Expounding the Word
This chapter is about preaching, and as I begin it, I am conscious of the need to make three preliminary points.
The first is a personal one. There is something fundamentally anomalous about one preacher presuming to preach to other preachers about preaching. For what do I know that you do not know? We have all preached, read and listened to sermons ad nauseam. I certainly claim no particular expertise. Often still in the pulpit I am seized with a communication frustration. Seldom if ever do I descend from the pulpit without feeling the need to confess my comparative failure and to pray for grace to do better next time. So I hope this puts us on the same level. We are all struggling in this privileged but problematic ministry.
My second point is social. It concerns the widespread disillusion with preaching. It is widely considered an anachronism, an obsolete medium of communication, a dead art form, ‘a sacred relic, a dubious thing of withered skin and dry bones enclosed in a reliquary of fond remembrance, still encrusted with the jewels of past glory’. Who wants to listen to sermons any more? People are drugged by television and the internet, hostile to authority, weary and wary of words. When the sermon begins, they quickly grow impatient, fidgety and bored. We cannot assume that people want to listen to us; we have to fight for their attention.
Third, and speaking pastorally, in spite of the acknowledged problems, we must persevere. For the health of the church depends on it. If it is true, as Jesus said, endorsing Deuteronomy, that human beings do ‘not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God’, it is equally true of churches. Churches live, grow and flourish by the Word of God; they wilt and wither without it. The pew cannot easily rise higher than the pulpit. Indeed, the pew is usually a reflection of the pulpit. This is the lesson of history. ‘Is it not clear,’ asked Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones, ‘that the decadent periods and eras in the history of the Church have always been those periods when preaching had declined?’ I am sure he was right. Indeed, we can see it illustrated in the world today. Although we rejoice in the statistics of church growth, we have to admit with shame that it is often growth without depth. There is superficiality everywhere. And I am convinced from observation that the low level of Christian living is due more than anything else to the low level of Christian preaching. Yes, it is the Holy Spirit who renews the church, but the Spirit’s sword is the Word of God. Nothing, it seems to me, is more important for the life and growth, health and depth of the contemporary church than a recovery of serious biblical preaching.
Let me develop the case for biblical preaching. I begin with a straightforward definition in twenty-four words: ‘To preach is to open up the inspired text with such faithfulness and sensitivity that God’s voice is heard and God’s people obey him.’
This definition of preaching contains six implications – two convictions about the biblical text, two obligations in expounding it and two expectations as a result.
Two convictions
The first conviction about the biblical text is that it is an inspired text. ‘To preach is to open up the inspired text.’ A high view of the biblical text – the recognition that it is unlike any other text, unique in its origin, nature and authority – is indispensable to authentic preaching. Nothing undermines preaching more than scepticism about Scripture. Without developing a sustained defence of this statement, I hope I shall carry you with me in reference to three words that belong together in our doctrine of Scripture, namely ‘revelation’, ‘inspiration’ and ‘providence’.
‘Revelation’ describes the initiative God took to unveil or disclose himself. It is a humbling word. It presupposes that in his infinite perfections, God is altogether beyond the reach of our finite minds. Our mind cannot penetrate his mind. We have no ability to read his thoughts. Indeed, his thoughts are as much higher than our thoughts as the heavens are higher than the earth. As a result, we would know nothing about God if he had not chosen to make himself known. Without revelation we would not be Christians at all, but Athenians, and all the world’s altars would be inscribed ‘to an unknown god’. But we believe God has revealed himself, not only in the glory and order of the created universe, but supremely in Jesus Christ his incarnate Word, and in the written Word which bears a comprehensive and variegated witness to him.
‘Inspiration’ describes the means God chose by which to reveal himself, namely by speaking to and through the biblical authors. As we have already noted, it was not a dictation process that would have demeaned them into machines, but a dynamic one which treated them as persons in active possession of their faculties. Many of the biblical authors were historians, and much of Scripture is history. For this they engaged in research, and made use of diaries, records and archives. They were also theologians, each with a distinct doctrinal emphasis, and writers, each with his own literary genre, style and vocabulary. These phenomena of historical research, theological concern and literary composition were neither incompatible with, nor smothered by, the process of inspiration. God spoke through them in such a way that the words spoken were simultaneously and equally his and theirs. This is the double authorship of Scripture, on which we reflected in chapter 1.
