Hermeneutic Matters

Is a personal hermeneutic necessary for correctly interpreting and applying God’s Word? Can one “get away” with ignoring the original intended meaning of the text and supplant it with an interpretation that fits today’s needs? What do you think?

Rhetoric Site

For all those who are not aware, check out www.americanrhetoric.com

This is a cool site that allows you to hear the many great speeches in America’s history and has plenty of learning resources on rhetoric.

Authority Matters

The other day I had to take an item back to the grocery store because I got the wrong brand (this is typical for me when shopping for my wife). I drove to Harris Teeter, got out of the car, took the bag with the wrong item, entered the store and went straight customer service. I told the clerk that I came here yesterday and bought the wrong item for my wife. The clerk asked for my receipt and I realized I had left it at home.  I told the clerk I had left it at home and she told me to go back home and get it! She then told me they had a new policy which does not allow returns or exchanges without a receipt. I tried to sweet talk her but it didn’t work. I had to go home, with my tail between my legs, and grab the receipt and then bring it back to the store. I know you’ve been there. I brought the receipt back with me and was allowed to exchange the item. The receipt gave me the power to exchange. It gave me authority. Without it, I could only tell the clerk my experience of coming to their store. Without the receipt, there was nothing to prove my experience true.

The issue of authority must not be layed aside when discussing the preaching event. Some have God’s Word as their authority. Others see the audience’s experience as authority. A. Mohler states that God has spoken. Thus, preachers have a mandate to preach because God has spoken. The preacher has divine authority as God’s spokesman when he speaks what God has spoken. Without this authority the preacher is on his own authority.

In the context of human history, authority has been questioned ever since the Enlightenment. David Allen in “A Tale of Two Roads” states “Enlightenment modernity distrusted authority. Radical postmodernity dismantles authority. Edward Farley’s oft-repeated statement sums up the late twentieth-century scenario: ‘the house of authority has collapsed.’ For many, great was the fall of it.” Joel Gregory credits the rejection of authority as one of the reasons why preaching has declined in the 20/21st centuries. The issue of authority seems to be the most significant issue which distinguishes the new homiletic from expository preaching.

The New Homiletic and Authority (for an excellent resource see DavidAllen’s  “Tale of Two Roads: Homiletics and Biblical Authority” in JETS 43 (2000)

The term “new homiletic” was coined by David Randolph in his 1969 book, The Renewal of Preaching. He defined the “new homiletic” as “the event in which the biblical text is interpreted in order that its meaning will come to expression in the concrete situation of the hearers.” One will read this and agree with it, right? Let’s read furthe

“The sermon is becoming understood as event, and event means encounter, engagement, and dialogue: the end of “monologue” in the pulpit. Preaching as a one-man affair is a thing of the past, to be replaced by that kind of participatory experience in which those present themselves involved, even though only one man may be vocalizing at the time. The sermon is being understood asa event, and the consequences of this are beginning to be understood in a new way” (Contextually, “new” means different from the kerygmatic teaching of Karl Barth).

For Randolph, the perspective of the hearer was signigicant. If not, too significant. Following Randolph was Fred Craddock whose 1971 book As One Without Authority further expanded the possibilities of the New Homiletic. Craddock’s background in the New Testament was influenced by Bultmann. Also, on a sabbatical at Tubingen, he studied under Ebeling, one of the founders of the new hermeneutic. Later Craddock was introduced to the writing of Soren Kierkegaard. For Craddock, God’s Word is God’s Word to the reader/listener, not a word about God gleaned frm the documents. Preaching is, thus, and experienced event. The preacher and the listeners are co-crators, of the sermonic experience. More important than imparting knowledge, the sermon seeks to affect an experience by cultivating the surprise of the gospel through the preacher’s ability to embed the experience in the familiar word of the congregation (once again, it seems that the audience take precedence. Craddock’s emphasis on induction, plot, and movement in the sermon has inspired preachers in their conceotion and practice of sermon structure. (see Scott Gibson, “Critique of the New Homiletic”)

Following Craddock was David Buttrick and his work Homiletics. His concern is what happens when language in a sermon interacts with the consciousness of the listeners (phenomenological approach). His sermon style consists of a sequence of five or six plotted ideational units culminating in a conclusion. This is sequence is called movement.

Eugene Lowry emphasized what he called the “homiletical plot.”. He comments, “As an evocative event, the sermon’s sequence follows the logic of listening , not just the consistency of conceptual categories.” His intention is the ordering of experience within a narrative plot. The overall common feature of the new homiletic is experience.

