Faults in English Evangelical Preaching

I stumbled across THIS article on preaching fortuitously this afternoon. It resonates with some frustrations with the general conservative evangelical culture a number of friends and I have been discussing recently and I think it is spot on in its analysis. It highlights failures in contemporary English conservative evangelical preaching, and points to reasons for these weaknesses. It has also made me want to go and repent of my past preaching in sackcloth and ashes.

The author has a weblog at http://grace-city.blogspot.com/ and I understand he is training for ministry in Cambridge.

Here are some highlights from the article (emphasis mine). I make no apology whatsoever for the fact that this post mainly consists of lots of quotations and a few comments.

This paragraph describes the problem well:

The anecdotal evidence that was the germ seed of this article was simply the large numbers of people from within evangelical circles who express dissatisfaction with preaching. From Ireland, England, America and Australia, I have heard a large number of faithful, enthusiastic and Biblically literate Christians complain that they find the preaching they listen to regularly, to be of a poor standard and not very helpful to them in their relationship with God. After hearing a number of people talk about this I began to notice common threads in the complaints. Again and again people complained of a ‘dryness’ and a ‘patronising tone.’ There are many who feel frustrated that every week they hear a simple issue preached about ‘as if it is a complex issue’. Numerous people are exasperated that they are constantly told the preaching in their church is of a high quality- but no matter how attentively it is listened to, God still appears to be distant and cold. Others are told by a friend that the sermon was ‘excellent’- but when they are asked what was so good about it, no meaningful answer can be given One person put it well, “The preacher tells me life is about a personal relationship with God, but then he seems to just give me impersonal facts.”

He goes on to point to some reasons:

There may be two problems that have developed as a result of the drive for clarity. Firstly, there can be the unspoken assumption that making things clear is the principle [sic] task of a preacher. The preacher can then spend a lot of time trying to explain issues in the passage – such a focus tends to produce a patronising tone. People are quick to notice this!

Secondly, our desire for simplicity has lead to many definitions and phrases becoming accepted jargon in preaching. The phrases have developed as simple explanations of key ideas in Christianity; such a thing is desirable. However many of these are simple to the point of ignoring rich and deep insights of previous generations of Bible teachers. This problem is all the more serious as the areas of theology that have been summarised by these catchphrases are naturally the ones most central to explaining the gospel.

While the author rejoices that the church has advanced in its welcome of outsiders, he notes that this has also led to its own problems:

Making things welcoming to outsiders is a matter of being warm and friendly- not assuming that they are not clever enough to understand our supposedly intellectual teaching. Outsiders notice when evangelicals feel awkward about issues such as The Lord’s Supper, financial giving, hell or teaching topics that clash with modern secularism. There is no need to feel awkward about these issues- unbelievers know they are coming to the church as opposed to some other gathering such as the cinema.

While the author affirms that Scripture must have an effect on the lives of the hearers, certain forms of application can be harmful:

This advance may have led to an unexpected problem- there is an overwhelming tendency to focus on external activities in application. The application turns out to be an invitation to come to a prayer meeting, Bible study or encouragement to do evangelism. This focus on the external is harmful as it ignores the deeper and prior internal aspect. We ought to recognise that the internal desires and attitudes are the foundational aspect of a person, and it is to these the arrows of application need to be shot. Aiming for the external only results in a superficial change, not the deep heart change the Spirit brings about.

Focusing on the external application of a passage also tends to produce a heavy handed shepherding approach, where the preacher gives the impression that he knows what is best for other people’s lives, when in actual fact the situation may be more complex. Listeners begin to feel squeezed and pressurised into doing the applications. Once they give in and do the activities suggested they are given a false assurance that they are experiencing genuine relationship with God. In actual fact they may merely be ticking external check lists, while the deeper internal reality of a relationship with God starves and shrivels up.

The author affirms the centrality of preaching (the undermining of which by Bible study groups must not be permitted) in glowing terms:

Only in preaching is the church family gathered to grow together. As the most authoritative method of proclamation, preaching displays the glorious authority of the gospel to command all to repent and cast their hopes on Jesus Christ. The gospel is not up for debate, it is not an idea to be played with- it is God declaring that He is God and in Christ has conquered sin, wrath and death. The power and majesty of the gospel is exhibited by pulpit preaching in a way that it cannot be by other methods. People can be exhorted, moved, threatened and affected by preaching in a way very conducive to awakening genuine faith and love in Jesus.

