davidfitch on February 22 2009

Expository Preaching: How John MacArthur Leads to Bart Ehrman

Rediscovering Expository Preaching by John F. MacArthur: Book Cover

This post is to all my friends, seminarians, and comrades in ministry who think I’ve “gone liberal” in my critiques of expository preaching. Recently a seminarian asked me “what I had against expository preaching?” He had read chapter 5 of The Great Giveaway and was struggling with it. The assumption was that anyone with a high view of Scripture would not discount the method of expository preaching. So in giving him an answer, I cut to the chase and said “because I believe John MacArthur leads to Bart Ehrman.” (Caveat – I am not trying to get too personal here. I do not know MacArthur or Ehrman personally. Yet their intellectual positions are so public and their vocations so on display, that I find them compellingly illustrative of what I am trying to get at here when it comes to expository preaching. Besides, I am sure each one of their respective ego’s can handle it :) ).

Admittedly, what follows is a caricature of a particular kind of expository preaching. And I DO NOT want to discount all exposition of the proclaimed Truth of God revealed in Scriptures through Jesus Christ. So for the purposes of this post, my comments are directed at the kind of expository preaching as articulated in John MacArthur’s classic book on the subject Expository Preaching (EP).

My contention here is that there is a similar approach to Scripture in both MacArthur and Ehrman. Both put an exorbitant authority upon the historical-literary-critical and linguistic sciences. So, when McArthur says “the true text must be used. We are indebted to those select scholars who labor tediously in the field of textual criticism. Their studies recover the original text of Scripture … Without the text as God gave it, the preacher would be helpless to deliver it as God intended” (EP p. 28) he gives the textual critic way too much power. For these texts have been handed down, in apostolic succession, though the centuries by the Holy Spirit, church to church, preacher to preacher. I am glad for the textual critics in showing us the reliability of our texts, and the way to a more “original” text. But the gospel has been preserved by the church, who has by the Spirit preserved the Bible. I don’t need textual criticism to preserve the Truth of the gospel. The Holy Spirit through the church did it.

Then MacArthur says “in tandem, hemeneutics and exegesis focus on the biblical text to determine what it said and what it meant originally. Thus exegesis in its broadest sense will include the various disciplines of literary criticism, historical studies, grammatical exegesis, historical theology, biblical theology, and systematic theology.”(EP p.29) Because MacArthur’s hermeutic is driven by a Cartesian modernist approach to language, he puts an exorbitant authority on the preacher’s (and/or scholar’s) getting it right. In the end this is the outlier effect of an excessive individualist Protestantism.

All of the above, in my humble opinion, leads to John MacArthurites becoming Bart Ehrman’s.

Ehrman, a good evangelical growing up, took historical critical scholarship and eventually himself too seriously. He did the same two-fold move of placing his faith and trust in the powers of historical literary criticism and then in his own skills as a Biblical scholar. He believed the scholars (and eventually himself) more than the Story of God in Christ as revealed and given through the Scriptures. He spent countless hours and years finding and revealing the thousands of differences and changes in the texts (to quote Ehrman) “some people take to be inerrant.” And so Ehrman would famously say in one of his hubris strewn diatribes “Given the circumstance that (God) didn’t preserve the words, the conclusion seemed inescapable to me that he hadn’t gone to the trouble of inspiring them.”  Can I say this? The seeds for these statements were sown in the kinds of assumptions necessary to do expository preaching as outlined in MacArthur’s book. Expository preaching, with its twofold hubris towards historical critical methods and the genius of the Biblical scholar, paves the way for an unfounded placing of authority in these two sources.

Bart Ehrman began studying the modern historical literary scholarship of the Bible at Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College. What he didn’t realize is that for most evangelicals, we will (or at least should) believe the historical critical sciences only to the point they are helpful in illuminating the Word, Jesus Christ as Revealed. We will go along with historical critical disciplines only up to the point where they undermine Jesus as Lord. Once the undermining happens we must especially pay attention to putting these disciplines in their rightful humble place, in service to the Word, not over the Word.

