I’ve had some ongoing interest in and questions about the practice of preaching. David Fitch has some interesting thoughts on how expository preaching doesn’t actually help us faithfully proclaim the gospel, because he says it "commodifies" the word of God, leaving the autonomous listener "in control" as he or she cognitively digests the content of the three points, and then goes home to put the "application" into practice.
And lest anyone think he is against preaching altogether, he lays out four ways we can let go of expository preaching and replace it with preaching that "funds imagination" (a Brueggeman term). The four ways are these. I like them (you’ll have to read the whole post to get his full meaning, but I list them here to provoke interest and questions):
- Quit explaining and start proclaiming!
- Please! Let’s come to Scripture as a drama and not a textbook.
- Forget the application points! Go for the liturgical response!
- The act of preaching can only be the tip of the communal iceberg.
I do think faithful preaching is extremely important in churches today, but it has to be something more than a motivational talk I could hear on PBS. Faithful preaching is more than just explaining the Bible and telling people to be nicer to each other. Preaching should never be reduced to three points and a "take home application". Tomorrow I’ll post what I think preaching should be.
Expository primarily explains. It teaches and brings understanding. This is good. Nothing intrinsically problematic there, i think. However, knowledge gained does not always mean changed values. Therein lies the weakness. As you say, after receiving knowledge of what to do and why, it is up to turn cognition of what to do into the action of doing it. This is not a common human ability.
Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks…and the body acts. Our values must be changed. We must be transformed, not merely taught.
So, the expository is fine. But it is more often than not ineffective.
That’s a good perspective, Nathan. One of the problems David Fitch points out is that expository preaching often has behind it the idea that people are transformed by individually understanding something about the Bible and then “applying” it to their lives (again, later, and individually).
So perhaps every sermon will need some element of explanation (we are preaching from a very ancient book, after all), but we should never be content to merely explain.
Yeah, “never be content to merely explain” is a good summary of this whole post/concept for me. To be content with explanation is trust the intellect with the whole of our life and spirituality. That is far from holistic.