Practice what you preach when you preach

This is addressed to preachers. Especially the evangelicals: those who believe that the Bible is the written word of God.

Let’s imagine that your church were visited by an outside researcher. An alien perhaps, or an angelic being if you’re not into the alien thing.

Imagine that this researcher was trying to determine what you believe about the Bible just by examining what you do with the Bible. How would you stack up?

What should we say about scripture?

As evangelicals, we believe that ‘all scripture is breathed out by God’, and so in spite of the fact that it was written by many human authors over many centuries, there is also an overall unity because God’s mind lies behind it all. So God has communicated with the world through the scriptures that He has preserved for us.

And what is God’s book like? Is it a coherent philosophy full of universal truths? Eternal wisdom on topics of spiritual interest? No, as we know, it is a raw collection of many different types of literature, including stories, prophecies, letters, and even poems and songs. The eternal truth and wisdom that it contains emerges from the storylines of the histories and the Gospels, or from the careful argumentation of the letters to the churches.

Are these books written to the believers across the aeons? Are they equally true and accessible to all readers? Indeed, they are written for all believers, but not to all believers. Each book had its own particular audience, bound to a particular time and culture.

This is how we believe God chose to speak His word to us—through this Bible. Yet when we preach every Sunday, does our practice bear this out?

What kind of preacher are you?

When an attentive outsider observes how you preach, what conclusion would they draw about your doctrine of scripture?

1. The Medieval Roman Catholic

Imagine you are the researcher, transported back in time to a Medieval Catholic church. The service is given entirely in Latin, including the message read from a collection of sermons. You don’t understand Latin, and so you are completely baffled, but no matter—none of the people beside you in the pews understand Latin either.

How would you judge the beliefs of this church? Where would they have found ‘the word of God’? Clearly they didn’t find it in the intelligible communication of scripture. Tradition and church order was obviously more important, even if nobody (not even the preacher!) understood what was being read.

More realistic doctrinal statement: God’s word is mediated by the Church, and the Bible is a document of Church order.

2. The motivational speaker

Now imagine you’re transported into a church in which the speaker is styled as a ‘life coach’. Perhaps the preacher discusses current affairs in order to provide some wisdom or encouragement to his listeners. The preacher may use the Bible, but only to help you towards ‘a better you’.

Many churches have declared their lack of confidence in the Bible, and teach this way as a result. Others teach this way because they are attempting to be Christianised versions of Oprah. Either way, the Bible is clearly of peripheral interest and only drawn in when a verse can be found that says something of service to the topic at hand.

More realistic doctrinal statement: The Bible contains much wisdom concerning the best way to live.

3. God’s word to us today

The previous two preachers are the kind that we as evangelicals love to hate, but how do we stack up in comparison?

In a church that I know and hold in high regard for many reasons, the sermons regularly affirm an orthodox doctrine of scripture, are based on biblical texts, and show deep reverence for the Bible as God’s word. However, the church is suspicious of academic study and intellectualism, and so its preaching usually prizes openness to what the Spirit is saying to the church now. They prefer to preach freely and without notes so as not to stifle the Spirit. Neither in its sermons or its cell groups does the church work systematically through books (or even chapters) of the Bible.

What conclusion would an observer draw about their doctrine of scripture? The sermons may be helpful exhortations to love, faithfulness and good works, but they are rarely if ever sustained explanations of the Bible.  Texts are separated from their contexts, and because there is no continuity week-by-week, there is never any sense of the storyline or argument of which each verse is a part. In practice, the Bible is a point of departure for a message generated from other sources.

Although messages are inspired by or based on the Bible, the preaching does not explain the message of the Bible in the terms in which it was written. The ‘word of God’ seems to be something that God ‘lays on the heart’ directly.

More realistic doctrinal statement: God speaks to His church, and this is often inspired by what is written in the Bible.

4. Direct application

A wedding sermon I heard this week (while playing ‘alien observer’ in another church) nicely exemplified the ‘direct application’ method of preaching.