The third word is ‘providence’. This is the loving foresight and provision of God by which he arranged for the words he had spoken
Scripture, then, is ‘God’s word written’, his self-disclosure in speech and writing, the product of his revelation, inspiration and providence. This first conviction is indispensable to preachers. If God had not spoken, we would not dare to speak, for we would have nothing to say except our own threadbare speculations. But since God has spoken, we too must speak, communicating to others what he has communicated in Scripture. Indeed, we refuse to be silenced! As Amos put it, ‘The Sovereign Lord has spoken – who can but prophesy?’, or pass on his Word. Similarly, Paul wrote, quoting Psalm 116, ‘I believed; therefore I have spoken.’ In other words, we speak because we believe what God has spoken.
I pity the preacher who enters the pulpit with no Bible in his hands, or with a Bible that is more rags and tatters than the Word of God. He cannot expound Scripture, because he has no Scripture to expound. He cannot speak, for he has nothing worth saying. But to enter the pulpit with the confidence that God has spoken, that he has caused what he has spoken to be written, and that we have this inspired text in our hands – ah! then our head begins to swim, our heart to beat, our blood to flow and our eyes to sparkle, with the sheer glory of having God’s Word in our hands and on our lips.
Our second conviction is that the inspired text is also a partially closed text. If to preach is ‘to open up the inspired text’, then it must be partially closed or it would not need to be opened up. And at once I think I see your Protestant hackles rising with indignation. ‘What do you mean,’ you ask me, ‘that Scripture is partially closed? Do you not believe with the sixteenth-century Reformers in the “perspicuity” of Scripture (that it has a transparent or “see-through” quality)? Cannot even simple and uneducated people understand it by themselves? Is not the Holy Spirit our God-given teacher?’ Yes, indeed; thank you for your questions. I can say a resounding ‘Yes’ to them. But what you are rightly saying also needs to be qualified.
The Reformers’ insistence on the perspicuity of Scripture related to its central message, namely the gospel of salvation through faith in Christ crucified. That is as plain as day in the Bible. But they did not maintain that everything in Scripture is equally plain. How could they when Peter wrote that some things in Paul’s letters ‘are hard to understand’? If one apostle did not always understand another apostle, it would hardly be modest for us to claim that we see no problems! As a result, the church needs ‘pastors and teachers’ to expound or open up the Scriptures, and the ascended Christ still gives these gifts to his church.
The story of the Ethiopian eunuch illustrates this need for human teachers. While he was sitting in his chariot and reading Isaiah 53, Philip asked him, ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’ Did the Ethiopian reply, ‘Why, of course I do. Don’t you believe in the perspicuity of Scripture?’? No, he said, ‘How can I [understand] unless someone explains it to me?’ John Calvin rightly comments on the Ethiopian’s humility, and contrasts it with those who, ‘swollen-headed’ with confidence in their own abilities, are too proud to submit themselves to teaching.
Here then is the biblical case for biblical exposition. It consists of two fundamental convictions, namely that God has given us in Scripture a text which is both inspired (having a divine origin and authority) and to some degree closed (difficult to understand). Therefore, in addition to the text, he gives the church teachers to open up the text, explaining it and applying it to people’s lives.
Two obligations
My definition of preaching now moves on from two convictions about the biblical text to two obligations in expounding it. ‘To preach is to open up the inspired text with . . . faithfulness and sensitivity . . .’ The main reason why the biblical text is partially closed and hard to understand is that a wide and deep cultural gulf yawns between the ancient world in which God spoke his Word and the modern world in which we listen to it. It is this cultural chasm, which occupied us in the last chapter, which also determines the task of the biblical expositor and lays down our two major obligations, namely faithfulness to the ancient Word and sensitivity to the modern world.
First comes the call to faithfulness. We have to accept the discipline of exegesis. We need to think ourselves back into the situation of the biblical authors, into their history, geography, culture and language. This task has long been graced with the name ‘grammatico-historical exegesis’. To neglect this discipline, or to do it in a half-hearted or slovenly way, is inexcusable. That would express contempt for the way God chose to speak. With what painstaking, conscientious and meticulous care should we ourselves study, and open to others, the very words of the living God!
Moreover, the worst blunder that we can commit is to read back our twenty-first-century thoughts into the minds of the biblical authors (which is ‘eisegesis’), to manipulate what they wrote in order to make it conform to what we want them to say, and then to claim their patronage for our opinions.
John Calvin, centuries in advance of his time, understood this principle well. ‘It is the first business of an interpreter,’ he wrote, ‘to let his author say what he does say, instead of attributing to him what we think he ought to say.’ Some 300 years later, Charles Simeon of Cambridge set out the same principle in a letter to his publisher: ‘My endeavour is to bring out of Scripture what is there, and not to thrust in what I think might be there.’ In our day we urgently need both the integrity and the courage to work by this basic rule, to give the biblical authors the freedom to say what they do say, however unfashionable and unpopular their teaching may be.
