The Christian Way to Maturity
Exactly what is preaching? I have tried so far both to face some current objections to it and to develop a theological defense of it. But I have not yet attempted to define it, except to insist that if it is to be authentically Christian it must be expository. Yet to assert that “preaching is exposition” would not be a wholly satisfactory equation, for then preaching would be no more than the interpretation of the biblical documents and would have no necessary concern for any contemporary application.
The Bible itself uses a variety of images to illustrate what a Christian preacher is. The commonest is that of the herald or town crier (kēryx), who has been given a message of good news and been told to proclaim it. So in the market square or some other public place, without fear or favor, he lifts up his voice and makes it known. “We herald Christ crucified” and “we herald. . . Jesus Christ as Lord” are two of Paul’s most direct descriptions of his evangelistic preaching (1 Cor. 1:23; 2 Cor. 4:5 cf. Isa. 40:9; 52:7).
Next, the preacher is a sower (speirōn). As in Jesus’ parable of the sower, he goes out into the world, like a farmer into his fields. There he broadcasts the precious seed of God’s Word, hoping and praying that some of it will fall into well-prepared soil and in due course bear good fruit (cf. Luke 8:4ff.).
Thirdly, the preacher is an ambassador (presbus). He has been commissioned to serve as an envoy in a foreign—even hostile—land. In it he has the responsibility of representing his sovereign or government, whose cause he is proud to plead (cf. 2 Cor. 5:20; Eph. 6:20).
The preacher is also a steward or housekeeper (oikonomos). It is his privilege to have been put in charge of God’s household and entrusted with the provisions they need. These are “the mysteries of God,” meaning God’s revealed secrets. He is expected above all to be faithful in dispensing them to God’s family (1 Cor. 4:1, 2; cf. 1 Tim. 3:4, 5; Titus 1:7).
The preacher as pastor or shepherd (poimēn) we have already considered. The Chief Shepherd has delegated the care of his flock to under-shepherds, who are charged to protect them from wolves (false teachers) and lead them to pasture (sound teaching) (cf. Ezek. 34; John 21:15ff.; Acts 20:28–31).
The sixth metaphor of the preacher represents him as “one approved, a workman who has no need to be ashamed” (2 Tim. 2:15). But what kind of a workman must he be if he is to be “approved” in God’s sight and “not ashamed”? He must be skilful in his treatment of “the word of truth.” The familiar AV translation of the verb orthotomeō has him “rightly dividing” it, but this is mistaken. Modern versions prefer something like “rightly handling” the Word (RSV), or handling it “correctly” (NIV), but these are too vague. For the word has a more precise meaning, namely to “cut straight,” and the image conveyed is either that of the plowman or of the road-maker. NEB opts for the former, and depicts the preacher as “driving a straight furrow” in his proclamation. The other rendering seems the more likely, however, because in its only other two biblical occurrences (Prov. 3:6 and 11:5 LXX) it “plainly means ‘cut a path in a straight direction’ or ‘cut a road across country (that is forested or otherwise difficult to pass through) in a straight direction,’ so that the traveller may go directly to his destination” (AG). This “straight” teaching of the truth is in evident contrast to the false teachers who were “swerving” from it (18), and emphasizes the need for such loyalty and simplicity in our exposition that our hearers understand and follow it with ease.
What is immediately notable about these six pictures is their emphasis on the “givenness” of the message. Preachers are not to invent it; it has been entrusted to them. Thus, good news has been given to the herald to proclaim, good seed to the farmer to sow, and good food to the steward to dispense, while good pasture is available for the shepherd to lead his flock there. Similarly, the ambassador does not pursue his own policy but his country’s, and the workman cuts a way for “the word of truth,” not for his own word. It is impressive that in all these New Testament metaphors, the preacher is a servant under someone else’s authority and the communicator of somebody else’s word.
What these models of the preacher’s task make less clear is the need for him to relate the given message to the existential situation, or, to use the modern jargon, to “contextualize” the Word of God. Not that this factor is altogether absent. The herald cannot be indifferent to those who listen to what he says, nor the ambassador to the people with whom he pleads, nor the steward to the household for whom he is responsible. So too the shepherd seeks pasture which will suit his sheep, and the road-maker is concerned about the travelers who will walk the way which he is cutting through the jungle. Perhaps the sower metaphor is the most suggestive of all in this respect, in spite of the fact that the actual picture is the least personal. Yet the different soils into which the seed falls represent different kinds of people who hear the Word, and a conscientious farmer is obviously concerned not only to sow the right seed but to sow it in the right soil.
It is because preaching is not exposition only but communication, not just the exegesis of a text but the conveying of a God-given message to living people who need to hear it, that I am going to develop a different metaphor to illustrate the essential nature of preaching. It is non-biblical in the sense that it is not explicitly used in Scripture, but I hope to show that what it lays upon us is a fundamentally biblical task. The metaphor is that of bridge building.
Now a bridge is a means of communication between two places which would otherwise be cut off from one another by a river or a ravine. It makes possible a flow of traffic which without it would be impossible. What, then, does the gorge or chasm represent? And what is the bridge which spans it? The chasm is the deep rift between the biblical world and the modern world. In a famous essay published in 1955, Lord Snow spoke of “The Two Cultures”—science and the arts—and bemoaned the increasing alienation of literary and scientific intellectuals from each other. He spoke of “the gulf of mutual incomprehension” between them. But if the gulf between two contemporary cultures is so wide, the gulf between both of them and the ancient world is wider still. It is across this broad and deep divide of two thousand years of changing culture (more still in the case of the Old Testament) that Christian communicators have to throw bridges. Our task is to enable God’s revealed truth to flow out of the Scriptures into the lives of the men and women of today.
A few years ago I was talking with two students who were brothers, one at Oxford University and the other at Edinburgh. They had been brought up in a traditional Christian home, both their parents being practicing Christians. But now they had renounced their parents’ faith and their Christian upbringing. One was a complete atheist, he told me; the other preferred to call himself an agnostic. What had happened? I asked. Was it that they no longer believed Christianity to be true? “No,” they replied, “that’s not our problem. We’re not really interested to know whether Christianity is true. And if you were able to convince us that it is, we’re not at all sure we would embrace it.” “What is your problem, then?” I asked with some astonishment. “What we want to know,” they went on, “is not whether Christianity is true, but whether it’s relevant. And frankly we don’t see how it can be. Christianity was born two millenia ago in a first-century Palestinian culture. What can an ancient religion of the Middle East say to us who live in the exciting, kaleidoscopic world of the end of the twentieth century? We have men on the moon in the seventies, and shall have men on Mars in the eighties, transplant surgery today and genetic engineering tomorrow. What possible relevance can a primitive Palestinian religion have for us?” I have often thanked God for that conversation. Nothing has brought home to me more forcefully the gulf which people perceive between the Bible and themselves, and so the challenge which confronts Christian preachers today.
Before developing the concept of preaching as bridge building, however, I think I need to qualify it in two ways, in order to avoid misunderstanding. First, although I have spoken of an unbridged chasm between the biblical and the modern worlds, I recognize that in fact there has been a long succession of bridge-builders; that throughout the history of the church Christians have tried to relate the biblical message to their particular culture; and that each new Christian generation has entered into its predecessor’s labors. So there has been more historical continuity in bridge building than my analogy may seem to allow. Sometimes, instead of building a new bridge, the new generation is actually adapting and refurbishing an old one, adding a span here, replacing a girder there. Nevertheless, the world is now changing so rapidly that each rising generation feels challenged by the width of the gulf and by the need to construct a new bridge. There was no doubt in the minds of my two student friends of the yawning chasm which separated them from the message of the Bible.
Secondly, I recognize that there are perils in the clamant demand for relevance. If we become exclusively preoccupied with answering the questions people are asking, we may overlook the fact that they often ask the wrong questions and need to be helped to ask the right ones. If we acquiesce uncritically in the world’s own self-understanding, we may find ourselves the servants rather of fashion than of God. So, in order to avoid the snare of being a “populist” or a modern false prophet, the type of bridge to be built must be determined more by the biblical revelation than by the zeitgeist or spirit of the age. The church’s calling is to challenge secularism, not to surrender to it. Nevertheless, there is a great need for more understanding of, and sensitivity to, the modern world around us.
Faced with this problem (the communication gulf between two worlds), preachers tend to make one of two mistakes.
