Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Preaching and Teaching in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
For someone who is nicely into his sixth decade to pronounce on the challenges of the twenty-first pulpit when there are 95 years left until the end of the century is simultaneously an implicit claim to a prophetic gift and, perhaps also, a charge to a lot of preachers to do what he himself is not going to live long enough to do.
As such, my assigned task is at least something of a cheek, so I thought I should begin by restricting myself to remarks on the beginning of the twenty-first century. This restriction owes nothing whatsoever to humility, false or otherwise. Think, for instance, of the amazing changes witnessed in the twentieth-century. Suppose we were in 1905 and looking ahead to 2000 instead of 2005, looking ahead to 2100.
It’s 1905. I am now charged with preparing preachers for the twentieth century. Yes, the automobile has been invented but just barely. Everybody is traveling by horse and buggy. The British Empire still paints all of its maps in red. We haven’t yet had World War I and World War II, not to mention the Korean Conflict, the Vietnam War, all of the more recent struggles, nor all of the skirmishes around the world.
Liberal theology has had its roots a couple of centuries ago, but it really hasn’t gotten through all the seminaries in any major way yet and is not really in the churches. Barth is not yet a household name. Liberation theology has not been invented in Latin America either. World ideological and political conflicts look very, very different. Communism has not yet surfaced in political power, nor has fascism.
We haven’t yet seen the slaughter, the deaths, from the Holocaust, Pol Pot, or local idiot buffoons like Idi Amin or the fight for civil rights, whether in America or apartheid in South Africa. Massive changes in communication, all the way from horse and buggy to being phoned in the middle of the night in Katoomba on a cell phone by my daughter in Ithaca, New York, who is excellent in communication but can’t get time zones straight.
Globalization, megalopolises (cities of 10 million or more)? Not invented yet. Multiculturalism? Give me a break. Plus, during the century, a major sacrifice of pretty dominant Christian consciousness, in much of the Western world at least, shifts in epistemology, changes in the centers of Christian strength from sort of Europe and North America suddenly to numbers that vastly exceed ours who are Christian in the so-called developing parts of the world.
There was a shift now to competing entertainments, so that all of our people have so many things they could do, why on earth should they ever want to go to church? There was a time a bare century ago where church was the center of the social construct in many, many villages and towns. Then, of course, with the demise of the great ideological conflicts, communism largely gone … well, there’s China, but we’ll let that aside … there is also now the “clash of civilizations,” to use Huntington’s term.
All of these things have at least some bearing on the distinctive challenges of preaching in the twentieth century, but which pundit living in 1905 would have gotten them right? So now I’m supposed to tell you what’s going to happen in the twenty-first century? No. I’ll keep my focus on the next few years, for a start.
I insist on a further limitation. It would be dangerous to focus on the challenges specific to the twenty-first century without recalling, however briefly, the challenges that confront the pulpit in every generation. That would be to ignore the perennially important for the sake of focusing on the temporarily important. The result would be a distorted view, both of our challenges and of preaching itself.
So at the risk of stepping outside my mandate, I propose first to remind you of some of the perennial challenges in preaching and only then to outline some of the challenges of the pulpit peculiar to the beginning of the twenty-first century.
1. The perennial challenges in preaching.
I will mention only four things.
A. The preparation and qualification of the preacher.
In the nature of the case, this will commonly, but not always, be an elder or pastor. In that connection, one is reminded of the list provided by the apostle in 1 Timothy, chapter 3. “Here is a trustworthy saying: If anyone sets his heart on being an overseer …” A bishop, a pastor, an elder. The terms were interchangeable with slightly different emphases in the first century. “… he desires a noble task.
Now the overseer must be above reproach, the husband of but one wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him with proper respect.
(If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s church?) He must not be a recent convert, or he may become conceited and fall under the same judgment as the devil. He must also have a good reputation with outsiders, so that he will not fall into disgrace and into the devil’s trap.”
Now when you work through that list, with the exception of only one or two items on it, each entry is, somewhere else in the New Testament, specified for all believers. He’s supposed to be hospitable, we’re told. Well, read Hebrews 13. Christians are supposed to be hospitable. He’s not supposed to get drunk. The New Testament doesn’t give the rest of us a pass on that one.
We’re supposed to have a good reputation for blamelessness. Blamelessness is an assigned responsibility for all Christians in several passages in the New Testament. So it goes right through the list. The only thing that is, in any sense, restrictive is first this business about not being a novice. Obviously, new Christians don’t quite fit there yet. Yet what “not a novice” means varies a bit from situation to situation, doesn’t it?
When I was serving in Quebec, I saw the church grow in eight years, between 1972 and 1980, from about 35 churches to about 500. Suddenly, we had all kinds of assemblies with no one who had been a genuine Christian for more than 18 months. So we had elders, suddenly, who were not novices because they had been Christians for 16 months as opposed to some who had only been Christians for 3 months. On the whole, you wouldn’t want to put such persons in charge of churches that had been around for 300 years and had a lot of elderly folk in them with vast experience. Even that is a sort of relative category, isn’t it?