The message was from Psalm 45, which speaks of the groom (seemingly the king) wielding the sword and the bow, the bride dressed in gold, and their children being princes in the land for generations. To his credit, the preacher moved through the text piece by piece, which would seemingly acknowledge that God’s word is related to the message of the text as it was written.

However, the text was assumed to be about every marriage (not the wedding of Israel’s king), and each of its details was assumed to be directly applicable to the couple being wedded that day. So allegories were constructed to account for the sword, arrows, and golden fabric, and the preacher even insinuated that it was the literal duty of the couple to have children.

Does it not matter that the psalm was written to Old Covenant Israel? That Jesus’ coming has changed things? That children played a special role in the OT that they do not in the NT? That Israel’s king and his children were theologically important in a way that does not translate any longer?

The preacher was at least explaining the text, but without the controls of literary and historical context that help to uncover what the text originally meant. He ignored the progression of time and revelation, and made no reference to differences in covenant and culture. He treated the Bible as though it were written to us, not just for us. Under those rules, I’m just pleased the message wasn’t about God’s command to be circumcised.

More realistic doctrinal statement: God supernaturally makes His word apparent to readers of the Bible (or perhaps only to specially chosen readers).

5. The topical preacher

Evangelical preachers seem most often to preach topically, that is, their sermons try to give the Bible’s view on justification, or homosexuality, or marriage etc. I have no major objection to topical preaching, but again, what would the observer deduce about our doctrine of scripture? The Bible itself is not arranged in this way. God’s word is not topical—the message emerges from material that is carefully arranged into plots and arguments, or structured as poetry. It has order, progression, context.

It is obviously helpful to distill out of these texts a theology of this or that, but should we consistently neglect how the Bible has been written in favour of a compendium of neat verses arranged around our theme for the day?

While topical preaching is often commendably biblical, it does not preach what God has said in scripture (at least not in the way that He said it); it preaches what God would probably say on a certain subject if we could ask Him.

More realistic doctrinal statement: The Bible provides enough information to allow us to uncover God’s word on various subjects.

‘What’s your point?’

I don’t mean to point fingers at other churches or to imply that my denomination (or our preaching) is more evangelical than yours. Who cares whose church is more at fault? Nor is this an attempt to provoke church members to become dissatisfied with their churches, or to suggest that the only valid preaching is exegetical preaching. Perhaps my hurried analysis of evangelical preaching is malformed and unfair. I’d welcome better suggestions concerning the relationship between our doctrine of scripture and our preaching of it.

This is merely a provocation. Our evangelical beliefs about scripture seem to be strongly worded in our doctrinal statements, but weak in practice. If we say that God has spoken in the Bible as we have it, why do so many churches neglect exegetical preaching almost entirely? The Good News is a message that is narrated by scripture. If we don’t work hard to understand that message in the terms in which it was given, we are likely to be presumptuous and to misunderstand it. And if we misunderstand the source material, our preaching can only ever be false (or, at best, true by accident). Is there any task more important than trying to attain deeper understanding of the message of the Bible?

Unless the Bible is the word of God in some mystical magical way, then the word of God is accessible to us only by exegesis. Yes, exegesis is hard and it demands painstaking study (maybe even in Greek and Hebrew). Understanding the message that was intended when it was written requires us to understand how each text connects to the next one, why a writer said what he said when he said it, and how his reader thousands of years ago would have understood it. Yes, it is somewhat academic, and yes it makes things rigid. But no, it does not limit the Spirit. It limits the spirit of the preacher, but not the Spirit of God. It is precisely the word of the Spirit that we have in scripture—why would His own words be a limitation?—and it is the minister’s duty to handle it with care (2 Timothy 2:15).

As evangelicals, we may preach that the Bible is the written word of God, but do we practice what we preach when we preach?

