Preaching Must Encompass the Full Council of the Word of God
The Gospel proclamation is the primary weapon in the Church’s war chest. She has several key means of grace at her disposal, including the fellowship of the saints, the sacraments, prayer, and Church discipline (Acts 2:42; Matt. 18: 15–20). Nevertheless, at present, she finds herself at an inflection point where her preaching is in crisis. While there is a copious stockpile of articles appropriately lamenting this state of affairs, I will spare the reader from proving the obvious. I will merely note some salient observations to lead into this discussion.
Firstly, it is safe to say that preaching today suffers from a general lack of grounding in the Biblical text. This shortsighted quest for “relevance” is a veiled search for popularity over biblical substance. Secondly, a pervasive cult of the preacher prevails. The preacher’s charisma, personality, and style supplant the biblical text and content.
Asking a simple diagnostic question can be quite revealing: What is doing the heavy lifting in a sermon? Is a sermon’s power to be found in the preacher’s communicative prowess, humor, polish, or technique? Or is it rooted in worldview-challenging biblical truth? Communicative skills are not unimportant, of course. The Apostle Paul, the archetypal biblical-theological preacher, even downplays artful speaking in favor of humble proclamation of truth saying, “and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God…” (1 Cor.2:4–5) That job, as a close friend once put it, is to “release the word of God like a pit bull.”
So what is Biblical theological preaching? To answer that question, one must first answer the question, what is biblical theology? At the very least, it is everything the phrase initially claims and yet more. Biblical theology is both “biblical” and “theological.” Yet, it extends to a broader interpretive perspective that leverages the entire redemptive story of God. Preaching is no less than a worldview-constructing activity. In what follows, we will briefly define the task of biblical-theological preaching and its necessity for constructing a biblically potent worldview—one that capably challenges the prevailing alternative salvation stories of modernism. Biblical theological preaching, as we shall see, dismantles the false salvation narratives of the broader culture while supplanting them with the transcendent Gospel of Christ.
I. Biblical Theology is “Biblical”
Biblical theology is “biblical” because it is based on the Bible. It is text-driven. According to Geerhardus Vos, it holds the place between exegesis and systematic theology.1 Exegesis, on one side, interprets texts within their contextual and co-textual relations. Systematics, on the other, serves to distill theological concepts down to summary positions—doctrines like the Trinity, the hypostatic union, and so on. In between exegesis and systematics lies biblical theology, tasked with deep reflection upon how each text fits within the greater salvation story. Most importantly, it is within this biblical theological space that the battle for the minds of men is waged.
II. Biblical Theology is “Theological”
Secondly, Biblical theology is “theological” because it is reflection on God. This reflection, however, does not live in a vacuum. Throughout church history, interpretation has collectively formed a tradition, a field of play, where both the text and her interpreters must live together. It is the legacy of theological reflection which, by growing consensus, bears a catholic authority over all interpreters that follow.
There is no authentic reading of texts without interpretation. Crassly unreflective statements like “I just believe the Bible” demonstrate not only a marked lack of self-awareness on how one moves from text to interpretation and on to proclamation, but they also evidence a lack of respect for it. Certainly, there is no fault in the humble commitment to the Bible behind such naive statements. Nevertheless, there is no exposition of any text without interpretation. When any preacher or interpreter states, “The word of God says (blank),” he is making a confession: “I interpret” or “I believe” the Bible to say (blank). Confession is good, but also limited by its subjectivity. Every homilist is making a statement about what he thinks the original author said, and not all interpretations are created equal; some are much closer to original authorial intent than others. So each must be judged on its own merit within the interpretive tradition.
This does not lead us into some dark postmodern abyss of subjectivism. While interpretation is inescapably subjective, the Biblical text is not. As a canon, it serves as an immovable standard militating against all modern and postmodern subjectivism. This draws one back into the arms of the Christian theological tradition. The interpretive discipline stretches back to the primeval garden, when God walked with man “in the cool of the day.” (Gen. 2:8) Like all tradition, it erects an ever-growing hedge against error. Time and history have proven that the more one respects what has come before, the less likely he is to repeat history’s errors. The biblical-theological preacher is never alone. He stands amidst a great cloud of witnesses, who offer him their wisdom if he is humble enough to receive it.
