The Worlds of the Preacher

Navigating Biblical, Cultural, and Personal Contexts

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• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780801099618
• eBook ISBN: 9781493413355
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Building on Haddon Robinson's philosophical approach to preaching, this book brings together accomplished evangelical preachers and teachers to help students and pastors understand the worlds--biblical, cultural, and personal--that influence and impact their preaching. The contributors explore the various inner and outer worlds in which a preacher functions with the goal of helping preachers sharpen their craft. Foreword by Bryan Chapell.

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The Worlds of the Preacher

HADDON W. ROBINSON

Introduction

One of the surprising discoveries that archaeologists have made is that the temple in Jerusalem and the temples of pagan religions in the Near East were not radically different. Most temples that have been excavated had an outer court and an inner court that led to the holy place. The architecture of the holy place in pagan temples, like Solomon’s temple, led to the holiest place of all. Everything pointed to that sacred chamber—the slant of the floors, the increasing darkness, the awe and mystery. Into that sacred chamber the pagan priest would go, sometimes once a month at the turning of the moon, or once a quarter, or even less often, only once each year. That central place was filled with mystery and awe.

In pagan religions, in the holy of holies sat a little gold idol. That god or goddess represented the sun or the moon or fertility that the people worshiped. If you look at the tabernacle and later the temple of Israel in the Bible, it too had an outer court and an inner court, it too had a holy of holies. In that holiest place of all, however, instead of a golden god, the god of war, or the goddess of fertility, was a golden box. Within that golden box were, among other things, the tablets of the law delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai.

You might think that the temple architecture was unique to the people of Israel. But what it may tell us is that what separates us from the pagans is not the shape of our buildings or even the forms of our worship. What separates men and women who take God seriously is that the center of the religion of the Bible is the revealed moral will of God. God revealed himself through history, and that revelation is contained in the Scriptures. We believe that this book is the Word of God without error, and for that reason all Christian thought must emerge from this book and all Christian preaching and teaching must be based on it.

That stands as the cardinal reason for expository preaching. If our thought must follow God’s thought, then those who lead God’s people must teach the Scriptures and relate the Scriptures to people’s lives.

We recognize that if we are going to be teachers, we’re going to be communicators. We not only have to have this supreme message, but we also want to have an understanding of the people to whom we speak. That’s why some people talk about preaching being not in the shape of a circle but in the shape of an ellipse. An ellipse has two centers. We are not singly centered in the Bible, as important and crucial as that is to us; we are also centered in the men and women in the world. James Cleland calls this “bi-focal preaching.”1 It has two centers—a center in the Scriptures and a center in people today.

The central image in John Stott’s book Between Two Worlds is that of a bridge.2 He says that the preacher stands like a bridge between two worlds—the world of the Bible and today’s world. A bridge brings two landmasses together. Two bodies of land that are separated by a river or a canyon are bridged, and the bridge brings them together. Stott argues that the expository preacher who takes the Bible and the listener seriously is like a bridge between two worlds.

Being a great communicator of God’s truth, however, involves us in not just two worlds but in four worlds. One world with which we are concerned is the world of the Bible—the ancient world. It’s the world we enter through exegesis, through the study of the Scriptures. It dominates us. It is crucial to our message. As preachers, we want to understand the history of the ancient world. One really cannot understand the Bible unless one understands its history.

The First World: The Ancient World or the World of the Bible

History

If you were to travel along the North Shore of the Boston area, you’d see a lot of little shops that sell antiques. We have one in Gloucester that has on one side of the sign “We buy junk” and on the other side “We sell antiques.” But let’s suppose you go into one of those stores, and as you wander around you see an old trunk. Your hand springs a small lever, and there is a compartment that has obviously been hidden for a long time. You reach into that compartment and come out with a bundle of letters. They are old and faded and tied with a ribbon that once was yellow but has been touched by the years. You gingerly open them. Though the ink is dim, it is still able to be deciphered. As you read, you recognize that these are letters written by a young man to a young woman. You discover that he has apparently gone off to war. You don’t have to know much else as you read those letters to get some feel for what they are about. You can understand his loneliness when he writes about it. You’ve felt loneliness too. You can understand his fear when he talks about comrades of his who have fallen in battle. You can understand his frustration. When he went off to fight, the motto was “Keep the eggs warm—we’ll be home for breakfast.” But they’ve grown cold. Then there are other things in those letters that you won’t understand. You might have references to Bull Run, to Chattanooga. There’ll be other mentions of generals and “the cause.” The letters are about the Civil War. Obviously, to understand the letters, you have to understand the history.

