Marginal Christianity

Wed, 07/01/2015 - 16:23 Goaded by a comment to the effect that my Christmas story “doesn’t preach as well” as the traditional sentimentalized God-in-a-manger version, I want to try to develop in a few posts some thoughts about preaching from a narrative-historical perspective. The basic problem is this: the more we confine the biblical narrative and its associated theology to its own historical context, the less direct relevance it has for the modern reader or congregation. Usually the historical distance has been overcome by reducing the complex narrative of scripture to a universal argument about God and humanity and allegorizing as much of the detail as possible. The basic error of interpretation made by modern evangelicalism is to think that the story of scripture can be translated into a sequence of theological abstractions —creation, fall, redemption, final judgment—which then provides the frame for every personal story: we are sinners in need of Christ’s atoning death...

John Calvin made much theologically of the three offices of Christ – prophet, priest, and king (the three main offices in the Israel of the Old Testament).   I want to float another use of this Calvinistic distinctive in this post – as a paradigm for preaching.   A lingering question for preaching, at least for me, is how it proclaims the gospel it is authorized to declare.   I guess I’m really pushing toward a biblical rhetoric for preaching.   Part of the issue is the overall theological perspective one brings to preaching.   By this I mean the fundamental distinction Paul makes in 1 Corinthians between a “theology of glory” and a “theology of the cross.”   We must, I think, side with Paul and work out of the “theology of the cross” he develops and practices throughout his ministry. Within that overall perspective, the munus triplex may offer a helpful way to move toward a rhetoric of preaching.   It might look something like this: ...

Yes, but don’t we need something more from our churches? Mark Galli [ posted 10/22/2013 2:21PM ] WIN–INITIATIVE / GETTY IMAGES SINGLE PAGE RELATED TOPICS READ THIS ISSUE I was talking with a fellow evangelical Christian, an older woman whose circumstances required that she live with her aging and abusive father. To say the least, this was a trial, but she said she had recently had a breakthrough. "I was watching Joel Osteen, and he was saying that we should not whine about our circumstances, but accept them as God's way of strengthening us, and use them to love those who make our lives hard. That really helped." This made me curious: Exactly what was Osteen preaching? I had heard mostly scathing critiques of the best-selling author and Houston pastor. So I listened to a few of his sermons. It's been said that even a broken clock is right twice a day. Osteen is right more frequently than that. As I flipped though the channels and caught m...

http://www.allanbevere.com/2013/09/911-and-33-ad.html Stanley Hauerwas at Homiletics Online: ___ ...one of the things that bothers me deeply about the situation we're in is how seldom preachers tell their congregations the truth! That's where you've got to start in a genuine politics. What would it mean to preach truthfully today? Seldom do congregations hear sermons on dying. You're going to die! Seldom are we told that and what it means to respond Christianly to that. Seldom are we told how Christians should understand war. What possesses the souls of mainline Christians in America? Greed! Everyone concentrates on sex, but greed is what's tearing us up. We concentrate on sex because we think we can figure out when we've done that wrong, but people can't figure out when they're greedy. What would they say? Owning two SUVs may be an indication of greed? What would it mean for us to acknowledge the fact that we're really possesse...

If you see the church as a “vendor of religious goods and services,”                             preaching will tend to take the form of life lessons and religious self-improvement (there are both liberal and conservative forms of this). If you see the church as a “conservatory of biblical truth,”                                        preaching will tend to take the form of verse by verse exposition or in-depth exploration of details and theology of biblical passages (this is primarily a conservative phenomenon). If you see the church as a “spearhead of social change,”                   ...