Then, “able to teach.” We’ll come to that one in a few moments. What is clear, however, is the dominant demand in a list like this is that Christian leaders, Christian teachers, Christian preachers, Christian pastors exemplify the graces and character, the moral fiber, demanded of all Christians. They must exemplify these things themselves, so that when they are telling other people how Christians are to live, they must also be showing other people how to live. How can such a preacher encourage people in prayer if that preacher is himself prayerless?
Another way of getting at this thing, I think, is to say that in the New Testament such people are to have a shepherd’s heart. That language is used explicitly in 1 Peter 5. It’s worth reminding ourselves that the word pastor simply comes from the Latin root for shepherd. Some of us today are inclined to distinguish between a pastor and a preacher. We look at some people, and we say, “Fine pastor, but can’t preach his way out of a paper bag,” or “Great preacher, but no people smarts.”
I have to tell you this is an abominable distinction. In the New Testament there is no consciousness of distinctive roles in this regard. None. For if someone is handling the Word of God well, he or she should be exemplifying the graces of the Word of God. It is possible to have tender skills of personal relationships and not be a teacher of the Word of God, but you are disqualified from public teaching of the Word of God if you do not have a pastor’s heart.
This is a dichotomy we must get rid of if we are to follow biblical criteria for preachers. Another way of saying this, to use more contemporary jargon, is that Christian preachers must be authentic. They must be genuine. They must be transparent. They must personally be in line with what they teach.
B. They must have an adequate grasp of what preaching is.
It is not a piece of performance to be admired. It is not simply an explanation of text, though it is in part that. Rather, as God has disclosed himself in times past through words.… “The Word of the Lord came to the prophet, saying …” “The Word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, saying …” As God has disclosed himself in time past in words, as those words are re-presented to people, so there is re-revelation.
That is to say, preaching rightly done, insofar as it faithfully reflects what God himself has disclosed in word, grants us again God’s self-disclosure. God reveals himself afresh in the Word, and everyone who teaches the Word of God must have this somber awareness that it is God’s means for disclosing himself afresh.
It ought to be a time, not for people to come and find their intellectual capacities increased and go out saying, “Ah, yes, I understand a little more now,” though hopefully they will understand a little more now, but they should come out saying, “I have heard the voice of God. We have met again corporately with God himself, through his Spirit, through his Word.”
That presupposes, then, that the preacher is not merely explaining like an instructor but so explaining with the consciousness that these are the oracles of God, that the preacher wants men and women to see what this means in terms of faith, obedience, family living, conformity to Christ, integrity, living with eternity’s values in view, and above all, being right with God by the means of the gospel God himself has given.
C. They must have a firm and growing grasp of Scripture.
I’m sure you have noticed, on occasion, reading through Acts, for example, how Paul can insist he has taught the whole counsel of God. In Ephesus, for example, he has taught the whole counsel of God, according to his address to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20. Two and a half years in Ephesus, and he’s taught the whole counsel of God. You’re going to have a tough job doing that if you only tackle half a verse a week.
When I started off in pastoral ministry, after about two years, I added together all the lines of text I had preached. In that particular church, I was speaking five times a week, five separate preparations a week. I added up all the texts I had preached through and then did an extrapolation. If I continued at the same rate for 40 years, what percentage of the Bible would I have covered? I figured just under 20 percent, and I knew something was dead wrong.
Just that little bit of arithmetic forced me, after a while, to change my whole approach to what it means to teach the whole counsel of God: bigger chunks, tying into the storyline, seeing how the bits fit together, teaching in such a way that when people read the next chapter or another similar book, they’re automatically reading it faithfully in line with the revelation of God.
There is no way Paul is claiming to have expounded the entire Old Testament line by line in Ephesus; he didn’t have time. Yet he was dead serious when he said he hadn’t withheld anything but had preached the whole counsel of God. That presupposes, then, that preachers must develop a deep and growing grasp of all of Scripture … its content, its flow, and how it fits together.
There are some preachers who seem to have a pretty good grasp of this little text and that little text and that little chunk in this chapter, but somehow when it comes to putting the bits together, they don’t have it. It’s disparate. It’s more like individual pearls on a string. There’s no coherence to it somehow. That simply will not do for the person who wants to be faithful to the whole counsel of God.
D. They must have a very deep commitment to making the important things the important things.
I have come across quite a number of young preachers who don’t want to preach John 3:16 because it’s too easy; everybody knows what that means. I’ve even come across some preachers who come up to the Easter season, for example, and approach it with dread because they’ve been in the ministry now for 10 years. They’ve had 10 other Easter seasons, and now they don’t know what to preach on Easter because they’ve handled all of that before! All I have to say is, “Shove over. I’d like your pulpit.”
This is central and part of the preacher’s task. Even while there is a place for handling relatively peripheral things at some level or another, the preacher’s task is to keep before the people all the time what is important, because this, in some way, is what hierarchializes our reading. It gives integration and wholeness to our reading of the Bible rather than making the Bible simply a scrapbook of independent pious spiritualities.