There is much to be said for the affective element in preaching, which has been neglected, perhaps as an overreaction to other Christian circles:

The affectionate teaching of Jonathan Edwards is little more than an explanation of what it really means to have a relationship with God. He argued that facts were necessary for a relationship, but the foundational and crucial thing in a relationship is more to do with feeling the passion of love, the joy of thankfulness, the sadness of sin, the eager hunger for heaven and the zeal to win people to Christ. Talking about the activities that may accompany such passions is no substitute for stirring up the passions.

We step back from that tradition for many reasons – culture, other groups’ excesses and our own culpable sinfulness. Sermons end up becoming explanations of facts within a passage because fundamentally we feel more comfortable with such cold lifeless things than we do with the immensity of a God of passion and power. People complain that sermons do not seem to be an experience of hearing God speak – because we have shifted the agenda to such an extent that hearing God speak is no longer the aim of a sermon. We are too scared to hear God speak, so we preach our non relational framework instead. This should not surprise us – for it is exactly the kind of thing our sinful nature tends to cause. It is the essence of sin that it creates a desire within us to avoid genuine relationship with God. Unless we actively guard against the influence of sin in this area it will bear fruit.

He goes on to say:

Our sermons are weak because we have forgotten that love requires more than facts, and the passion of love for Christ is set alight only by preaching that is not scared of relational engagement with the text, God and people.

He points to Calvin’s example:

Calvin was not satisfied with an accurate explanation of the facts of the gospel- he realised that the whole point of preaching was to stir up a ’sense of’ God’s wonder, to make men ‘feel’ the reality of their dependence on God – in short to place their entire ‘happiness’ in God. Piety was the word Calvin used to denote this warm, experiential, heart felt depth of personal relationship which is the fruit of the gospel.

He has a stinging conclusion:

Dealing with the matters of the heart should be our default position – it should naturally arise from our sermons, not be found despite them. To the extent that our preaching has lost the affectionate relational aspect of the gospel, our lives let the vitality of true piety seep out, leaving behind a cold mechanistic life style. To put it bluntly – a sermon that does not stir up a deeper love for Jesus is not a Christian sermon. It may have many excellent features and could possibly be a good lecture, but it is nonetheless a failure as a sermon.

“The bridegroom was delayed”

We had a very helpful sermon on Matthew 24.36-25.13 last night. I’m still convinced ch. 24.1-35 is about AD 70 (more to follow in the fullness of time), but, following some of David Field’s comments on Matthew 24 I think a transition to the second coming in v. 36ff can be sustained. The disciples ask two questions – one about the destruction of the temple and the one about his coming and the close of the age – and it is quite reasonable to see that Jesus answers them in turn. There is a transition from references to “those days” to “that day” in v. 36. Moreover, the language of being cut in pieces and being put with the hypocrites in the place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, and of the bridegroom coming to the marriage feast is suggestive that Christ’s second coming is in view here.

One thing that was highlighted last night was that the point of being ready and keeping watch in light of Christ’s unknown return is to make sure we are serving God faithfully and relating to the Lord Jesus. The emphasis in the parables is on the bridegroom’s delay.

I merely want to add to that the further point that none of this requires the Christian to believe that Jesus could return at any moment. For example, Peter is told in John 21.19 that he would die before Jesus returns. He certainly wasn’t expecting Jesus to return in his lifetime. Yet that didn’t negate the need for him to be faithful and prepared in the present. Indeed, there’s a thought going round at the back of my mind that maybe the fact that the virgins in the second parable, having prepared (or not) beforehand fall asleep and are woken by the cry that the bridegroom has arrived suggests that Jesus’ hearers were even meant to expect that they would die and then be raised up to meet their Lord when he finally returned. A long delay is to be expected. Murray in The Puritan Hope also makes the point that the expectation that Jesus could return in the lifetime of each generation of Christians, from the first generation onwards, would mean that we have been misled for the past 2000 years.

Given that we have the promise, for example, that “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you” (Psalm 22.27), and since we don’t quite see that yet, on the basis of God’s word, we don’t have to live expecting that Jesus could return at any moment. Yet the master’s delay isn’t a license for unfaithfulness and unreadiness. We need to serve faithfully in the light of his eventual return, and make sure that we are obeying the gospel, and repenting of our sins and trusting in Christ.