In truth, the Scriptures and the church are inseparable. On the one hand, the task of preserving the truth of Scriptures is the task of the church and its leadership as passed down (through ordination) through the centuries. On the other hand, the Scriptures within the church guard the church through the Spirit from heresy and are sources for further discernment for the leadership. The fact that there have been many disagreements, tug of wars, and politics in the forming of the canon should not bother us for the sovereign Lord works through politics (even polluted politics). When we impose some scientific historical critical ideas of accuracy upon these texts from the outside, we not only set that standard as an authority over the church, we put that standard over the Scriptures. The task of interpretation must likewise be a communal historical traditioned work carried on by the church. There is authority in the preacher, but it is a chastened one born in recognition by and in submission to the church. No one pastor, sitting isolated in her or his desk on Saturday evening, can interpret a word of Scripture without being ordered within the ongoing orthodoxy of the alive tradition of the interpretation beginning in the apostles and passed on and on and on until Jesus returns. If I come up with a brilliant exegesis on Saturday night in preparation for my sermon for Sunday, it still must fall within the orthodoxy of the church. If I study very hard the text where Jesus declares he saw Satan fall like lightning, and then, after discovering that “lightning” meant the planet Saturn in its original Jewish context, I declare that Jesus is calling for us to worship Saturn, I would be rightfully accused of heresy, I DON’T CARE HOW GOOD MY EXEGESIS OR HISTORICAL SOURCES WERE. It is not therefore historical grammatical work that governs interpretation (although it helps), it is the historical tradition grounded in Christ and the apostles.

Unfortunately, ex-evangelicals like Ehrman, schooled in evangelical higher education which fell under the spell of modern confidence in the sciences, think that in order to have “intellectual integrity” we have to take these historical disciplines as far as they would go. Huh? To these people who bow to the idols and succumb to the hubris of modern historical critical scholarship, I suggest a good dose of some old fashioned French postmodernist literary scholars who help us put modern science in a more humble epistemological pecking order. I suggest a quick review of the history of modern historical scholarship which reveals itself to be a “tradition-born-discipline” of the Enlightenment rationality which itself is in the process of crashing and burning as a viable narrative and way of life in our time. Go ahead and follow it as a religion unto itself, but at least realize what you’re doing. My contention is, that because evangelicals cannot see the relativity of the narrative of modern historical critical studies (for it might in turn mean our own tradition is relative), they often give undue authority to it. This inevitably leads to many of the John MacArthur’s of the world at Moody and Wheaton becoming Bart Ehrman’s. These evangelicals take the fallible human disciplines to the point of actually putting their faith and trust in them over the Lordship of Jesus Christ as manifested in and through the Scriptures. I believe this deluded impulse (I KNOW IT IS IRONIC!) is encoded in the culture of excessive expository preaching.

So let us return to the Drama of God, His Story, the Scriptures alive inviting us into the continuing Mission of God. Let us proclaim the gospel, declare the truth out of Our Story in Christ as revealed in the Scriptures over the poor, destitute, self enclosed and the ones caught up in materialism. I believe in expository preaching in the sense we are called as messengers of God in Christ to proclaim the gospel, describe it, elaborate it, unfold it in its glory and invite people into it. I believe in critical exegesis to the point it is chastened and in submission to the intratextual integrity of Scripture itself (We have a wonderful one hour community Bible Study at the Vine in preparation for our service every Sunday). As I said in The Great Giveaway, the goal of preaching is “the unfurling a reality we could not see apart from being engulfed in the Story of God from creation to redemption.”

I say all this to clarify why preaching at Life on the Vine does not diminish the preaching of the Word. Instead by submitting the preacher and the community to Scripture, and calling ourselves to live into it (The Mission of God), the preacher in effect lifts up Scripture over us, not putting it at our disposal to be used as we each see fit. Sometimes, it takes a not so subtle statement to make a point, so I’m sticking with it, because John MacArthur I am sure can handle it. In terms of expository preaching, the real danger is that “John MacArthur leads to Bart Ehrman.”

For further reading by me on the subject of expository preaching, you can look here, here and here, here , here, and here and of course the 5th chapter of The Great Giveaway. If people want to see what preaching looks like at Life on the Vine, I have a powerpoint that might help. Perhaps I’ll post it next week.