That means we must have, for instance, a very firm grasp of who God is, of what the problem is that the Bible addresses. It is rebellion against God. It is idolatry. It is anti-Godness. Sometimes, you see, we are so eager to explain what Christian faith looks like to our secularizing society that we try to show that Christian morals have a bearing on how the culture develops. If you want good taxpayers and decent citizens, you need stable families, and we produce stable families.
There’s some truth to all of that, and thank God for it, but when you read the Bible carefully, what is it that narks God? What is it that makes him angry again and again? Yes, there are some instances where social injustice provokes him to wrath (read parts of Isaiah, parts of Amos), but what is central in God’s antipathy toward his own image-bearers is our rebellion, our idolatry, our sin.
Unless we keep central what the chief problem is the Bible addresses, we will inevitably begin to distort what the Bible is about. Moreover, there is a great deal in contemporary evangelicalism today that assumes the gospel, but what interests it is not the gospel by which human beings are reconciled to God. That’s merely assumed.
What interests it are the styles of worship, particular kinds of experience, a particular structure in the church, a particular interpretation of what takes place at the end, a certain understanding of postmodernism, or whatever it is. If you say, “Yes, but where is the gospel?” they are very indignant.
They say, “I believe in the gospel too. Why are you challenging me?” but I want to know what a preacher is passionate about, I want to know if a preacher is preaching from the center, I want to know if the preacher is trying to be prophetic from the center, to make important what God makes important, in life, in thought, in word, in deed, above all in the handling of the Word of God. These things, it seems to me, are perennial challenges. It would be possible to list more, but I suppose I’d better get on to my proper mandate. So now let me come to …
2. The challenges of the pulpit peculiar to the beginning of the twenty-first century.
I’ll outline these seasonal challenges, the peculiar things we face, without for a moment forgetting the perennial things. I’ll list six.
A. Multiculturalism.
Now when I say these things are challenges, I am not necessarily saying these things are problems. If you really like monolithic cultures, then multiculturalism is a problem. Personally, I love the diversity, but it does represent a certain challenge just the same. This is the fruit, above all, of massive changes in immigration patterns.
My work takes me to a lot of different corners in the world, and last summer I spent a fair bit of time in Central and Eastern Europe. I recall one day walking down the streets of Bratislava in Slovakia just looking around, and with only one or two exceptions that particular day, every single face I saw was white. I’m not used to that! I live in Chicago.
If I live anywhere in Western Europe, I’m not used to that. That’s not what you see in Paris. It’s not what you see in London. It’s not what you see in Brussels. It’s not what you see in Rome. It’s not what you see in Amsterdam. The whole world is there. Bratislava is white. Cheer up; it won’t be for very long. All those Central and Eastern European countries that joined the EU in May 2004, means all the immigration patterns are going to change there too. In a few years there’s going to be a blessed mix.
These changes come on at different speeds, of course. Toronto, Canada, was an astonishingly WASPish (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) nation until about 20 years ago and then, probably faster than any other major city in North America, became one of the most cosmopolitan cities on the continent. It’s unbelievable! The question is.… How have the churches handled it? I can take you to many, many churches with a residue of white WASPs, average age 70, in the midst of a multi-cultural environment, and they just haven’t adapted.
I could take you to another church, like Churchill Heights Baptist Church, which is splendid. The demographics of that church are the demographics of the neighborhood. So also are the demographics of the staff, pastoral and otherwise. They’ve adapted in their evangelism, in their appointments, in their outreach. There can’t be fewer than 60 or 70 different nationalities and ethnicities in that church of about 1,000 or 1,200.
This is happening now in virtually all of the major cities of the world. The only question is how fast it’s happening. Now if you’re called to serve a church all your life in Bathurst, it’ll probably reach Bathurst a little more slowly than the suburbs of Sydney. On the other hand, where urbanization is going, where multiculturalism is going, means we are dealing more and more with multiculturalism. This is not an easy thing to sort out.
Those of you who have older, longer memories and who read in this sort of area will remember it not very long ago (three or four decades) that the so-called homogeneous unit principle governed a great deal of mission thought. That is, the way to plant a church or the way to make a church grow was to go after a defined people group. If you go after the defined people group, you target that group and you don’t worry about the other groups around. You let other mission agencies, other churches, look after them. That’s your group.
Almost in reaction to that today there is a pretty strong appeal in a lot of confessional evangelicalism to insist, “Yes, but ultimately in heaven there will be a wonderful unity of diversity with men and women gathered from every tongue and tribe and people and nation, and in some measure we’re supposed to reflect that already down here.” That’s true, yet at the same time, the homogeneous unit people were not entirely wrong.
The apostle Paul, in 1 Corinthians 9, can say, for example, that when he’s evangelizing Jews, he makes himself a Jew so he can win the Jews. That is, he’s adapting to their culture, do you see? When he is evangelizing Gentiles, he makes himself a Gentile, though he is not himself a Gentile. He is not a Jew in the sense that he’s bound to the old covenant; he’s not a Gentile in the sense that he’s bound to their customs either. Racially, he is a Jew, but he makes himself, he says, “All things to all people so that by all means I might win some.”