The Resurrection and Christopher Hitchens

Today is Easter, the celebration of the day on which Jesus was supposed to have been resurrected, an event upon which the entirety of biblical Christian faith rests. As St Paul once wrote,

And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost.If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. (1Corinthians 15:17-19)

While many Christians have disagreed with Paul and have tried to find ways of distancing Jesus from such ’embarrassing’ claims, the resurrection of Jesus is still the place in which I find my doubts most often stilled, and where proselytising atheists would do well to aim their attacks. In tandem with the incarnation (God becoming flesh in the person of Jesus), this is the central miracle of all the biblical miracles.

Christopher Hitchens was a much-loved atheist who sadly died of cancer recently, and he was one such opponent of the resurrection and the miraculous in general. Here is a clip that encapsulates many of his arguments that I’ve heard:

In the clip, he argues that the definition of ‘miracle’ is the ‘suspension of the natural order’. There may be some minor quibbles with the wording (Hitchens’ opponent in the video, for example, tries to insist on the word ‘intervention’), but it is basically good. Hitch then goes on to present David Hume’s old argument: Which is more likely? That a suspension of the natural order occurred in your favour, or that you’ve made a mistake?

Trivial Pursuit: Pleasure in Ecclesiastes

This is a paper I wrote on Ecclesiates in 2005. The text is pasted below, but that may produce some untidy formatting errors (and removes page numbers), so here is the original PDF for download if you prefer.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Trivial Pursuit

FINDING PLEASURE IN ECCLESIASTES

JSM Pickering, 2005

Introduction

Christians perennially struggle with a life lived either completely immersed in the things of this world, or as though enjoyment of this life means diminished desire for the life to come. The former view leads to misplaced trust in the ability of this world to provide fulfilment and meaning, whereas the latter leads to suspicion of pleasure and a tendency towards asceticism. The book of Ecclesiastes suggests a way to walk the balance of life in a corrupted, doomed world.

Critical Scholarship Lacks Self-criticism

Some scholarly debates reach a ‘consensus’ because, although unresolved, scholars get bored of discussing them. The majority position is assumed to have won, and no one is allowed to talk about it anymore. One such view is the belief that the Old Testament is comprised of multiple sources and that little bits of the Pentateuch can be pigeon-holed into compartments labelled ‘Jahwist’, ‘Elohist’, ‘Deuteronomist’ or ‘Priestly’ (JEDP). These little bits and pieces are given their own theological motivation and an entirely new chronology. You would hope that people calling themselves ‘critical scholars’ would have some sort of evidence for their slicing up of the text, at least something that distinguishes it from what is popularly called ‘making stuff up’.

A parable:

The text: ‘It was 1920. I was walking past the German butchery on my way to my lodgings when a horse and rider galloped past me down the street. The sound of a car engine and a sudden blast from its horn startled the horse, and the rider fell from its back, injuring his wrist. I decided to get some Bratwurst.’

As an accomplished historian and source critic, I approach the text knowing that travel on foot was characteristic of pre-technological stages of human development, that domestication of horses for transportation purposes was common for three millennia or so, and that motorised transportation became popular in the mid 20th Century. Therefore, it can be noted that the above text has gone through three stages of historical development, where one tradition, which we shall call P (for Pedestrian), represents the earliest story layer dating from an age of prehistoric forms of transportation. The second source, which we shall call E (for Equine), represents a significant development in the life of this story, but an intermediate stage about which little is known for certain. What is much clearer is the work of the final editor, which we shall refer to as M (for Motorised), whose work included the provision of the late date (1920s), as well as the ‘Teutonicising’ of the text in order to turn this centuries-old travel narrative into a post-World-War-I apologia for the German nation. It is of course the character from the P source who shows sympathy by entering the German butchery after the great ‘fall’ that precedes it, and not the expected M source, but this is clearly an attempt by M to edit out the P material. He was not entirely able to do so, as the remnants of P are still discernible.

