Light Brings Salt
Volume 2, Issue 34
Iron Range Bible
Church
Dedicated to the
Systematic Exposition of the Word of God
What, Me Think?
M |
odern Americans have been raised on a steady diet of entertainment. Television has affected our culture to a very
large extent. Preachers are now confronted every Sunday with members who have
spent hours that week in viewing the very latest in entertainment. Television
has made the general public very entertainment conscious. It has definitely had
an adverse impact upon people’s ability (and desire) to think and to follow
reasoned arguments. Since preaching is based upon reasoning and the orderly
marshaling of ideas, it becomes difficult for many moderns to follow an
exposition of the Bible. One has rightly
observed of television:
Its form of communication (and form of
knowing) encourages
the aversion to abstraction, analysis, and reflection that characterizes our
culture at all levels. Thinking is often hard work.
Television’s surfeit of instant
entertainment not only provides relief from such hard work, it offers an
attractive, alternative, ‘‘way of knowing’’ that makes reasoning seem
anachronistic, narrow, and un-necessary.
In an interesting examination of the
differences between ‘‘Pre-Boomers,’’ ‘‘Baby Boomers.’’ and ‘‘Baby Busters,’’
Gary McIntosh notes that ‘‘while expository sermons used to be thought of as
the order of the day, baby boomers and baby busters now want ‘how to’ sermons
and ‘issue-oriented’ sermons. In light of this trend, however, the preacher
must ask, ‘‘Is genuine, acceptable preaching a declaration of what God wants
man to hear or of what man wants God to say?’’ Historically, preaching has been
viewed as the art of communicating to men, in language understandable to them
the timeless truths from the Bible about God and His works. The starting point for preaching has been God
and not man. This is not to say that true biblical preaching is in any way
impractical. In such preaching, however,
the preacher begins with an exposition of what God says, and then makes
application to man’s personal needs. The
Bible was not written merely to satisfy man’s needs and to give him answers to
his everyday problems. It was written to show forth the majesty of God and to
trace God’s purposes for
the created universe, angels, earth,
One of the chief purveyors of the ‘‘new
approach’’ in preaching is Leith
Anderson, pastor of a mega-church in the Twin Cities. His two books Dying for Change and A Church for the 21st
Century have made a great impact upon the thinking of many young preachers and
are considered to be among the leading statements of the philosophy of church
growth promoted by New Evangelicals. Because of
"The old paradigm taught that if you have the right teaching, you
will experience God. The new paradigm says that if you experience God, you will
have the right teaching. This may be disturbing for some who assume that
propositional truth must always precede and dictate religious experience. That
mindset is a product of systematic theology and has much to
contribute....However, biblical theology looks to the Bible for a pattern of
experience followed by proposition. The experience of the Exodus from
This alarming statement graphically illustrates the shift of emphasis
which has taken place in the modem church. Experience is magnified over
knowledge and actually becomes the judge of knowledge. Invalid is the argument
that the exodus supports the theory that the experience of God precedes the
knowledge of God. God clearly imparted much knowledge about Himself to Moses
and the children of
According to
One of the chief errors of New Evangelicals is their tendency to over
emphasize experience to the neglect of sound teaching. The charismatics have
led the way in developing this mindset and have influenced evangelicalism in
general. This is the reason so-called Christian rock is popular. People want to ‘‘feel’’ something rather than
‘‘learn’’ something. It also explains
the current fascination with so-called "Christian psychology". Again, people want to ‘‘feel good about
themselves’’ but are far less interested in digesting any systematic diet of Scripture. &