There is some place for adapting to the particular group you’re targeting. Yes, there is. Yet at the same time, Paul’s aim is not to target that group and then just leave them there but to integrate them into the one church of Jesus Christ. That’s what begins to precipitate, though there are some theological matters as well, the crisis you find in Galatians 2 in Antioch. “One church, one Lord, one faith, one baptism.”
In some measure, then, even though you might target, as outreach, these individual groups and make all the adaptations necessary, without for a moment compromising anything of what Scripture demands, the aim of the exercise should not be to leave all of this race in that church and all of that race in another church.
The long range aim ought to be to find some venues for linking men and women together, for what we have in Jesus Christ is of far more importance, far deeper commonality, than what we have in our particular ethnicities, as interesting and as important, as diverse and as creative, as they are. That tension we’re going to live with until the new heaven and the new earth. What shape it has is going to depend a bit on the surrounding culture too.
In North America, if you go to a city like New York on the Northeast Coast or a city like Los Angeles on the Southwest Coast, there you’ll find lots of churches that are themselves as multicultural as the cities in which they are embedded. You go to the Deep South, and white is white, black is black, and yellow is yellow, and never shall any of them meet, except once in a while where they have an exchange of pastor for a Sunday. It’s a moment of great sacrifice and cultural flexibility.
Somewhere along the line in these tensions, you try and find your way on how to be faithful, and which emphasis you try to give is going to turn a little bit on what you can get away with in that culture as you nudge things toward faithfulness in the gospel of Jesus Christ. These are enormous challenges. It is not merely a question of racism; don’t misunderstand me. It’s far more complex than that.
There are issues here of worldview, sense of humor, how people are viewed, the place of tradition, which tradition, how you respect old people, and on and on, but let it never, ever be named among us that the demands and constraints of our particular ethnicities outclass or trump the demands of the kingdom of God.
B. Rising biblical illiteracy.
Those of us who are a little older remember a time when, if we were doing university missions and we had to deal with an atheist, he or she was almost certainly a Christian atheist. That is to say, the god in which he or she disbelieved was the Christian God, which is a nice way of saying the categories of the discussion were still on my turf. Nowadays you can’t even assume that.
The degree of biblical illiteracy is massive. Most of our young people now in universities don’t know the Bible has two Testaments. They don’t have a clue who Isaiah is, let alone Zerubbabel or somebody a little more obscure. This is developing in all kinds of interesting ways. About 10 days ago I was in Paris giving some lectures at Vaux-sur-Seine, which is the location of a theological seminary downstream from Paris on the Seine.
It was meant to be a fairly high class assembly (pastors, theologians, and so on); there were about 200 people there. At one of the coffee break times, this young woman came up to me, maybe 30 years old or so. She wanted me to sign a book. As I was signing it, I said, “Have you been coming to these conferences long?”
“Oh, no. I haven’t gone to anything religious for a long time.” I said, “How did you come here?” “Well,” she said, “I live in that boat there down on the Seine, and one day a student was jogging by, getting some exercise, and just sort of saw me on the boat and passed me an advertisement. So I came.”
Now you’ve got to understand, I was talking at this conference about Christ and culture. This was not an evangelistic exercise. She had some Catholic training way back in her background; that made her very much a minority in France. In the course of the discussion, I had referred to what Augustine had thought, what Abelard had thought, the contribution of Thomas Aquinas, and these names she knew, so she was interested to sort of get them plugged in again.
Then she started saying, “But you know; I have to tell you. I haven’t been to church for 20 years. I don’t trust Catholicism, but I’m spiritually hungry. I’d like to know more. I’ll tell you what I really found a bit obscure here. Before you spoke, there was that chap Nisus. He was trying to explain the Bible or something. I didn’t understand any of that.”
I didn’t know what to do with that. I had heard the exposition of Alain Nisus. It was brilliant. It was a first-class exposition of 1 Peter 2. Really excellent. Of course, he was addressing theologians and pastors who already knew the text. They didn’t have their texts in front of them; this dear woman probably didn’t even own a Bible. So he was making all of these allusions to the text, and she didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.
Here I can talk about Augustine and Abelard, and she was clicking in! It suddenly dawned on me that this woman, with even her marginal theological background, knew a little bit more about Catholicism than she knew about the Bible. She found Nisus completely incomprehensible precisely because she knew nothing whatsoever about the texts to which he was referring.
There are huge implications to this ignorance in the way we go about preaching the Bible. Huge. The vocabulary we choose, the things we can assume people know, how we get across bits and pieces.… Even when we provide text. When I do university missions, I always provide text because the people don’t have Bibles.… You have to develop something of the storyline. You can’t assume they know any of it.
In this mix of biblical illiteracy, there is also, on the positive side, a new openness. This young woman was entirely transparent with me. “Yeah, I’m really hungry. I’d like to know more about the Bible. I’m really interested in spiritual things. I don’t have a clue what it’s about, but you guys seem to know something or other.” It was fantastic, very positive. You can believe I introduced her to some of the locals who would then follow her up.