III. Biblical Theology Is Historically Oriented
Biblical theology as a discipline is nothing new. The prophets like Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, the Apostles, as well as church fathers and reformers like Irenaeus, Origin, Augustine, Calvin, and Luther all engaged in what may rightly be hailed as “Biblical theology.” As a discrete discipline known by that name, that development has only taken place since the end of the 18th century. Johann Philipp Gabler’s inaugural address at the University of Altdorf in 1787 offers a starting point where this terminology was first minted. Gabler rightly insisted that biblical theology was an historical discipline. Unfortunately also pregnant with enlightenment antagonism to the dogmatic and philosophical theology of the late medieval schoolmen and protestant scholastics, Gabler wanted to forge an entirely new way. Though in many ways overreacting, he wasn’t entirely unjustified in this.
Taking a cue from Gabler, biblical theology is historical in its basic organizing principle. It is more concerned with the contextual interpretation of texts and books than the theoretical categories of systematic theology. Nevertheless, for a theology to be truly “biblical,” it cannot reject those systematic and dogmatic categories but remain informed by them. Systematics and dogmatics are nothing less than the accrued legacy of exegesis and biblical theology; it is only right that they be mutually informed by them. This point may have aggravated Gabler, but a theology of reaction is rarely healthy. Gabler only invented a term, not the discipline itself. It long preceded him and the Enlightenment agenda, and remains the legacy of both the Reformation and Patristic Age.
IV. Biblical Theology Is Narrative
This brings us to our fourth point: Biblical theology is a consideration of texts within the larger biblical story. This approach has been referred to as the historico-genetic method (Gustav F. Oehler) or the more popular term, redemptive-historical method. Every text participates in a larger Gospel story, and therefore should never be preached in isolation. It comprehends the Bible as comprising a single story arc narrating what God has been doing throughout history. We must also add that Biblical theology is canonical; it does not read any biblical text as if it exists in isolation from the rest of the Bible. Every story, pericope, and book exists in situ within a complete canon. The biblical-theological task interprets every text as if part of this larger narrative framework. No statement has put this better than that typically attributed to Augustine, “In the Old Testament the New is concealed, in the New, the Old is revealed.”2
If summarized in these four pillars, then biblical-theological preaching is to carry this discipline and message into the pulpit and the streets. When preaching, we are communicating nothing less than God’s great salvation story, culminating in Christ. Biblical theological preaching is Christo-centric; we preach no text as if Christ has not been incarnated, crucified, and raised from the dead. However, this raises some very practical contemporary questions regarding knowledge, the controversial nature of modern communication, and narrative epistemology after postmodern critique.
Narrative Epistemology
This forces our hand to consider narrative as a conduit of knowledge (epistemology). This was observed by no less than the controversial postmodern philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in his essay The Postmodern Condition. There he famously defined the postmodern condition as an “incredulity toward metanarratives.” By “incredulity” he implied a “suspicion.” Unfortunately, many interpreters have remained flummoxed over what he precisely meant by the ambiguous term “metanarrative.”
Directly from the French, grand recits is literally translated as “big story.” Consequently, many Christian thinkers mistakenly reasoned that since the Gospel is a really “big story,” then postmodern philosophy must be out to deconstruct the Gospel too. James K. A. Smith observes how many mused, “If postmodernism is incredulity toward metanarratives…” and if “Christianity is just such a “big story,” then postmodernism and the Christian faith must be antithetical.”3 If we employ the terminology as Lyotard himself does, then an epic story like the Gospel is not a metanarrative at all, but a traditional premodern narrative and welcomed by him as an authentic conduit of knowledge.
What did Lyotard mean by metanarrative? He is not describing epic premodern stories like the Gospel or a civilizational myth like the Babylonian Enuma Elish. Lyotard is taking issue with the false narratives of modernism in particular, which parade themselves in scientific drag to legitimate their agenda or autonomous reason. As Smith again notes, a metanarrative is a narrative of legitimation that pretends not to be one. Lyotard is out to expose the same problems that presuppositionalist Christian thinkers like Herman Dooyeweerd and Cornelius Van Til were, namely the lie of autonomous human reason and the faith commitments behind it.4 Lyotard is not out to deconstruct Christianity or premodern knowledge, but ironically its nemesis, modernist epistemology. As he puts it:
I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth.[Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xxiii]
With a sweep of the pen, Lyotard blasts Hegel, Kant, Marx, Liberation theology, and a buffet of modernist secularism and scientism. Metanarratives boil down to legitimating narratives that pretend not to be so, while also assuming to be above critique because they are based “in science.”