If we are conservatives (I am referring to our theology, not our temperament or our politics), and stand in the tradition of historic Christian orthodoxy, we live on the Bible side of the gulf. That is where we feel comfortable and safe. We believe the Bible, love the Bible, read the Bible, study the Bible, and expound the Bible. But we are not at home in the modern world on the other side, especially if we have reached—or passed—middle age. It bewilders and threatens us. So we tend to insulate ourselves from it. If we read Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, which documents the rapidity with which western culture is changing and the disturbance this causes people (a form of “culture shock” though caused by our passage through time instead of space), we go into a state of profound shock from which, it seems, some of us never emerge. You can tell it from our preaching. We preach biblically. Why, of course; how else could we preach? Charles Simeon and Charles Spurgeon are our heroes. We are determined like them to expound the Scriptures and to derive all our teaching from God’s Word. But if I were to draw a diagram of the gulf between the two worlds, and then plot our sermons on the diagram, I would have to draw a straight line which begins in the biblical world and then goes up in the air on a straight trajectory, but never lands on the other side. For our preaching is seldom if ever earthed. It fails to build a bridge into the modern world. It is biblical, but not contemporary. And if we are called to account for our practice of exposition without application, we piously reply that our trust is in the Holy Spirit to apply his Word to the realities of human life.
I hope my readers will forgive me if my diagram of conservative preaching is a hurtful caricature. In self-defense I can only plead that it is my former self that I have been portraying. For, although I hope that in recent years I have begun to mend my ways, yet previously both my theory and my practice were to expound the biblical text and leave the application largely to the Holy Spirit. Moreover, this method is by no means as ineffective as it may sound, for two reasons. First, the biblical text is itself amazingly contemporary, and secondly, the Holy Spirit does use it to bring the hearers to conviction of sin, faith in Christ, and growth in holiness. No one has expressed this better than P. T. Forsyth:
It is into the Bible world of the eternal redemption that the preacher must bring his people. . . . To every age it is equally near, and it is equally authoritative for every age, however modern. The only preaching which is up to date for every time is the preaching of this eternity, which is opened up to us in the Bible alone—the eternal of holy love, grace and redemption, the eternal and immutable morality of saving grace for our indelible sin.
At the same time, it would be quite inadmissible to use the perpetual relevance of the gospel and the up-to-date ministry of the Holy Spirit as an excuse for avoiding the communication problem. We should not follow the example of the Reverend Maynard Gilfil, the Ango-Catholic curate of Shepperton, whom George Eliot introduces to us as “an excellent old gentleman, who smoked very long pipes and preached very short sermons.” In fact, “he had a large heap of short sermons, rather yellow and worn at the edges, from which he took two every Sunday, securing perfect impartiality in the selection by taking them as they came, without reference to topics.” A number of horror stories are current about inappropriate sermons. There was, for example, the chaplain who visited the construction works on the great dam being built on the Upper Nile. His congregation consisted of men who had to endure great heat, extreme isolation, and the strong temptations which assault people who have too much time for recreation and too few facilities for it. So what do you think he preached about? “The duty of observing all the saints’ days in the church calendar—as if they had been a group of the devout widows and spinsters in the home congregation.” He was “a first prize idiot,” comments W. M. McGregor, who tells the story. Then there was the “Cambridge don of whom E. L. Mascall tells in one of his books” who “began his sermon to a group of Cambridge bedmakers (college servants): ‘The ontological argument for the existence of God has in recent years, largely under Teutonic influence, been relegated to a position of comparative inferiority in the armoury of Christian apologetics.’” Yet even this crass stupidity was exceeded by Bishop John Wordsworth of Salisbury (1885–1911) who, in his sermon at a confirmation service at Sherborne School, “vehemently implored the boys, whatever else they might do, on no account to marry their Deceased Wives’ Sisters.”
Let C. H. Spurgeon expose the tragic folly of such irrelevancies, and of a preoccupation with the minutiae of doctrine:
For instance, the great problems of sublapsarianism and supralapsarianism, the trenchant debates concerning eternal filiation, the earnest dispute concerning the double procession, and the pre- and post-millenarian schemes, however important some may deem them, are practically of very little concern to that godly widow woman, with seven children to support by her needle, who wants far more to hear of the loving-kindness of the God of providence than of these mysteries profound. I know a minister who is great upon the ten toes of the beast, the four faces of the cherubim, the mystical meaning of badgers’ skins, and the typical bearings of the staves of the ark, and the windows of Solomon’s temple: but the sins of business men, the temptations of the times, and the needs of the age, he scarcely ever touches upon.
In other words, he is totally irrelevant.
I turn now to the characteristic fault in the preaching of those whose theology is “liberal” or, more extreme, “radical” rather than conservative. They find it congenial to live on the contemporary side of the great divide. They are modern people who belong to the modern world. They are sensitive to the current mood and understand what is going on around them. They read modern poetry and philosophy. They are familiar with the writings of living novelists and the discoveries of modern scientists. They go to the theater and the cinema, and they watch television. Toffler’s Future Shock fails to shock them, for they have their built-in shock absorbers. They are moving with the moving times. So when they preach, I would have to draw another straight line on my diagram, although this time in the opposite direction. All their sermons are earthed in the real world, but where they come from (one is tempted to add) heaven alone knows. They certainly do not appear to come out of the Bible. On the contrary, these preachers have allowed the biblical revelation to slip through their fingers.
Those of us who criticize and condemn liberal theologians for their abandonment of historic Christianity do not always honor their motivation or give them credit for what they are trying to do. The heart of their concern is not destruction but reconstruction. They know that large numbers of their contemporaries are contemptuously dismissive of Christianity because they find its beliefs untenable, its formulations archaic, and its vocabulary meaningless. This fact causes the best liberals profound pain, and it is this which lies behind their theologizing. They are anxious to restate the Christian faith in terms which are intelligible, meaningful, and credible to their secular colleagues and friends. All honor to them in so far as they are genuinely wrestling with the need to discover the modern gospel for the modern world. I wish we conservatives shared this incentive and were ourselves neither so entrenched in antique cliches, nor so offensively complacent about our failure to communicate. What is sad and reprehensible about liberals is that in discarding the ancient formulations they tend also to discard the truth formulated, and so to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
The contrast I have been drawing between the two main theological groupings in today’s churches seems to me to be one of the greatest tragedies of our time. On the one hand, conservatives are biblical but not contemporary, while on the other liberals and radicals are contemporary but not biblical. Why must we polarize in this naive way, however? Each side has a legitimate concern, the one to conserve God’s revelation, the other to relate meaningfully to real people in the real world. Why can we not combine each other’s concerns? Is it not possible for liberals to learn from conservatives the necessity of conserving the fundamentals of historic, biblical Christianity, and for conservatives to learn from liberals the necessity of relating these radically and relevantly to the real world?
Meanwhile, each group stays on its favorite side of the cultural chasm, and almost nobody seems to be building bridges. Yet we preachers are supposed to be in the business of communication. A lecture has been wittily defined as the transfer of information from the lecturer’s notes to the student’s, without it passing through the mind of either; but sermons should not be equally dismal examples of non-communication. We should be praying that God will raise up a new generation of Christian communicators who are determined to bridge the chasm; who struggle to relate God’s unchanging Word to our ever-changing world; who refuse to sacrifice truth to relevance or relevance to truth; but who resolve instead in equal measure to be faithful to Scripture and pertinent to today.
This earthing of the Word in the world is not something optional; it is an indispensable characteristic of true Christian preaching. Indeed, it is an obligation laid upon us by the kind of God we believe in and by the way in which he has himself communicated with us, namely in Christ and in Scripture, through his living and his written Word. In Scripture he spoke his Word through human words to human beings in precise historical and cultural contexts; he did not speak in culture-free generalities. Similarly, his eternal Word became flesh, in all the particularity of a first-century Palestinian Jew. In both cases he reached down to where the people were to whom he desired to communicate. He spoke in human language; he appeared in human flesh. Thus the great doctrines of inspiration and incarnation have established a divine precedent for communication. God condescended to our humanity, though without surrendering his deity. Our bridges too must be firmly anchored on both sides of the chasm by refusing either to compromise the divine content of the message or to ignore the human context in which it has to be spoken. We have to plunge fearlessly into both worlds, ancient and modern, biblical and contemporary, and to listen attentively to both. For only then shall we understand what each is saying, and so discern the Spirit’s message to the present generation. We have to ask, in the controversial language of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Who is Christ for us today?” Already in 1932 he had said, “The point is not how are we to model the message but what really is the message and its content” for the present age?
All this will mean a greater thoughtfulness in our preaching. On the whole, if I may generalize, we do not make sufficient demands on the congregation. When they come to church, they have heard it all before. They have known it since they were in junior Sunday school. It is stale, boring, and irrelevant. It fails to “grab” or excite them. They can scarcely stifle their yawns. They come with their problems, and they leave with their problems. The sermon has not spoken to their need.
