Preaching

[brightlights]

I see two types of preaching in the New Testament. Preaching Christ from scripture and preaching Christ from culture. Acts 7 gives us an excellent example of Stephen preaching Christ from scripture. He is speaking to Jews who hold the Bible to be authoritative. Acts 17 is a good example of Paul preaching Christ from culture. He does not appeal to the scriptures for authority but instead appeals to Greek cultural authorities. How do you suppose this should inform the way we understand preaching today?

 

[BryanW92]

I see two types of preaching in the New Testament. Preaching Christ from scripture and preaching Christ from culture. Acts 7 gives us an excellent example of Stephen preaching Christ from scripture. He is speaking to Jews who hold the Bible to be authoritative. Acts 17 is a good example of Paul preaching Christ from culture. He does not appeal to the scriptures for authority but instead appeals to Greek cultural authorities. How do you suppose this should inform the way we understand preaching today?

Preaching today requires that you do both. You have to touch people that live in a largely secular culture and use their familiarity with that culture to connect to something that may not be very familiar--scripture. Once you've made that connection, you have an opportunity to teach scripture in a way that they understand. Preaching is a lot like teaching algebra. When they say, "How does that apply to me and my life?", you better have a good answer and its better to have answered that question before they can even ask.

 

[Rathvon350]

I have to agree with BryanW92. If there is no application of what we preach we leave the people saying, "So what?" The Bible itself is an example of contextualizing the message to the culture. The historical events and circumstances that the authors found themselves in flavored what they were writing. Though God stands outside of time and culture He is constantly using it to speak to people. Jesus came to earth in a specific time and culture and His physical appearance and language was consistent with that. I mean, He wouldn't look the same if He came to earth now.

That being said, Christ also stands in contrast to culture oftentimes. The message of the prophets was usually about how culture had degenerated to a point that it was displeasing to God. I think we have to be careful that we don't overly contextualize the Gospel to the point that we lose much of the power behind it. As preachers and teachers I think our duty is to learn as much as we can about the culture in which the Bible was written so we can draw conclusions about what God is speaking to us in our context. What I'm trying to say is that if we find ourselves compromising core doctrines in the interest of making the message relevant we've really lost all together.

In Christ,
Christian