When God chose to give us his revelation, he chose to give it to particular people at a particular place and a particular time. God spoke once to a people long ago and through those people he speaks to us. To understand the Bible, you have to know its history. If you take the Minor Prophets, for instance, and you do not understand anything about Edom, you cannot understand the book of Obadiah. If you don’t understand anything about Israel and Judah, you cannot understand Hosea, and it would be more difficult to understand Amos. That is, to understand the meaning of any passage of Scripture, you must understand the history.

Language

To understand the Bible, it’s also helpful to understand the languages of the Bible—Greek and Hebrew. Let me at least file this disclaimer (not very popular on a campus of a theological seminary): you do not really have to know Hebrew or Greek to be able to understand the Scriptures. It’s amazing how much of the Bible you can learn just by reading it in English. What I think the languages do is like the difference between a color photo and a black-and-white photo. Both the black and white and the color give you the picture, but one gives you a bit more depth, a bit more “color.”

Philipp Melanchthon said, “The wisdom of the Bible is in the grammar.” One of the reasons for knowing the languages is that when you are using commentaries, you discover that commentators are just like you. They’re people who read the Bible and try to make sense out of it. The fact that they put their information in a book doesn’t make them any more authoritative than you sitting in your study. When you get three or four commentaries, you discover that they differ. Usually commentators differ not because one bunch fell off a turnip truck and the other went to seminary. They differ because in order to translate the Bible, in order to comment on it, you have to try to understand its flow of thought. So as a preacher, you have to make interpretive decisions. For example, you have a subjective genitive, “The love of Christ constrains us.” You ask, is that an objective genitive? Is that my love for Christ, or is it his love for me? You have to make a decision. In making that decision, it turns around and makes the rest of your passage and sermon. Read three or four translations and see where they are the same and where they differ. To be sure, it helps to know something of the language, to know why some translators didn’t translate this passage in exactly the same way. So even if you only have a minimum knowledge of the language, you discover that it’s a help. You can understand the translations, and you sometimes have a better understanding of the commentator.

But there is another reason that an exposure to the languages of the Bible can help you. Language not only is a way of expressing thought; language is a way of helping us think. We can’t think apart from language. Benjamin Lee Whorf was a noted linguist who worked with the Hopi Indians in the American Southwest. As he worked with them, he discovered that they understood Einstein’s theory of relativity. When it was explained to them, it made sense because in the Hopi language there is no sense of time. Hopis do not talk about the past, the present, the future. For them, everything is either happening here where they are or away from them; it has nothing to do with time.

For us, we cannot think apart from time if all we know is English. Bound up into English, and Greek for that matter, there is past, there is present, there is future, there is past beyond past; you just can’t talk apart from time. Einstein said that he could not have thought of the theory of relativity if he did not understand mathematics and German. What Benjamin Lee Whorf came to realize was that language not only expresses thought; it also forms thought.

For instance, the Eskimos do not have merely a single word for snow—they have seventeen. They have words for snow falling, snow that has just hit the ground, snow that’s beginning to freeze, snow that’s been there for several days, snow that’s beginning to melt. When Eskimos think of snow, they can really think of snow!3 Likewise, we do not have a single word for a bread product made from wheat. When we think of bread, we tend to think of a loaf of bread. We don’t think of Twinkies or donuts or bear claws. In other parts of the world, that isn’t so. Where people do not use wheat, one word may cover it all. So one advantage of knowing the language of the Bible, in particular, is that it enables you to understand how people thought in the ancient world.

That’s what grammar is. It’s the way people put their thought together. If you studied German, you’d know that the verb is in either the second position or the last position. Imagine how it is when you’ve got one of these long, complicated sentences and you have to wait until that final verb to discover what the action is. Grammar is that way. Those who study other languages often discover that you learn English by studying Greek. You grew up knowing English—you didn’t know indirect objects or objects or prepositional phrases. These are ways of thinking. They’re ways in which people put thought together.

So, to know the world of the Bible, it helps to know the history and the language that exposes us to the way the people in the ancient world thought.

Culture

To know the Bible is to know its culture. It was only a few years ago that it dawned on me that the biblical writers and the readers were bound up in their culture. I used to think that the cultural problem of the Bible was that Paul said to greet one another with a holy kiss and we make it a hearty handshake. We don’t want to go around kissing people in our churches. That makes sense. The more I work with it, as the revelation comes to us in Greek and Hebrew, it still comes to us out of a culture. That culture is all-pervasive. One of the enormous problems that you have as you work with the Bible is to understand how much of it is bound up in the culture and how much of it transcends culture. The answer is, all of it is bound up in the culture. It is out of that culture that you are to find the truth that transcends culture.