I am not of course advocating that we treat our congregation as if it were a university audience, or that we turn our sermon into an academic lecture. Nor do I forget Marshall McLuhan’s dislike of literary man, who reads books in antisocial isolation, extinguishes his imagination, and becomes a slave to linear logic. It is perfectly true that the conclusions which some reach through logic others reach through intuition; that it is possible to learn by images as well as by words; and that the human beings God has created are not only “cerebral” (with brain power) but also “visceral” (capable of what is vulgarly termed a “gut reaction”). Therefore, there is a legitimate, even an essential, place in preaching for the intuitive, the imaginative, and the emotional. I shall have more to say about these later. Nevertheless, it is also true that all human beings, including entirely illiterate people, are rational by creation; that God has addressed to them a rational revelation, speaking his message to their minds and expecting them to understand it; and that, even if we were to give up reading, we would still remain to some degree linear thinkers, since “speech is just as linear as script—more so in fact.” I have myself been struck by how many modern films and plays (e.g. of Bergman, Woody Allen, Tom Stoppard, and Brian Clark) contain very little action, but rely instead on rapid dialogue which demands of the audience a high degree of concentration.
Yet obviously we must preach in such a way that people can understand. Henry Paget, Bishop of Chester from 1919 to 1932, who described himself as “far better at making friends than at making speeches,” would have preferred to remain in East Suffolk where he had earlier served. For there in the farming villages it was possible gradually to get to know everybody and understand them. “I am no preacher,” a village clergyman had said to him one day, “but my reach is a little longer than theirs, and I can pull down the fodder low enough for them to get it.” To preach instead over people’s heads is to forget who they are. As Spurgeon once commented, “Christ said, ‘Feed my sheep. . . Feed my lambs.’ Some preachers, however, put the food so high that neither lambs nor sheep can reach it. They seem to have read the text, ‘Feed my giraffes.’”
Although we must not overestimate our congregation’s intellectual capacity, we must not underestimate it either. My plea is that we treat them as real people with real questions; that we grapple in our sermons with real issues; and that we build bridges into the real world in which they live and love, work and play, laugh and weep, struggle and suffer, grow old and die. We have to provoke them to think about their life in all its moods, to challenge them to make Jesus Christ the Lord of every area of it, and to demonstrate his contemporary relevance.
In developing the picture of preaching as a bridge building operation, I am not proposing anything new. Christian preachers in every age have seen the need to relate God’s revelation to the times in which they lived, and have responded to the challenge. Let me give you a few examples. Chrysostom (who died in AD 407), perhaps the most eloquent and forthright preacher of the first three Christian centuries, was summed up by C. S. Horne in these words, “We have two qualities in Chrysostom, which in their combination make him unique—he is a man of the Word and a man of the world.” Again, “As with all effective preachers, his message had both a timeless: and a timely element in it.” Somewhat similarly, S. E. Dwight wrote of Jonathan Edwards, who was at the heart of the Great Awakening in the eighteenth century, “His knowledge of the Bible, evinced in his sermons . . . is probably unrivalled. His knowledge of the human heart, and its operations, has scarcely been equalled by that of any uninspired preacher.”
A nineteenth century British example is F. W. Robertson (1816–1853). In stature he was tall and thin, and in personality sensitive, proud, nervous, and lonely. After only six years as incumbent of Trinity Chapel, Brighton, his health broke down, and he died at the age of thirty-seven. Yet “this relatively obscure Brighton preacher,” said Hensley Henson in a lecture celebrating the centenary of his birth, left a mark on the spiritual life of his countrymen which was “deep and permanent.” Why so? Because “whatever was agitating society he took up . . . in the pulpit.” Bishop Henson explained his influence in three ways: (1) “the deliberate reference of his preaching to modern conditions of thought and life,” (2) “the intensely personal note which runs through his preaching,” and (3) “the passionate devotion to the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ which inspires his words.” Of these three the first was paramount. He can be criticized for his somewhat arbitrary use of Scripture, but he had great courage in fighting the reigning prejudices, and he maintained throughout “his habit of ‘preaching to the times,’ by linking his argument to the subjects which at the moment were engaging the public mind.” As Bishop Phillips Brooks put it, “truth and timeliness together make the full preacher.”
In the twentieth century it is perhaps Karl Barth who has spoken most persuasively about the need for relevant biblical preaching. At a ministers’ meeting in 1922, he gave an address entitled “The Need and Promise of Christian Preaching.” He spoke personally of his twelve years in the pastorate. During this period, he said,
I sought to find my way between the problem of human life on the one hand and the content of the Bible on the other. As a minister I wanted to speak to the people in the infinite contradiction of their life, but to speak the no less infinite message of the Bible, which was as much of a riddle as life. Often enough these two magnitudes, life and the Bible, have risen before me (and still rise!) like Scylla and Charybdis: if these are the whence and whither of Christian preaching, who shall, who can, be a minister and preach?
It was this dilemma, he went on to explain, which finally led him to write his epoch-making commentary on the letter to the Romans, and readers will understand it best if throughout they hear the minister’s question “what is preaching?” The standpoint of the “man in the pulpit” is this: “Before him lies the Bible, full of mystery; and before him are seated his . . . hearers, also full of mystery. . . . What now? asks the minister.” When the church bells ring, “there is in the air an expectancy that something great, crucial and even momentous is to happen.” What is this? It is the people’s expectation that they will hear God’s Word, that is, answers to their ultimate questions.” Years later “someone . . . asked Karl Barth ‘What do you do to prepare your Sunday sermon?’ Barth answered, ‘I take the Bible in one hand and the daily newspaper in the other.’” It is intriguing that some fifty years previously C. H. Spurgeon had written what he entitled “My little shilling book The Bible and the Newspaper.”
The same emphasis has been made by Professor Jean-Jacques von Allmen of Neuchatel, Switzerland, who wrote in his book Preaching and Congregation of “the two poles of preaching,” namely God’s Word and our hearers. Neither is of much use without the other. “To repeat from the pulpit ‘Jesus Christ our Lord,’ ‘Jesus Christ our Lord,’ rather as the Ephesians proclaimed the greatness of their Diana, is no guarantee that one has truly preached the lordship of Christ”; for this to happen, there must be listeners who hear, understand, relate, and respond. But the contrary mistake is also possible: the listeners may assemble and no Word of God be proclaimed. Both errors, he suggests, correspond to Christological heresies. The first is Docetic preaching (denying the humanity of Christ) and the second Arian (denying his divinity). The preacher’s task is faithfully to translate the Word of God into modern language and thought-categories, and to make it present in our day. Thus “to translate the Word we must know two languages; to make it present we must know two epochs.” As Bishop Yngve Brilioth of Sweden put it, two major elements in preaching are “the expository or exegetical (it starts from and expounds a text of Scripture) and the prophetic (it is a message for the present time, making the Scriptural text a living word in the actual situation).”
To sum up this necessity of holding together the biblical and the contemporary, I call four final witnesses. James Stalker quoted the German theologian Tholuck as saying “a sermon ought to have heaven for its father and the earth for its mother.” Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones has written that “the business of preaching is to relate the teaching of the Scriptures to what is happening in our own day.” And Professor Ian Pitt-Watson writes, “Every sermon is stretched like a bowstring between the text of the Bible on the one hand and the problems of contemporary human life on the other. If the string is insecurely tethered to either end, the bow is useless.” Fourthly, Bishop Stephen Neill develops yet another metaphor. “Preaching is like weaving,” he writes. “There are the two factors of the warp and the woof. There is the fixed, unalterable element, which for us is the Word of God, and there is the variable element, which enables the weaver to change and vary the pattern at his will. For us that variable element is the constantly changing pattern of people and of situations.”
It is time now to turn from theory to practice. Supposing it is conceded that genuine Christian preaching is a bridge-building exercise, legitimized by ample biblical and historical precedents, what will be required of us? Not just renouncing theological jargon in favor of modern slang, though in some situations this will be necessary, but actually entering other people’s worlds of thought and feeling. Incarnation (exchanging one world for another), not just translation (exchanging one language for another) is the Christian model of communication. I will try to develop two examples, the first personal and individual, the second ethical and social.