Dr. Piper’s Eschatology

I currently have the pleasure of reading John Piper’s The Pleasures of God with a friend. The more I read, the more I grow in respect and admiration for this man. He clearly has a big brain (well, he does have a doctorate in theology), and he uses words like ‘ineluctable’ that I have to look up in a dictionary.

In the second chapter (‘The pleasure of God in all he does’) he recounts a letter he wrote to someone who was preaching at a conference who taught that God is our model risk-taker. The impression I’m getting is that Piper is very much a gospel optimist and may well have postmillennialist leanings, and I’d love to know where I might go to find out more about his eschatology. He references The Puritan Hope mentioned in a previous post a few times and recommends it as further reading for those who were inspired by the pleasure of God in all he does to spend themselves in world mission. In answer to a point about God taking a risk by entrusting the Great Commission into our hands, he writes:

The Great Commission is not in question. “This gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come” (Matthew 24:14 – although I’m not sure that’s what this verse is about). “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD; and all the families of the nations shall worship before him. For dominion belongs to the LORD and he rules over the nations” (Psalm 22:27-28). The full number of the Gentiles shall come in (Romans 11:25). “The earth shall be filled with the glory of the LORD” (Numbers 14:21). All of Scripture affirms the victory of God in world missions. It is not in question. God has promised. God is sovereign! Because he rules over the hearts of men and is the Lord of his church, his purpose cannot fail! – p. 57

“In view of the present distress”

I was thinking about 1 Corinthians 7 as one does, and further to a comment on a post on singleness last year, I’m warming to the idea that when Paul is saying that singleness is better (1 Corinthians 7.38), he is addressing a particular redemptive-historical context. Could “the present distress” (v. 26), the “appointed time” which has “grown very short” (v. 29), the fact that “the present form of this world is passing away” (v. 31), and the requirement for some slightly odd behavior more in keeping with a temporary situation than normal life (v. 30), be referring not to the whole of the last days, but a particular crisis, maybe even AD 70? Jesus advice for AD 70 (see e.g. Matthew 24.17-19) bears some resemblance to vv. 29 and 30. That then forms the context for the anxiety and divided interests the married man faces which Paul wants to avoid (vv. 33 and 34).

The implication of Paul’s teaching for us in the chapter as a whole is therefore first to be content with our current situation, second realise that there may be particular situations of crisis which makes singleness a better state to be in (not morally, but practically), and since Paul’s aim is to promote good order and secure undivided devotion to the Lord, it seems fair to say that those in some kind of courtship or marriage should be to make sure that they are charactised by good order and undivided devotion to the Lord.

Puritan Eschatology

Thanks to Liam Beadle for drawing my attention to the existence of The Puritan Hope by Iain Murray. It’s a stimulating book, showing that the Puritans, as well as Reformers such as Calvin and evangelical leaders of the eighteenth century held to an optimistic view of the future, in which prior to the return of the Lord Jesus Christ, the church would enjoy a blessed state on earth, the nations would be converted to Christ, and the earth would be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea. In the main, the belief appears to have been held that abundant gospel blessing for the world would come as a result of the Jews as a race being converted to Christ. They appeal to texts in Romans 11, and I am unconvinced by their arguments. Such an advance of Christ’s kingdom among the nations of the world would come as a result of the work of the Holy Spirit by the preaching of the gospel. Murray believes that this will take the form of a series of revivals; whether the Puritans actually believed that is unclear from his quotations: there may be a degree of imposition of revivalism on the gospel optimism of the Puritans. While we do pray for revival and we believe that God has worked and can work through general revivals, we don’t want bursts of conversions followed by stagnant periods. While we long for revival, we want the fruit of any such activity to include the instruction of the next generation, that they might tell their children, and so that they would set their hope in God (cf. Psalm 78.5-7), and we want such dynastic work to begin now. Murray demonstrates that the fruit of the Puritan optimism that the nations of the world would bow before Jesus Christ as their Saviour and Lord was world mission. Their view that this was a way off in the future in no way diverted their focus from the ultimate hope of Christ’s return and their resurrection from the dead. They did not feel it necessary to believe that Christ could come at any moment.