So I’m finding in university missions today. There is a sense in which, although there’s more biblical illiteracy, there is also, in some ways, less opposition because they don’t know enough to rebel against anything. We, therefore, must learn to be apologetically shrewd but not in any sense defensive, learning how to communicate with people who know nothing without, in any sense, feeling nervous lest they’re going to attack us or the like.
Moreover, this also brings to the preacher the responsibility to think and plan strategically through the entire ministry of the Word. In other words, there is in the local church a responsibility for the entire ministry of the Word that includes, but certainly goes beyond, preaching.
Preaching has a certain heraldic element to it. There is an announcement to it. It is the voice of God confronting others, but the total ministry of the Word includes small group evangelistic Bible studies, personal devotions in the home, study guides. It includes family devotions. It includes one-on-one Bible studies. It includes the kind of counseling that carefully takes people through the Bible. All of that should be the ministry of the Word.
So those who are responsible for organizing the ministry of the Word in the entire local church, of which preaching is a fundamental part, must think about how to integrate this declarative heraldic preaching element with everything else that is going on in the whole church so these gaps can be plugged, so there is coherence and thoughtfulness in taking new converts and introducing them to the Bible’s storyline, to what it says, to what’s of ultimate importance, preparing people to study the Bible for themselves.
C. Shifting epistemology.
You knew I’d use a big word sooner or later, didn’t you? Epistemology is merely the study of how people know or how they think they know. That’s all it is, and most people in the Anglo-Saxon Western world think of the shift in epistemology from modernism to postmodernism. The terms are very slippery. In Europe, postmodernism means something really quite different, and it’s just getting harder and harder to make shifts across the Atlantic without understanding those differences.
In our context, this shift in epistemology looks something like this: instead of being quite so certain human beings can know objective truth, this shifted epistemology thinks of truth, rather, as a social construct. We put it together this way because this is where we live, this is our language, these are our categories. So there is less possibility (some would say no possibility) of knowing something firmly, truly, with certainty outside ourselves, outside the world of text.
What we know instead is something we think we know because we belong to the group that tries to know in that particular way. Some other group would know in some other way, with some other language, with a different set of presuppositions, with a different set of methodological tools. Things look different in different cultures.
If that sort of thing is pushed hard enough, then you ultimately come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as objective truth. There is only truth as I know it or truth as my group knows it. This makes it really difficult to start speaking about “the truth once for all delivered to the saints” and things like that.
I know some Christian colleges and universities elsewhere where postmodernism has gained such a hold of the epistemological structures that young people who do at one level really believe the Bible is the Word of God are, nevertheless, somewhat embarrassed by the frequency with which it speaks of truth.
In fact, as soon as you start mentioning passages in the Bible that speak of truth, they immediately say, “Oh, yes, yes, but Jesus says, ‘I am the truth.’ That proves truth is not propositional. Truth is personal. Truth is incarnational. So we must have incarnational relational manners of reflecting the truth.”
Now that’s antithetical thinking, either this or that. It’s true the Bible can say Jesus is the truth. It’s John’s gospel. It’s also true that eight times in John’s gospel Jesus says, “Unless you believe that …” and then gives a proposition: the person is not a Christian. That’s propositional truth.
One of these young men I challenged recently and said, “I’ve got some homework for you. You say you believe the Bible but you’re embarrassed by its references to truth. I want you to go home, get out a concordance, and then list all of the passages in the Bible, on sheets of paper, that speak of truth in a propositional way. All of them, whether they’re theological or not. For example, the Queen of Sheba comes to Solomon and says, ‘Everything that was told me about you was true.’ ” He said, “What does that mean?” “Just list them,” I replied.
“Then after you’ve listed them, go through all of the passages that speak of being assured or confident or persuaded of something. For example, writing to Theophilus, ‘That you may know the certainty of the things that you have been taught.’ Or 1 John 5, ‘I have written you these things that you may know, that you might have assurance, regarding them.’ After you’ve read them all, written them all down, reread them a couple of times, then ask yourself, ‘If I am embarrassed by these things, is it God’s fault or my fault?’ ”
Christians are increasingly going to have to address this matter of epistemology. We cannot duck it. In recent years, I found it helpful for myself to distinguish between soft postmodernism and hard postmodernism. Soft postmodernism does recognize that all human knowing is perspectival. That is to say, all of human knowing is necessarily knowing out of a certain perspective because, after all, we’re finite. I can’t know things as God knows them. Only God’s knowledge is omniscient and therefore non-perspectival; it’s exhaustive.
So it’s true; all human knowing is perspectival. In that sense, the postmoderns are right. In that sense, in that soft sense, I’m a postmodern and so are you. The only difference between a soft postmodernist and a hard postmodernist, at this level, is whether or not you admit you are one. The hard postmodernist goes on a little farther and says, “Because all of our knowledge is perspectival, therefore, we cannot have knowledge of the objective.”
Well, for a start I want to know how you know that. There’s a sense in which hard postmodernism is self-refuting. Perspectival knowledge does not mean I cannot know the objective. It merely means I cannot know the objective with all of the knowledge of God, with omniscience. It seems to me it is important to recognize that I look at things as a white middle-aged Caucasian Canadian male. I really don’t look at things exactly the same way as, let’s say, royalty in Namibia or a prostitute on the streets of Mombasa.
