Preaching Matters: The Matters That Matter

Preaching matters.

I write those words not only to echo what others across the centuries more eloquently than I have affirmed, but as a play on words because there are certain preaching-related matters that matter immensely—matters that ought to be distinguished and duly appreciated. Three Pauline texts bring these matters to the fore. Before exploring these passages, we do well to account for the philosophical times in which the apostle wrote, as well as our own.

Paul lived in a premodern world. Prior to the 1600s, Western people particularly believed in “God” or some notion of the transcendent. What one believed about this “God” provided a basis for understanding the world and one’s place in it. Generally, premodern people believed in the objective existence of the physical world, the truthfulness of propositional statements that corresponded with the way things “really were,” and a thread of purpose that connected and directed all of history.1

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During the modern age that followed, man no longer viewed God but self, science or some such thing as the basis for understanding the world and his place in it. Three hundred subsequent years of exploitation and oppression, ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union, eventually compelled a new generation to conclude that all bases for understanding the world were suspect—whether those bases be divine, human, scientific, psychological, economic, etc.

In this postmodern world, reality became suspect, truth became relative and life became pointless. People who today claim to know the truth and claim an exclusivity about the truthfulness of their truth are viewed as intolerant at best, delusional and dangerous at worst. Skeptics, cynics and sophists are very much at home in a postmodern world.

The skeptics who predated Paul by some 300 years claimed that no criterion for determining truth exists. One’s sensations perceive only the appearance of a thing without yielding an indubitable knowledge of the thing itself. Because our senses can deceive us into believing what is untrue, no one can say for sure what is true.

The cynics of the fifth century B.C. wished to live like dogs, that is, without fear of imposed social, religious and ethical standards. Indifference to worldly things and norms was the ideal. Contact with others was believed to lead inevitably to unhappiness. Rather than seek truth in others, cynics chose to rely on their own individual judgment.

Pre-Pauline sophists were professional disputers whose allegiance to and willingness to defend a given position could be bought. The majority appear to have been skeptics in matters of religion and ethics but pragmatic enough to keep their opinions to themselves. Persuasion by all means available was the name of their game.²

In sum, skeptics considered truth to be unknowable; cynics viewed the opinions of others as untrustworthy; and sophists respected above all else techniques and the prowess to persuade. Asked whether a thing such as preaching matters, skeptics would have disputed the validity of its message; cynics would have dismissed the authority of its messenger; and sophists would have dissected the efficacy of its methods.