An Evangelical Theology of Preaching

by Donald English

Overview

By exploring the biblical basis for preaching, Donald English shows how fundamental theological issues pertain to the proclamation of the Word.
He provides a theological basis for preaching, practical insights regarding the movement from text to sermon, and practical guidance in preparing for Sunday worship.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781426760150
Publisher:	Abingdon Press
Publication date:	03/01/1996
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

Read an Excerpt

An Evangelical Theology of Preaching

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By Donald English

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 1996 Abingdon Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4267-6015-0

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CHAPTER 1

God Is Here

How Could You Tell?

A basic assumption running throughout the Bible is the idea that God is among God's people. In the beginning God "walks in the garden at the time of the evening breeze" (Gen. 3:8). As the people of Israel make their journey across the wilderness, they are led by "the cloud ... by day, and fire ... by night" (Exod. 40:38). Even when they do not wish for God's presence, they hear the divine voice through the prophets, "Thus says the LORD" (Amos 1:3, 6, 9, 11). In the New Testament, God is present in Jesus (John 14:8-14), and after Pentecost through the Holy Spirit given to every believer (Acts 2:1-4; Rom. 8:9). God's people without God's presence is a contradiction in terms!

This assumption is also central to worship. We sing our hymns to offer God praise and thanks for the whole of life. We say our prayers as a way of affirming that we depend on God at every moment. Our readings from the Scripture declare our obedience to the revealed will of God every moment of every day. Our offerings make plain once more that everything we have comes from and belongs to God. So we sing the words of Fred Pratt Green: "God is here! As we your people meet to offer praise and prayer...."

Without this awareness much of our worship loses its life and meaning. Hymns become merely artistic activity; prayers are moments of human reflection; the readings an intellectual engagement; and the offering is a way of sustaining the economy of the church as a human institution. When I asked the saintly Richard Wurmbrand, after his many years of imprisonment for his faith, how he found worship in British churches, he replied, "I miss the presence of the angels." The sense of the divine presence transforms a corporate performance into an act of worship, as nothing else can.

This awareness that God is present in worship is more than a basis for our preaching. It is fundamental to its content. Many, who in worship are happy to sing about God's presence, need a great deal of help about what it means. If we cannot comprehend it in worship, how are we to do so beyond the walls of the church and outside worship? The preacher dare not avoid so basic a reality.

The traditional theological way of addressing this issue has been to speak of God's immanence and transcendence; immanence meaning presence, transcendence often seeming therefore to mean distance. The difficulty of that way of thinking is that it creates a division within God's very being. What is more, it makes God subservient to spatial concepts in an unworthy way.

A former archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, points us in the right direction. He makes it plain that transcendence is not about distance but about difference.

God is near but God is different. God is here, but man is dependent. God's otherness is the otherness of the Creator to the creature; of the Saviour to the sinner; and it is for the creature still to worship the Creator and for the sinner still to ask for the Saviour's grace.

To say that God is transcendent is not to distance God from the world. "Our Father in heaven" (Matt. 6:9) is not a reference to God's postal address! The God who is transcendent is different from us, but not distant from us. Preaching ought to make that clear.

David Jenkins offers a helpful way of stating the relationship between God's immanence and transcendence. He writes of "transcendence in the midst." If Ramsey is affirming God's presence but preserving God's difference, Jenkins begins with God's difference, but wishes to stress the reality of God's presence.

The Bible is full of examples of transcendence in the midst. The call of Abraham, Moses' experience of the burning bush, Gideon's summons in the fields, Isaiah's vision in the temple, and the word of God to Amos tending his sheep are all such instances in the Old Testament (Genesis 12; Exodus 3; Judges 6; Isaiah 6; Amos 1). In the New Testament, the disciples are called as they do their work of fishing, Matthew as he collects taxes, and the woman at the well as she goes for water (Mark 1:16-20; Matt. 9: 9-13; John 4: 1-26). Again and again, people sense the presence of God and respond to the call that comes through the transcendent in the midst.

The question for the preacher is whether people can have such experiences today. Since we who stand in pulpits are facing those who live in the modern world, we cannot simply commend experiences from the past if they have no relevance in the present. From the worlds of theology and sociology come strong affirmations of the continuing experience of the transcendent in modern life.

Ian Ramsey wrote about what he called "disclosure situations"; those moments and experiences that defy natural explanation, needing something more to do them justice. We may think of those experiences so deep as to seem timeless; so beautiful as to defy description; so inward that words don't begin to express their true nature; so profound that one feels only the "soul" could respond to them. It may be a piece of music, a natural scene, a lovely relationship, a beautiful action. It can also be a profound loss, a moment of aloneness, a sense of being gripped by mystery, a feeling of deep need. In those moments something is disclosed far deeper than any of our logical or natural explanations can account for. We feel we would be gullible to accept such explanations. Something—more precisely Someone—is being disclosed to us, if we canbut perceive what is happening. We touch the very center of the universe and its meaning. We may pass the experience by and try to forget, or we may ask what kind of a universe we inhabit where such things are experienced.

