Preaching to a Post-Everything World

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Preaching to a Post-Everything World

Reviewed On: August 13, 2008

by Zack Eswine

Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008. Paper, 288 pages.

Postmodernism has been a boon to the religious publishing industry. Countless volumes have been written about how the faith relates to postmodernity, and preaching is no exception. Some have been shallow and of little value, while others have been substantive and a worthy addition to the literature of preaching. Zack Eswine’s new book fits neatly into the latter category.

Eswine teaches preaching at Covenant Theological Seminary and, like his colleague Bryan Chapell (who writes the foreword), is a key contributor to the Christ-centered preaching movement. He has provided here a useful handbook to faithful biblical preaching in the challenging context of postmodernity.

The book begins with a powerful moment of reflection, as Eswine explains, "I was the child of a single mother in a low-income apartment complex. I had little biblical context. I smoked cigarettes as a 5-year-old while playing with the older kids. I think that sometimes our playing together was like parenting one another. … My family tried to love one another, but we often broke one another with various forms of active abuse, passive neglect, or earnest attempts to love that didn’t accomplish what we hoped.

"That was then. The grace of God has long since met my family in the deep places. I am a Christian, a pastor, a seminary professor. And I have been asking myself this question: Could I now reach who I once was?"

As he notes, "Every preacher needs to ask this question." Continuing that thought, he observes that meeting the challenge of reaching today’s world with the gospel will only happen "when a generation of preachers remembers where they have been." And Eswine proceeds to help his fellow preachers explore what it will take to reach "post-everything" people with God’s Word.

The book shares many of the challenges biblical communicators face in today’s culture, but Eswine reminds us that ultimately our work is dependent not on ourselves but on God’s power.

In the book’s first major section, the author discusses how to reorient the biblical sermon to the unique challenges of a postmodern culture. Arguing that preachers are to help the faithful navigate "the terrain of reality," he introduces the concept of the "Context of Reality" (or COR), which he defines as "the mutual life environment that contemporary believers and unbelievers share in common with those to or about whom the biblical text was written that teaches us about the nature of reality." Preachers use the COR to help their listeners understand, "This is what life is like."

Citing the "expository bans" (those areas of biblical reality we avoid discussing for various reasons), Eswine encourages pastoral sensitivity but, at the same time, insists that we must not avoid bringing biblical truth to bear on these challenging areas of reality. We do so, he says, by faithfully recognizing and addressing the COR of our texts.