Spiritual apprehension
Central to holistic listening is a theological issue about what God does in the act of preaching. Though this paper allows only limited space to sketch out some implications we should consider how the triune God empowers effective preaching?
Torrance warns how many Christians are practical Unitarians with a practice of worship which:
Has no doctrine of the mediator or sole priesthood of Christ, is human-centered, has no proper doctrine of the Holy Spirit . . . we sit in the pew watching the minister "doing his thing," exhorting us "to do our thing," until we go home thinking we have done our duty for another week (1996,20).
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In contrast, a Trinitarian view of worship sees it as "the gift of participating through the Spirit in the incarnate Son's communion with the Father (20)." Torrance calls for a fresh experience of the two movements of grace: the God-humanward from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit and the human-Godward to the Father through the Son in the Spirit. No genuine listening and responding to God in preaching can occur except by gracious revelation of the Father, Christ's interceding presence in the midst and the empowering Holy Spirit who enabled Scripture first to be inspired, and now interpreted, interactive, heard and lived out in faith. Preaching is a Father event, a Christ event, a Spirit event or it is merely resounding gongs or clanging cymbals.
Preaching occurs within a 360 degree dynamic as the Lord gives a word and it returns to him. Comparing the word to the cycle of rain falling from heaven and not returning until it has watered the earth and caused seed to grow, "so shall my word be that goes from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it" (Isa.55: 11.)
This returning word, in a 360 degree dynamic, is difficult to describe. Any attempted model is untidy and multi-dimensional with arrows and lines flowing in many directions and many more connections too complex to show in a flat diagram. The triune God of grace is involved in every point yet begins and finishes the process. Each line and arrow describes Trinitarian connections between preacher and hearers, and hearers and preachers as the whole community is challenged in its living.
The command: "Let anyone with ears to hear, listen" invites participation in a dynamic where God's word will not return empty, Christ stands with those who gather in his name (Matthew 18:20) and prays for all believers (John 17:20-26) and the Holy Spirit actively creates spiritual apprehension (1 Thess. 1: 5). "The quality of preaching is affected most significantly by the level of awareness of the movement of the Spirit shared by those in the pulpit and the pew" (Forbes, 20).