Some
Journal Entries on Preaching
John
M. Frame
1/17/99: W. F. preached at the
evening service, on the serpent in the wilderness, which I’ve heard expounded
several times recently. He didn’t reach me. Complicated
discussion, without anything new. Not much application except the
traditional redemptive-historical applications: (1) Wow! Christ in the OT!, and (2) repent and believe. All this supposedly
sophisticated biblico-theological research always
leads, in the end, to the simple gospel, as if nothing else ever needed to be
said.
* * * * * * * * * *
AUG. 2,
1999: From 2-3:30 I attended a D. Min. exam by M. E., pastor of Gloria Dei
Lutheran, on how to preach about addiction. As a typical Lutheran, he went on
and on about Law and Gospel, but nothing I couldn't have said in other
language. But he seemed to be saying that you need take no other “steps” than to
have faith in Christ. So faith replaces everything else. But, I asked him, once
one trusts Christ, is deliverance from addiction automatic? No,
of course not. Then are there “steps” to be taken in addition to
trusting Christ? Well, yes. But he never mentioned them, nor authorized
preachers to mention them. Hugely oversimplified in my
estimation.
Also inveighed against medical models. I asked him if there
could be any physiological factors contributing to alcoholism. Well, maybe.
No doubt
his counseling is better than this. But I don’t think the proper response to psychologizing everything is to theologize everything.
I have
essentially the same problem with the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals and
the redemptive-history fanatics. And maybe the Van Tillian
extremists, who want to hear only the Word and nothing of the evidence. And the
worship traditionalists who think we don’t need to worry about speaking the
language of our culture.
* * * * * * * * * *
8/8/99:
Alone today at the house, I listened to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion all the way
through: three hours and some. What a magnificent piece! I had always been
intimidated by it in the past. Certainly it is formidably complex and difficult
music, But I followed the words, and it all seemed to
come together for the first time.
Bach doesn’t belong to the
Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. He was not the great musician of the
magisterial Reformation, pitting the objective against the subjective,
pooh-poohing experience, simply proclaiming redemptive history. Bach was a pietist. One of the major differences between Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s Passions is that the
former is all Scripture: it just sets Scripture to music. In Bach, some of the
text is Scripture, but a lot of it is hymns and devotional reflections on the
texts. The singers are constantly seeking to get nearer to Christ in his
sufferings.
Not all the applications would
make Redemptive-Historical enthusiasts happy. When Jesus is buried, the choir
asks that he be buried in their hearts. Hmmm… That
application never would have occurred to me, and it probably doesn’t reproduce
the Adamsian telos of the text. But there’s something precious about
this. The singers say, “Lord you shouldn’t be buried in the ground. If you are
buried anywhere, it should be deep in my heart.”
There is no explicit reflection on
the Resurrection in this Passion (though Bach arranged many Easter hymns and
wrote an Easter Oratorio, a Cantata Christ Lag in Todesbanden
and others honoring the Resurrection). This lack has been an embarrassment to
some writers. But the Passion bears witness to the Resurrection by presenting a
living Christ: one you can talk to, draw near to, bury
in your heart.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Ordinary
Preaching
8/8/99:
On another subject: what is preaching, anyway? I don’t mean the preaching of
the OT prophets, or Jesus, or Peter at Pentecost, or Paul on his missionary
journeys. I mean the preaching we hear every Sunday morning. You see, this
“ordinary” preaching is not quite the same as the others, though to be sure
there are similarities. The preaching of the prophets, apostles, and Jesus, was
specially inspired of God, for one thing. Ordinary preaching is not, or at least
doesn’t have to be. And the apostolic preaching was usually out in the open,
not in a gathered worship service of God’s people. And its themes are almost
entirely judgment and/or grace. It is evangelistic in thrust. When we gather in
church, of course, we need to hear the Gospel again and again; but we are not
in the position of those in the marketplace. We have believed, and we need to hear what Scripture says about living
the Christian life.
All the Reformational
emphasis on the power of the preached Word seems to transfer what Scripture
says about the marketplace preaching of the apostles to the ordinary preaching
of the church. Reformation theology built a huge theological construct on this
equation: the Second Helvetic Confession even said, “the preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.” We
have spent a lot of time talking about heralding and so on. But were the
Reformers and we right to make such an equation between the extraordinary and
the ordinary? Maybe so. But the issue hasn’t been
studied much, and somebody ought to do it.
Some have found the origins of
ordinary preaching in the Synagogue, or in the great occasion when Ezra
expounded the Law to the returning exiles and the Levites “gave the sense.” So
the essence of this kind of preaching is biblical exposition. This is closer to
the mark, in my view. We don’t know if the church followed the synagogue
pattern in the very beginning of its existence. 1 Cor.
14 looks like something rather different. Eventually, things did settle down,
and something like a Christian synagogue did develop. But note that if this is
the model we are to follow, we cannot bring into ordinary preaching all that
Scripture says about preaching being the saving power of God, being a heralding
of redemption, about the preacher as God’s special representative, and so on.
There may something in all that, but it needs to be shown.
So far as I can see at the moment,
Scripture never commands us to preach sermons in church,
or in synagogue either, for that matter. At least the kind of sermons we are
accustomed to. 1 Cor. 14:26 does refer to a “lesson” (didache)
taught in the worship service, but it says very little about the character of
that teaching. In general, Scripture doesn’t tell us anywhere to preach on a
single text (even the inspired preaching of the apostles fails to do this), or
to have just one sermon per service. It doesn’t tell us that every sermon has
to be by an ordained officer, and by only one. It doesn’t forbid drama as a
means of communication. It doesn’t tell us we must always preach on the history
of redemption as opposed to “moralistic” ethics. It doesn’t appoint the
preacher to be an official herald of the coming age. Indeed, it doesn’t tell us
much of anything. Thus it seems to me that we have great freedom.
I do think we should have sermons
in church, simply because believers and visitors alike need to hear God’s Word.
But I think there can be a simplicity about ordinary
preaching. It does not have to be something dreadfully complicated that
requires enormous theological sophistication. It’s simply teaching one another
what the Bible says. So it seems to me that the teaching of preaching can be
simple too.
There are many maxims in homiletical
texts. But in my estimation, there are only four rules: (1) make it biblical, (2) make it clear, (3) apply it
correctly to the congregation, (4) make it interesting.
I wish we could focus on these rules in the teaching of homiletics. But
instead, the students have to focus on the Reformation theology of preaching
and to master the biblical theology of texts. (Why BT and not
ST or ET?) They learn methods of preparing sermons that require maybe 40
hours for each message. Their applications are not very practical, usually not
much more than “Isn’t Christ great?” and ”Repent and
believe.” (As a bottom line, that hardly fulfills the promise of profundity
made by the Redemptive-Historical method.) And most students never do learn to
communicate. So many Reformed Christians turn to the Grahams, Swindolls, and others, people who were taught preaching
(usually by a mentor) without all the theological elaboration.
Perhaps some of our failure here stems from our pride, our wanting to be seen as preaching more profoundly than mere fundamentalists, and with much better scholarship. And as God’s poetic justice would have it, the result is often less rich, less interesting, less penetrating, and less clear than many mere radio preachers. We should be able to do better, perhaps by setting our sights lower.