While the above is clearly ludicrous, you’d be surprised how many doctorates are handed out for work that appears to me to be only slightly better dressed than my parable. Heck, I could possibly get a doctorate simply for coining the term ‘Teutonicising’. A book I’m busy reading by Claus Westermann, purporting to explain what blessing means in the Bible, does just this sort of thing. He approached scripture with a pre-formed historical paradigm (courtesy of the generalisations of the early 20th C ‘history of religions’ school) through which the biblical material is to be assessed. In this case, it is the assumptions that a) ancient Arabic beliefs about magic spells were commonly held in the Ancient Near East, and that b) belief in magic words securing fertility for the family was the ‘original’ belief, followed later by belief that God or a god was responsible for blessing even whole nations, followed later still by the belief that blessing came via religious activities. [Do I need to point out that each of these views is held concurrently today?]

So he sets about hunting for this three-stage development through which religions are supposed to pass, and because it doesnt exist in this way in scripture, he turns to the wonder of source criticism, finding vestiges of the early beliefs ‘under the surface’ and ‘stripping away’ the work of later editors that tried to ‘theologise out’ these previous magic-words beliefs about blessing. In other words, if there’s a detail that can be made to fit with my paradigm, but seven other details that make it impossible, source criticism provides me with an academically acceptable means of ignoring the information that stands in the way of what I believe.

Take for example the story of Balaam, hired to curse the Israelites so that they would be unable to succeed militarily. Here, says Westermann, is an example of the early belief that certain people were in possession of ‘power-laden words’, people who could be hired to send evil upon others by magic. This is one of only two places that later editors were ‘unable’ to fully remove evidence of the ‘early beliefs’, showing that blessing is indeed related to magic words and ‘soul power’.

Unfortunately for Westermann, as CW Mitchell points out, the Balaam story completely opposes this view in every way. Balaam was hired because what he said was reputed always to come true. But he specifically says that he has no innate power to curse, but only to report what the gods determine to do (Numbers 23:8 ‘How can I curse those whom God has not cursed? How can I denounce those whom the LORD has not denounced?’ — this sort of thing is repeated a number of times in the story). He doesn’t attempt to curse Israel only to find his power removed or overcome. He refuses to curse Israel, because the One with the power to curse is determined to bless.

Westermann then uses this ‘evidence’ of the supposedly ‘early’ view to revise the way that the earlier texts should be understood. According to his fictional paradigm of history, magical views of blessing precede God’s promises of blessing, as so any divine promises to Abraham has to be the work of later theologians, who really ought to have known better than to buck Westermann’s system that he just made up.

If one is critical of the critics’ paradigms and divination of the seams between sources, and if one rather looks at the way that the blessing words are used in scripture (and even in non-Israelite literature from the region), it emerges that all the uses of the word actually share the same things in common: blessing is to do with receiving a good thing from God, or wishing a good thing from God upon another, or living in a state of goodness from God, all on account of a relationship between God and man. It has nothing at all to do with magical incantations from Arabia.

Imagine. Biblical scholarship that uses the Bible instead of foreign interpretive paradigms and an over-eager scalpel. A man can dream. For now I have to read the rest of Westermann.

Poppins and Perception

Gritty realism

When we were young, one of my siblings got her hands on a VHS copy of Mary Poppins. Children have a high tolerance for repetition, and so for what felt like an endless succession of days, weeks, and months, my brothers and I were subjected to a daily dose of Supercalifragelisticexpialidocious and Feed the birds / tuppence a bag. Eventually, there was no sugar that could make that medicine go down, and we taped an inconsequential local football game over it in protest. My irrational hatred of musicals may have something to do with such scarring childhood experiences.

Mark Dickson talks Monsters

Mark Dickson has raised some interesting questions in the discussion of my previous post: “Has Creationism Created a Monster?” These are my responses to the gist of his questions. (You can see his remarks in full in the comments beneath that post). I thought I’d turn my response into a new post for those who are interested, because it’s a sticky topic, and because it saves me having to write something else.

Why Doesn’t the Bible Explain Itself Better?