Murray then introduces us to the premillennialists (among whose ranks even J. C. Ryle could be found, and who could work out what Spurgeon thought?), who believed that things would get worse and worse until Christ returned (and that could happen any day), raised the dead believers and reigned with them on the earth for a thousand years, before the judgment. The fruit of this was a lack of long-term gospel investment. What mattered was saving souls now, not building missionary schools that would be their in two hundred years’ time. No longer was the work valued like the explorations of David Livingstone, in preparation for future missions. Murray doesn’t deal with the amillennialist position for whatever reason, although it should be clear that the general pessimistic outlook and the belief in the potential for Christ’s imminent return are common to both and they do have similar fruit, with the lack of planning for the long term and a tendency to a lack of appreciation of anything that isn’t directed to the immediate salvation of souls. “What’s the point of X? It’ll burn anyway.” But what about building an inheritance for our children and our children’s children? We have departed from the hope of the Puritans, a hope which had such a wide and deep impact.

All things in subjection under his feet

For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. – 1 Corinthians 15.24-26

Christ has been raised from the dead, ascended into heaven, and is now reigning at the right hand of the Father. When he returns, he will hand the kingdom to the Father. But he will only hand the kingdom over after everything has been put in subjection to him, death included. This subjection of all things, the last of which is death is a process that takes place while Christ reigns before he returns and hand the kingdom back to the Father. I take it therefore, in this time after the ascension of Christ, that we can assume that to an increasing extent, Christ’s enemies will be conquered, so that by the time he returns, all his enemies will have been conquered (then the last enemy, death, is destroyed and the kingdom is handed over to the Father).

I warmly recommend Doug Wilson’s sermon on the Ascension, which I think is a great exposition of Philippians 3.20-21. Because of the ascension, earth has a new capital city, heaven. ‘Our citizenship is in heaven’ doesn’t mean that we’re just passing through this world and then we’ll go to heaven for all eternity. It means that the church is a colony of heaven, that is, ruled by heaven and intended to spread the rule and influence of heaven around it (just as Philippi was a Roman colony, and that didn’t mean that everyone would retire from Philippi to Rome). Bishop Tom Wright makes the same point in his in many ways excellent book Surprised by Hope. We do not live in a gnostic two-storey universe in which we’re waiting to be saved from this terrible world to go to heaven where everything will be nice. When we go to heaven, it will be appropriate to ask, “How long before we get to go home?”. When we die, we visit the capital city temporarily, before Christ returns and renews the earth. In the meantime, we look forward to his coming, when all things will be subject to him. We can expect that before his coming, most things (death excepted) will be subject to him. This will be achieved by the preaching of the gospel. The fact that the earth will be transformed rather than thrown away means that our labours in the Lord now are not in vain, even if the labours of the world’s empires are (where is Assyria now? Babylon? The Medes? The Persians?). We should start Christian businesses and schools with the hope that they will pass from one generation to another and still be there in a few hundred years’ time. God behaves inappropriately towards us. He shows us grace and mercy in redeeming us, sending his Son to die for our sins, which we don’t deserve.

Uzziah and Adam

I went to the 10.00am service at church this morning (as the 11.30am service I normally attend was cancelled for the Love Oxford event, which as in previous years I did not attend since I am not comfortable with an event that seeks to proclaim unity in Christ between evangelicals and Romanists, and also those who proclaim a prosperity gospel). We had an excellent sermon on Uzziah from 2 Chronicles 26, where we saw how he prospered when he sought the Lord, but that there were two problems – the first was that he only seemed to seek the Lord in the days of one Zechariah, who instructed him and the second was the more obvious one of pride. There were three lessons for us, first the danger of spiritual isolation, with no-one to ask us the hard questions, secondly, the danger of the good times (it was when he became strong that he grew proud, and ceased to locate his strength in God), and thirdly, the danger of pride, thinking that we’re beyond God’s rules.

During the sermon, I noticed the following pattern: Uzziah had dominion over Israel and some of the Gentile nations, he guarded the land with fortifications and by equipping his army, and he worked the land, cutting out cisterns and employing farmers and vine-dressers “for he loved the soil”. But then his pride led him to unfaithful behaviour, which consisted in going where he shouldn’t and doing what he shouldn’t there – offering incense which only the priests were authorised to do. The consequence was physical disability – a skin disease – and then expulsion from the sanctuary and the house of the Lord.

The parallel with Adam is striking. Adam was to have dominion over the earth, keep the garden and work it, but then sinned by disobeying God’s command, taking the fruit from the tree that had been forbidden, and received God’s judgment, including the proclamation of physical death (‘dust you are and to dust you shall return’) and followed by exclusion from the garden.

Uzziah, too, repeats Adam’s sin.