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davidfitch on February 14 2009

The Missiology/Ecclesiology Question: One Last Time

Ben Sternke is one of the Midwest Missional Learning Commons co-conspirators (a word I got from Bill Kinnon). His recent post nailed what some of us have been trying to say about the ecclesiology – missiology question. This is the last post I’ll make on this subject for a long time, I promise, but Ben did such a great job of summing up what I’ve been trying to say (saying it better that I did) that I just had to post some quotes from his fine post.

Ben said:

In all the deconstructing and rethinking of church practices that seems to be going on today (a good thing in and of itself), it seems that sometimes we get to the point of thinking about whether God really needs the church to fulfill his purposes for this planet. To put it slightly more theologically: How does the church as the people of God fit into a missional theology?

Ben then quoted himself from a previous post about Simon Chan. He said

In the first chapter of Simon Chan’s Liturgical Theology, he asks the question of whether the church is to be primarily understood as the instrument through which God will accomplish his purpose in creation, or rather the expression of that purpose itself. Is the church here to work for the fulfillment of God’s purpose in creation, or is the church itself the fulfillment of God’s purpose in creation? If the church in the instrument of God’s purpose, then we understand it primarily in functional terms; what it does. But if we understand the church as itself the expression of God’s purpose, we look at the church in ontological terms; what it is…

But what if the church is both the expression of AND the instrument of God’s purpose in creation? Which seems to be what Dave Fitch is saying when he argues that ecclesiology IS missiology and vice versa. In the end, I think that any paradigm that seeks to place missiology “ahead of” or “prior to” ecclesiology (ala Hirsch) is problematic, because the church always ends up being provisional and/or optional.

To put it bluntly: Yes, God needs the church.

Read the wholepost here.

This was all provoked by my interview with Frank Viola this past week. Thanks Frank and good to connect a little bit with you.

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davidfitch on February 10 2009

Frank Viola/David Fitch on Missiology’s Relationship to Ecclesiology

Frank Viola and I are dialogue-ing via an interview he has done on his blog. I’m trying to keep up. Frank’s got more energy than my three-year-old. In response to question 6, Frank gives his take on the whole “missiology precedes ecclesiology” thing. I respond first to this. (I deliberately didn’t get into the whole Christology precedes ecclesiology issue because I addressed that here). Below find Frank’s and then my response.

FRANK VIOLA: Regarding what comes first mission or church — missiology or ecclesiology, I think it boils down to how one defines mission. For instance, if we define “the mission” as God’s Eternal Purpose, as I do, then mission proceeds ecclesiology because it produces the ekklesia. But if we define it through the lens of D.L. Moody, which is so often the case today, then it simply means bringing the gospel to lost souls and seeing them converted. Evangelism flows out of the ekklesia. It’s what she, the organism of the church, does biologically when she is following her spiritual instincts. But it’s not the only thing she does. Nor is it the most important. God’s purpose goes far beyond the saving of lost souls (or whatever language one likes to use for that).

I personally think that within the modern missional movement there’s massive confusion on the difference between what Luke calls “the work” and “the church.”

The work is the regional, traveling, itinerant ministry of apostolic workers. The goal of the work is to produce local, corporate expressions of Jesus Christ (ekklesias). Workers, however, are produced by the church. Which comes first? It’s a chicken-egg situation. The church produces workers and workers raise up the church.

I’m really not sure how helpful it is to argue over what comes first, mission or church. To my mind, that line of thinking often leads us to the same place that fruitless Word vs. Spirit debates take us. Not very far.

I could be wrong about this, but I think it’s far more important to understand what God’s mission is exactly. I’ve done some surveys on this question among my friends in the missional church movement, and one thing stands out. When that question is raised, things get really murky.

That brings us back to the question of the Eternal (or Ageless) Purpose of God, as Paul calls it in Ephesians. I believe that this is the critical issue of the missional church conversation today.

DAVID FITCH: First of all Frank, many thanks for engaging me. If it weren’t for friends like you, I would not be challenged nor grow from interactions as valuable as these.

