A Culture’s Prow

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We live in a time when most believers have less understanding of the cultural impact of preaching than did some unbelievers of another era. For example, Herman Melville once wrote, “What could be more full of meaning? — for the pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is that the storm of God’s quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is that the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favourable winds. Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.”

Since the resurrection of Christ it has been the case that the Church, in some fashion, leads the world. Sadly, this does not mean that blessings automatically abound. It means, among other things, that when the Church is in a spiritual declension, the salt is good for nothing but to be trampled upon by men. But even this trampling is an example of how the condition of the Church determines and directs the behavior of unbelievers. Time to trample. When the Church is blessed with a season of reformation and renewal, the world expectantly awaits the messengers of the evangel, and listens to the Church respectfully. So for better and for worse, the Church has an inescapable position of influence in the world.

But as the Church sets the agenda for the world, we must further acknowledge that the condition of the pulpit sets the direction of the Church. And this explains quite a bit about the present day. George Whitefield once said that the churches of his time were dead because dead men preached to them. We may expand the observation. The churches are effeminate because effeminate men with wireless mikes stroll around a platform chatting with the congregants. The churches are leaderless because we are nervous about prophetic preaching, and settle instead for bland and balanced leadership teams. The churches have no sense of the numinous because men refuse to preach the greatness and glory of the living God.

While speaking of the true calling of the preacher, A.W. Tozer once said, “We must not imagine ourselves commissioned to make Christ acceptable to big business, the press, the world of sports or modern education. We are not diplomats but prophets, and our message is not a compromise but an ultimatum.” Of course, some might object to quoting a writer like Tozer, a man outside the Reformed tradition, but we live in confused times. Men like Tozer might be worth half a dozen of our contemporary pretty boys, men who subscribe to the Westminster Confession because they think they might have read it once.

The point of preaching is never to make Christ acceptable. But in a man-centered era, this is automatically thought to be the task of the preacher — how to make God acceptable to man? The problem which confronts us in the Bible is actually quite different. The real problem is one of sin, and how to make sinful man acceptable to a holy God. With this as the true problem, the solution, one which made holy angels stop their mouths, was the Incarnation, Cross, and Resurrection. That is how sinners are made acceptable to God. And how do they hear of it? The word must be preached, and preached to every creature.

But reverse “the problem,” as we have, and we discover that “the solution” is necessarily reversed as well. And when the solution is reversed, we discover at the end of the day that we still have the gospel in our hands, but it is backwards and upside down. If we try to make God acceptable to sinners, we find that we are busily engaged in altering the faith once delivered to the saints. We should be preaching in such a way that sinners are altered, not accommodated. We should be preaching in such a way that the truth is adorned, not draped in tinsel.

A thought experiment might help. Suppose for a moment that the current grand masters of secularism and unbelief sent out a fund-raising letter seeking support for a bill in Congress that would ban the preaching the gospel in the churches of Christ. The ensuing controversy would be easy to imagine; we have high-volume mailing capacities of our own. The Christian world would be in an uproar and we would all be yelling about it.

This being the case, why are we not in an uproar now? No, the ACLU and cronies have not made any such attempt. The attempt was made, and accomplished, by our own leaders. The gospel is not preached in our churches now. The secularists have not passed any such law, but the Church is out there way ahead of them. We are already in voluntary compliance. We have skits, we have synthesized muzak, we have youth ministers on unicycles, we have flag drill teams over by the baptistry (or rather, over where the baptistry used to be before we took it out), we have relational and helpful chats from a member of the leadership team, a member who wears a nice casual and non-threatening sweater, and we have holytainment, but preaching? No, no preaching.

And we wonder why the nation is in the condition it is in.

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