On the other hand, all three of us brought to face the Word of God can, as that Word of God is repeated and taught carefully again in our own language and passed by again and again, bring us to full assurance about what is true regarding God, such that there will be huge areas of convinced overlap in our beliefs, even though at some level, I’ll have some little corners that I think are right, and they’ll have some little corners that they think are right. Even there, in many ways, we can talk about them, argue over them, and see what the text says.
My knowledge will never be omniscient knowledge, but soft postmodern that I am, looking at things inevitably from my perspective, I can have that perspective modified, changed, and revised so that I can know some things outside the text to which the text bears witness. In other words, the Christian should neither be locked into modernism or postmodernism, and unless we begin to deal with those sorts of things in convincing ways, we are going to lose certain numbers in this generation.
There are a number of entailments to this. Have you noticed how so many preachers 30 to 50 years ago loved to preach from discourse passages? Colossians, Galatians, Ephesians, Sermon on the Mount, discourse chunks of Isaiah. Then if they ever did any narrative, it was sort of “Life of Abraham” or “Life of Daniel” stuff. Abraham here was a good man; therefore, be good. Abraham slipped up over there; therefore, don’t be bad.
In terms of the whole sweep of literary genre, there was a lot of silence. How many preachers preached through Wisdom Literature? Or apocalyptic? Understood a fable like Jotham’s fable? Parables? The difference between Wisdom Literature, on the one hand, with its absolutes, Lady Folly or Lady Wisdom? You’re either in or you’re out.
What about the kind of subtle narrative story of a David, who’s a man after God’s own heart and yet ends up in adultery and murder? In Wisdom you don’t get that. You either follow Lady Wisdom or you follow Lady Folly, one or the other, but here is dear ol’ David managing to follow both, thank you very much. You can only do that in narrative; you can’t do that in Wisdom. What does that do for your preaching? How do you handle that?
A bare 20 years ago, when I started visiting Africa, I discovered a lot of sub-Saharan African black preachers were pretty good with narrative chunks of Scripture but didn’t know how to get through Romans. We, until 20 years ago, were just about the opposite.
One of the things multiculturalism and biblical illiteracy are conspiring amongst us to do, as we think through what it means to teach the whole counsel of God, as the epistemology shifts under our feet, one of the things it’s teaching us to do is to handle all the different literary genres of Scripture. That is becoming desperately important for the preacher.
In university missions today, I often use the Apocalypse. The reason is it’s full of the most amazingly vivid images, and because this is a vivid image-bearing visual generation, I think you can meet that concern with words by using apocalyptic. So that instead of saying images or words, God in his mercy has given us some forms of literature that are full of images in words, but that means learning how to preach apocalyptic effectively in the evangelistic setting.
What does faith mean on the streets of Sydney? Stick a microphone in somebody’s face downtown outside the cathedral and say, “What do you mean by faith?” Unless you happen to get one of the Christians (unlikely) you’re going to get some variation on this: “Faith is subjective, personal religious preference.” Now it might not be put as succinctly as that, but that’s what you’re going to get.
“It’s subjective personal, religious preference. You have your faith; I have my faith. It’s got nothing to do with truth, very little to do with evidence. It has to do with personal religious preference.” Now you come across this person, and you say, “You know, the Bible really tells you that you must believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.” What are they hearing you to say? They’re hearing you to say, “You must exert your personal religious preference to opt for Jesus.” There’s no truth claim there. None. Not as they hear it.
Somewhere along the line, then, these undergirding cultural things must interact with the shifting epistemology and our handling of texts, so that the meaning of the text as it was given, when it was given, is brought across to where these people are in this culture in this generation with their epistemology. I sometimes take people on this faith issues to 1 Corinthians 15. There Paul, for example, tries to work out what it would mean if Christ really hadn’t risen from the dead. Supposing Jesus hasn’t risen from the dead. What follows?
First, he says, “The apostles are a bunch of liars.” In other words, the object of Christian faith here is the resurrection of Jesus, which itself depends on witnesses. You have to believe what the witnesses said was true if you really are to believe Jesus rose from the dead, but if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, then what the witnesses said was false. So the first thing you’ve got to say is the apostles are liars.
Next, he says, “Your faith is in vain.” Now what he means by that, of course, is granted what the Bible says about us being lost in our trespasses and sins, lost apart from Christ’s death on our behalf and his vindication by the resurrection, if he really hasn’t been vindicated by the resurrection, then how can we be assured his death meant anything significant either? So we’re still in our lost situation. Your faith is useless; it’s futile.
Third, he says, “Your faith is not to be commended; rather, you are of all people most to be pitied because you’re believing something that isn’t true.” Paul is not of the persuasion that says, “Provided you’re sincere in your personal religious faith, then that’s a wonderful thing. If Jesus is alive, he’s alive to you.” “I know he’s alive because he’s in my heart.”
