A couple days back, this post kicked off a discussion regarding the centrality and form of preaching.  On the one side were those, like myself, who hold to the centrality of biblical exposition in preaching.  On the other were those who contend that not only is “dialogical preaching” better than exposition but that exposition has stunted the disciple and growth of many a Christian.  It’s been an interesting discussion.

This morning, I cam across a section in Christopher Ash’s The Priority of Preaching called “Preaching is culturally neutral.”  It’s really an aside to his main argument about the priority of preaching, which he develops from Deuteronomy, but I thought it a good contribution to our discussion.  Enjoy and respond.

Preaching is culturally-neutral

It is worth pausing to consider why God exercised his authority in Israel not by the written word, but by the written word preached.  Every culture knows what it is to sit and listen to an authoritative human being speak.  That is not culturally specific.  You don’t need to be literate to do that.  You don’t need to be educated to do that.  You don’t need to be fluent or confident in debate to do that.  Every human being can do that.  And that’s what preaching is.  Of course we clothe preaching in cultural garments.  We  may slip into preaching in a church way, or a preachy way, or in the language of the ghetto, or in a stilted way, or in a way that sounds like a commentary extract being read.  We ought not to do this.  But preaching in its essence is an authorized human being speaking the words of God to listening human beings; and every culture understands that.

An interactive Bible study is not culturally-neutral.  To sit around drinking coffee with a book open, reading and talking about that book in a way that forces me to keep looking at the book and finding my place and showing a high level of mental agility, functional literacy, spoken coherence and fluency, that is something only some of the human race are comfortable doing.  Not everyone feels comfortable when the bright spark in the corner pipes us, “Ah, yes, but I was wondering about the significance of the word ‘However’ in verse 3b.  What do you think about that?”  Some of us love that kind of seminar interaction, but many do not.  For those who can do it, it may well be profitable; but many people can’t, and just feel daunted or excluded by the exercise.

In some churches we have slipped into assuming that personal Bible reading and one-to-one Bible studies and Bible study groups are the normative way for Christian people to hear the word of God.  This, we say, is what a healthy Christian life looks like.  But in defining the Christian life like this we may unwittingly have alienated the illiterate, the functionally illiterate, the less-educated, those less confident in studying a text.  I wonder if, quite unintentionally, we may have contributed to making some of our churches more monocultural than they might otherwise be.  Paradoxically it is not that preaching is culturally outmoded, but rather that the study of written Bible texts is culturally narrow.

So how are we to reach those for whom this kind of study is culturally alien?  We have two options: theatre and preaching.  By ‘theatre’ I mean entertainment, whether it be by the liturgical colour and drama of high church ritual, or by entrancing music or by entertaining anecdotes.  Just as the Roman emperors reckoned the people would be happy so long as they had ‘bread and circuses’ so church leaders may rely on the entertainment culture of the circus.  Peter Adam makes the point that from the seventh to the twelfth century there was a movement that said that ordinary people could not understand preaching, so the best way to communicate with them was by statues, stained-glass windows, and pictures.  But, as the Reformers discovered, it failed.  ”It produced people who knew the gospel stories, but did not know the gospel; people who knew what had happened, but who did not know the meaning of it.”

The alternative to theatre is preaching, the simple activity of a man speaking the words of God face to face with men and women.  This is how God used John Wesley, George Whitefield, Charles Spurgeon, F.B. Meyer, Billy Graham to reach the masses.  We have no need to be defensive about preaching: it speaks to every culture.

“If elephants can be trained to dance, lions to play, and leopards to hunt, surely preachers can be taught to preach.”

–Erasmus, cited in John Stott, Between Two Worlds, p. 213.

From Jonathan Leeman’s The Church and the Surprising Offence of God’s Love: Reintroducing the Doctrines of Church Membership and Discipline (pp. 85-86):

Does God love humanity because of something intrinsically valuable or lovable in us?  Logically, that would be impossible.  He created us, and in his omniscience and sovereignty he wrote down every day of our lives before one of them came to be (Ps. 139:16).  He is the source of everything we have, including every good gift that’s been given since creation (James 1:17).  As such, there is literally nothing that God could behold with affection in us that he did not give us in the first place (cf. 1 Cor. 4:7).  (Can we create anything that our omniscient God did not think of first?)  God loves everyone because God beholds his own handiwork, image, and glory in everyone.  God’s love is God-centered.  When we as humans then love in a God-centered way, we love–as Augustine said–with respect to him, or for his sake.  That means we burn to see his character and glory expressed everywhere–in ourselves, in our friends and family, in our enemies, in creation, in everything.  From the vantage point of creation, God-centered love bears no judgment and draws no boundaries.  It knows only pleasure and delights in the gift of itself.

