Biblical Theological Preaching And Narrating a Gospel World View
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. Vos, Biblical Theology, 5] 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. Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter, chapter 15]
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. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism, 63] 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. Dooyeweerd, In the Twilight of Western Thought] 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.”[6. Frederic Jameson, forward to Lyotard, p. xi]
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.[7. Lyotard, 21]
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.”[8. Lyotard, 21]
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.
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