regular practice of biblical exposition in Spiritual formation? Stan Grenz describes an e-mail he received from an acquaintance who is establishing an emergent church in Reno, Nevada. The church leaders have “five values” they will use to guide their new emergent community. These are:

1. Mystery – We’re learning that there can be fewer answers and more questions when it comes to God, life, and life with God. And, we’re OK with that.

2. Beauty – We celebrate artistic responses to a passionate, creative God.

3. Conversations – We value every person’s story because every person’s story is valued by God.

4. Organic – We are real people living in a real world trying to make a real difference with no strings attached.

5. Chicala (sp.?) – a cool Indian word for past, present, and future; a merger of ancient or historical Christian faith and our emerging culture.

This list does not include any clear affirmation of solidarity with the timeless authentic practice of raising Christians to maturity through the regular exposition of the Holy Scriptures. There is a great divide in the western evangelical Church. Two extremes seem to vie for legitimacy in the practice of preaching in the contemporary evangelical Church in the West. On the one extreme are those who would champion what has been known as “biblical (or expository) preaching” as the authentic approach to Christian proclamation, whether people will (or can) listen or not. On the other extreme are those who have rejected what they see as a modernist paradigm, and are attempting to craft a truly postmodern approach to Christian Spiritual formation. This emergent movement emphasizes the need to change the style of public, weekly church proclamation to make it more listener-centered and palatable, sometimes whether the message of God’s Word is heard or not.

Tom Sine asks, “Is it possible the church is in crisis and no one noticed? Is it possible God is raising up a new generation to re-invent the church?” There is a movement of young, postmodern, emergent churches growing in the West, led by 20-30-year-old Christians. These churches are forging new communities with unique expressions of Christian faith. The young leaders of these emergent churches are rejecting the modernist, rationalistic paradigm inherent in contemporary western churches. Meanwhile, they are attempting to craft truly postmodern approaches to Christian Spiritual formation. This is especially true of their attitude towards and practice of preaching. They are emphasizing the need to change the style of public, weekly church proclamation, and to make it more palatable to a postmodern audience. But what will this new approach look like, and will it be an authentically Christian expression?

The Postmodern Worldview (Part 1)

Just as modernist philosophers began to question premodern assumptions long before the modernist Enlightenment took hold of western civilization, postmodern philosophers and artists began to challenge the ideas and mores of the modernist paradigm. Near the turn of the 20th Century, Virginia Woolf wrote scandalous stories that challenged the accepted mores of human sexuality. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity challenged the accepted ideas of Newtonian science. Karl Marx challenged the rightness of western capitalist commerce. Ideas like these took time to sink into the popular imagination.

One event, however, shattered the entrenched optimism of modernism in western civilization more than any other. At a time when it was assumed that with enough good western science, education, medicine, government, and religion, modernism could conquer every problem and virtually bring heaven to earth, the two nations that had the best western science, education, medicine, government, and religion went to war in the most horrific conflict the world had yet witnessed. Germany and England (and their allies) fought across Europe, devastating a continent and a generation. Following WW1 was a global influenza pandemic, a global economic depression, and a second world war. By the 1950s, western optimism was replaced with a new pessimism that precipitated the revolutionary postmodern paradigm shift.

As modernism was in every way a reaction to premodernism, so postmodernism is in every way a reaction to modernism. Every way that postmodernism judges modernism as wrong, it is right. Unfortunately, though, postmodernism sets up a just-as-wrong alternative to biblical revelation.

The optimistic secular worldview of modernism has been replaced with a pluralistic worldview. David Henderson writes, "Postmodernism is a rejection of Enlightenment thinking, the rationalism and optimism of the modern world. Purpose, design, objective truth, absolutes, and any idea of overarching “metanarratives” or “totalizing discourses” are thrown out the window. Instead, postmodernism embraces the nihilism of and perspectivism of Nietzche and the existentialism of Sartre. Life is pointless. There is no inherent meaning or purpose in life and there is no truth."

The politically correct liberalism of postmodern western civilization accepts all opinions as being pluralistically “true.” The concept of “truth” itself has been deconstructed and is now popularly understood to be a perspective, and only one piece of a pluralist mosaic of opinions. Therefore, contradictory ideas can be held to be mutually “true” in that they merely represent differing perspectives.

In the post-Einstein world, human reason was found to be an unreliable arbiter for understanding reality. Postmodernism has replaced rationalism with sentimentalism. Human experience and feelings have replaced reason as the most trustworthy, final authority. If the truth about life and faith is relative, one can rely on personal experience and personal revelation to be as – or even more – authoritative as the Scriptures.