Second, biblical preaching demands sensitivity to the modern world. Although God spoke to the ancient world in its own languages and cultures, he intends his Word to be for everybody. This means that the expositor is more than an exegete. The exegete explains the original meaning of the text; the expositor goes further and applies it to the contemporary world. We have then to struggle to understand the rapidly changing world in which God has called us to live. We must grasp the main movements of thought which have shaped it. We must listen to its many discordant voices, its questions, its protests and its cries of pain. We must feel a measure of its disorientation and despair. For all this is part of our Christian sensitivity.
Here then are the two obligations which the call to preach lays upon biblical expositors – faithfulness (to the Word) and sensitivity (to the world). We are neither to falsify the Word to secure a phony relevance, nor to ignore the world to secure a phony faithfulness. We are not to fulfil either obligation at the expense of the other. It is the combination of faithfulness and sensitivity which makes the authentic preacher. And because it is difficult, it is also rare. The characteristic fault of conservative preachers is to be biblical, but not contemporary. The characteristic fault of liberal preachers is to be contemporary, but not biblical. Very few preachers manage to be both simultaneously.
In practice, as we study the text, we need to ask ourselves two distinct questions, and to ask them in the right order. The first is, ‘What did it mean?’ and the second, ‘What does it say?’ In posing these two questions, our concern begins with the text’s original meaning, when it was first spoken or written, and then moves on to its contemporary message, as it addresses people today. We must neither confuse these two questions, nor put them in the wrong order, nor ask either without also asking the other.
The first question, ‘What did it mean?’, could also be worded ‘What does it mean?’, since a text’s actual meaning does not change. It still means today what it meant when it was first written. In his well-known book Validity in Interpretation, Dr E. D. Hirsch, formerly Kenan Professor of English at the University of Virginia, reaffirms the ‘sensible belief that a text means what its author meant’. He complains of the ‘banishment of the author’ from legal, biblical and literary texts. The result is pure subjectivism. As a result, in legal circles, ‘the meaning of a law is what present judges say the meaning is’; in Bultmannian biblical exegesis, ‘the meaning of the Bible is a new revelation to each succeeding generation’; and in literary theory, a text is ‘what it means to us today’. Indeed, in some university literature departments it is now claimed that ‘a text is infinitely interpretable’, because it ‘means’ different things to different people. But this is a misleading use of the words ‘mean’ and ‘meaning’. Professor Hirsch insists that it is only the author who determines the meaning of a text, and that to ‘banish the original author as the determiner of meaning’ is to ‘reject the only compelling normative principle that could lend validity to an interpretation’. So a text’s ‘meaning’ is what its author meant by it, and is therefore permanent, whereas its ‘significance’ is how it strikes different people and relates to different contexts, and is therefore variable. There is all the difference in the world between Bultmann’s ‘a text means what it means to me’ and E. D. Hirsch’s ‘a text means what its author meant’.
So the meaning of a text must be sought and found in the words themselves, the author’s words, and not in the reader’s thoughts and feelings. As Professor David Wells has put it, ‘Meaning is not to be found above the text, behind it, beyond it, or in the interpreter. Meaning is to be found in the text. It is the language of the text which determines what meaning God intends for us to have.’ This is because ‘words have meanings . . . No language allows meaning to float free of the words used . . . Unless words and their meaning are re-joined in hermeneutical practice, we can have no access to revelation in anything but a mystical sense.’
The second question we have to ask of the text is, ‘What does it say?’ That is, having discerned its original meaning (which is fixed by its author), we need next to reflect on its contemporary message (how it applies to people today). This is where spiritual sensitivity comes in. We have to increase our familiarity with the modern world – its presuppositions and preoccupations, its mentality and mood, its volatile culture and falling standards, its values, goals, doubts, fears, pains and hopes, and not least its obsession with self, love and death. Only then shall we be able to discern how the unchanging Word speaks to the changing world. Nothing has helped me to do this more than the reading group of younger professionals who have been meeting with me in London roughly every six weeks for the last twenty years. We agree at the end of each session which book to read or film to see before our next meeting. We choose mainly books and films that express a non-Christian perspective. Then we ask ourselves two questions:
In other words, we put our second question, ‘What does it say?’, to the biblical text.
If we grasp the original meaning of a text, without going on to grapple with its contemporary message, we surrender to antiquarianism, unrelated to the present realities of the modern world. If, on the other hand, we begin with the text’s contemporary message, without first accepting the discipline of discovering its original meaning, we surrender to existentialism, unrelated to the past realities of revelation. Instead, we must ask both questions, first being faithful in working at the text’s meaning and then being sensitive in discerning its message for today. Moreover, there are no short cuts to this. There is only the hard slog of study, seeking to become familiar both with the Scriptures in their fullness and with the modern world in all its variety.