That’s not Paul’s stance. If you believe something and it helps you psychologically, well, God bless you; it helps you psychologically, but as far as Paul is concerned, even if it helps you psychologically, you’re to be pitied if what you’re believing isn’t the case. The Bible never encourages you to believe something that isn’t true. “You’re of all men most to be pitied if you believe Jesus rose from the dead when in fact he didn’t.”
Which is why, in the Bible, the strengthening of faith is so regularly accomplished by the articulation and defense of truth, because faith’s object must be true or it is not, in any sense, biblical faith. Do you hear the culture clash between that sort of approach to faith and what’s going on in our culture? I didn’t have to explain that 30 years ago when I was a young man in the ministry. I have to explain it all the time now. That’s part of the shifting epistemology, not to mention the rising biblical illiteracy.
D. Integration.
This category needs a bit of unpacking; the next two won’t. What I have in mind is the need for Christians to think through God’s Word such that they can wrestle discerningly, penetratingly, integratively, with the dominant movements and cultural, moral, and ethical issues of the day. I do not mean our day’s perceived challenges should set our agenda. I do not mean that.
I do mean we should not be preaching the Bible in a cultural vacuum but in such a way that we address the questions that are being raised today. I do not mean our felt needs must control us. No, the Bible’s analysis of our needs must control us. Yet after we have done that, we must then show how this biblical response to our real needs, according to Scripture, nevertheless does address these things that are perceived needs.
Have you ever met someone who did his or her PhD on the Puritans? A massive dissertation on Richard Sibbes or Baxter’s view of justification? Somehow they never, then, leave the seventeenth century. Every time they preach, even though they are saying wonderfully true things for those who are historically informed, somehow you doubt they’ve made it all the way to the nineteenth century, let alone the twentieth, and certainly not the twenty-first.
The fact of the matter is the Puritans were expert at addressing their own day. If we really want to honor them, we should, by all means, read them and make sure we address our own day. There are a lot of issues today that somewhere along the line we have to think integratively about. Let me list a few.
There are many bioethical concerns: end of life, euthanasia, beginning of life, abortion, in vitro fertilization, and many other kinds of things. The whole digital world. The Internet, which is such a source of strength and instant communication, yet I could introduce you to many pastors and others who are so addicted by porn they’ve destroyed their home, their marriage, their integrity. It’s not that we’ve invented porn; we’ve just made it accessible.
Worse … a new generation that is so tied into the Internet, the games and the like, that a young person can think somehow, “This is the world.” In Japan, they are speaking of young people now who come home and lock themselves in their room, and the food is slipped under the door. They’re such awkward young people, in any case, that you don’t want them at the meal table particularly, and if there’s a good excuse to leave them in their room, it may not be a bad thing.
Meanwhile, these young people, then, have their whole world in front of them on this computer screen. Then where are the social skills? Where is the dehumanizing going on that is so profoundly unbiblical for anybody who thinks human beings are made in the image of God? Are we addressing those things? What does that mean for what our families should be doing, for what kind of caps we should be having in our own family, for what sort of modeling?
Moreover, many of the great cultural movements of the twentieth century (communism and fascism both, but many other things as well) are profoundly utopian in vision. “Follow me and I will lead you to the Promised Land.” A fair bit of politics in the Western world is based on that same kind of utopian visionary idealism, isn’t it? “Provided you vote for me and my party, we’ll sort out all your problems. I know the other party is corrupt, silly, ignorant, and not concerned for the poor, but if you follow me, I will lead you to the Promised Land.”
Christians know this really is ou-topia; that is, no place. Christians are profoundly anti-utopian vision, because there will be no final peace until Jesus Christ comes back. So while we’re committed to “doing good to all human beings, and especially the household of God,” while we’re concerned to pray for the city, while we’re concerned to do good and exercise justice and do mercy and preach the gospel, while we’re concerned for all of those things, we will not be taken in by every utopian vison that comes along, because they all stumble across the guilt and corruption of the human heart.
You show me a system, and I can destroy it, because my own heart is so evil. That’s why in Marxist theory, the move from the revolutionary man, as Marx described him, to the new man could never take place, because once the revolutionary man got into power, he then himself constituted the new oligarchy, the new hierarchy, the new power controllers, and you just had another form of dictatorship.
Christians cannot duck these issues. Let me stick my neck out and say something dangerous here? Those of you who are familiar with the history of the Reformation know that in some ways, indulgences were the trigger. Dear ol’ Tetzel was selling his indulgences; Luther saw red and posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door.
In one sense, indulgences are not very important. It was the wrong thing to split the church over, in one sense, but indulgences became the trigger for thinking through whether you live under the Bible or not, with all of the solas of the Reformation coming out: sola scriptura, solus Christus (Christ alone), sola gratia, sole fide.
The great principles were then hammered out, but the trigger was something really not all that important … indulgences. It was only important insofar as it indicated something much worse, much more corrupt, in the very foundations of all of the theological teachings that dominated the age.
I’m neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, and I work for a non-profit organization, but it may be that in the twenty-first century, homosexuality will be a trigger for us. It’s the wrong issue. At one level, it’s not all that important. Churches that won’t discipline teachers of the Word of God for christological heresy or for denying the resurrection or for denying the Trinity suddenly are raising issues over homosexuality.