Size Doesn’t Matter
For Lyotard, it is not the size of your narrative that matters, but what you do with it. While attacking the modernist legitimation narratives, he also praises traditional premodern narratives as authentic conduits of knowledge and identity for community formation. Commenting on Lyotard’s essay in the forward of the 1984 edition, Frederic James praises him for “the way in which narrative is affirmed, not merely as a significant field of research, but well beyond that, as a central instance of the human mind and mode of thinking fully as legitimate as that of abstract logic.”5
Consequently, premodern narratives (like the Gospel) do not need “legitimating” in Lyotard’s thought because they are “self-authenticating.” The postmodern thinker’s “incredulity towards metanarratives” and premodern man with his narrative myths stand on one side in opposition to modernism and its metanarratives of legitimation on the other. Ancient community stories provided sound pathways to knowledge and community formation. This stands in contrast with the “language games” of modernism, which depend on the pretense of objectivity. Has it not been precisely these types of modernist stories that have been forcing Christianity to the periphery for over a century? Is not modernism’s marginalization of Christianity, not a prime example of precisely what Lyotard was pointing at? The Gospel would then not count as a metanarrative, but as a premodern narrative that is self-authenticating and imparts genuine knowledge. To use Lyotard’s own words:
[A] narrative tradition is also the tradition of criteria defining a threefold competence—”know how, knowing how to speak, and knowing how to hear…”—through which the community’s relationship to itself and its environment is played out.6
One could not uncover a more apropos summary of community formation through story. He summarizes with, “what is transmitted through these narratives is the set of pragmatic rules that constitute the social bond.”7
This is precisely how the Gospel story functions, and has functioned in Western civilization. Genuine narratives shape culture and bind people-groups together. That is why every ancient people have their origin stories and mythology. It is not being suggested that the original postmodern theorists are necessarily our friends, either. But when understood correctly, their critiques provide some helpful tools for the Church towards combatting modernism and its mutant spawn, today’s woke progressivism.
Narrative Epistemology
Biblical-theological preaching is nothing less than narrating the Gospel story. Yet it is not, in the Lyotardian sense, a ‘metanarrative.’ It comprises the baseline power towards the formation of people and community through shared narrative identity. Therefore, understanding the postmodern critique of modernism is quite helpful to the discipline of biblical-theological preaching for the following reasons:
First, early postmodern theorists like Lyotard were concerned with dismantling modernist metanarratives deployed for acquiring, legitimating, and holding power which marginalized premodern storied identities. Most particular for the Church is Christian epistemological identity. Scientistic and Darwinist metanarratives, for example, have progressively sued for legitimation to wrest cultural power from Christianity and, quite successfully, drive it to the cultural periphery. Classic postmodern theorists like Lyotard shrewdly saw through the ruse, in a way reflective of Dooyeweerd’s transcendental critique.
Secondly, the original critical theorists developed useful tools for deconstructing modernist metanarratives. Unfortunately, shallow readings and knee-jerk reactions have caused many Christian leaders to overlook these assets, much less deploy them against modernism. Again, this does not make the postmodern godfathers our friends, but the enemy of our enemy certainly has resources to draw on.
Thirdly, the Church needs to understand these tools well because they are now being taken up again by Neo-critical theorists—radical leftist and Neo-Marxist activists deploying them as weapons against Western civilization, and by proxy, against the Church. As the best of the modern West was raised from the legacy of Christendom and especially the Reformation, we cannot fail to see that an assault on Western civilization, is nothing less than a proxy attack on Christianity. Activists marching under the collective banner of “wokeness” are committing what their postmodern philosophical superiors in principle refused to do, namely constructing new metanarratives while toppling the old. Thinkers like Lyotard and Derrida intentionally offered little in the way of constructive answers, though Lyotard pointed back to premodern stories and myths as epistemological resources. Having painted themselves into a nihilist corner, they at least were academically unwilling to wager new metanarratives to fill the void. The new activists do not feel the same. Happy with their contradictory position, they aim to erect new metanarratives to press their ideological agenda. For these reasons, original critical theory and narrative knowledge are relevant in the war for the Western mind.
The Good News Story
The Gospel is truly good news because it is the only holistically coherent worldview narrative. It begins with the premise, “I am the Lord your God… Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” All others are impostor stories to prop up the false gods behind them. Premodern narratives like the Enuma Elish provided the mythology to legitimize Babylon’s city-statehood. Functionally, ancient mythologies bear little difference from their modernist metanarrative cousins, aimed to legitimize the modern secularized state and statist religion. Modern tales like Darwinism, Marxism, and “science” aim to legitimize the humanist pantheon and its chief deity autonomous reason. Running through all of them is a theme of autonomous salvation from the reigning boogeyman—religion. Modernist salvation narratives promise a human race now loosed from the specter of religion and divine authority. Their confession echoes across the ages, “Let us burst their bonds apart, and cast away their cords from us.” (Ps. 2:3) The only difference between these metanarratives and their premodern mythological forebears is their feigned objectivity and false claims of being the product of “reason,” but these are as religious and dependent on faith commitments as the myths of premodern man.
