Fling him into his office, tear the office sign from the door and nail on the sign “study.” Take him off all mailing lists. Lock him up with his books, his typewriter, and his Bible. Slam him down on his knees before texts and broken hearts and the flick of lives of a superficial flock and a holy God. Force him to be the one man in our surfeited communities who knows about God. Throw him into the ring to box with God until he learns how short his arms are. Engage him to wrestle with God all the night through. And let him come out only when he is bruised and beaten into being a blessing. Shut his mouth forever spouting remarks and stop his tongue forever tripping lightly over every nonessential. Require him to have something to say before he dares break the silence, and bend his knees in the lonesome valley of prayer. Burn his eyes with weary study. Wreck his emotional poise with worry for God. And make him exchange his pious stance for a humble walk with God and man. Make him spend and be spent for the glory of God. Rip out his telephone. Burn up his ecclesiastical records. Put water in his fuel tank. Give him a Bible, tie him to the pulpit, and make him preach the Word of the living God. Test him, quiz him, examine him, humiliate him for his ignorance of things divine. Shame him for his good comprehension of finances, game scores, and politics. Laugh at his frustrated effort to play psychiatrist. Form a choir, raise a chant, and haunt him with it night and day “Sir, we would see Jesus.” When at long last, he dares assay the pulpit, ask him if he has a word from God. If he doesn’t, dismiss him. Tell him you can read the morning paper and digest the television commentaries and think through the day’s superficial problems and manage the community’s weary drives and bless the sordid baked potatoes, green beans add infinitum, better than he can. Command him not to come back until he’s read and re-read, written and re-written until he can stand up worn, and forlorn, and say, “Thus saith the Lord.” Break him across the board of his ill-gotten popularity. Smack him hard with his own prestige. Corner him with questions about God. Cover him with demands for celestial wisdom. And give him no escape until he’s back against the wall of the word. And sit down before him and listen to the only word he has left: God’s Word. Let him be totally ignorant of the down street gossip. But give him a chapter and order him to walk around it, camp on it, sup with it, and come at last to speak it backward and forward, until he says about it all things that ring with the truth of eternity. And when he’s burned up by the flaming word, when he’s consumed at last by the fiery grace blazing through him, and when he’s privileged to translate the truth of God to men, and finally transferred from earth to heaven, then bear him away gently and blow a muted trumpet and lay down softly, place a two-edged sword on his coffin, and raise the tune triumphant. For he was a brave soldier of the Word and ere he died he had become a man of God.
The Responsibility of Congregants
The following was written by great Presbyterian preacher Floyd Doud Shafer in an issue of Christianity Today dated March 27, 1961. It addresses the responsibility of congregants to demand nothing less than a hearing of God's Word. What congregants must do to their leader is:
Just deliver the message!
The fundamental task of the Christian 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 God’s Word and teach it to his community. John Stott points out that when the Church has neglected to execute its first duty to authentic, exegetically based, expository preaching, it has experienced its eras of decline and weakness in strength, numbers, and vitality.
Some may assert, “Of course the content of Christian proclamation is the Scriptures. That’s obvious.” If it is obvious, why is it so often not practiced? Why do we find, in so many gatherings of God’s people, that there is so much topical, human opinion being proclaimed, while God’s plain message to his family is ignored or changed? The fundamental task of making sure God’s Word is heard, is not just the responsibility of Christian leaders. The people of God must take responsibility for their own spiritual formation. They must demand that their leaders expose them to an authentic hearing of God’s authentic message.
Imagine I had to suddenly leave my home for a foreign country without a chance to say good-bye to my family. But, before I left, I dictated a letter for my family to a friend and charged him with the task of delivering my message to my family. Suppose though, on the way to deliver this message to my family, my friend decided that what my family really needed to hear was a series of lectures on his opinions of the perfect family. He then delivered these lectures, using quotes from my letter, taken out of context, to back up his points. If I found out he had done this, I would be furious at my friend! I gave him a message for my family. His task was to deliver it to them with no embellishments or distractions. I would say, “Just deliver the message! Only ad what you need to say, to help them understand it because they weren’t there when I dictated it!” I believe God is furious over what passes for preaching in many churches. He has given a message to his family and has appointed teachers and preachers to “just deliver the message!” and to only ad what they need to ad to help God’s family understand it because they are in a new context. His message is his transformative Word. It is to be listened to, understood and obeyed. This is the fundamental task of Christian attention.
The Art of Christian Persuasion
In 'The Mind Changers', Em Griffin brings the lessons he learned from being on the staff of Young Life U.S.A., lessons learned from years of “earning the right to be heard” by hundreds of uninterested, cynical, pagan, American teenagers, the right to proclaim the good news of Christ. Using humor, Griffin offers Christian apologists some great points to consider. 'The Art of Christian Persuasion' is the subtitle to the book. This is the sentiment of his whole approach. One cannot force anyone to believe anything, whether through clever argument or violence. The best one can do is learn the art of loving people and the art of loving the message of Jesus Christ, and bring those two loves together in introducing friends to the friendly God. This is perceived as authentic pathos in this generation.
