Negotiating the London subway system, also known as the Underground, provided just one of many interesting experiences during the recent International Congress on Preaching. Those who rode the Tube, as the Underground is also known, saw and heard the slogan, Mind the Gap, as the trains stopped to let riders exit and enter. The gap is that menacing chasm between the subway car and the platform. In reality, it usually only stretches an inch or two. In only a few places the gap expands to a whole five or six inches. I can't imagine anyone falling into the gap, but the warning was ever present.

Mind the Gap is reminiscent of John R. W. Stott's description of the gap existing between the world of the ancient text and the world of the immediate audience in his classic Between Two Worlds. Stott was correct when he reminded preachers that our task is to connect those two worlds.

It is because preaching is not only exposition but communication, not just the exegesis of a text, but the conveying of a God given message to living people who need to hear it, that I am going to develop a different metaphor to illustrate the essential nature of preaching -- that of bridge-building.

We should pray that God will raise up a new generation of Christian communicators who are determined to bridge the chasm; who struggle to relate God's unchanging Word to our ever-changing world; who refuse to sacrifice truth to relevance or relevance to truth; but who resolve instead in equal measure to be faithful to Scripture and pertinent to today.1

The gap represents the precarious distance between the languages, cultures, values, and experiences of the biblical authors/readers and the interpreters/ hearers of our day. A wide gap, indeed, in most cases. Of course, one of the ways "those in the know" suggest for bringing these two very different worlds together is to fuse or to merge them. The phenomenologists introduced us to the problem of "horizons," pointing out some of the barriers, or supposed barriers, to interpretation as a result of the horizon or vision limitations that blind all of us. Anthony C. Thiselton brought the discussion closer to home in his The Two Horizons in 1980.

Having wrestled with the distance between the past and the present, Thiselton concluded, "The hermeneutical goal is that of a steady progress towards a fusion of horizons."2 Yet in the extreme, merging pollutes both the ancient text and the contemporary message. The merging metaphor may grant the modern interpreter too much influence over the Scriptures.

This "New Hermeneutic" has resulted in a "New Homiletic" which, at its worst, merely tells a story because there is nothing left to be said with propositional, biblical authority. Thiselton warned that fusing "is to be achieved in such a way that the particularity of each horizon is fully taken into account and respected. This means both respecting the rights of the text and allowing it to speak."3

Others have found that Stott's bridging metaphor proves much safer and more practical. It more easily pictures each world existing in its own contextual identity, but also allows the world of the text to interpret and influence the world of the reader/listener.