One of our design school projects was to draw a notable piece of the architecture of our city. An annoyingly meticulous friend of mine decided to do the very ornate city hall. When it was deadline day, she sheepishly pulled out a pencil drawing that was stunningly beautiful. The main entrance and dome of the hall were rendered in dramatic shading of almost photographic detail, but the austerity and pomposity of the colonialist landmark quickly broke down into quieter minimalistic line-work towards the edges, leaving the composition light and dynamic. It was an inspired balance of tense, intriguing texture and easy, sensitive calm. However, she didn’t realise this. The first thing that she did was to apologise for not finishing the whole thing. Mercifully, time constraints had prevented her from brutalising the harmony of her drawing with oppressive OCD shading from wall to wall.

God Hates ‘Fags’ but not the Hateful?

I came across the website of ‘Westboro Baptist Church’, which has the charming address: ‘godhatesfags.com’ (which they claim is a profound theological statement — they are short of real ones over there). It is the work of the unlikeable Reverend Fred Phelps, who has made it his mission to expose the ‘greatest lie ever told’, i.e. that God loves everyone. He has organised a whopping 41,000 protests since 1991, all with the aim of telling homosexuals that God hates them. A favourite protest site is any funeral of gay people. His followers even attended the funeral of a young man who was beaten and strung up to die on a barbed-wire fence, where they happily announced that he had ‘split hell apart’ and is burning under the hatred of God.

His motivation is that homosexuality is a sin, and therefore to let it persist unabated is consigning people to hell. People need to hear the truth so that they can be saved. That’s fine, but what makes it the only sin worth mentioning (so much so that his entire church is covered by this hateful banner, and so much so that he blames September 11 – and virtually every other major tragedy, it seems — on God’s judgment upon homosexual sin)? What makes it OK to abandon the core Christian ethic of love, and instead to actively hate? What about him would make anyone want to be saved by what ‘saved’ him?

Open Letter to Preachers #1

Dear Preacher

I’m writing to you because I’m concerned that you’re not doing your job. Sure, if you’re the average preacher, then you’re preaching to a robust group of a hundred or two, you manage to stay out of the TBN gutter, you try hard to craft topics that are Biblically faithful, and you also manage to keep your talks lively and encouraging. What more could any Christian ask, right?

Well, I wonder if you’ve spent any time recently considering where spiritual Dark Ages come from? This question bothers me a lot, because it seems to me we might be heading there soon enough. Consider this quote from our friend Richard Dawkins:

“As long ago as 1954, according to Robert Hinde in his thoughtful book, Why Gods Persist, a Gallup Poll in the United States of America found the following. Three quarters of Catholics and Protestants could not name a single Old Testament prophet. More than two thirds didn’t know who preached the Sermon on the Mount. A substantial number thought that Moses was one of Jesus’s twelve apostles. That, to repeat, was in the United States, which is notoriously more religious than other parts of the developed world.” (The God Delusion, ch.9)

So 50 years ago, in a self-consciously Christian America, Moses was an apostle, for all they knew. And I can’t imagine that Christians are doing vastly better since then.

Holy Horror: The Levite and the Concubine

JUDGES 19-21

Horror movies follow a predictable set-up. They always begin with the most normal, wholesome scenes possible. It’s the picket fence, the high school, the camping trip. Of course, just as we become saturated with the calm, everyday familiarity, it becomes increasingly obvious that something is a bit off. Even though horror movies are usually the most fantastical genre, the better the viewer believes the normalness of the set up, the more terrifying the horror is when it finally splatters on screen. [In fact, movies that start off with unrealistic settings and circumstances are probably comedies, and if you find yourself completely incapable of suspending disbelief far enough, it’s probably a chick flick.]

If the story of Micah’s Idols in Judges is divine comedy, the book’s conclusion with the much-maligned story of the Levite and the Concubine is holy horror (without hollywood’s sense of relish at the bloodshed). It covers a vicious re-enactment of the horrors of Sodom, the rape and murder of a woman, a grisly summons to war, and inter-tribal genocide. It is a story that is frequently misunderstood, meeting with criticism, for example, in Dawkins’ God Delusion, and some inarticulate gasps from skepticsannotatedbible.com. What critics seem always to miss is that the narrator shares their revulsion towards these events, and is passing comment on the moral depravity into which God’s chosen nation has sunk.