Life, then, is governed not by principles, but by personal preference. There is a post-liberal idea in postmodernism that suggests that Jesus and the Bible may be true for Christians, but not necessarily for others. In the smorgasbord of religious ideas available to the western postmodern person, the individual’s personal preference is the final governance for life and faith practice. The highest form of religious freedom is the liberty of each individual to make personal choices in every area of life and faith.

The place of God in the imaginations of postmoderns has been replaced by a myriad of spiritualities. This contemporary western generation is religiously sophisticated. It is exposed to a plethora of religious traditions and ideas, which are being picked over, accepted, and combined with pluralistic zeal to create new, relativistic, personal religions. John Stackhouse Jr. writes, When it comes to ultimate matters, then, many of our North American neighbors have resorted to a secularism that frees one from all religious authority to a hyper-individualistic “religion a la carte.” Indeed, our society’s tolerance of do-it-yourself religion is, itself, a manifestation of secularization. For in leaving questions of the reality of God or the gods up to each individual, this attitude implies that there really aren’t any such supernatural entities."

The highest value for postmoderns is tolerance. The least tolerated notion from modernism is the idea that one religious expression is better than another. It is interesting that angels, demons, ghosts, and miracles are more prevalent in popular postmodern culture than they were in the modernist context. American movies and television, capitalizing on the religious milieu of the nation and the surprising popularity of Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ, are addressing issues of the supernatural and religious. Meanwhile, mainline churches in North America are losing adherents at an alarming rate.

The place of the self in the postmodern context is “unanchored” and responsible to no one. There is a fixation with the freedom of the adolescent lifestyle in popular western culture. Staying young, fit, and active are the highest of values, while responsibility, wisdom, and maturity are abhorred. The place of others is seen in terms of their value in serving the self. Others are there for the self to use. Relationships become means to an end in the service of personal fulfillment. The self exploits the relationship to get what it can from the other and then discards the other when it is of no more use to the self. This is a disposable culture. Marriages, churches, friends, and business associations can all be discarded when they no longer serve the perceived needs of the self. No-fault divorce is an invention of the postmodern western world. It is simply a symptom of a wider throwaway society.

However, the place of creation in the postmodern context is over the self. Nature has come to be seen as practically a deity to be served. The virtues of ecological preservation are unquestioned by the majority of postmoderns, and the literal worship of nature through pagan religions is on the rise in the West, with significant representation of the “Covenant of the Goddess” at the 2004 Parliament of World Religions. Meanwhile, the United Nations Environmental Protection Agency names Christianity as a source cause of environmental problems in its 1995 document, The Global Biodiversity Assessment.

In the postmodern context, morality is governed by personal choice. The popular way of judging whether something is morally acceptable is whether someone’s rights are perceived to be in danger of being violated. Anything is permissible, then, as long as “no one gets hurt.” Each individual defines his own morality based on his perception and interpretation of individual, personal rights. It can be said that in the postmodern context, life is lived for “whatever.” If there is no objective truth, and morality is governed by personal choice, then the purpose of life is determined by the sovereignty of each individual. It is no longer asked, “Is it true?” Rather, it is asked, “Do I like it?”

The Biblical Christian Paradigm

First, the biblical worldview is a theistic one. One must begin with God at the center. He is radiating out from the center, his revelation of his character and will to his whole creation. This is the overarching imagination of the biblical Christian perspective. God is preeminent in all things. Everything fits together into his plan for life and faith.

Final authority in all matters of life and faith, then, is God. But the Church must be more specific and say that all final authority is in Christ, who is the visible revelation of the invisible God (Col. 1:15). God has given him all authority in heaven and earth (Matt. 28:18). Here the Church must be even more specific, for neither Christ nor his authority is known apart from his revelation, which is recorded for us in the Scriptures. These must all be put together for a proper biblical perspective. Final authority rests in Christ, revealed through the canon of the Holy Christian Scriptures. These Scriptures must be the arbitrator for teaching, correcting, rebuking, and training (2 Tim. 3:16-17).

Next, it must be noted that life is governed by theology. Theology must be understood as “God (theos) understanding (logos)” rather than merely the ideas and philosophies of theologians, preachers, or religious leaders. How is “God understanding” gained? God has revealed everything his people need to know for life and faith in the Scriptures. Therefore, the Word of God must be studied to understand his character and will. This “God understanding” is proper theology, and it must guide all Christian thinking and living.