First, we must boldly handle the major themes of human life, the incessant questions which men and women have always asked and which the great novelists and dramatists have treated in every age: What is the purpose of our existence? Has life any significance? Where did I come from, and where am I going to? What does it mean to be a human being, and how do humans differ from animals? Whence this thirst for transcendence, this universal quest for a Reality above and beyond us, this need to fall down and worship the Infinitely Great? What is freedom, and how can I experience personal liberation? Why the painful tension between what I am and what I long to be? Is there a way to be rid of guilt and of a guilty conscience? What about the hunger for love, sexual fulfillment, marriage, family life, and community on the one hand, and on the other the pervasive sense of alienation, and the base, destructive passions of jealousy, malice, hate, lust, and revenge? Is it possible truly to master oneself and love one’s neighbor? Is there any light on the dark mysteries of evil and suffering? How can we find courage to face first life, then death, then what may lie beyond death? What hope can sustain us in the midst of our despair?
In every generation and every culture men and women have asked these questions and debated these issues. This is the stuff from which the world’s great literature is formed. Have we Christians nothing to say about these things? Of course we have! We are convinced that the questions themselves reflect and bear witness to the paradoxical nature of human beings which the Bible teaches, namely their dignity as Godlike creatures and their depravity as fallen and guilty sinners. We are also convinced that Jesus Christ either has the answers to these questions or—in the case of intractable mysteries like pain and evil—that he throws more light on them than can be gathered from any other source. Jesus Christ, we believe, is the fulfillment of every truly human aspiration. To find him is to find ourselves.
Therefore, above all else, we must preach Christ. “Enthusiasm for Christ is the soul of preaching,” wrote James Stalker in his Yale lectures of 1891. “If we can but teach Christ to our people,” Richard Baxter had written more than two centuries earlier, “we teach them all.” Not only so, but Jesus Christ exerts on people an almost irresistible attraction. Uplift him, and he draws people to himself, as he said he would (John 12:32). Was this not the major secret of the power which attended the preaching of Whitefield and Wesley in the eighteenth century? In January 1739 in Bermondsey, South London, George Whitefield found the church packed to capacity, while outside perhaps another thousand people could not get in. “I offered Jesus Christ freely to sinners,” he wrote of his sermon in the church, “to all who would lay hold of him by faith.” And even while he was preaching, he dreamed of the possibility of going out into the churchyard, and of climbing on to a tombstone in order to preach Christ again.
John Wesley’s favorite text, particularly during the first year of his itinerant ministry, seems to have been 1 Corinthians 1:30, which announces Jesus Christ as “our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption.” It thus declares the comprehensive adequacy of Jesus Christ for all our needs. If we want to find true wisdom, to enter into a right relationship with God, to grow in Christlikeness of character or to be one day fully and finally redeemed, it is to Jesus Christ alone that we must turn. For Christ crucified and risen has been designated by God to be all these things to his people. Wesley reveled in proclaiming this. Take these quotations from his journal, which all belong to 1739, the year following his conversion. On 14 June he preached in Blackheath to between twelve and fourteen thousand people “on my favourite subject ‘Jesus Christ who of God is made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption.’” On 17 July, on the top of a hill overlooking Bradford, five miles from Bath, “I there offered Christ to about a thousand people for wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption.” On 7 October, on the village green a few miles from Gloucester, “I called on all who were present (about 3,000 people) . . . to accept of Christ as their only wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption. I was strengthened to speak as I never did before; and I continued speaking nearly two hours.” Then on 15 October, on a little green two or three miles beyond Chepstow in South Wales, he preached to 300 or 400 plain people on “Christ our wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption.” Although all these quotations come from the same year at the beginning of his ministry, Wesley never grew tired of preaching Christ. Twenty-two years later on 22 June 1761, his message was the same. He was in County Durham, in the north of England. The sun was hot and he was feeling physically weak. The place was unsuitable too, “for there was so vehement a stench of stinking fish as was ready to suffocate me, and the people roared like the waves of the sea. But the voice of the Lord was mightier.” Neither weakness, nor heat, nor stench, nor hostility could silence him. “In a few minutes the whole multitude was still and seriously attended while I proclaimed ‘Jesus Christ made of God unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption.’”
In his lectures to his students and in his addresses to pastors, Spurgeon continually reverted to the same glorious theme. “What shall we preach?” he asks himself, and replies:
Of all I would wish to say this is the sum; my brethren, preach Christ, always and evermore. He is the whole gospel. His person, offices and work must be our one great, all-comprehending theme. The world needs still to be told of its Saviour, and of the way to reach him. . . . Salvation is a theme for which I would fain enlist every holy tongue. I am greedy after witnesses for the glorious gospel of the blessed God. O that Christ crucified were the universal burden of men of God.
Later, at one of his annual conferences for pastors, in an address entitled “How to Meet the Evils of the Age,” Spurgeon said: “Keep to the gospel, then, more and more. Give the people Christ and nothing but Christ.” Then, after expatiating on some current evils, he concluded: “We have only one remedy for them; preach Jesus Christ, and let us do it more and more. By the roadside, in the little room, in the theatre, anywhere, everywhere, let us preach Christ. Write books if you like and do anything else within your power; but whatever else you cannot do, preach Christ.”
It should be plain from these quotations that the One we preach is not Christ-in-a-vacuum, nor a mystical Christ unrelated to the real world, nor even only the Jesus of ancient history, but rather the contemporary Christ who once lived and died, and now lives to meet human need in all its variety today. To encounter Christ is to touch reality and experience transcendence. He gives us a sense of self-worth or personal significance because he assures us of God’s love for us. He sets us free from guilt because he died for us, from the prison of our own self-centeredness by the power of his resurrection, and from paralyzing fear because he reigns, all the principalities and powers of evil having been put under his feet. He gives meaning to marriage and home, work and leisure, personhood and citizenship. He introduces us into his new community, the new humanity he is creating. He challenges us to go out into some segment of the world which does not acknowledge him, there to give ourselves in witness and service for him. He promises us that history is neither meaningless nor endless, for one day he will return to terminate it, to destroy death and to usher in the new universe of righteousness and peace. “In him (Christ) the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness of life in him” (Col. 2:9–10). One of the most fascinating of all the preacher’s tasks is to explore both the emptiness of fallen man and the fullness of Jesus Christ, in order then to demonstrate how he can fill our emptiness, lighten our darkness, enrich our poverty, and bring our human aspirations to fulfillment. The riches of Christ are unfathomable (Eph. 3:8, NEB).
From this personal example of bridge building, of relating the Word to the world, or Christ to the individual, I turn to the sphere of ethical duty. All Christians of every conceivable tradition are agreed that the gospel has ethical implications. Justification leads inevitably to sanctification. Doctrine without duty is sterile; faith without works is dead. But what are the “works” which are the fruit of faith? It is here that disagreement begins. It may be helpful to consider the matter as a series of concentric circles, beginning with personal ethics and then moving on through the churchly, the domestic, and the social to issues which have a political dimension.
Even individual Christian ethics, in at least some Christian circles, have been pitifully trivialized. There is, for example, an evangelical subculture which is obsessed with the questions of smoking and drinking, with what used to be called “questionable amusements” (dancing, card-playing, theater-going, and visiting the cinema), together with styles of clothing (how short a woman may wear her skirt), coiffure (how long a man may grow his hair), and cosmetics (how much cream, powder, lipstick, and mascara are permitted, if any). Now I am not saying that these issues have no importance. For example, alcohol dependence has become a serious problem in many countries, so that every Christian must come to a responsible decision whether to be a total abstainer or to drink occasionally and in moderation. Now that a link between heavy smoking and some forms of cancer has been scientifically established, the Christian’s duty to his body as the Holy Spirit’s temple is involved in his decision whether to smoke. Since Jesus taught that the discipline of the eyes is a major means to sexual self-control, Christians are forced to make a conscientious choice between what films and plays they will see, and what novels and magazines they will read, and those they will not. Further, in questions of clothing, cosmetics, coiffure, and jewelry, further choices have to be made between modesty and vanity, simplicity and extravagance, as the apostles themselves taught. So these issues are not unimportant. In all of them we need to develop a Christian perspective and make a Christian decision. Nevertheless, some Christians lose their sense of proportion over these matters which, in comparison with the big moral and social issues of the day, can only be described as minuscule. They are “micro-ethics” in distinction from “macro-ethics.” To become preoccupied with them is to be guilty of an evangelical pharisaism (“straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel”) which majors on minors and neglects what Jesus called “the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith” (Matt. 23:23–24).
Individual or personal morality was taught in the Old Testament by prophets, priests, scribes, and wise men who sought to draw out the implications of the Ten Commandments. John the Baptist was the last representative of this honorable tradition, before Christ came. He not only exhorted the people to “bear fruits that befit repentenance,” but spelled out what this would mean to different people, instructing the tax-gatherers to collect no more than was appointed them and the soldiers to rob nobody, accuse nobody falsely, and be content with their wages (Luke 3:8–14). Similar teaching in personal ethics is given in the New Testament letters, sometimes in the general commendation of Christian virtues (“the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” Gal. 5:22, 23), and sometimes in a particular requirement like the control of that unruly organ and “restless evil,” the tongue (Jas 3:1–12).