A similar perspective, this time from a professional sociologist, is offered by Peter Berger. His research asked whether modern men and women who had undergone an education based on enlightenment principles and dominated by the scientific and technological revolutions, showed any need for awareness of realities beyond the scope of such disciplines. His conclusion is that, in an age of "the alleged demise of the supernatural" he discovered that, "for whatever reasons, sizeable numbers of the species modern man have not lost the propensity for awe, for the uncanny, for all the possibilities that are legislated against by the canons of secularised rationality."

Berger selects such evidence as our sense of justice. Why, after centuries of injustice, do I get so angry at injustice? Why not accept it as the norm? Or what about our incurable sense of hope? Why do we assure the crying child in the middle of the night that, "It will be all right, dear"? What rational evidence supports that general approach to life? Or is some deeper conviction at work? Where do we get the remarkable sense of humor that seems to flourish in the most dangerous situations? How do we find time to play games? Is life not so serious that we should spend all our time working to keep it right? Berger suggests that our humor and our games are ways in which we affirm, subconsciously, that life is serious, but that its demands are not ultimate. There is a more ultimate demand on us than even the most serious of life's requirements.

If these assertions are true then the role of the preacher becomes a much larger one than the textbooks often suggest. There is no conflict with the encouragement to study the Bible. That remains basic. Neither is there any lessening of the responsibility for reading of theology and other disciplines. That is the source of many of the insights set out above. But neither of these in itself, nor all of them together, produces a preacher.

The significant requirement at this point is that of the preacher as observer. We are required to have more than a grasp of the biblical and theological basis for affirming God's presence in the world—transcendence in the midst. We are expected to recognize that presence when we see it. It is said that 90 percent of the secret of being an artist lies in what you see; committing it to canvas is the minor part. Paul Cézanne wrote of Claude Monet, "He was only an eye, but my God what an eye!" The cost of that approach is clear in the works of Monet. He doesn't simply paint haystacks. He paints (the same) haystacks at noon and at sunset; he paints them in snow, in fine weather, on an overcast day, and so on. The same is true of a line of poplars, or of Rouen Cathedral. In 1890 he wrote to his friend Gustave Geffroy, "I'm hard at it, working stubbornly on a series of different effects (grain stacks), but at this time of year the sun sets so fast that it's impossible to keep up with it...."

The preacher who takes seriously the transcendent in the midst will find even greater difficulty in "keeping up with" God's presence in the world. We are called not just to be a mouth for the Lord, but also an eye for the Lord, watching and witnessing to God's activity in the world around us.

But is there any evidence, beyond the committed opinions of religious people, that transcendence in the midst is being experienced today? Alister Hardy was Linacre Professor of Zoology at Oxford University. In 1969 he founded the Religious Experience Research Unit and was its first director from 1969 to 1976. His book, The Spiritual Nature of Man, records the remarkable response the Unit received. An initial gathering of four thousand firsthand accounts led to the conclusion that, "a large number of people even today possess a deep awareness of a benevolent nonphysical power which appears to be partly or wholly beyond, and far greater than, the individual self." He goes on:

At certain times in their lives many people have had specific, deeply felt transcendental experiences which have made them all aware of the presence of this power. The experience when it comes has always been quite different from any other type of experience they have ever had. They do not necessarily call it a religious experience, nor does it occur only to those who belong to an institutional religion or who indulge in corporate acts of worship. It often occurs to children, to atheists and agnostics, and it usually induces in the person concerned a conviction that the everyday world is not the whole of reality: that there is another dimension to life.

Alister Hardy's work has been carried on by David Hay and others. David Hay notes that although Western cultures discourage bold claims of a religious nature, when encouraged, people stand firm by their positive response to the question, "Have you ever been aware of or influenced by a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday self." Hay is now working to show that the phenomenology of religious experience is being neglected by modern scientific thinkers in a way that produces a distorted understanding of a "widespread and normal field of human experience."

In these terms, the preacher becomes more than an observer of God's presence. The preacher becomes an advocate of a reality otherwise being neglected in the Western world with its overrationalized culture. The task of the pulpit becomes a witness to the reality of transcendence in the midst, which will broaden life and our perception of it. Like the radio operator receiving messages covertly under a reactionary regime where news is controlled, the preacher is identifying realities otherwise neglected or ignored in our culture. Or like the astronomer, looking at the same sky as those who stand in the crowd, the preacher sees what is there but not necessarily perceived by others who simply see "stars," which to the astronomer are the Bear or the Plough.

In such a context the preacher becomes more than an observer. The role now involves the preacher in being an interpreter. From the pulpit people should expect not only to hear what the preacher, and those whom the preacher quotes have seen and experienced, with an indication of their meaning. They need also to have identified that which they themselves are experiencing, with the necessary help to interpret it. Like the Ethiopian eunuch whom Philip the evangelist met, our congregations need some help in understanding what they read (Acts 8:26-31). He had been overtaken by an experience he couldn't understand. With not a little difficulty, Philip got alongside the Ethiopian and helped him to grasp the significance of what he read. The preacher's task is no less than that.