Following this, the place of God must be seen as supreme in all Christian thinking and living. He is at the center, not any individual or philosophy. Christians recognize him in both individual and collective imagination as the center of all things. It follows, then, that the place of self (personal opinions and feelings) is under God and peripheral to his revealed truth. The human cries of “who am I?” or “Where do I fit in?” are only answered as one finds one’s place in the periphery of God’s being.

As the place of God and the self is understood in light of biblical revelation, the place of others and of creation follows. The place of others is that others are there for the self to serve (Matt. 20:25-28). Christians are to relate to one another in light of God’s generosity to us. He has freely given. Believers can freely give. He has freely forgiven. His followers can freely forgive. He freely serves. Christians can freely serve. Likewise, it is understand from God’s revelation that all of creation is his, and humans are here as caregivers.

In the biblical Christian paradigm, morality is governed by virtue. Morality is something God does by his Holy Spirit in and through individuals. They are not under religious law. They do not perform good deeds for God. Their best efforts are as filthy rags to him. Rather, his Holy Spirit resides with Christian believers and he produces his fruit in them and through them (Gal. 5:22-23). His Law is written on their hearts. Finally, in the biblical paradigm, life is lived for the glory of God. He alone is sovereign. All things are by him, with him, in him, and for him.

The Clash of Ideologies

To understand the issues of the western, postmodern paradigm, one must see it in its juxtaposition with western modernism. Likewise, western modernism itself can only be understood in its contrast and reaction to western premodernism. Finally, all these patterns must be contrasted with the biblical paradigm. Below is a chart showing the differences between each of these paradigms when contrasted with each other in their approach to nine seminal issues.

The first thing to consider is the “worldview.” This is the overarching way of seeing the world, which dominates the imagination of culture. The second consideration is what constitutes the “final authority” for each era in question. This is the issue of how truth is understood and mitigated. The third thing to consider is the issue of what people see their “life governed by.” This is the issue of how social structure is ordered. The fourth consideration is the “place of God” in the social structure of each given era.

ISSUES	BIBLICAL	PREMODERN	MODERN	POSTMODERN
Worldview	Theistic	Superstitious	Secular / Naturalistic	Pluralistic
Final Authority	Christ in the Scriptures	Church / Monarch	Reason	Feelings
Life Governed by	Theology	Fear	Principals	Personal Preference
Place of God	Over All	Distant Ruler	Distant / Absent	Replaced by spiritualities
Place of Self	Under God	Within Feudal Hierarchy	At the Centre Under No One	Unanchored / Responsible to No One
Place of Others	There for Self to Serve	Competition	For Mutual Benefit	There for Self to Use
Place of Creation	To be Cared For	Equal to Self	Under the Self	Over the Self
Morality Governed by	Virtue	Law	Ethics	Personal Choice
Life Lived for	The Glory of God	The Glory of Rulers	The Glory of Man	Whatever

The fifth thing to consider is the “place of the self.” This is the question of where the individual fits within the structure of society. Sixth is the consideration of the “place of others.” This is the question of how individuals relate to other individuals and to the larger community. The seventh consideration is the issue of the “place of creation” in the governing of life in each era. Creation would consist of everything in the natural world besides humans and their social and technological structures. Eighth is the question of what “morality is governed by” in each era. This is the way that the rules of social interaction are understood and regulated. The ninth and final consideration is what “life is lived for.” This is how the purpose of life is understood and followed. This grid can help us understand the clash of ideologies. One must consider each of these issues in light of biblical Christianity. 

The Radiating Revelation of God through People: 6. The Wise Ones

During the full epoch of the time of the prophets, the faith community created the wisdom literature of the Old Testament Scriptures as Holy Spirit-inspired response to God’s revealed Law. Designated wise ones wrote application of God’s revelation and response to God’s action and Word. These songs, poems, proverbs, and stories were accredited as Scripture by God’s Holy Spirit, endorsed by God’s designated authoritative representatives, embraced by the authentic faith community, and lived and prayed as a part of the formative sacramental life of God’s people. Jesus and the apostles also endorsed the wisdom literature of the Old Testament as authentically part of the revealed Word of God by quoting it and teaching from it. These “wise” artists are part of the representative, Scriptural concentric circle around the revealing center of God’s throne.