To me the most striking example, however, is to be found in the second chapter of the letter to Titus. Here Titus is told to give detailed ethical instruction to different groups in the congregation: the older men are to be temperate, serious, and mature; the older women are to be self-controlled and to teach the young wives their responsibilities to husband and children; the younger men are to learn self-mastery; Titus himself is to set a blameless example; and slaves are to be submissive, hardworking, and honest. More impressive even than these particularities is their grounding in Christian doctrine. For the paragraph begins with the command to “teach what befits sound doctrine” and ends with the statement that good behavior will “adorn the doctrine of God our Savior.” There were, then, two parts to Titus’ pedagogical responsibilities. On the one hand, he was to teach “the sound doctrine” (the apostolic faith which, like the human body, is an integrated whole). On the other, he was to teach “the things which befit it” (the ethical conduct which is appropriate to it and will “adorn” it or display its beauty). It is of the utmost importance that we follow the apostles by keeping these two together in our preaching ministry and by refusing to divorce them. When we proclaim the gospel, we must go on to unfold its ethical implications, and when we teach Christian behavior we must lay its gospel foundations. Christians need to grasp both that their faith in Christ has practical consequences and that the main incentive to good works is to be found in the gospel. God’s saving grace in Christ is actually personified as our moral teacher, “training us to renounce irreligion and worldly passions, and to live sober, upright and godly lives in this world” (Titus 2:11–12).
By our “churchly” duty (“ecclesiastical” sounds too pompous and institutional), as distinct from our “individual” duty, I am referring to our responsibilities to each other within the new community which Jesus founded. Much of the ethical teaching of the apostles refers to “how one ought to behave in the household of God” (1 Tim. 3:15), and so to the new style and standards of conduct which are expected in God’s new society. It is here that all the many “one another” exhortations in the New Testament find their place. We are to love one another, to forgive and forbear one another, to encourage and admonish one another, to “practice hospitality ungrudgingly to one another” (1 Pet. 4:9), and to “bear one another’s burdens” (Gal. 6:2). This is the context of Paul’s catalogue of duties in Ephesians 4 and 5. We are to put away falsehood, anger, dishonesty, evil talk, bitterness, slander, and impurity, as incompatible with the new fellowship (God’s family, Christ’s body, and the Holy Spirit’s temple) which has come into being through the cross. For “we are members one of another” (4:25), and all our behavior must be consistent with this fact of our belonging to one another in Christ. Such practices as litigation, or enjoying our liberty in a way that offends another’s weak conscience, are absolutely at variance with the notion of being brothers and sisters through Christ. “Brother goes to law against brother”; “by your knowledge this weak man is destroyed, the brother for whom Christ died” (1 Cor. 6:6; 8:11). One can hear the outrage in the apostle’s voice as he dictated these sentences about violations of the brotherhood.
It is already quite evident that, although good behavior is an inevitable consequence of the good news, it is not “automatic” in the sense that it does not need to be taught. The apostles who proclaimed the gospel gave clear and concrete ethical instruction as well. The law and the gospel were thus related in their teaching. If the law is a “schoolmaster” to bring us to Christ, placing us under such discipline and condemnation as to make Christ our only hope of salvation, Christ now sends us back to the law to tell us how to live. Even the purpose of his death for our sins was not only that we might be forgiven but that, having been forgiven, “the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit” (Rom. 8:3–4). There are many pastors today who, for fear of being branded “legalists,” give their congregation no ethical teaching. How far we have strayed from the apostles! “Legalism” is the misguided attempt to earn our salvation by obedience to the law. “Pharisaism” is a preoccupation with the externals and the minutiae of religious duty. To teach the standards of moral conduct which adorn the gospel is neither legalism nor pharisaism but plain apostolic Christianity.
The third circle of ethical responsibility, to which we now turn our attention, is the domestic. The apostles Paul and Peter both include a section in their letters which specifies the reciprocal duties of husbands and wives, parents and children, and masters and slaves (Eph. 5:21–6:9; Col. 3:18–4:1; 1 Pet. 2:18–3:7). They evidently set great store by the Christian home and the harmonious relationships which should characterize it. So they give straightforward instruction on this subject. Home, marriage, the upbringing of children, and working for a living remain a major part of human life, and are daily concerns of nearly everybody in each Christian congregation. Moreover, Christian standards in each sphere differ markedly from those of the non-Christian world. So thorough teaching on the Christian doctrines and duties of marriage, parenthood, and work is urgently needed today, and too few pulpits attempt to give it.
Wider than our individual, ecclesiastical, and domestic duties are the social questions which affect our behavior in the community at large. Let me begin with our Lord’s own teaching in the Sermon on the Mount about non-retaliation on the one hand and loving our enemies on the other (Matt. 5:38–48; Luke 6:27–36). Here is teaching which takes us out of our home and our church into the world where violence reigns and where there is hostility to the person and standards of Jesus. The question of the Christian attitude to the evil-doer and the enemy cannot be confined to the realm of personal ethics either. It immediately raises questions about the state and its officers (legislators, policemen, judges). This Paul makes clear by placing in deliberate juxtaposition the duty of the individual Christian to “repay no one evil for evil” and the duty of the state to punish the evil-doer (Rom. 12:14–13:5). Indeed, he makes the contrast the more stark by his teaching on both wrath and revenge. “Never avenge yourselves,” he writes. Why not? Not because retribution is wrong in itself but because it is God’s prerogative rather than ours: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” Similarly, we are not to curse those who persecute us but to bless them, and never to retaliate but to live peaceably with everybody. Why so? Are anger against evil and judgment upon evil always incompatible with righteousness? No, but they belong to God. “Leave it to the wrath of God,” Paul writes (12:19). For God expresses his wrath partly through the state, which is “the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer” (13:14).
The reason why I have tried briefly to elaborate this Pauline teaching is to show that the Sermon on the Mount cannot be simplistically confined to the realm of individual ethics; it raises questions about violence and non-violence in the community which cannot either be dodged in our own thinking or be eliminated from the pulpit.
Several other examples could be given. One is sexual ethics. Certain standards of sexual morality are clearly taught in the Bible, for instance that lifelong heterosexual marriage is the only context, and “honor” as opposed to “lust” the only style, in which sexual intercourse is to be enjoyed (Gen. 2:24; Mark 10:5–9; 1 Thess. 4:3–5). Moreover, since marriage is an ordinance of creation rather than of redemption, these divine standards apply to the whole human community, and not merely to a diminishing religious remnant. It is impossible, therefore, to rest content with the faithful teaching of biblical sex ethics to the congregation (though, to be sure, this is so rare that in itself it would be a welcome advance); we have to be concerned also with the public debate about marriage (is it not now dispensable?), about divorce and the remarriage of divorced persons (why make a fuss about these things?), and about homosexual partnerships (if characterized not by promiscuity but by fidelity, are they not an acceptable variation on heterosexual marriage?). Christians should enter vigorously into these debates and fearlessly use the pulpit to do so. We have a responsibility not only to expound God’s standards with clarity and courage, and without compromise, and to exhort our own congregations to maintain and exhibit these standards with joyful faithfulness, but to go on to commend them to the secular community. Just as we must not only preach the gospel but argue it, as the apostles did, so we must not only teach biblical ethics (including sex ethics), but go on to argue that they are as conducive to society’s well-being as a departure from them is destructive of it.
From sex I move on to money. Jesus spoke much of the dangers of wealth, the sin of covetousness, the folly of materialistic ambition, and the duty of generosity. James his brother includes in his letter a fierce denunciation (reminiscent of the Old Testament prophets) of those rich people who hoard their wealth like misers, oppress their workers by withholding their wages, and live in selfish luxury (5:1–6). He and John and Paul all also emphasize the obligation of well-to-do Christians (people who possess the world’s goods) so to share with the poor as to ensure that they have the necessities of life (2 Cor. 8:1–15; Jas. 2:14–18; 1 John 3:17, 18). Yet how much do we hear of this biblical teaching today, even from those pulpits and in those churches which claim to adhere most strictly to biblical authority? Are we afraid of offending an affluent congregation by preaching on the perils of affluence and the joys of sacrifice and simplicity? Or do we try to evade the challenge of such biblical themes by restricting the scope of our concern to our impoverished fellow Christians? To be sure, even this would be a revolutionary step, for there are millions of deprived and even destitute Christians in the world, whose plight puts our western Christian affluence to shame. Yet this restriction is inadmissible. For though the Bible does teach that our priority responsibility is to our brothers and sisters in the Christian fellowship, it commands us also to “do good to all men” (Gal. 6:10). And of course Jesus told us to love even our enemies and to express our love in action, for only then shall we prove to be genuine children of our heavenly Father who loves the evil and the good indiscriminately, and expresses his love in his gifts of rain and sunshine to all (Matt. 5:43–48). So the gross economic inequality between the nations of the north and the south is not just a legitimate concern of Christians, but a mandatory one. It is an unavoidable extension of the biblical doctrines of the unity of the human race, the stewardship of the earth’s resources, and the injustice which is inherent in inequalities of privilege.