It’s the wrong issue, except that like indulgences, it becomes a trigger for a whole lot of other things, all based around one issue.… Will we live under the Word of God or will we not? It is going to be extremely important, if this does become a trigger, that we do not handle this the wrong way. Homophobia is always ugly and sinful. So also is homophobia phobia. We are going to have to be careful in our handling of texts and extremely careful in our handling of people.
Nine days before the towers fell in New York, I was in Princeton for something, and my wife and I took the fast train into New York City so I could spend a few hours with Tim Keller. Tim Keller is the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. A wonderful story. I won’t burden you with it, but I know that in this church, which is now running about 4,000 Tim himself has always had, all the time, at least one evangelistic group that he himself leads.
His reason is he doesn’t want to get out of touch. If he’s only going to teach Christians, only going to teach other pastors, and only going to teach leaders, then he himself will be progressively distanced from the culture. So he disciplines himself, therefore, to have at least one evangelistic group running on at the same time. The people he can see in that group are extraordinarily diverse, because he has learned to be able to talk with anybody.
I would love to see preachers coming out of SMBC who are very effective at having Bible studies with local homosexuals, local anybody. I don’t care. Not because they’re compromised or anything like that, just because they have the integrity of relationship that they can talk with and earn the respect of anybody. At Trinity, where I teach, I look for the MDiv-ers who can talk with anybody. I want them in our cities. There some MDiv-ers who are going to be great in Lincoln, Nebraska. There are others …
I had one in my advisee group three or four years ago. He was an African-American who came out of a gang in Detroit. He probably committed every crime in the book, save murder, and I’m not even sure about that one. He was a rough gem, but on the other hand, he was a gem. That guy is going to be terrific on the streets of Detroit. He’s not going to make it in Lincoln, Nebraska; he just isn’t.
The ones I look for are those who can talk to anybody, absolutely anybody. For the fact of the matter is now it is our mandate to integrate the biblical Word of God with all of the movements, the challenges, and the diversities that are around us, to think penetratingly about them while not losing that which is central … the gospel itself. That means we must not duck the hard issues.
If, for the sake of peace, we just refuse to talk about the hard issues, 5 years, 10 years, 15 years down the road, the dark issues come back and bite us. Don’t duck. Be biblical, be theological, be mature, and integrate. If some people don’t like it, well some people don’t like all kinds of things. Don’t duck.
E. The pace of change is accelerating.
At the beginning of this address, I briefly drew attention to some of the changes that took place in the twentieth century. When you stop to think about it, it was a pretty fast sweep, wasn’t it? It was 95 years, but almost all cultural commentators argue that the pace of change has accelerated and will continue to accelerate in the twenty-first century. That’s why I’m loath to make many specific predictions.
Once again, it must be said that we are dealing with eternal realities. The pace of change must not dictate our message. Jude rightly says, “The gospel is once for all delivered to the saints.” Nevertheless, where the dangers lurk, whose assumptions are changing, and where the worldview of the audience is shifting, the preacher must be aware of it and adapt.
After all, the way Paul preaches to the people in a synagogue in Pisidian Antioch is not exactly the way he preaches to pagans who don’t know anything in the streets of Athens. That means part of our training must mean upgrading reading, following the patterns of culture, finding some people who are very good at helping us see what’s developing, and unpacking things as we go along.
If you cannot do this yourself, you must have ongoing courses to help you think this through, give you some guidance in your reading. The pace of change itself is going to become an increasing challenge in the next decades. I wish I could give you some examples, but I pass to my last point.
F. Modeling.
It has always been the case that some things are better caught than taught. I have sometimes said, with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek, that if, God forbid, I suddenly became the first evangelical pope, my first action on my first day in office (I’m speaking now from the vantage point of Chicago) would be to move the best 10 pastor-preachers in the country to churches within a 20-minute drive of Trinity, because as strong a school as Trinity is (and it is a strong school), there are a lot of things that are learned by modeling.
You find people who handle the Word of God well, who love the people of God, who are pastors who care for the sheep, and that is why their relationships are so good. That is why they teach the whole counsel of God, do it well, and know how to address today and tomorrow, not simply yesterday and the day before. They suddenly show a whole new generation how to put feet under all that is taught at Trinity.
That means a really good school of preaching has got to give thought, serious thought, to modeling, to mutual critique, to discipline, to accountability. There are a lot of ways of doing it, but that is becoming more and more essential. You and I can doubtless think of many trends that are unwinding in front of us in the twenty-first century.
It is important to think through these things, for if preachers stand between the speaking God and the listening people, it is crucially important to know who these people are and how they hear. Even so, in all of our attempts to understand the twenty-first century, we must never, never, not for a moment, forget whose ambassadors we are.
We must be faithful in word and life to his mandates, still pleading in every culture, “Turn! Turn from your evil ways. Why will you die? The Lord has no pleasure in the death of the wicked. Be reconciled to God,” or else all of our cultural grasp is but sophistry and diversion. We serve this culture and tomorrow’s culture and the next day’s culture. That’s where we serve, but we look for the day when the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever. Amen.