Scott Gibson, in an insightful critique of the New Homiletic, provides several presuppositions of those influenced by the New Homiletic:
1. The Interpreter and the Text
The interpreter realizes that he comes to the text with presuppositions. The
text is not considered to be the object with the interpreter as the subject.
Instead, the interpreter is himself the object of interpretation. The text then
is spoken into and creates the community of faith. Thus, the center
of authority does not lie in the text but with the listener(s) in the context of
community. Authority, then, is not located in a particular place but rather in
the relationship between the preacher, the text, and the congregation..Some advocates of the New Homiletic appear to dispense altogether with the
use of the biblial text. Read this from David Buttrick and let your jaw drop: We must not say that preaching from Scripture is requisite for
sermons to be the Word of God (Homiletics).” Further, in A Captive Voice, Buttrick states, “For the better part of the twentieth
century, preaching and the Bible have been wrapped up in a kind of
incestuous relationship.”
2. The superiority of self.
The emphasis on application has caused a shift from the objective use of the
Bible to the subjective. Craddock argues, “It is, therefore, pointless, to
speak of the gospel as Truth in and of itself, the gospel is Truth for
us.”As Yandall Woodfin in “The Theology of Preaching: A Search for the
Authentic” (Scottish Journal of Theology, 23, 1990) states,
“The belief that preaching, created by the living Word of Scripture, may
itself under God’s sovereign grace become God’s Word can only be
sustained by an existential impresssion and response which is auto-
pistic or self-validating.” Thus, in light of the first two points, the final
presupposition is…
3. The authority of experience.
Whereas in classical homiletics the preacher brought the meaning and
application of the text to the congregation, in the New Homiletic the
listeners and preacher altogether create the experience of meaning. One
advocate of the New Homiletic boldly states:
“One of the reasons we must alert our eyes to keener sight and
feel the bodily weight of truth is that if we do not ground our
sermons in the actuality of experience, the authority of what we
say will be suspect. Appeals to the Bible or tradition do not carry
sufficient weight in themselves.” -Thomas H. Troger, Imagining a Sermon, 1990.
Summarizing it all, Scott Gibson states, “The emphasis on
experience certainly raises questions about the movement’s dependence
upon the modern liberal paradigm and presuppositions.”Expository Preaching and AuthorityFor expository preaching, its authority derives from God. We speak because God has spoken. Expository preaching attempts to expose Scripture and let God speak. Thus, the expository sermon has authority because it speaks what God speaks. Peter Adam states there is often a direct link between one’s theology of Scripture and a theology of preaching.

H.C. Brown in Steps to the Sermon points out that the connection of the sermon with a text is its basis for authority. He described four kinds of authority for the sermon based on the extent which it reflects the subject and purpose of the text:
1. The sermon has direct biblical authority when its central idea and
purpose are the same as that of the text.
2. Indirect biblical authority comes to the sermon when a secondary
theme of the text is the main idea of the sermon.
3. Beyond that the sermon has only casual biblical authority or
even corrupted biblical authority when it does not reflect the
central idea and purpose of the text at all.Wayne McDill in 12 Essential Skills for Great Preaching(1993, 2006), states, “There is no doubt that the connection between the text and the sermon will make a difference in the authority with which the preacher speaks. If we believe the Bible is authoritative for the Christian community, we will want our preaching to draw on that authority. A faithful messenger must report what he is given to say, not declare a message of his own, however he may think it is.”Authority matters. There are many of us who are unknowingly influenced by the New Homiletic. While being careful to generalize, it seems that preachers of the emergent tradition are advocates of the New Homiletic. Doug Padgitt, Dan Kimball, Brian Maclaren (though even emergent leaders admit he is going off the theological deep end), and others are huge critics of propositional Aristotilean preaching. They have been influenced by the theology of Schleirmacher and Hans Frei (maybe unknowingly) and seemed to overreact against propositional preaching.

When one preaches according to the audience’s experience, then the authority becomes the audience. Thus, the preacher fails to fulfill his original biblical duty to speak what God has spoken. However, those who preach expository sermons rest on the solid foundation of God’s authority in His Word.

David Allen concludes:
“A high view of biblical authority creates a solid foundation for
expositional preaching. Such exposition will respect and reflect the
various literary genres in which God was pleased to reveal His Word. But the
view of biblical authority adovcated here requires that the umbrella term for
preaching today should not be “narrative,” “topical,” or any approach to
preaching other than the expository method. Biblical exposition week
after week from the pulpit is, as far as I am concerned, the logical outcome of ahigh view of biblical authority and the most effective means of fulfilling Paul’s mandate to ‘preach the Word.’”