I have now slipped into the fifth and widest of the concentric circles of Christian ethics, the political, that is, into situations of social injustice which may be ameliorated but cannot be remedied without political action. What attitude are preachers to take up toward the issues of “macro-ethics”? They press upon us from every side—human oppression and the cry for liberation; poverty, hunger, illiteracy, and disease; the pollution of the environment and the conservation of its natural resources; abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, and other life and death issues; work, leisure, and unemployment; civil rights and civil liberties; dehumanization by the technocracy and the bureaucracy; the increase of crime and society’s responsibility for the criminal; racism, nationalism, tribalism, and human community; violence and revolution; the armaments race, the nuclear horror, and the threat of world war. The list seems almost endless. These are the questions which fill our newspapers and which thoughtful university students debate all day and all night. How then can we ban them from the pulpit? If we do so, in order to concentrate exclusively on “spiritual” topics, we perpetuate the disastrous separation of the sacred from the secular (implying that these are distinct spheres and that God is concerned only for the one and not for the other); we divorce Christian faith from Christian life; we encourage a pietistic Christian withdrawal from the real world; we justify Marx’s well-known criticism that religion is an opiate which drugs people into acquiescing in the status quo; and we confirm non-Christians in their sneaking suspicion that Christianity is irrelevant. All this is much too high a price to pay for our irresponsibility.
But I can hear my objectors rallying for their counterattack. “You are presuming to advocate in Christian preachers today,” they will say, “something which neither the biblical writers, nor Jesus, nor his apostles ever did. They never meddled in politics. They preached salvation. The ethical instruction they gave was limited to the individual, the home, and the church. They did not concern themselves with social or socio-political questions in the outside world.” Are you so sure, my friend and critic? I reply. Think again, I beg you, and consider these arguments. The living God of the Bible is the God of creation as well as of the covenant, and his concern extends beyond his own covenant community to the whole human community. And since he is a God of justice and of compassion, he desires to see these flourish in every society. Look at the first two chapters of Amos, in which it is written that his judgment will fall not only on his own people, the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, for disregarding his law and oppressing the powerless, but on the surrounding heathen nations too, on Syria and Philistia, on Tyre, Edom, Ammon, and Moab. And why? Because of their barbaric atrocities in warfare, their depopulation of conquered countries and enslavement of their peoples, and their desecration of the bones of an enemy king. This passage (with similar prophetic oracles against the nations) shows that God is concerned for justice and humane behavior in every community.
Allied with this is the biblical doctrine of man, male and female, the crown of God’s creation, bearing his likeness, possessing a unique worth and dignity, and on that account to be honored, respected, and served. To oppress the poor is to insult their Maker, the Scripture says, and to curse human beings is to dishonor people “who are made in the likeness of God” (Prov. 14:31; Jas. 3:9). This respect for human beings as Godlike beings is fundamental according to the Bible to our attitude to them. It moves us to oppose everything which dehumanizes human beings and to support everything which makes them more human. Nothing, it is true, is more humanizing than the gospel. So we must proclaim it throughout the world with all possible energy, thoroughness, urgency, and zeal. But once the good news of Christ’s salvation has brought people into right relationship with God, and caused them to stand upright and lift up their heads with a new self-respect as his adopted and beloved children, we cannot then leave them alone in the inhuman conditions of poverty, disease, and illiteracy in which so many millions of them are condemned to live. Nor indeed can we consider the same inhuman conditions which oppress non-Chiristian people, and react to them with composure and idleness on the ground that their victims do not know Christ. What callous discrimination is this? Do they not bear the divine image too? Is not all oppression offensive to God? Then what displeases him must displease us. We cannot stand by and do nothing.
As for our Lord Jesus Christ, his message had more far-reaching political implications than is commonly recognized. His contemporaries certainly thought so, for they had him arrested, tried, and condemned on a charge of sedition. “We found this man perverting our nation,” the Jewish leaders, said to Pilate, “and forbidding us to give tribute to Caesar, saying that he himself is Christ a king” (Luke 23:1–2). while the inscription over the cross, identifying the crime for which he was executed, read “This is the king of the Jews” (Luke 23:38). Of course the Jewish accusation was partly a lie. Jesus neither perverted the nation nor prohibited tribute to Caesar. Yet he did claim to be a king, indeed, the King, God’s King. And the Jewish leaders perceived something of the implications of his claim to kingship. Indeed, the Jews later continued the same campaign against his apostles. “These men . . . have turned the world upside down,” they complained in Thessalonica. That is, they are political subversives, for “they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus” (Acts 17:6–7). Was it a slander? Or was the accusation true? It was both. Of course the apostles were not inciting the people to revolt. But they were proclaiming the supreme kingship of Jesus, and this necessarily meant denying to Caesar that which he coveted most, namely the absolute homage of his subjects, even their worship. It meant, further, that King Jesus had a community of subjects who looked to him for directions about their values, standards, and lifestyle; who knew they had a responsibility to be the world’s salt and light; and who were prepared, whenever there was a collision between the two communities and their two value-systems, to defy Caesar and follow Christ, even at the cost of their lives. It was all very alarming to the political establishment whose chief concern was to maintain undisturbed the social status quo.
Yet these arguments will not convince my objectors. Even granted the rival kings and the alternative communities, they will say, Jesus and the apostles still did not instruct Caesar how to conduct his business, nor suggest how the law-code of the Roman Empire should be improved, nor even demand the abolition of slavery. No, it is quite true, they did not. But surely we are not going to argue from this that they condoned slavery (to continue with this example), and that those Christian politicians who finally succeeded in securing its abolition first in Britain and then in the United States, were mistaken in their understanding of their duty and had no mandate from Christ for what they did? My objectors will certainly not pursue this line of argument. No, we surely all agree that William Wilberforce and his friends had discerned God’s mind and were doing God’s will in their courageous activity; that they correctly deduced from Scripture that slavery (the ownership of one human being by another) is incompatible both with the Christian doctrine of man and with the “justice” which Paul himself required slave owners to give their slaves (Col. 4:1); and that they were rightly encouraged from Christian pulpits to translate these biblical principles into practice. So they campaigned, with indomitable perseverence, not only for the abolition of the slave-trade (“this most detestable and wicked practice” Wilberforce called it) but also for the emancipation of the slaves.
Why then did Christians not make this deduction from Scripture and get rid of this evil centuries earlier? Leaving aside the tragedy of blind spots, the principal difference between New Testament times and the nineteenth century lies in the social status and political power of Christians. In the early centuries Christians were a tiny, persecuted, powerless minority. Direct political activity was out of the question for them. It is the same with Christians in many countries today, whose prevailing culture is Marxist, Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist, or secular. In many such situations either there is no democratic government, or if there is, there are no (or extremely few) Christians in parliament. In such a state of political powerlessness, Christians can preach and teach, argue and persuade (though with differing degrees of liberty), and seek to exhibit their beliefs and standards in consistent Christian lives and homes. But they can take no direct political action.
What are we to say about the west, however, and about some countries of the Third World, where professing Christians are actually in a majority and the culture has been substantially Christian for centuries? Surely in this situation our Christian responsibilities are quite different. Although it is hardly the responsibility of a church or denomination as such to engage in direct political action, yet Christian individuals and Christian groups should be doing so, and should be encouraged from the pulpit to do so. For Christians should avoid the two opposite mistakes of laissez faire (making no Christian contribution to the nation’s political well-being) and imposition (trying to force a minority view on an unwilling majority, as with the American liquor laws during the period of Prohibition). Instead, we remember that democracy means government with the consent of the governed, that “consent” means majority public opinion, and that public opinion is a volatile thing which is open to Christian influence. Pessimists will respond that human nature is depraved (which it is), that Utopia is unattainable (which it is), and that socio-political activity is therefore a waste of time (which it is not). It is really absurd to say that social amelioration by Christian influence is impossible. For the historical record demonstrates the contrary. Wherever the Christian gospel has gone and triumphed, it has brought in its wake a new concern for education, a new willingness to listen to dissidents, new standards of impartiality in the administration of justice, a new stewardship of the natural environment, new attitudes to marriage and sex, a new respect for women and children, and a new compassionate resolve to relieve the poor, heal the sick, rehabilitate prisoners, and care for the aged and dying. Moreover, these new values become expressed, as Christian influence grows, not only in philanthropic enterprise but also in humane legislation. This is still far from being Utopia. Nor is it the “social gospel” of old-fashioned liberalism which made the mistake of equating the kingdom of God with Christianized society. No, the kingdom of God is his rule over his redeemed people through Christ. But this new people with their new life, new vision, and new power are meant to be the salt and light of the world. They can hinder social decay and spread the light of Christ’s love, peace, and righteousness, and so help to shape a society which is more pleasing to the God of compassion and justice than the society which it replaced.
