Some of us are guilty on Sunday morning of preaching biblical ideas in a most unbiblical way.
When many of us begin preaching on the Bible, we resort to propositions. In the modern world, everything gets rendered down to four spiritual laws or three simple steps. Many of us preachers act as if we are being paid to make everything simple, contained, explained, and fixed. But this is not the primary biblical way of dealing with the truth.
PROPOSITION VS. NARRATIVE
My colleague at Duke, Dan Via, once commented that “The Bible tends to be propositionless.” The typical biblical way of dealing with the truth is through narrative, rather than through abstract propositions.
Take for instance, the Ten Commandments. What could sound more like propositions than this? “You shall not have other gods before me. You shall not kill. You shall not steal.”
However, these are not abstract propositions about the way the world works, but are rather secondary and derivative of a prior narrative: “I am your God. You shall be my people.” You have to know the story of the Exodus to know the significance of the Ten Commandments.
The story of the Exodus begins with God saying to Moses, “I am going to liberate my people from the yoke of the Pharaoh, and guess who is going to help me?”
Moses reluctantly goes to the pharaoh and asks for a holiday so the people can worship God. Pharaoh says, “If you people want to have a holiday, I will send a royal chaplain down to the ghetto, and you can worship God there.”
Moses protests that God wants to be worshiped out in the desert, but Pharaoh resists. There is a long series of exchanges, and finally the Hebrew children are free, out in the desert, ready to worship God. But it has been so long since anyone has worshiped the one, true God, they have forgotten how. Moses goes up on the mountaintop to ask God, “How do we worship you?” Is God into incense? Does God like high-church or low-church worship?
Through smoke and fire the great God says to Moses, “Write this stuff down. You will have no other gods before me. You will not steal. You will not have sex with other people’s spouses.”
Moses says, “This sounds like a weird way of worshiping.”
God says, “I’m funny about the way people worship me. The way I like to be worshiped is through righteousness and justice.”
Moses goes down from the mountain into the valley and discovers that, as it turns out, we are having a worship service of our own. We have ordered a golden calf from the Cokesbury Church Supply Catalogue and are having a wonderful time. Moses gets mad, telling us that this is not what God had in mind for worship. Aaron replies, “It is meeting the needs of the people. They are having a wonderful time. You can’t argue with numbers, can you?”
This is the story from which the Ten Commandments are derived. The Ten Commandments are not general principles for any thinking, sensitive American. They are rather the way that we are to respond now that God has brought us out of slavery and owns us. This is the way we witness to the world that God is a true God.
PROCLAIMED & PERFORMED
I once heard Eugene Lowry say, “Now there are two ways of thinking about things. The first way is, say, when you are working on a complicated math problem. You work on the problem, trying to figure it out. Suddenly, everything falls into place and you shout excitedly, `I got it.'”
Then Lowry said, “Now there is another way of thinking about things. This is the way when you go to some really good movie. You come out of the movie deeply moved by what you saw. You don’t know what to say. You don’t want anyone to speak to you for a while. In this case, you don’t say, `I got it!’ No, what you mean is it got you.”
That latter way is the primary way of biblical truth. It reaches out, grabs us, and shakes us up and down. The ultimate test for whether we have been biblical in our preaching is congregational: Are our listeners moved to embody God’s Word in their lives? Biblical truth is to be proclaimed. Then it is to be performed.
Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./LEADERSHIP Journal
lecurrmrj5L40775A2g
Copyright © 1995 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
