Expository Preaching
My church had given me as a young man a great many questions that I knew, at least on an intuitive level, would give me no rest, however long I lived, until they were dealt with. I also knew enough by the time I graduated from a state university that such schools were not the best place to deal with "religious" matters (as David Tracy complained in Blessed Rage for Order), for the faculties were liberal, and although they had many scholars from whose work I profited, they were operated on the practical theory that God did not exist, or at least that if he did, he was not the proper, much less prime, object of human thought—as Pope and Kant had taught them—only perhaps of religious contemplation, which was something else entirely and had no objective, scientific validity.
The Dallas Experience
It appeared that what I needed to study was theology, and the obvious place for a person with my background to do this was Dallas Theological Seminary. In the mid-seventies it was the place to which all young men in my circle with aspirations to religious vocation wanted to go. The school was highly selective: I heard that in those days it only accepted thirty percent of its applicants, and they were the best and brightest of the American Bible schools and Christian colleges. The school was also beginning to favor the graduates of secular universities, and I was proud when a place in the student body was offered me.
I found my fellows at Dallas to be the brightest student group I had belonged to until I came to the University of Chicago. Still, I left Dallas after a year, part of what the dean told me in the exit interview was "a small exodus," because by then I had become nervous about being denied my degree for coming to disagree with a school that viewed its Th.M. as the faculty's nihil obstat for ministry. (There are good reasons for that policy, but, knowing myself, I did not wish to risk living under it.) I have heard that the current Dallas Seminary is not the same one I attended: that it is now much more of the standard-issue Evangelical sort. I only knew it in a former day.
Something that apparently remains, however, is Dallas's specialty since its earliest days, the training of Bible expositors. To that end, it does not offer the standard three-year seminary M.Div., but instead a four-year Th.M., the extra year providing time for more intensive study of Greek and Hebrew as foundational for competent scriptural exposition.
There was a saying at the seminary that the only real preaching was expository. Sermons built upon anything but close interpretation of the biblical text itself were not worthy of the name. The maxim, commonly but wrongly attributed to Karl Barth, that preachers should compose their sermons with the Bible at one hand and a newspaper at the other would have been rejected because it implies an unacceptable elevation of the word of man in proximity to the Word of God—which Barth, of course, rejected emphatically. To this expository end also its principal teacher of homiletics was the celebrated Haddon Robinson, who insisted that his students' preaching be made both substantive and moving by disciplined attention to the text itself.
Practical Experience
I left Dallas thoroughly convinced of the value of good knowledge of the biblical languages for adequate preaching, but with its expository preaching codicil still in suspension, for of that I was not so sure, since I could imagine excellent preaching of other varieties when placed in knowledgeable and competent hands. There did not seem to be any reason why orthodox, biblical, and penetrating homilies could not be built on other models—a dialog, for example, of newspaper and Scripture, or a subject or idea laid topically open to Christian thinking steeped in biblical word and wisdom, or even using Paul Tillich's Method of Correlation, with which I had no theoretical difficulties.
Forty years of listening to sermons after my Dallas days, however, has convinced me that Haddon Robinson and Dallas Seminary were resoundingly right about expository preaching—not because other kinds can't in theory be done well, but because as a practical matter they almost never are. They almost invariably contain too much preacher and not enough Bible. They are composed not upon tracks laid in and disciplined by Scripture itself, but which pre-exist and have been pre-cultivated in the minds of men who seek to make Scripture fit upon those lines
(if they are conscientious and scholarly), or which swerve precariously from truth to error and back again if the preacher is of an undisciplined, imaginative, and speculative turn of mind—which describes most attempts at preaching I have heard.
The Wheelbarrow
I judge a sermon by how much and how often I have to use on it what I call my "wheelbarrow" to cart away and dump the preacher's obiter dicta—the products of his own brain he expects his hearers (most of whom don't have very good wheelbarrows themselves) to take seriously as something from God. Such preachers have forgotten that they are not their own men, and are not free to give their private opinions on anything, at least not without explicitly identifying them as such, or to draw conclusions based upon things not found in the text, but are humbly to seek the face of the Lord in the Scriptures he inspires (God does not inspire newspapers), and pray that the Spirit blows away any chaff he may produce in the process of his own labors. From time to time such a preacher will realize that his own word is also the word of God, for it pleases the Lord to give this gift—but it must never be presumed upon, nor may the possibility of the desired Christic synthesis of God and man be taken lightly.
Expository preaching, within the phenomenon itself, is not uniform, and often appears to be such only under analysis. But this seems to me to be true: that most preaching I have heard does not expose the Word of God, which is the whole business of preaching—and is very, very bad. It shows scant knowledge of or interest in Scripture, with however much religiosity it is delivered, reveals laziness and ignorance in the preacher, and an almost complete lack of vital interest in what the text is saying. The typical preacher makes an attempt to "apply the text to life" instead of preaching clearly what the text actually says, which is his main duty. He reaches for some contemporary conclusion that seems good to him instead of simply preaching the text and letting it stand and work on its own, which is something that can and should be done by those who believe in its divine inspiration.
How to Fix Things
Each Christian tradition seems to have its own manner of bad preaching, but within each there are enough examples of good preaching to be found and to follow. An Evangelical whose sermon is full of proof-texting and pious boilerplate has no standing to criticize the Catholic who can't get beyond five minutes of half-baked moralizing or a letter from the bishop on how much money the diocese needs: the Evangelical has John Stott, the Catholic has Bishop Sheen, and the Orthodox has Patrick Henry Reardon—and the truly great preachers both transcend and belong to every tradition.
There is no good reason why they must be in such short supply, but to make it larger the rules must be followed:
• The Master is to be given the best for this work. The pastors must be, as they have been in other times and places, the "first sons" instead of the all-too-traditional third. Churches must find ways to devote their most talented men to the task, instead of sanctifying them to law, medicine, or trade, and they must see that those chosen believe and love the Scriptures and are immersed in them—not an easy thing to do where biblical authority is effectively nullified by a historical-critical approach that puts interpretation in the control of the academy rather than the Church.
• Women must not be allowed to preach, thus compromising the natural authority of the man, of which the Apostle speaks.
• Those who preach must be relieved of responsibility for the diaconal work that comprises the majority of the modern minister's job description, so that they may devote themselves to the Word of God and prayer, which includes the service of worship and exposition of Scripture.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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