We, as preachers and stewards of God’s Word have a divine mandate to preach what God has spoken. When we do this, then we possess the authority to call our audience to repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. One must be faithful to the subject, structure, and substance of the biblical text. If that means the text is of the narrative genre, then by all means, structure it as a story. However, do not be afraid of propositional truth. We must preach for a verdict. In other words, hell is too hot and people are too precious for us to tell stories without any direction for repentance, without any urgency for truth.

Consistency Matters (or “How To Avoid the Macarena”)

I am writing my dissertation on G. Campbell Morgan and his use of imagery during his first tenure at Westminster Chapel (1904-16) and implications for contemporary preaching. In my research one of the many helpful areas we can learn from Morgan is his consistency. While I have never heard him preach, an in-depth study of his sermons and the authors of his biographies reveal remarkable consistency. In other words, when you read Morgan (or when one heard him) you always know what you were going to get. There is hardly a time when I have finished reading one of his sermons and was disappointed in its exegetical depth and relevance (though I understand he wasn’t one of the most passionate preachers as compared to his friend D.L. Moody)

In my short 27 years of living I have listened to many preachers preach at conferences, on tapes/CDs, and other channels and have heard remarkable sermons. Sermons that have made me so excited that I wanted to charge the gates of hell with a water pistol. Many preachers have impressed me with their preaching but too often many of them are “one-hit wonders” when it comes to their preaching. In other words, preachers and their preaching must not be like Los Del Rio and be satisfied with “Macarena Preaching.” Everyone knows how to “do the Macarena” but hardly anyone knows who sang the song and what the group is doing now. Why? Because they had one hit song, it was popular for a while, and now we look back and laugh. No one takes Los Del Rio seriously because of that silly song. We talk about the song and the group in the past sense becuase there is nothing about them to currently talk about and there is nothing in the future. No one camps out at BestBuy the night before their new album comes out. Los Del Riois not known for their consistency.I read many “top 10 Preachers” lists and am often confused as to the judgment grid used. There is often not one. These lists are just someone’s opinion with no reasonable evidence to justify their choices. What makes a preacher able to enter into one’s top ten list? Is it the size of the church? The amount of response during their invitation? The number of conferences they preach? The amount of displayed passion (their personality)? The accuracy of their biblical interpretation? Often there is no reason provided for those included in “top ten preacher” lists. Besides the above reason, another weakness of top ten best preacher lists is that these lists are often limited to our awareness of them. Just because we hear more of one preacher than another one does not make them better. Certainly there are various levels of preaching skill and intelligence but who says one mega church pastor is a “better” communicator than a friend of mine in Nepal (Subash) who preaches often to the poor immigrants of his country? What does the term “better” mean anyway? That is why I believe the faithfulness or effectiveness of a particular preacher should not be judged by a single sermon. Anyone can hit a “grand slam” sermon once in their life. But it is the preacher who, like Morgan and others, can provide their audience with consistency everytime they preach. Joe Dimaggio, one of my favorite baseball players, was known for his high batting average. A high batting average implies that the batter is often effective in hitting the ball into an open part of the field. I fear too many preachers are content to hit a grand slam once in a while and strike out the rest of the time.

Maybe I’m wrong but I believe the most faithful men in the pulpit are the most consistent day in and day out. They preach the Word “in season and out of season.” No matter how they feel, they preach consistently with the same fervor, exegetical skill, and surrender to the Holy Spirit every time they preach. I used to want to be a great preacher, but over time my impure motives were revealed. I still want to be the best preacher I can be. However, I am finding myself desiring to also be consistent in my preaching. When people hear Ben Brammer preach I do not want them to walk away and say “I’ve heard him preach better” or “Last week’s sermon was better.” I want to please Jesus and I want people to say, “Ben may not be the best speaker and have the sharpest wit, but he is consistent. I trust him because everytime I hear him he reveals the Word of God to me and I am engaged with a passionate conversation”. I want to be consistent. I want to be faithful. I do not want to be satisfied with “Macarena” preaching. I want to be a trusted preacher that everyone knows what to expect when they hear me communicate God’s Word to them.

Although there are many preachers we will never hear about, the following are some of the most consistent contemporary preachers I am aware of.

In no particular order:

1) Chuck Smith (I’m aware of his present troubles), Calvary Chapel
2) Danny Akin
3) Ed Young, Jr.
4) J.D. Greear, Summit Church Durham, NC
5) David Jeremiah
6) Adrian Rogers
7) Billy Graham (um, who can argue his consistency over the years?)
Michael Cloer Englewood Baptist Church Rocky Mount, NC
9) Phil Ortego, Scotts Hill Baptist Church Wilmington, NC