Stetzer: I think that’s the key—the faithfulness. We think of fidelity as fidelity to the text – and I want us to – but I want to us also to have fidelity with the context. So I think we need both a serious view of the text and a serious view of the context. Unfortunately I can’t find many people who do both. And I think that’s got to be the future of biblical preaching.
David Finch, in his new book
The Great Giveaway talks about “The Myth of Expository Preaching,” and he sort of challenges us. David’s a great guy, though I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says. But one of the things he says is that we kind of thought that if everyone preaches expositionally, we’d end up with everyone sort of believing the same because we’d all rightfully handle the word of God and peoples’ lives would be transformed because of that. Yet the reality is a lot of people have at the end of the day not been transformed even in churches that take seriously the word of God, because they don’t think it matters to them. They focus on the information not the transformation.
I think the best form of preaching is expository preaching. Those ought to be redundant words “expository preaching” — preaching ought to be just normatively exposing the truths of the text. But I think also we’ve got to ask the question, “Why does this matter?” And I think we ought to recognize that we have to help people answer that question.
Preaching: And just to clarify, when we talk about expository preaching we’re not necessarily talking about preaching verse-by-verse through a text in that kind of classic model, but preaching that’s driven by a biblical text.
Stetzer: I think that’s key. I probably most of the time preach verse-by-verse through the text. I have a view of the authority of Scripture and I want to work through it and verse by verse; every word by word is helpful. But I think to say – and some do – that that’s the only form of biblical preaching is a huge problem, since we don’t find it anywhere in the Bible and nobody does it until John Chrysostom in the fifth century. Chrysostom basically does it because someone came up with the tools to do it. I mean, nobody in the second century would have said, “We should work grammatically through a text.” It was just an historical impossibility. So I think we have to be careful to say, “This must be biblical preaching.”
But again it’s that pendulum thing. I think many of the people who say that have seen so many preachers handle carelessly the Word of God. You know, here’s five truths in
Psychology Today that I read that I thought you should know, with verses to proof-text them that were taken out of context from seventeen translations. I would say that the key is: is the text shaping my message? There are some texts that I think demand to be preached verse-by-verse. There are others that need to be communicated differently.
