Preaching Christ Alone (pt. 2)
The second deficiency that Michael Horton finds in today's preaching is what he calls Verse-By-Verse Exposition:
His description of such preaching leaves out most of the specifics, but I think I know what he is referring to. It tends to be very specific, very detailed, and very focused on the particulars of each word. Much time is spent delving into clauses, explaining the original meanings of words, and the various interpretations for each verse.
This is something I have to be careful about. My two years of Bible college gave me lots of knowledge (including Greek), but the problem with knowledge is that it puffs up. It can also make you look down your nose at common, everyweek preaching because it isn't as intellectual as those heady college-level classes. Looking back, I can remember during my first few years out of Emmaus wishing that more sermons were as engaging as a Dr. MacLeod lecture on Romans. Over time, however, I have come to realize that there is a difference between classroom instruction and preaching. This should be obvious, but it's not. The goal of classroom instruction is learning. Learning is a commendable goal (and I am very appreciative of my Bible college years), but learning doesn't necessarily lead to a changed life. What I found out in my post-college years was that even though I wasn't being engaged by the rigors of academic Bible study God was still teaching me much through the school of real life. And through the struggles and experience of time, much of the coursework that had been mere head-knowledge before was made real to my heart.
Horton identifies four short-comings of the verse-by-verse approach:
(1) A focus on root-words can be misleading because it ignores how a word was actually used in the ancient languages.
(2) We can miss the forest for the trees. This would be like using a microscope to examine only the smile of Mona Lisa instead of stepping back and admiring the whole painting.
(3) We can forget that the Bible contains different genres in its many books. Poetry, proverbs, history, lectures, personal letters, etc. We shouldn't try to diagram a verse from the Psalms the same way we do in Romans.
(4) There is a tendency to "remove the congregation from Scripture". In striving to investigate each word so thoroughly people can get the impression that Bible study is far too complex and deep for the ordinary reader to undertake. And if we don't struggle to relate the passage to the "here-and-now" of life, we can be left with cold mental agreement but no change of the heart.
I'm wondering if this commits the opposite error of the moralistic sermon. If the moralistic message sacrifices knowledge for practicality then perhaps the verse-by-verse message sacrifices practicality for knowledge? I suspect that the real issue for both these approaches is that both knowledge and practicality (in and of themselves) are lacking.
What do you think?
I remember the pastor going through even rather brief books like Jude over a period of several months and there we would be, pen and paper in hand as though we were in a classroom, following his outline--either printed in the bulletin or on an overhead projector. Words would be taken apart like an auto mechanic taking apart an engine, conducting an extensive study on the root of that word in the Greek language.
His description of such preaching leaves out most of the specifics, but I think I know what he is referring to. It tends to be very specific, very detailed, and very focused on the particulars of each word. Much time is spent delving into clauses, explaining the original meanings of words, and the various interpretations for each verse.
This is something I have to be careful about. My two years of Bible college gave me lots of knowledge (including Greek), but the problem with knowledge is that it puffs up. It can also make you look down your nose at common, everyweek preaching because it isn't as intellectual as those heady college-level classes. Looking back, I can remember during my first few years out of Emmaus wishing that more sermons were as engaging as a Dr. MacLeod lecture on Romans. Over time, however, I have come to realize that there is a difference between classroom instruction and preaching. This should be obvious, but it's not. The goal of classroom instruction is learning. Learning is a commendable goal (and I am very appreciative of my Bible college years), but learning doesn't necessarily lead to a changed life. What I found out in my post-college years was that even though I wasn't being engaged by the rigors of academic Bible study God was still teaching me much through the school of real life. And through the struggles and experience of time, much of the coursework that had been mere head-knowledge before was made real to my heart.
Horton identifies four short-comings of the verse-by-verse approach:
(1) A focus on root-words can be misleading because it ignores how a word was actually used in the ancient languages.
(2) We can miss the forest for the trees. This would be like using a microscope to examine only the smile of Mona Lisa instead of stepping back and admiring the whole painting.
(3) We can forget that the Bible contains different genres in its many books. Poetry, proverbs, history, lectures, personal letters, etc. We shouldn't try to diagram a verse from the Psalms the same way we do in Romans.
(4) There is a tendency to "remove the congregation from Scripture". In striving to investigate each word so thoroughly people can get the impression that Bible study is far too complex and deep for the ordinary reader to undertake. And if we don't struggle to relate the passage to the "here-and-now" of life, we can be left with cold mental agreement but no change of the heart.
I'm wondering if this commits the opposite error of the moralistic sermon. If the moralistic message sacrifices knowledge for practicality then perhaps the verse-by-verse message sacrifices practicality for knowledge? I suspect that the real issue for both these approaches is that both knowledge and practicality (in and of themselves) are lacking.
What do you think?
posted by Alan at 11:57 AM
1 Comments:
I should add that I don't think Horton is talking about the "expository" approach here, which reads through a passage thought-by-thought and seeks to structure the message around what the text is saying.
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