Monday, July 08, 2013

The Pastor as a Generalist

The exegete has to find the meaning of the text and its witness to an event and for this the tool is grammatical-historical exegesis. To relate it to other events recorded into the Bible is the task of the biblical theologian and historian; to relate it to the modern Christian experience is the task of the preacher.

This is from an article by David L. Baker entitled “Typology and the Christian Use of the Old Testament” (Scottish Journal of Theology 29 (1976), 155).

Though there is much about this article not to like, this is helpful.

Good preaching (by which I mean biblical preaching that engages both the ancient text and the modern audience) must do all three things. It must engage the text itself to find it meaning, it must relate that text to the rest of the revelation of God (the canonical context and redemptive-historical context), and it must also relate both the text and its place in the canonical context to the life of the person listening.

Failure to do the first (exegesis), but only the second or third, might result in a message based on something God never said or did.

Failure to do the second (place it in its canonical and redemptive-historical context), but only the first or the third, might result in moralistic, “Be” preaching that ignores the redemption on which “Be” preaching should be based. (Remember Chapell’s comment that "Be messages are not wrong in themselves; they are wrong messages by themselves" (Christ-Centered Preaching, p. 294).

Failure to do the third (relate it to the modern Christian experience), but only the first and second,  might result in messages with lots of information, even interesting stories, that fail to be the voice of God to the individuals.

This means that the pastor has to be a generalist of sorts. He must be able to do all three, each week.

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