I think I get what you and others are talking about when you make that distinction between the guiding telos of God being Mission and therefore Mission is prior to the church, versus say D L Moody, who made the evangelism of souls into personal salvation a mission of the church, therefore for him, the church is prior to mission. In this sense, I am very much on board with you and others who follow this same line.

Where I’d like to push for more clarity is just how much the church is God’s chosen means to engage the world. In other words, Mission is unthinkable in God’s economy of salvation, without the church. In response to Gerhard Lohfink’s question from his book of the same title, “Does God Need the Church?”: the answer is “yes” in the sense that God chose to redeem all of creation while choosing to safeguard humanity’s freedom and living as human in history. God’s chosen means therefore to redeem the world was through the creation of a people whose social existence bears witness to the comprehensive scope of God’s salvation for the world. This is where God would show forth (proclaim out of a visible reality) his mighty works into the world (1 Peter 2:9). This is the Story from the beginning of God’s covenant with Abraham to the formation of Israel, and to the culmination of God’s revealing in Jesus Christ thereby birthing a people to embody (“the body of Christ”) and carry on this mission until He returns. To summarize then why the church is so important to us Hauerwasian Yoderian Anabaptist Missionalites (I just made that word up!), I offer the famous quote from Lohfink in his book which I quoted at the end of The Great Giveaway. Here goes:

“It can only be that God begins in a small way, at one single place in the world. There must be a place, visible, tangible, where the salvation of the world can begin: that is, where the world becomes what it is supposed to be according to God’s plan. Beginning at that place, the new thing can spread abroad, but not through persuasion, not through indoctrination, not through violence. Everyone must have the opportunity to come and see. All must have the chance to behold and test this new thing. Then, if they want to, they can allow themselves to be drawn into the history of salvation that God is creating. Only in that way can their freedom be preserved. What drives them to the new thing cannot be force, not even moral pressure, but only the fascination of a world that is changed.” p 27.

Salvation like this, in other words, demands a concrete place (Lohfink’s words). To me this is why the church must be truly “incarnational” (concrete) in the ways Hirsch and Frost and others talk about it. This church is not attractional so much as attractive. The gospel is lived in a way that is visible to, engaging in and redeeming of the surrounding context. It must inhabit and discern and capture and heal as well as bless the surrounding community with its presence as Christ’s body. In this way it becomes a visible foretaste of the Kingdom that is coming.

But it is never as simple as the cheap modernist contextualization where we go into a context and discern where the hurts are and design a church and translate the gospel message in a way that would meet these needs. This is not what I think Alan (Hirsch) means when he says ecclesiology comes “out the back end” of mission. But it is the way a lot of missional practitioners that I meet all over the country have interpreted him and others. Contextualization must be more incarnational than that. This to me is the problem of inviting an alcoholic into an alcoholics anonymous meeting. The goal becomes overcoming alcoholism. And the alcoholics together largely stay within the frame of other alcoholics calling on Jesus (or another higher power) to achieve a personal goal. Instead all we sin-aholics of all kinds must be invited into a community of God’s all-encompassing Mission, His Story of reconciling the whole world into Himself thereby redeeming all of creation. In the process, every part of our lives (including our addictions) are re-oriented into a way of life born out of the salvation in Christ.
It is scary thing to say (because many of us are so disappointed with our churches) but in the sense described above, the church is the epistemological foundation for doing ministry in the world. I believe Yoder is the primary influence here (the Politics of Jesus), by which Hauerwas becomes more explicit on the epistemological priority of the church in a post-foundationalist world. To say somehow that ecclesiology precedes missiology however is to miss the entire point. For there is no dualism here. Ecclesiology is missiology and vice versa.
I’ve got to go teach, and do some meetings and get two hours of writing in. But I hope to visit the blog today and tomorrow from time to time. I’ll sure try to respond to those other questions about our church today or tomorrow. Hope that is alright. I’m honored.
David Fitch

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davidfitch on February 7 2009

Whoah, That Just Felt Like Christianity!

I was listening to Moody Founder’s week on the radio yesterday morning (I love Moody’s Founder’s week). Francis Chan was speaking and told two stories that I loved.