When I was broadcasting on Discover the Word, we were studying the book of Proverbs. If there’s any book in the Old Testament that looks like a slam dunk, it’s the book of Proverbs. Wisdom literature tends to move over from one culture to another with ease. But as you read that book and work with it, you find that in the last chapters the wisdom that is given is for young men who are preparing to serve in the king’s court. There’s a great deal about kings and royalty that you take for granted as you read the book. You ask questions like, When the biblical writer talks about kings, is he saying that a monarchy is a preferred form of government?

Or consider the warnings in the book of Proverbs about cosigning a note. If you cosign, you cannot get out of it. You might beg, plead, nag—anything to get out of the obligation. The reason, of course, was that if you cosigned a note, you became responsible for the note. If the person who took the note out couldn’t pay the note, the lender would come back to you, the cosigner. He could take you and everything you possess—your wife, your children—and sell them into slavery to pay off that note. If you cosigned a note, you were in big trouble in the ancient world. That’s not true today. Today you can file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The fuss in Proverbs about cosigning a note, while probably still a good thing to keep in mind, doesn’t cause the same alarm today as it did in the ancient world. The question is, What do you bring over to the twenty-first century? With what force do you bring it over to today?

When you’re dealing with the ancient world of the Bible, you have to know its language, you have to know its history, you have to know its culture.

The danger at this point is that there are preachers who never get out of the ancient world. All of their preaching is at least two thousand years old or more. What they deal with in their sermons is the language, the history, the culture of the ancient world from which the Bible comes. Those are the kinds of sermons from which you leave saying, “David shouldn’t have done that with Bathsheba” or “Abraham made a mistake when he went down to Egypt,” but it doesn’t touch today. A person who takes the Bible seriously understands the ancient world.

The Second World: The Modern World

History

The world of the preacher, the modern world, is the world that I have to work with—the world of homiletics, the world of the twenty-first century. This world, too, has a history. Evangelicals, it seems to me, have a tendency to ignore history. Unfortunately, history will not ignore us. We might want to ignore history, but history does not ignore us.

I remember the first time I ever talked with someone, a couple, considering an abortion. It was in the middle sixties and I was working with a group of physicians in Dallas in a Bible study. The young man and his wife came to my office. He was in his third year of medical school. They discovered that his wife was pregnant, which, to them, got in the way of their plans. She had been working to put him through school, and it looked like that would change. He was going to go on to advanced residency, and that was going to take several years, and children were not in their plans. They came to tell me that they were seriously thinking, in light of their situation, of having an abortion. That was 1965. I can still remember the feelings that I had. If they had told me that they had a two-year-old and that they were going to kill the two-year-old because he was just getting on their nerves, I might have understood that! But I couldn’t have been more repulsed by the thought of abortion. I did not know how to handle it.

In 1968 there was the first of a number of judicial decisions related to abortion. Up until that time in our country, every state in the union had laws against abortion. Two—Colorado and Hawaii—allowed abortion if a woman’s health was affected. Then in 1973 when Roe v. Wade was upheld by the Supreme Court, abortion became the law of the land. Today a million or more pre-borns are aborted. Numerous women in our society have had an abortion. If you don’t keep that in mind as you get up to thunder like a prophet against the evils of abortion and recognize that in front of you in that congregation are a group of women who have had an abortion, you cut their hearts out and bring back a whole flood of guilt. You can’t be just a prophet today; you have to be a pastor. You have to understand that history has caught up with you. We ignore history, but it doesn’t ignore us.

I would like to believe that the reason folks today, more or less, think it’s good to have churches that are racially integrated is because a group of theologians from Gordon-Conwell and Trinity and Dallas and Fuller and Westminster got together in the 1940s and studied the book of Ephesians. One of them might have said, “You know, the middle wall was broken down between the Jews and the gentiles. It strikes me that that must have some influence, some effect on blacks and whites. We ought to break down the wall in our churches.” It didn’t happen that way. Rosa Parks got tired of sitting in the back of the bus and didn’t move. And then there were the marchers of the 1950s and 1960s. The last group to figure it all out were the churches, and some haven’t figured it out yet. Integration didn’t come because we were so biblically correct and so formed by the Scriptures that we said, “This has got to go! It’s damnable; it’s against the law of Christ!” No, it happened out there on the streets. We ignore history, but it doesn’t ignore us.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Worlds of the Preacher
• 2. The Preacher and the World of the Old Testament
• 3. The Preacher and the World of the New Testament
• 4. The Preacher’s Personal World
• 5. The World of Ethnic and Cultural Issues in Preaching
• 6. The Worlds of the Listener
• 7. Preaching in This Present World
• 8. The Mission of Preaching in This World
• 9. The World of History and the Task of Preaching
• 10. Preaching to a Culture Dominated by Images
• Afterword
• Contributors
• Back Cover