The Thunderer

I was introduced to this by my American brethren this weekend. If only church history were always this fun.

God’s angry man, His crotchety scholar
Was Saint Jerome,
The great name-caller
Who cared not a dime
For the laws of Libel
And in his spare time
Translated the Bible.
Quick to disparage
All joys but learning
Jerome thought marriage
Better than burning;
But didn’t like woman’s
Painted cheeks;
Didn’t like Romans,
Didn’t like Greeks,
Hated Pagans
For their Pagan ways,
Yet doted on Cicero all of his days.

A born reformer, cross and gifted,
He scolded mankind
Sterner than Swift did;
Worked to save
The world from the heathen;
Fled to a cave
For peace to breathe in,
Promptly wherewith
For miles around
He filled the air with
Fury and sound.
In a mighty prose
For Almighty ends,
He thrust at his foes,
Quarreled with his friends,
And served his Master,
Though with complaint.
He wasn’t a plaster sort of a saint.

But he swelled men’s minds
With a Christian leaven.
It takes all kinds
To make a heaven.

Puritans on Marriage and Family

It has been a while since I put up some notes from Packer’s series of lectures on the Puritans which can be accessed from the RTS iTunes interweb page. Here are some on the Puritans, marriage and the family.

The Puritan view of marriage and the family is a subset of Puritan casuistry, that is, cases of conscience in which Biblical principles were applied to a vast array of situations in which a believer might find him or herself. The Puritans followed the Reformers, contra the vast majority of the Church Fathers and the mediaevals. Aquinas taught that marriage was no sin, it was necessary for the procreation of children and avoidance of sin, but that a man’s most suitable helpmeet would be another man. The Puritans said that marriage was not spiritually or morally inferior to singleness. Problems encountered during marriage were not a problem with the institution of marriage, but with the fact that marriage takes place between two sinful people. Their responsibility is to help each other fight sin and grow in sanctification. For the Puritans, marriage was the highest state of life; the vast majority of Christians would get married and indeed Christian men should seek a wife and women should pray for a husband. There may be those exceptional individuals who are called to celibacy. While my view is certainly not that of the mediaevals, I think I would have to take the rare step of holding back from going as far as the Puritans on this. While Scripture does present a very high view of marriage, it doesn’t appear to present one state of life as higher than the other, nor does it say that the majority of people should seek marriage, even if the majority of Christians do, ultimately marry. So Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 7, “To the unmarried and the widows, I say that it is good for them to remain single as I am,” (v. 8), “In whatever condition each was called, there let him remain with God,” (v. 24) and, “Are you free from a wife? Do not seek a wife” (v. 27). Singleness isn’t something for which one has to have a specific calling.

On the subject of whom to marry, a man is not to ask a man if he may court his daughter (for that is how it is done) if she is someone with whom their parents would not be content, and parents are not to choose wives for their sons with whom their sons could not be content (a common practice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). There should be affection. The criterion for choosing a wife is the inner beauty of a godly character (see 1 Peter 3, Ephesians 5 and Proverbs 31) and the question one should be asking is not, “Do I love X?” but “Can I love X?”, remembering that marriage is a commitment for the rest of life. A man’s responsibility is to love and cherish his wife, not lord it over her or crush her under foot. A man is not to marry a woman if he is not able to provide for her; that is part of what it means to cherish her, keeping her free as much as he can from financial concerns. Marriage presupposes the equality of status before God of the man and the woman. Marriage is for procreation, avoidance of sin, and also (and even primarily) for “the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other” as the Prayer Book puts it. In response to the question, “Why do feminists trace male chauvinism to the Puritans?” Packer replies, “Because they’re ignorant.” Once the laughter subsides, Packer replies, “Even Packer can give a short answer to a question when the question deserves it.”

Marriage itself is a contract between a man and a woman before God and should be carried out in the presence of the saints, who witness the marriage and pray for those entering into it. There would be a period of three weeks between fixing the date of the marriage (engagement) and the wedding itself, during which time the banns would be read out in the church as the public place where the people of the local area gather, in order to safeguard against bigamy. In the ceremony, there would be a sermon, which was in the majority of cases a weighty exposition of the duties of the husband and the wife. The wife is primarily a home-maker with the responsibility for the upbringing of the younger children. The husband is the head of the household, with the responsibility for instructing the older children, and making sure his family worships God. The family is a little church and a little commonwealth.