Story One. Chan talked about a gang member who got saved and then baptized in his church yet disappeared a year later. A leader in the congregation noticed and sought him out and asked “What happened?” He said “I had the wrong idea about what I thought church would be. I thought it would be like family, a different kind of family. See, when I was in the gangs, we hung together, watched each other’s backs, took care of each other, we committed to each other 24-7, not just two meetings a week. When I got here, it was like each one was on his own. There was just no reason for me to be here with these people.” Chan said this broke his heart. The gang was better at being the church than the church was at being the church.

Story Two:  Chan met with the elders over this (I presume). They talked about their commitments to each other. They talked about the ways they were so radically independent of each other and tried so hard to maintain that independence. Each had their own insurance policies to take care of their families if they died. Each sought hard to take care of their own needs and never ask each other for help. They saw in themselves what this gang member saw in the congregaton. And they started to break it down and commit to each other. In the midst of praying they started to make commitments to each other. “I commit to take care of your kids if you die.” “What is mine is yours.” “They opened up their bank accounts.” “They sold their insurance policies gave some money away.” Chan said these commitments were not haphazard that night they prayed. They were commitments out of deep trust in God and that relationship borne out in their relationships one with another.  Chan said they left that meeting that night with a feeling of awe like you read about in Acts – kinda like – “Whoah … that just felt like Christianity.”

I don’t know Chan or his church although I’ve run into him at times. But I commend what I heard in this sermon and I ask a question I’ve asked for many years in the last two church communities I have served: is this kind of commitment to koinania possible in our time?

Forgive me if I go off on this again, but I really do think this is central: Given the ways we are influenced by capitalism and the way we let it reign in so many areas of our lives, is this kind of koinania possible in our times? I get chastised whenever I try to show how capitalism shapes Christians into being pagans. Many of my evangelical friends, automatically assume I am espousing socialism as a social system that is better than capitalism. Sorry, I am not doing that. Instead I am showing how this system shapes us into a spiritual formation that disables us from being Christians. Chan’s illustration of life insurance illustrates my point. Many of us have sat down with an insurance broker and watched him/her outline on an excel sheet how much we will accumulate if we contribute so much. We then hear the words and if we “want to maintain our lifestyle” when we retire we will need some sort of outrageous number of dollars of life insurance. Then this person walks off in disgust if we dare question these “scientific expert” projections. But right there, as we listen, we are all being shaped by the powers to be independent, do not trust anyone else, and be responsible, and maintain a lifestyle you never needed in the first place. This in turns shuts us off from one another, and keeps us working harder and longer and keeping more of our money so we can pay these insurance premiums. We lose our capacity to be dependent upon one another and to give time and money to His Mission. This is one good example of how capitalism shapes and forms our lives into being pagans.

I have no desire to get rid of all insurance (I still recommend car insurance). Our church requires health insurance of some kind to work at our church although there are Christian coop’s now that embody the idea of sharing our medical burdens much better than insurance companies (who got the idea from Christian coop’s in the first place). I do wonder however if we can ever come together in these incredible ways (hinted at by Chan’s sermon) to find the blessings that come in koinania. Or has capitalism done us in. Better yet, perhaps now that capitalism as we once knew it is unraveling, these days might be coming sooner than we think.

Blessings, and if you want to listen to Chan at Moody, here’s the link.

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davidfitch on February 2 2009

My Interview with Frank Viola

Frank Viola is a constructive and disruptive (in a good way) voice in American church. He is a strong advocate for the renewing of authentic organic expressions of the church. Of course he is most well known for this book and then this one. In these books, he forces all of us to think through the assumptions behind what we are doing as we live our lives as the church of Jesus Christ. This exercise of deconstructing our assumptions about church, and uncovering the historical sources of these assumptions, is a worthy one. Frank is good at it – especially being provocative while doing it (wink, wink).  And so I greatly appreciate Frank.

This is why I was honored that Frank, a practitioner and writer with a large audience, would ask a theology professor at a little seminary (but great Missional seminary!!) in Chicago, and a co-pastor of a church under 200 people, to answer some questions and engage in a dialogue. Frank posted his interview with me today on his blog over here. I look forward to further dialogue!

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