panta dokimazete
Puritan Board Post-Graduate
Reading this blog post - saw this:
The author later posts:
Thought some might find this...thought provoking...
Please, discuss amongst yourselves!
Consider preaching, for example, which they essay to dismantle in a chapter subtitled “Protestantism’s Most Sacred Cow.” It is their thesis (see also here) that preaching in the New Testament is sporadic, delivered on special occasions to deal with special problems, extemporaneous and without rhetorical structure, and most often dialogical rather than monological–it was two-way, not one-way. What we think of as the “Christian” sermon came out of Greek Sophist practice. Its entry into the church was “the arrival of a polluted stream.”
(Perhaps ironically, my first encounter with this view of New Testament preaching practice came less than a week before I read it in this book, on links from this page at Facing the Challenge blog.)
Viola and Barna think sermonizing positively harms the church; for example:
* It makes the preacher the “virtuoso performer,” so that congregational participation is “hampered at best and precluded at worst.”
* It often stalemates spiritual growth; because it is a one-way affair, it encourages passivity.
* It preserves an unbiblical “clergy mentality,” discussed in a prior chapter.
* Rather than equipping the saints, it de-skills them.
* It is often impractical: “Countless preachers speak as experts on that which they have never experienced…. In this regard, the sermon mirrors its true father–Greco-Roman rhetoric…. bathed in abstraction.”
The author later posts:
For all my questions about its educational validity, I’ve concluded that preaching remains vital for communicating the centrality (and even the authority) of God’s word to God’s people. Still, the more interactive learning that churches practice, the happier I will be about it.
Thought some might find this...thought provoking...
Please, discuss amongst yourselves!