Theocentric Preaching

One of the reasons sermons become anthropocentric is that they set out to address felt needs. This approach can lead us into trouble because, according to Will Willimon, we live in a culture that sees “orgasm, a satisfying career, an enjoyable love life, a positive outlook on life” as needs, “stuff the Bible has absolutely no interest in.”

In an interview called “Preaching Past TiVo” in the Summer 2006 issue of Leadership Journal, Willimon reflects on a sermon he heard that addressed a felt need:

One assumption is that the gospel has anything to do with “my needs.” As I read the Gospels, Jesus seems oblivious to most of my needs. Was Jesus about fulfilling people’s desires? What a curious image of Jesus.

Another assumption is that I have needs worth having. A consumer culture is not about the fulfillment of real need; it’s about the creation of a need I wouldn’t have without the advertising. So when I say “I need this” I shouldn’t be trusted.

My point: I have tremendous respect for the power of the market to own everything, including preachers. If my sermon becomes another product that makes you feel a little less miserable this week, then that, it seems to me, is a little less than the gospel.

Eugene Peterson compares us to warehouse dwellers, who spend our whole lives in a warehouse and don’t even know that a world exists outside. When we open the Bible, we enter the unfamiliar world of God. “Life in the warehouse never prepared us for anything like this,” he says.

He tells us to stop thinking that the secular world (our warehouse life) is bigger than the biblical one:

We need a complete renovation of our imaginations. We are accustomed to thinking of the biblical world as smaller than the secular world. Tell-tale phrases give us away. We talk of “making the Bible relevant to the world,” as if the world is the fundamental reality and the Bible something that is going to fix it. We talk of “fitting the Bible into our lives” or “making room in our day for the Bible,” as if the Bible is something we can add on or squeeze into our already full lives…

As we personally participate in the Scripture-revealed world of the emphatically personal God, we not only have to be willing to accept the strangeness of this world – that it doesn’t fit our preconceptions or tastes – but also the staggering largeness of it. We find ourselves in a truly expanding universe that exceeds anything we learned in our geography or astronomy books.

Our imaginations have to be revamped to take in this large, immense world of God’s revelation in contrast to the small, cramped world of human “figuring out.” (Eat This Book)

From Jim Hamilton:

Many pastors are a threat to their churches because they show from what they say and do that they do not understand what Christianity is. They think Christianity is the best form of therapy. They think Christianity is about self-help. They think Christianity is about better marriages, better parent-child relations, better attitudes and performance at work, and on and on. You can see that this is what they think because this is what they preach. Fundamentally, they think that Christianity is about success here and now. Also, for them, when it comes to how we do church, what the Bible says does not matter. What works best is what we should do.

But Christianity is not primarily about any of that. Christianity is primarily about the Gospel…

Pastors who present Christianity as therapy and self-help do not present Christianity. They are like the liberals that J. Gresham Machen denounced. Machen said that people who don’t believe the Bible should be honest and stop calling themselves Christians because they have in fact created a new religion that is not to be identified with Christianity.

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From Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places:

A huge religious marketplace has been set up in North America to meet the needs and fantasies of people like us. There are conferences and gatherings custom-designed to give us the lift we need. Books and video seminars promise to let us in to the Christian “secret” of whatever we feel is lacking in our life: financial security, well-behaved children, weight-loss, exotic sex, travel to holy sites, exciting worship, celebrity teachers. The people who promote these goods and services all smile a lot and are good looking. They are obviously not bored.

It isn’t long before we are standing in line to buy whatever is being offered. And because none of the purchases does what we had hoped for, or at least not for long, we are soon back to buy another, and then another. The process is addictive. We have become consumers of packaged spiritualities.

This also is idolatry. We never think of using this term for it since everything we are buying or paying for is defined by the adjective “Christian.” But idolatry it is nevertheless: God packaged as a product; God depersonalized and made available as a technique or program. The Christian market in idols has never been so brisk or lucrative.