It is, in fact, another case of the discipline of ‘double listening’, as we listen humbly to Scripture and critically to modernity, in order to relate the one to the other. Such listening is an indispensable preliminary to preaching.
The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Special Envoy Terry Waite successfully negotiated the release of several hostages in the Middle East. Eventually he himself was taken captive by a Lebanese group known as Islamic Jihad, and held for five years. On 18 November 1991, the day he was finally released, one of the hostages whose liberation he had negotiated was asked for a comment. Jean Waddell, a former missionary in Iran, replied, ‘He’s such a good communicator; he listens.’
Two expectations
After the two convictions about Scripture, and the two obligations in expounding it, come two resulting expectations. If we do open up the inspired text with faithfulness and sensitivity, what can we expect to happen?
First, we expect God’s voice to be heard. This expectation arises from our belief that the God who has spoken in the past also speaks in the present through what he has spoken.
Such an expectation, that through his ancient Word God addresses the modern world, is, however, at a low ebb today. As Dr Langmead Casserley, a scholar of the American Episcopal Church, has said, ‘We have devised a way of reading the Word of God, from which no word from God ever comes.’ When the time for the sermon arrives, the people clasp their hands and close their eyes with a fine show of piety, and sit back for their customary doze. And the preacher encourages this by his soporific voice and manner.
How different it is when both preacher and people are expecting God to speak! The whole situation is transformed and becomes electric. The people bring their Bibles to church, and when they open them, they sit on the edge of their seats, hungrily waiting for what the Lord God may have to say to them. It is a re-enactment of the scene in the house of Cornelius the centurion when the apostle Peter arrived. Cornelius said to him, ‘Now we are all here in the presence of God to listen to everything the Lord has commanded you to tell us.’ Why may a Christian congregation not experience the same degree of expectation today?
The preacher himself can encourage this attitude. He prepares carefully, in such a way that he is evidently expecting God to give him a message. He prays earnestly before he leaves home, and prays again in the pulpit before he preaches, that God will speak to his people. He reads and expounds his text with great seriousness of purpose, feeling deeply what he is talking about. Then, when he has finished and he prays again, there is a stillness and a solemnity in the presence of the God who has spoken.
Our second expectation is that God’s people will obey him. The Word of God always demands a response of obedience. We are not to be forgetful hearers, but obedient doers, of God’s Word. Throughout the Old Testament we hear the divine lament, ‘Today, oh that you would listen to my voice!’ God kept sending his envoys to his people, ‘But they mocked God’s messengers, despised his words and scoffed at his prophets until the wrath of the Lord was aroused against his people and there was no remedy.’
How then should people respond? What kind of obedience is required? Our answer is that the nature of the response expected is determined by the content of the word expounded. What we do in response to God’s Word depends on what he says to us through it. Consider some examples. If, in and through the text expounded, God speaks about himself and his own glorious greatness, then we respond by humbling ourselves before him in worship. If instead he speaks about us, our waywardness, fickleness, rebellion and guilt, then we respond in penitence and confession. If he speaks about Jesus Christ, who died to bear our sins and was raised from the dead to prove it, we respond in faith, laying hold of this heaven-sent Saviour. If he speaks about his promises, we determine to inherit them; if about his commands, we determine to keep them. If God speaks to us about the world, and its colossal spiritual and material need, then his compassion rises within us both to preach the gospel and to serve the needy. If, on the other hand, God speaks to us through his Word about the future coming of Christ and the glory to follow, then our hope is kindled, and we resolve to be holy and busy until he comes.
The preacher who has penetrated deeply into his text, who has isolated and unfolded its dominant theme, and has himself been moved by its message, will hammer it home in his conclusion, and give people a chance to respond to it, often in silent prayer, as each person is brought by the Holy Spirit to an appropriate obedience.
This, then, is the definition of preaching which I offer you. It contains two convictions (that the biblical text is an inspired text which nevertheless needs to be opened up), two obligations (that we must open it up with faithfulness to the text itself and sensitivity to the modern context) and two expectations (that through the exposition and application of the written Word, God himself will speak, and that his people will hear his voice and respond to him in obedience).
It is an enormous privilege to be a biblical expositor – to stand in the pulpit with God’s Word in our hands and minds, God’s Spirit in our hearts and God’s people before our eyes, waiting expectantly for God’s voice to be heard and obeyed.