I am not suggesting that the pulpit is the place in which precise political programs are framed or from which they are commended. Rather that it is the preacher’s responsibility to open up the biblical principles which relate to the problems of contemporary society in such a way as to help everybody to develop a Christian judgment about them and to inspire and encourage the opinion-formers and policy-makers in the congregation, who occupy influential positions in public life, to apply these biblical principles to their professional life. There may be politicians in the congregation, or lawyers, teachers, doctors, industrialists, business people, novelists, journalists, actors, radio and television producers, and scriptwriters. The pulpit should help them to develop their Christian thinking and so to penetrate their segment of the human community more deeply for Christ.
What is certain is that the pulpit has political influence, even if nothing remotely connected with politics is ever uttered from it. For then the preacher’s silence endorses the contemporary socio-political conditions, and instead of helping to change society and make it more pleasing to God, the pulpit becomes a mirror which reflects contemporary society, and the church conforms to the world. The neutrality of the pulpit is impossible. We can find ample evidence to substantiate this fact in Paul Welsby’s anthology of forty-five Anglican sermons preached during the 400 years ending in 1947, published under the title Sermons and Society. He begins his preface with these words:
The object of this anthology is to illustrate the attitude of Anglican preachers, from the Reformation onwards, towards social conditions in this country. In the process of reading their sermons we can also see, through the eyes of the preacher, what life in England was like at the time the sermon was preached.
Some preachers acquiesced in the status quo, while others denounced it. Some disapproved of reform, while others actively promoted it. Their sermons tell us something, therefore, about both society and the church, and about the impact of each on the other. For most of this long period, sad to relate, “the social teaching of the Church had ceased to count, because the Church itself had ceased to think.” That was the judgment of R. H. Tawney which Paul Welsby quotes. Only from the end of the nineteenth century, he argues, did the Church of England become more influential for social change.
If, then, we are to include in our preaching themes which have social, moral, and political implications, how shall we handle the controversial ones? It is indubitable that even equally biblical Christians, with an equal desire to discover the mind of God in the Word of God and to submit to it when discovered, come to different conclusions and find themselves in painful disagreement with each other. How, then, should we tackle such topics? We can go any one of three ways.
First, we can avoid these topics altogether. “Controversy has no place in the pulpit,” we may say. “I want to be able to preach with authority, to echo the prophetic formula ‘Thus says the Lord’ or to declare with dogmatism ‘The Bible says.’ But I cannot preach on these subjects with authority, partly because they are acknowledged to be controversial even among Christians, and partly because I do not possess the necessary knowledge or expertise to do so. I have no alternative; therefore, I will avoid them.”
This attitude is understandable, but irresponsible. Christian people are crying out for guidance in these areas. They want to be helped to think about them as Christians. Shall we abandon them to swim in these deep waters alone? This is the way of the coward.
Secondly, we can adopt a partisan position. In this case, if preaching about war, we will become an uncompromising pacifist (dove) or militarist (hawk); if preaching about economic realities, we will either defend capitalism or advocate socialism; or if preaching about the relations between man and woman, husband and wife, we will embrace either a total feminism or a total male chauvinism. This way we can preach with dogmatism and passion. Since we have a clear-cut position to commend, we can do so with all the eloquence and argument we can muster, meanwhile ignoring alternative viewpoints.
But this is to misuse the pulpit, which is for the exposition and application of God’s Word, and neither for the ventilation of private opinions, nor for the pretension that we have the infallibility of a biblical prophet and apostle. It is also deceitful, because it gives the impression that there is only one position for biblical Christians to hold, and it conceals the fact that other biblical Christians think differently. This is the way of the dogmatist, and even, I think, of the fool.
Can we find a third way? Is there a way to handle controversial topics in the pulpit which is brave not cowardly, humble not dogmatic, and prudent not foolish? I think there is. It is to help Christians to develop a Christian mind. The Christian mind (an expression popularized by Harry Blamires in his book of that title) is not a mind which is thinking about specifically Christian or even religious topics, but a mind which is thinking about everything, however apparently “secular,” and doing so “Christianly” or within a Christian frame of reference. It is not a mind stuffed full with pat answers to every question, all neatly filed as in the memory bank of a computer; it is rather a mind which has absorbed biblical truths and Christian presuppositions so thoroughly that it is able to view every issue from a Christian perspective and so reach a Christian judgment about it. Mr. Blamires bemoans the almost total loss of a Christian mind among church leaders today: “The Christian mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness and nervelessness unmatched in Christian history. . . . As a thinking being the modern Christian has succumbed to secularization.”
Preachers should facilitate the recovery of the lost Christian mind. For by our systematic exposition of the Bible over the years we should be giving our congregation a framework of truth. This will include such basic convictions as the reality and loving personality of the living God; the dignity of human beings by creation and their depravity by the fall; the pervasiveness of evil and the primacy of love; the victory and reign of Jesus Christ; the centrality of the new community in God’s historical purpose; the transience of time and the certainty of the eschaton of judgment and salvation. More simply, a mind may be said to be Christian when it has firmly grasped the fourfold biblical scheme of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation, and is able to evaluate the phenomena of life in the light of it. So all our preaching, week in and week out, should gradually unfold “the whole counsel of God” and so contribute to the development of Christian minds in the congregation.
How, then, does this task relate to controversial preaching? How can we help church members to think Christianly about a particular topic of debate? It seems that we have a fourfold duty. First, we must expound with courage, clarity, and conviction the biblical principle or principles which are involved, and those aspects of the subject on which God has plainly revealed his will. Secondly, we should seek to summarize fairly the alternative applications which biblical Christians have made, and the arguments they have used to buttress their conclusions. Thirdly, we should feel free, if we judge it wise, to indicate which position we hold and why. And fourthly, we should leave the congregation free, after grasping the principles we have taught and weighing the issues we have sketched, to make up their own minds.
My first illustration comes from the Middle East. On two or three occasions I have had the opportunity to travel through several Arab countries, and so to experience at first hand the Arab-Israeli tension and feel something of the Arab sense of injustice over the Palestinian question. How should Arab Christians react to this situation? I was asked. And what should their pastors say about it? It seems to me that it would not be possible either to banish from the pulpit what is the main topic of conversation outside it, or to adopt an extreme partisan position as if justice were entirely and exclusively on one side, although I believe there are pastors following both these courses. It is perhaps presumptuous for an outsider like myself to express an opinion on such a delicate situation, but after discussion with some local Christian leaders I feel able to say something like this. On the one hand, there are certain plain truths of Scripture which pastors should be preaching with confidence, e.g. that the God of the Bible is the God of justice and does not condone injustice in any individuals or nations; that personal hatred and revenge are completely forbidden to Christians; that Jesus commanded his followers to love their enemies and to express their love constructively in deeds and prayers; that therefore every Christian Arab church which meets for worship should spend time specifically praying for Israel, and every Christian group in Israel should pray for their Arab neighbor; that Jesus expects his disciples to bear unjust suffering patiently and without retaliation; that he calls them to be peacemakers; and that Christians who obey all this teaching of Jesus (whether Jews or Arabs) would have to disassociate themselves from the blind, vindictive fanaticism of many of their compatriots, and might therefore be misunderstood, accused of being unpatriotic, and vilified. None of this teaching could be called controversial.
On the other hand, perplexing areas of controversy remain, on which the Christian pastor would need to be much more tentative. What does the Bible teach about nations, about national sovereignty over territory in general, and in particular about the right to occupy the promised land? Is it ever right to seek to secure justice by violent means? Should Christians in the militia ever shoot to kill? What constructive Christian peacemaking is possible? In these areas the pastor would have to open up the debate. On the issue of violence and pacifism, for example, he would have to concede that throughout church history Christians have ranged themselves on opposite sides; that although all Christians condemn war as evil and agree that it is wrong to kill innocent civilians, some have gone further and urged that the way of the cross demands the unconditional renunciation of violence, while others have developed the theory of the “just war,” namely that war may be in certain specific situations (relating especially to its object, the means employed, the suffering involved, and the outcome anticipated) the lesser of two evils. Church members would have to be encouraged to face the issue, consider the arguments, and reach their own conclusion.