A helpful picture of Spiritual formation that Griffin uses throughout the book is that of candle making. In candle making, one takes the wax through the stages of becoming a candle. One must melt the wax, mold it, and wait for it to harden. Here are the steps to the art of authentic Spiritual formation, especially in the postmodern context. One must melt the hearts of those one wishes to reach, through building trust-filled relationships of love and friendship. Next, one must mold the ideas of the pre-Christian through gentle persuasion, transparent modeling of the normal Christian life, and clear presentation of the historic, biblical message. Finally, one must harden (solidify) the commitment to the new life in Christ through an ongoing discipleship relationship with the pre- and new believer. This is a very helpful book for all believers to use to grow in confidence and interest in communicating and demonstrating the good news of the Christian hope.
Evaluating the pathos
The evaluation of the logos and the ethos of the preached message are only two of the three parts of the communication of the eternal Word to one’s contemporary audience. One can rank the logos and the ethos of a message in a grid of nine options. Finally, one must also evaluate the perceived pathos of the message. This adds a third dimension to the evaluation process, enabling anyone to assign the sermon to one of twenty-seven options, as in the figure below:
The pathos of a message is the ability of the speaker to connect with his or her audience. It is the perceived authenticity of the speaker. What allows an audience to receive a message depends on the perception of the speaker as one worth listening to, one who can hold the audience’s attention. The pathos of Christian Spiritual formation is the authentic, Spirit formed conveyor of God’s logos in the contemporary ethos. The goal is to be in the one quadrant that would have the message be the authentic logos, in the authentic ethos with authentic pathos.
Here then, is a tool to evaluate the full measure of a given message. After hearing a message, my wife, Liz and I will ask each other, "So, how was the message: logos? ethos? pathos?" Then we will rate it as high, medium or low on each dimension. The serious conveyor of God's Word must aim for the only acceptable square out of the 27 possibilities. Only that would be the proclamation of God's authentic Word to the authentic contemporary audience by an authentically reliable proclaimer. And, only that will lead to kind of authentic Spiritual formation in the lives of the hearers we want from preaching.
Some believe this contemporary generation will not accept a hearing of God's Word proclaimed. Darrell Johnson of Regent College comments, "The younger generation, in preaching, is looking for authenticity in the communicator; the communicator having something to say that they don’t hear anywhere else, and the communicator treating young people as smart and not dumbing it down and buying into the television view of a young person. I think (being) given the chance to enter into a text and engage that text is what young people are looking for, and (it) is much more powerful than the “pabulum” that they are given. And I think young people would flock to a church where, either young or old, a communicator was to do that."
Evaluating the ethos
The evaluation of the logos of Spiritual formation through the preached message is only the first of the three parts of the communication of the eternal Word to one’s contemporary audience. One can rank the logos of a message in one of three places: low, medium, or high. When one adds a second dimension of persuasive speech, one now has nine options in evaluating the preached message, as in the figure below.
The ethos of the message is the perceived authenticity of the speaker, based on his ability to communicate in the language, culture, and history of his audience. One cannot only evaluate how well the preacher exposes the authentic logos, but also how well the preacher reaches the authentic ethos of the receptor language of his audience. One may have the very Word of God to convey, but if one is not perceived as authentic, the message is not heard.
In this case, “ethos” is not used strictly in the sense of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. By “ethos,” Aristotle means something more akin to the English word “ethic.” The credibility of the speaker is judged on his perceived character. It is used to mean the credibility of the conveyor of the message, but “ethos” will here be used more in the sense of his ability to connect with the “ethnicity” of the audience; their language, history, and culture.
In his book, 'The Unknown God', Alister McGrath examines the task of seeing how the Christian Church can communicate the gospel to this postmodern culture. His argument is that one must discover the common ground from which to start the proclamation of the gospel, and then couch it in the terms and interests of the hearers. This is precisely what the apostle Paul does in Athens on Mars Hill in Acts 17, where McGrath takes his title. McGrath demonstrates how one can see that there is a common spiritual hunger in every person, and he uses this archetypal longing to begin his exploration of the claims of the Christian faith. He uses Plato’s classical Greek metaphor of “The Cave” and postmodern sentiment to build a case for a hearing of the Christian worldview and the particulars of the historic, biblical message.
With 'Reckless Hope', authors Todd Hahn and David Verhaagen do an excellent job of describing the ethos of this generation, drawing on some statistical research as well as some anecdotal evidence. They faithfully adhere to a desire to present the authentic Christian gospel found only in the Scriptures. They also make helpful and wise suggestions when challenging the local church to put this into practice. Their three-angled paradigm for presenting the gospel today is very helpful; creation, covenant, and community can communicate the message and connect with the interests of “Busters.” They also provide an excellent discussion of the dangers of the modernist approach to the Bible that treats God’s revelation as merely a “road map” or an encyclopedia of morality.
In his 'Homiletic', David Buttrick argues for structuring sermons in the natural way of thinking and speaking of the postmodern setting. It is the best way to structure a sermon, because it is the best way of connecting with the ethos of this generation. Buttrick takes the ethos of his audience seriously, and the logos of the Word of God seriously. Putting these two elements (audience and message) together is the task of the authentic Christian proclaimer. The committed proclaimer of God’s Word in the postmodern setting will need to understand these two elements intimately.
Evaluating the logos - Part 2
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.
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:
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