Preaching: You talk about the hunger postmoderns have for integrating things into their lives -- into their own sense of identity. To what extent is postmodern preaching rooted in the life of the listener versus rooted in biblical truth communicated to that listener?
Pagitt: I tried to argue in the Preaching Re-Imagined book that preaching is really something more than this speech-making act that we’ve all become accustomed to. Preaching is the delivering of the good news into a certain context where it’s taken and understood and functions as good news. So it’s the proclamation of good news inside of a certain context. And that’s rarely done, rarely accomplished, through a speech-making act where this speech is developed in isolation from the hearers.
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If you look at New Testament/Old Testament preaching, it’s very contextual. It’s contextual to the experience, it’s contextual to the hearers, it’s contextual to the happenings, it’s contextual to the Old Testament. Even the prophetic preaching is, “Israel, this is where you are right now, this is who you are, this is what’s happening, this is God’s word unto you in this situation.” So I think this notion that what we do is preach the text is a really faulty notion from my vantage point. What preaching ought to be is preaching the good news, the kingdom of God, the kingdom of God alive in the world, the activity of God in people’s lives.
What we ought to be doing is preaching to people in situations, sort of like that little adage that teachers will say when someone asks the teacher, “What do you teach?” And they say, “Oh, I teach students.” You know, the answer isn’t, “I teach math.” And that shows a difference in our focus. Are you more worried about the subject matter or are you worried about teaching people? Good teachers always remember, “I teach people,” not “I teach a subject.”
It’s that same attitude around preaching. And I know that there are forms of preaching and a whole theology to preaching and traditions of preaching which come from a framework of the text enlivened through the preaching act becomes the word of God so on. But that’s not the avenue I come from and I think it’s a much more difficult thing, especially for postmodern people. I think we’ve seen this reality over the last hundred years -- the lack of confidence and rising suspicion in the modern worldview. So it’s my perspective that what we are to do is preach so that the good news becomes enlivened in the lives of people. And I know that for those who say, “No, preaching is really a telling of the text,” that’s something different.