Perhaps, as a second example, I could take the western debate over abortion. If one were preaching about this, the plain biblical principle to teach with authority would be the sanctity of human life. That is, the reason why murder is regarded in Scripture as such a heinous crime is not so much because of the sanctity of all life (which, carried to its extreme, is more a Buddhist than a Christian concept) as because of the sanctity of human life, “for God made man in his own image” (Gen. 9:6). The area of debate concerns the point at which the fetus should be regarded as a human being. The Roman Catholic position is that from the moment of fusion a full human being exists, with both body and soul. The Protestant view is that certainly God knew us before we were born; that it is he who formed us in our mother’s womb (Ps. 139:13–16); and that the fetus from the moment of fusion is at the very least a “human being in the making.” Protestant theologians have therefore emphasized that the unborn child (and not the mother only) has “rights” which must be protected. On these grounds they have not only regarded “abortion on demand” with horror, but have also opposed all abortions except in the rare cases when a choice has to be made between the mother’s life and that of the unborn child. Whether there are other extreme cases in which a medical termination of pregnancy may be morally justified (e.g. when a young, unmarried girl is pregnant after being raped) is a matter of anxious, conscientious debate. But Christians will find it easier to reach a decision in such cases when their Christian mind has strongly grasped the sanctity of the life of Godlike human beings both when they are “in the making” and when they are fully developed.
Our task as preachers, then, is neither to avoid all areas of controversy, nor to supply slick answers to complex questions in order to save people the bother of thinking. Either way is to treat them like children who are unable to think for themselves, and to condemn them to perpetual immaturity. Instead, it is our responsibility to teach them with clarity and conviction the plain truths of Scripture in order to help them develop a Christian mind and to encourage them to think with it about the great problems of the day, and so to grow into maturity in Christ.
Conscientious thought and decision-making are an indispensable aspect of human maturity, which is the reason for the so-called “non-directive” element in modern counseling procedures. To make choices for other people is to treat them as children and keep them as such; to help them make their own choices is to treat them as adults and help them to become such. Christian teachers and preachers need to do their utmost to safeguard this human freedom and defend it against the inhuman manipulations of the secular world, such as we see in some forms of advertizing and of education.
In his famous book The Hidden Persuaders, subtitled “An Introduction into the Techniques of Mass-persuasion through the Unconscious,” the author and journalist Vance Packard described Americans as “the most manipulated people outside the Iron Curtain because of their constant exposure to “mental-depth advertizers” or “depth persuaders.” Using the findings of “motivational research” (experiments relating to our subconscious reasons for making choices), he argues, merchandizers, public relations experts, fund raisers, politicians, industrialists, and others are systematically exploiting our hidden frailties (e.g. our vanity, ambition, fears, and sexual desires). The book is amusing. But it is also disturbing, because it uncovers the possibilities of persuading people beneath the surface of their conscious mind. “Large-scale efforts are being made,” Vance Packard writes, “often with impressive success, to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes by the use of insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences.” Whether we are thought of as “consumers” or as “citizens,” the hidden persuaders are at work, trying “to invade the privacy of our minds.”
The other sphere of manipulation is education. Many have written about it. But the author I have chosen to illustrate this danger is Paulo Freire, who was born in Recife, northeast Brazil, in 1921. Experiencing himself the pangs of hunger when he was a boy of only eleven, he vowed to fight against hunger in the world. He became education secretary and general coordinator of Brazil’s “National Plan of Adult Literacy,” but after the military coup of 1964, he was first jailed and then exiled. Since then he has worked in Chile, at Harvard, and in Geneva. His main concern is what he calls “the culture of silence,” that is, the condition of ignorance and passivity in which the Latin American masses are submerged. So in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he advocates their “conscientization,” an educational process in which they first perceive their social reality with accuracy and then take action to transform it. Now Paulo Freire is evidently a Marxist, and there are therefore some features of his book which I find distasteful and unacceptable. Yet I do not think his Marxist commitment gives us any reason to reject his main educational thesis. He contrasts two concepts of education. The first is “narrative education,” so called because it involves “a narrating subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students).” It turns students into “containers” or “receptacles” which the teachers proceed to fill. “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués. This is the ‘banking’ concept of education.”
The alternative concept, which Paulo Freire himself advocates, he calls “problem-posing” as opposed to “deposit-making.” It presupposes a dialogical situation in which teachers and students together confront reality and help each other to reflect on it critically. He sums up the difference between the two concepts in this way:
Whereas banking education anaesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality.
Further, it is here that man is most clearly to be distinguished from the animals. Animals, he argues, are “a-historical” because they can neither reflect on their situation, nor “set objectives,” nor “commit themselves” purposefully to the transformation of reality. By contrast, human beings are aware of themselves and of the world, and can set objectives for change. Again, “animals do not consider the world; they are immersed in it. In contrast, men emerge from the world, objectify it, and in so doing can understand and transform it with their labour.” Without this reflection and action they would not be fully human. For it is by thinking and acting that they cease to be mere objects of the domination and manipulation of others, and themselves become subjects, taking history into their own hands.
In both advertizing and educating, then, it is possible either to manipulate people or to serve them, either to dehumanize them or to help them to grow into human maturity. The same alternative confronts the preacher. It is true that preaching is a different process, and indeed unique because it involves handling the inspired and authoritative Word of God. And yet we must never wield the authority of God’s Word in such a way as to destroy people’s humanness. For God himself, out of love for the people he has made in his own image, addresses us as human beings. He respects the mind and will he has given us; he refuses to coerce us, and instead asks for our thoughtful, loving, and free response. Is this not the reason why the biblical writers encourage their readers to develop critical listening? Elihu was right to say that “the ear tests words as the palate tastes food,” namely with a view either to savoring it or to spitting it out. As with food, so with ideas, Elihu continues, “let us choose what is right; let us determine among ourselves what is good” (Job 34:1–4). Similarly in the New Testament, Christians were told to “test the spirits to see whether they are of God,” indeed to “test everything,” for only then could they “hold fast what is good” and “abstain from every form of evil” (1 John 4:1; 1 Thess. 5:19–22). That is, even messages claiming to be inspired had to be evaluated in the light of apostolic teaching. In this way Christian knowledge and discernment would gradually grow, and Christians would become “mature,” having “their faculties trained by practice to distinguish good from evil” (Phil. 1:9, 10; Heb. 5:14).
We who are called to be Christian preachers today should do all we can to help the congregation to grow out of dependence on borrowed slogans and ill-considered cliches, and instead to develop their powers of intellectual and moral criticism, that is, their ability to distinguish between truth and error, good and evil. Of course we should encourage an attitude of humble submission to Scripture, but at the same time make it clear that we claim no infallibility for our interpretations of Scripture. We should urge our hearers to “test” and “evaluate” our teaching. We should welcome questions, not resent them. We should not want people to be moonstruck by our preaching, to hang spellbound on our words, and to soak them up like sponges. To desire such an uncritical dependence on us is to deserve the fierce denunciation of Jesus for wanting to be called “rabbi” by men (Matt. 23:7–8). By contrast, the people of Beroea are commended as “noble,” more noble in fact than the Thessalonians, because they combined enthusiastic receptivity with critical listening: “they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11).
This kind of open but questioning mind is implicit even in the “pastoral” metaphor. Sheep, it is true, are often described as “docile” creatures, which may be so, but they are fairly discriminating in what they eat, and are certainly not uncritically omnivorous like goats. Moreover, the way in which the shepherd feeds them is significant. In reality, he does not feed them at all (except perhaps in the case of a sick lamb which he may take up in his arms and bottle-feed); instead he leads them to good grazing pasture where they feed themselves.
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In conclusion, let me summarize the principal features of a preaching ministry which is conceived as an activity of bridge building between the revealed Word and the contemporary world. Such preaching will be authoritative in expounding biblical principles, but tentative in applying them to the complex issues of the day. This combination of the authoritative and the tentative, the dogmatic and the agnostic, conviction and open-mindedness, teaching the people and leaving them free to make up their own minds, is exceedingly difficult to maintain. But it seems to me to be the only way on the one hand to handle the Word of God with integrity (declaring what is plain, but not pretending that everything is plain when it is not) and on the other to lead the people of God into maturity (by encouraging them to develop a Christian mind, and use it).