The only effective weapon against a false narrative is a true one. Lyotard’s contributions to our thought here are (1) that narratives are conduits of knowledge, and (2) they shape thinking and construct a worldview that binds communities and imparts life-navigating resources. Premodern mankind understood this intuitively, which is precisely why they manufactured a panoply of mythologies to orient themselves to the cosmos. The Gospel, however, through creation, fall, redemption, and kingdom, orients us to the past, the present, and to the future Kingdom of God. Every salvation narrative, no matter how secularized, promises a narrative hope. Hope is the end to which all point, and the Gospel alone points to ultimate hope. Only the Gospel narrative restores the full person, purpose, and identity to the fallen human.
The Church As Narrative Beacon
What then is the Church? It is a universal communications and community-building institution. Christianity spread by planting local grassroots communities that fanned out across the Roman Empire, North Africa, Europe, and Asia. Wherever one found a church, one found a people gathered around a transformative and identity-imparting story. Each community served as a beacon, soaking local culture with Gospel truth. The Church’s toolbox contains preaching, fellowship (koinonia), sacraments, prayer, and catechesis, all of which she deploys to supplant prevailing narratives. (Acts 2:42 & Luke 1:4)
As historian Tom Holland observes in his historical odyssey, Dominion, the Gospel story saturated and shaped the West. According to Holland, this transformation extended to all facets of life and provided the basis for human rights, human dignity, and modern humanist ideals that Western thought holds dear today. Western civilization’s ligaments and sinews formed through the story of a compassionate Savior who offers grace and accountability, consequently calling humanity to intimacy and moral responsibility. The crucified God implies the redemption and healing of the world.
The way to overcome a false narrative is not always best accomplished by a frontal public attack, though sometimes absolutely justified and necessary, but through a positive and compelling counter-narrative—one that rebuilds families and societies as the churches of the Reformation and Patristic periods did. The Church of the first three centuries succeeded because it was quietly proliferating as a network of Gospel-narrating communities. This gradually led to converting, not just the plebeian masses, but also social elites and institutions and thus transforming culture. They did not expend as much energy frontally storming the portcullis’ of Roman social injustices as much as through plodding transformation of the formative cultural narrative. It happened again in the sweeping social transformations of the Reformation. A return to a robust discipline of biblical-theological preaching is what a “wartime” church needs—and yes, we are most definitely at war.
Image Credit: Unsplash
The problem that Post Modernism rightly sees which Pre Modernism and Modernism are blind to is arrogance from those eras. And that arrogance is based on the belief that one’s own group or meta narrative, has a monopoly on the truth. And that belief leads to delusions of entitlement. And one example of when such delusions of entitlement came to fruition is Christendom.
We Christians need to understand that the full restoration of being human as God created us to be does not come in this life time. And so, despite our knowledge of God through His Word and our experiences with being forgiven and changed, we must believe that we can never afford to pray the prayer of the Pharisee nor ever stop praying the prayer of the tax collector from The Parable Of The Men Praying from Luke 18:9-14. And that is relevant to what the above article says about Post Modernism, Marxism, and so forth.
There are two kinds of criticisms of the isms that challenge Christendom’s, which is not to be confused with Christianity’s, view of what society should be. The one approach can be seen in Martin Luther King’s criticisms of Marxism (see pg 92-95 from https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ows/seminars/aahistory/Pilgrimage.pdf, don’t panic because that webpage begins with pg 90). King calls Marxism, which he seemed to have unfortunately conflated with Soviet Union Communism, ‘evil‘ and he states why. But then he borrows from William Temple, who is a former Archbishop of Canterbury, who called Marxism a ‘Christian Heresy.’ Why call Marxism a Christian Heresy? It was because both saw that Marx combined interests in justice that all Christian should have with beliefs that no Christian could afford to have. In the end, King stated that we need to combine the truths in Marxism with the truths in Capitalism.