The size of the task is suggested by imagining the variety of experiences people who sit in the pew on any given Sunday have brought with them! Internal questions and affirmations, family relationships, work experiences, abilities and disabilities, hopes and fears, riches or poverty, surrounded by friends or largely alone, the list goes on. Yet, in the context of worship, and with Bible in hand, the preacher's privilege is so to expound and witness to the transcendent God who is in our midst that each may recognize and enter into the meaning in his or her situation. There can be few higher privileges than drawing alongside so many people at that intimate level that changes lives for the better.

So the preacher is observer who sees and witnesses, and interpreter who draws alongside to make sense of where people are.

"Where people are" is not a simple matter, however. So far we have thought largely of personal and individual elements of human experience. But "where people are" also relates to a wider setting than personal, family, and local life. The media age ensures that the context for everyone of us is in the whole wide world. Our congregations bring with them the news they have seen on television or heard on radio or read in the newspaper. Is the transcendent in the midst there, also? If so, how do we make our witness on that larger stage?

A variety of attempts have been made to grapple with the issue of how God is present in the world. That question is made all the more complicated because of the influence of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on human reason, and the scientific revolution and enterprise that was built on it. How can God act in any free way when the world God made seems to answer to certain basic principles sometimes referred to as scientific laws?

Many in our congregations may not, of course, have viewed the question in that academically elevated light (though probably many more have than we preachers tend to allow). But few can avoid the question "Why?" about many things that happen in life. Why did certain people die young when others lived so long? Why do some people seem to make dramatic recoveries from illness and others do not? Why do natural disasters happen? Why does good not always seem to be rewarded in life, or evil punished? At any given time there are probably three or four items in the news, and three or four more in our personal experiences, that reinforce the questions. Where is the transcendent in the midst on all these occasions?

Maurice Wiles expressed the difficulties involved in arguing for a day by day detailed involvement of God in the world's activities. Instead he claimed that:

We can make best sense of this whole complex of experience and of ideas if we think of the whole continuing creation of the world as God's one act, an act in which he allows radical freedom to his human creation. The nature of such creation ... is incompatible with the assertion of further particular divinely initiated acts within the developing history of the world.

By emphasizing the single work of God as a continuing creation, Wiles encourages us to search out the purposes and intentions of God's creative work. By discerning these we will be on the way to recognizing what God is doing in the world in that general way. All that coheres with that purpose will therefore be God's activity, since they fit in with the purpose for which God made (and makes) the world.

In such a setting we need to ask about our understanding of biblical teaching about creation and redemption, about destiny and freedom, about chance and necessity. Our reading both of science and of history becomes significant, too, since they provide material for reading back the degree to which, and the events in which, the purposes of God for the world were either fulfilled or opposed. What is more, the understanding of this whole process receives a particular focus and interpretation in the ministry of Jesus Christ. Wiles argues:

This then is the fashion of God's acting in the world ... making possible the emergence, both individually and corporately, of a genuinely free human recognition and response to what is God's intention in the creation of the world.

In the context of our approach in this chapter, therefore, we help our hearers to recognize the transcendent in the midst wherever they see God's purposes for the world being worked out.

There is a crucial question remaining, however, about the part we may play in cooperating with God in the world: How may our lives do more than witness to transcendence in the midst?

David Jenkins addresses this question. He, too, is reluctant to speak of "interventionist" acts of God in a world whose story is told in terms of critical historical study and rigorous scientific method. He does concentrate serious attention, however, on the question of how we recognize God's work, and what part we may play in it. He views God's work in creation, what followed in the story of the people of Israel, and story of Jesus Christ, as the significant basis for human involvement in the development of the continuing story. He sees the kingdom of God as a focusing context for understanding this perception.

The kingdom of God is the focusing symbol of a faith and claim that the life of men and women and the history of humankind can be made sense of within a story because the universe itself is part of that story. This story is the story of God's risking creation so that he may share love in the establishing of a kingdom, a city, a promised land or a shared and shareable space, with persons or beings who are capable of relationships with him and yet are other than himself.

For Christians this means that:

To discover that Jesus ... is the Christ (which is what, for Christians, the resurrection is all about) is to discover that in enabling the story, in taking part in the story, and in steadfastly contributing to making the story come true, God pursues the ways of immanence, identification, service and suffering which are a severe affront to the normal, or indeed normative, human ideas of power.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from An Evangelical Theology of Preaching by Donald English. Copyright © 1996 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword,
Introduction,
1. God Is Here How Could You Tell?,
2. Cultivated or Salvaged Creation and Redemption,
3. Doctrine as a Rhythm for Life Dying and Rising with Jesus,
4. Atonement, Repentance, and Conversion If This Is the Solution, What Is the Problem?,
5. Reason and Faith Thinking and Believing,
6. Uniformity and Variety God's Many-Sided Grace,
7. Gospel and Life Making It Public,
8. Evangelistic Content Dimension and Intention,
9. Text and Context It's Okay to Be Interesting!,
10. Preaching and the Preacher What Kind of Persons?,
Notes,