There was a period of about 400 years between the last prophetic Word of the Old Testament, and the first apostolic Word of the New Testament. During this time, like the 400 years of captivity in Egypt, the people of God experienced a dry season without any new Word from God. One picture of the authentic practice of preaching in the faithful covenant community, just before that inter-testamental period, is recorded in Nehemiah 8: All the people assembled as one man in the square before the Water Gate. They told Ezra the scribe to bring out the Book of the Law of Moses, which the LORD had commanded for Israel. So on the first day of the seventh month Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly…He read it aloud from daybreak till noon…in the presence of the men, women and others who could understand. And all the people listened attentively to the Book of the Law. Ezra the scribe stood on a high wooden platform built for the occasion...All the people could see him because he was standing above them; and as he opened it, the people all stood up…The Levites... instructed the people in the Law while the people were standing there. They read from the Book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people could understand what was being read…Then all the people went away to eat and drink, to send portions of food and to celebrate with great joy, because they now understood the words that had been made known to them (Neh. 8:1-12 NIV).

Here the authentic practice of the people of God is seen as they gather to listen to the formative Word of God read, sung, prayed, and preached, and then go out and worship God with their lives. This event occurred in the 5th Century B.C. Yet it is a model of Spiritual formation that could be contemporary with Moses through to Saint Paul, or with Saint Clement through to Martin Lloyd-Jones or any emergent leader today. The public proclamation of God’s Holy Scriptures is the historically authentic way that God’s Word continues to form, reform and transform his people.

As in the historic case of the Josian reformation (2 Ki. 22-23), the people of God gather and God’s book is brought out. It is read aloud. They listen. God’s leader (who has been formed himself through listening to the text, meditating on the text, and exegeting the text) explains the meaning of the text and applies it to their existential context. Then the transformed people of God respond in worship. Besides the Josian and Nehemian reformations, the authentic faith community is always reformed and rejuvenated whenever God’s text is faithfully heard, exegeted, preached, and applied.

This picture in Nehemiah 8 also introduces the practice of developing “targumim” as instructive, interpretive commentary on the Scriptures. The habit of the faith community at public gatherings during the Babylonian exile was to read the text of the Scriptures at synagogue in Hebrew, and then to give a paraphrase and an application of the text in Aramaic (the language of their contemporary culture). These renderings were also written down. Here another type of biblical, exegetically based, expository sermon can be seen as a vital part of the life of the faith community.

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.

Evaluating the logos - Part 1

The logos of the message can be evaluated on whether the messenger has correctly exegeted the text. This involves interpreting the message of the passage in its original contexts. These include its historical, cultural, and literary contexts. The text of the logos was written to a particular ethos at a particular time for a particular purpose. These contexts must be understood before one can apply its meaning for the contemporary ethos. The message cannot mean what it never meant. One danger is to take the text of Scripture and apply it directly to one’s contemporary ethos, as in this figure:

This accounts for many awkward applications of texts, written for culturally sensitive occasions, being applied inappropriately in contemporary settings, such as requiring women to cover their heads in churches. Brian Hebblethwaite warns, "It is not even possible for us to mean what the writers of the Bible and the creeds meant just by saying what they said. We have to embark on the process of interpretation, in the light of our recognition both of their presuppositions and of our own, and struggle to express the truth of God and of God’s acts for our own time."

An equally dangerous approach is when a preacher begins with his own contemporary ethos and approaches the biblical text, looking for material he can take out of context to have the Bible say what he thinks his ethos needs to hear, as in this figure: 

The Big Idea of Biblical Preaching is a helpful book for applying Haddon Robinson’s excellent concept of finding the one big idea in the biblical text passage and exposing it to the listeners through preaching. But the preacher must be most careful that his “one big idea” is not in fact his own “one small idea” eisogeted into the text, nor his own rendering of God’s dynamic presence reduced to a mere moral principle or a feel-good, pop-psychology nuance. Rather, what one must do is to listen to the biblical text (the logos) and interpret what its message was to the original audience (biblical ethos) in light of its original context. Then one must take that message and contextualize it for one’s own audience (contemporary ethos), as in this figure:

Who's right?

After visiting a church service with two church colleagues, we were asked by our hosts to evaluate the sermon. One colleague (an American pastor) said that it was “excellent” because the preacher spoke with such passion. The other colleague (an African pastor who was working in Canada) rated the sermon only “fair” because, though it spoke in the language, history, and culture of the group present, it would not speak to his own context. I rated the sermon as “poor” because there were far too many exegetical flaws in the interpretation of the biblical text that was preached from. Which one of us was right? We could all agree that the preacher was passionate, but the crucial question is whether the people were actually exposed to God’s revelatory and formative Word that day. These are the questions that have driven me to pursue this exploration of authentic Christian preaching (the task I have before me) in this postmodern culture (the setting I find myself in).