Fast forward now to current Reformed criticisms of Marxism and what we will see in contrast with King’s approach is that recent Reformed criticisms take a Jenga approach to criticizing outside thought. What I mean by a Jenga approach is that recent Reformed criticisms hope to isolate the one tenet of an ism, like Marxism, that when removed causes the whole thing to collapse. And with such a collapse, we Reformed Christians can be relieved to know that we can safely ignore what those sinners say about society and about us because we are not like them–again, look at The Parable Of The Two Men Praying. Of course, such a relief leads to arrogance and such an arrogance leads to delusions of entitlement. And it is at that point that we start to verify the criticisms that Post Modernism, Neo-Marxism, and even Marxism has made about Christianity because of the sins and failures of Christendom.
The Gospel is about calling people out of society and into the Church through believing the preaching of the Word of God–here we should look at the definition of the New Testament Greek word for the word ‘Church.’ At this point, we should note the presupposition about society with which the Gospel is always working. From here we should see that Christendom could be summed up by the title, but not the lyrics, of an old rock and roll song: Try Too Hard. That doesn’t mean that the Gospel should not have any influence on society. But its influence on society should not be like the current Reformed attempts to criticize Post Modernism, Neo-Marxism, and Marxism where all-or-nothing thinking is enthusiastically employed.
I have a monopoly of truth as a Christian.
Duke,
You do? Do all Christians have such a monopoly? If so, what happens when they disagree?
Thanks for the reflections here Curt. I will have to give some more thought to the “Jenga” approach you mention. Portrayed that way, It certainly sounds oversimplified. I just can’t come up with an example of who in Reformed circles is actually presenting such flat earth approach. I mentioned at a couple points Van Til, and Dooyeweerd, who are themselves very textured and quite complex and spent a prolific amount of time considering western thought.
Christians do indeed need to consider your point about arrogance in regard to the truth, or what I prefer to call “certitude.” Nevertheless this is a universal problem with all human beings, not just Christians. The counterbalance to that is that the Gospel story is the only world view that begins with human depravity, sinfulness, and weakness, all of which are designed to address pride, certitude, and lead us to humility. It is the only philosophy where the primary presumption is that we are morally and even intellectually sometimes wrong and called to repent. These things to make Christianity stand out in a unique way from all other religious and philosophical systems. Even our religious rites (baptism and Lord’s table) require repentance to participate so that the entire system requires an admission of wrongness as a starting presupposition. — Thanks
T.,
Thank you for your response. I very much like your term ‘certitude.’
I remember reading Van Til, whom I met, when I was in seminary and read a little bit of Dooyeweerd. Their writings are very complex and they mostly target academic and theological peers. But if what I have read is accurate, I believe that it was Francis Schaefer with his popularization of our need to have a Christian worldview to understand the world which started the Jenga approach. What I wrote as their Jenga Approach is another way of saying that they employ all-or-nothing thinking when discussing a subject. I have learned to sense that kind of thinking from my studies in Psychology, in particular the Cognitive Therapy School of thought which is a variation of Albert Ellis’s rational thinking approach.
I’ve seen what people from the Gospel Coalition, William Dennison and his book on Marx from P&RP, possibly the Acton Institute, and others whose names escape me at the present have written about Marxism. And their writings take all-or-nothing approaches to Marxism.
I think that some people have been taught to expect that if they, or especially an esteemed teacher, approach a given subject with a Christian worldview, then they can essentially deduce all that needs to be said about that subject. And if anyone approaches any subject without a Christian worldview, then we have nothing to learn from them.
I agree that we Christians have no monopoly on any sin. But just as we have no monopoly on any sin, I don’t think that we have a monopoly on any personal virtue. Romans 2 points that out. For example, I think Islam also emphasizes our problem with sin. I think that what makes Christianity really stand out is not our philosophy or us Christians, but it is Christ dying for our sins and his physical resurrection. And I fully agree with you that our own problems with sin should help us to have more humility.
I see what you are saying about the “Jenga” approach. I think you are saying some Reformed apologists tend to think that if one doesn’t have a distinctly Christian world view, then their lifestyle and society will just suddenly come crashing down like a house of cards. If I understand you correctly, I see the problem with that—it really doesn’t happen that way.
Perhaps the Reformed answer to that thinking is that we often fail to see the larger degree to which common grace works in the most pagan people. Even in full rebellion against God, there is more of his created order and common grace still operating in humanity than we would ever hope to appreciate.
In my reflections on worldview and culture, I have noticed that the sin and aberrations in a few are only possible because the larger part of humanity conforms to God’s design/law. Crime only pays because most don’t. Homosexuality is only possible in a predominately heterosexual society, and so on. Once everyone steals, it no longer is profitable, and then societal collapse (Jenga?) comes swiftly. That is my sense of it anyway. Blessings!