I sat over espresso with a friend this summer. Being passionate about such things, we talked about churches.
He’d just come from a conversation with a mutual friend, the lead pastor of a rural Midwest congregation. The topic of preaching had come up. He’d asked his friend what the goal of his preaching was. After a moment of thought, the pastor replied: “My goal in preaching is for my church to understand the meaning of the text.”
We sipped our drinks and picked at the statement a little. To understand the meaning of the text. A good goal. But is it enough? After all, a congregant can understand the text and remain aloof, untouched by the Spirit, disengaged, unchanged, hard of heart.
A listener could get big-headed if a preacher stopped at “understanding the text” … with the same puffy cerebellum that can lead to porch-chair critiques of another man’s ministry philosophy.
And there’s the rub, Paul, a voice said inside. There’s something wrong about it, but it’s in you, too.
Bible students or closet Gnostics?
Earlier this year, I sat over a different espresso with Jeff Vanderstelt of Seattle’s Soma community.
“I’m convinced” he said “that many of us look at Bible study as self-righteousness. We think that the more we study and preach the bible the more righteous we are. It’s a stream of Gnosticism, though—this thought that the more knowledge we have the more spiritual we become.”
“Like we’ll ascend to some hidden knowledge?” I volunteered, playing off the Gnostic idea.
“Exactly” Jeff said. “You hear people saying, ‘Man, I just need deeper teaching.’ And I think What? You have Jesus! Like the Pharisees, we can go to the Scriptures but fail to come to Jesus. People can get to the Scriptures and never get to Jesus.”
At what point does my search for scriptural knowledge become a distraction from discipleship? When does my yearning for wisdom conflict with closeness to Christ? How does my well-meaning desire to teach deeply, to understand, depart from the path of discipleship?
I don’t know yet.
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While best known for heresies related to spirit and matter, the real root of various Gnosticisms’ divide with orthodoxy is a character-of-God issue. While the Christian God is a God who reveals, the inverted Gnostic deity keeps cruel secrets. This is why gnosis—”knowledge”—is the path to enlightenment. Truth is for initiates, the select few. Truth is high, humanity is low, and therefore, humanity must ascend.
Wisdom is up there somewhere. Start climbing, kid.
But the Christian story is that God has sent Wisdom among us. He came down. Our key doctrine is not gnosis, it’s kenosis—”the emptying”. The incarnation is a descent that shames our every attempt at elevation. As a result Christian initiates are the meek, the poor in spirit, the scum of the earth. The lame and the blind.
But do we live this mystery? Or are the “wise” among us still closet Gnostics, yearning for secret understandings, for our preachers to initiate us into heavenly spheres with all the right language?
I think sometimes that I am, nodding my head at the folly of the downward gospel, then craning it back up to try and follow the best and brightest on their upward journeys.
Is our well-intentioned desire for deeper teaching (to do it if we’re pastors, to receive it if we’re not) buying the Gnostic lie about the nature of things? Are we all just climbing into the clouds while Wisdom passes us on the way down to the back alleys and barrios?
Have we gotten the backwards truth backwards?
The foolishness of preaching
“For seeing that in the wisdom of God” wrote St. Paul, “the world in its wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.” Whether that folly lies in the message or the preaching itself is ambiguous. I think both spins are appropriate. The passage is direct; God uses preaching (folly though it may be in means or in message) to save.
So does that mean we don’t even try for wisdom or “deeper teaching” in our preaching? No, I reject the pietistic suspicion of “head knowledge.” Knowledge or deeper teaching in itself cannot distract the heart of a disciple. It is the direction that the knowledge leads that matters.
Devotional favorite Oswald Chambers wrote: “The golden rule to follow to obtain spiritual understanding is not one of intellectual pursuit but one of obedience.”
Intellectual pursuit is helpful, to some degree even necessary for obedience. We cannot obey what we do not know. But our pastor friend’s goal—preaching with the primary goal of promoting textual comprehension—feels like it falls short. It leaves the obedience step assumed, or unthought-of in the first.
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“…Nor are you to be called teachers” says Christ in the gospel of Matthew. “For one is your Teacher, the Christ.”
We crave his teaching, do we not? We long for the living word, the sword of God, the fire of God, the hammer of God that smashes open the rocks. We hunger for the milk of it, the meat of it, the rich bread that feeds without making full, that nourishes us, heart and mind.
What is the relationship of teaching to spiritual formation? Complex to be sure. Humans, after all, are integrated animals. It’s hard to feed the heart without engaging the mind. And somehow both can starve, even if one’s being stuffed to the gills.
How far up am I?
We sat for a while on his porch, my friend and I. And while I sat in silence, I listened to the rain. I thought about the ladders of the Gnostics, who climbed rung after rung of esoteric knowledge searching for wisdom, unaware that he’d come down among them, and was calling up into the clouds after their disappearing penny-loafers. I thought of congregations faithfully ascending, until they can no longer tell between the voice of their preacher and the voice of their Teacher.
I thought about the many ways we try to squirm around the folly of preaching, saying that it does nothing, saying that it does everything. How we convince ourselves that the rich folly of it all is wise.
It rained on, the espresso cooled. As the light faded, I thought that the laurels along the road grew imperceptibly.
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I am weekly in danger of forgetting the “folly of preaching”, not through rejecting a deeper understanding of scripture, but by allowing that Teaching to usurp the place of my Teacher. The lines that determine where that process sours are beyond me right now, but somehow I set my mind on wisdom, and miss the Wise One.
As I think back, some of the worst sermons I’ve ever heard in my life ended up changing my heart, because in some nearly intangible way, they connected me to Jesus.
Ask any rock climber—down climbing is usually suicide. But I am up on an impossible ladder, trying to descend. My head is still in the clouds. I do not know how far the fall is yet. Can someone tell me?
I am afraid to look down.
Paul Pastor is associate editor forLeadership Journal andPreaching Today,a writer and grassroots pastor in Portland, Oregon.