On the other hand, God’s God-centered love bears a posture that opposes everything that opposes God, just as you and I will oppose anyone who opposes the human objects of our love such as a friend or spouse.  I love my daughters, so I have an affection for their good.  How then can I not oppose anyone or anything that intends for their ultimate ill?  So it is with God’s love for God, and so it is for any true love of God that we have.  Loving him means having affection for his glory and honor.  A complex posture is therefore required.  God loves all sinners insofar as they reflect his glory; he opposes them insofar as they don’t.  What that means is that a God-centered love must discriminate; it must have preferences; it must make judgments, and it must do so in light of sin and the fall.  It is not universal, because it does not love anything that opposes God.  God-centered love does not love sin.  What is sin?  Sin is anything that opposes God and intends God’s ultimate ill.  Therefore, God’s God-centered love will discriminate between that which is sin and that which is not; between those who belong to sin and those who do not; between those who love him and seek his glory and those who do not.

God’s love is for everything that glorifies God.  God’s love is against everything that opposes His glory.  Both His being for and His being against are love because both make much of the supreme Object of all possible exultation: God himself.

If we love this way, then we do everything to posture ourselves to magnify God’s glory in Christ.  As Leeman puts it, “we burn to see his character and glory expressed everywhere–in ourselves, in our friends and family, in our enemies, in creation, in everything.”

Are you burning to see God’s character and glory expressed everywhere?

“Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen, such alone will shake the gates of hell, and set up the kingdom of heaven on earth.”

John Wesley, Letters, vol. 6, p. 272.  Quoted in Iain Murray, Wesley and Men Who Followed (Banner, 2003), p. 87.

I recently had the joy (I mean that; it was a real joy) of reading Mack Stiles’ book, 17 Things My Kids Taught Me about God.  If you can find a copy, get it!  Among the gems I enjoyed is this bit of pastoral counsel:

Ask yourself this question: In what ways are you dissatisfied with how God is running things?  If you can identify your dissatisfaction with how God is running the show, you can identify the place where you are tempted for idols to become your God.

Kill the idols in your life by making Christ your life. (pp. 68, 69).

Read this slowly and repeatedly.

“All the dark, intricate, puzzling providences at which we were sometimes so offended, and sometimes amazed, which we could neither reconcile with the promise nor with each other, nay, which we so unjustly censured and bitterly bewailed, as if they had fallen out quite against our happiness, we shall then see to be to us, as the difficult passage through the wilderness was to Israel, ‘the right way to a city of habitation’ (Ps. 107:7).”

By the very things that seem to bring us so much unhappiness and difficulty, God may be leading us directly to the heavenly city, purifying us for a happier enjoyment of that eternal habitation.  Think about it.

John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence, p. 22.

“When individuals disagree on the proper interpretation of a passage of Scripture, the problem does not lie with the Scriptures, for God guided its composition so that it could be understood.  Rather, the problem lies with us.”

“When we don’t find the specific answer to a question in the Bible, we are not free to add to the commands of Scripture what we have found to be pragmatically correct.”

Wayne Grudem, Christian Beliefs: Twenty Basics Every Christian Should Know,  pp. 17, 19.

Kevin DeYoung in Just Do Something (pp. 47, 48):

We obsess about the future and we get anxious, because anxiety, after all, is simply living out the future before it gets here.

We must renounce our sinful desire to know the future and to be in control.  We are not gods.  We walk by faith, not by sight.  We risk because God does not risk.  We walk into the future in God-glorifying confidence, not because the future is known to us but because it is known to God.  And that’s all we need to know.  Worry about the future is not simply a character tic, it is the sin of unbelief, an indication that our hearts are not resting in the promises of God.

“Idleness is active selfishness.”

You won’t likely hear me quoting Walter Rauschenbusch much, but this little ditty provoked me.  From A Theology for the Social Gospel, p. 55.

“If it is I who say where God will be, I will always find there a God who… corresponds to me, is agreeable to me….  But if it is God who says where he will be,… the place is the cross of Christ.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Meditating on the Word, p. 45.