Theocentric Preaching

From Albert Mohler:

The idea that preaching should be addressed to the self-perceived “needs” of the congregation is now well ingrained in the larger evangelical culture. The argument behind this is almost always missiological — just preach to the needs people already feel and then you can point them to a deep need and God’s provision of the Gospel.

There are several basic flaws with this approach. In the first place, our “needs” are hopelessly confused - even hidden from us…

Second, our perceived or felt needs almost always turn out to be something other than needs — at least in any serious sense…

Third, preachers who believe they can move the attention of individuals from their “felt” needs to their need for the Gospel will find, inevitably, that the distance between the individual and the Gospel has not been reduced by attention to lesser needs. The sinner’s need for Christ is a need unlike all other needs — and the satisfaction of having other needs stroked and affirmed is often a hindrance to the sinner’s understanding of the Gospel.

via

No preacher sets out to be anthropocentric. It usually happens when preachers try to be relevant by crossing the gap between the world of Scripture and the world of today, but fail to bridge this gap properly. They end up transferring isolated elements of the text rather than its central message.

This leads to preachers, for instance, using the story of Joseph being thrown into a pit to talk about the pits of depression, or of David’s lamenting of the death of Absalom to talk about parenting.

Here, according to Sidney Greidanus in The Modern Preacher in the Ancient Text, are the ways that sermons go off the track and become anthropocentric:

• Allegorizing, “which searches beneath the literal meaning of a passage for the ‘real’ meaning.” For instance, The Song of Solomon is understood in this approach to be about the love between Christ and the church.
• Spiritualizing, which “discards the earthly, physical historical reality the text speaks about and crosses the gap with a spiritual analogy of that historical reality.” For instance, the story of Jesus stilling the storm is taken as a lesson on how Jesus handles “storms” on the “sea of life.”
• Imitating Bible characters, which uses the characters of the preaching text as “examples or models for imitation.” For instance, Abraham is preached as an example of faith, or Joseph as someone who moves from pride to humility. Among other problems, this approach “tends to shift the theocentric focus of the Bible to an anthropocentric focus in the sermon” and is a “dead-end road for true biblical preaching.”
• Moralizing, which emphasizes “virtues and vices, dos and don’ts” without “properly grounding these ethical demands in the scriptures.” This is common in biographical preaching, ignores the intention of the text, can turn “grace into law by presenting imperatives without the divine indicative,” and transforms “the theocentric focus of the Bible into anthropocentric sermons.” It transforms the Bible into a set of moral precepts and examples.

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 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.

From Connexions:

Indeed I’d suggest that the fundamental malaise of contemporary Christianity is precisely its substitution of a problem-solving God for a God who is ultimate mystery.

For many people, God is a god who answers my questions, satisfies my desires and supports my interests. A user-friendly god you can access and download at the push of a prayer-key, a god you can file and recall when you need him (which gives “Save As” a whole new meaning!). A utility deity for a can-do culture. Evangelism becomes a form of marketing, and the gospel is reduced to a religious commodity.

The real God is altogether different. He is not a useful, get-it, fix-it god. He is not “relevant”, he is the measure of relevance. Indeed best think of God as good for nothing and totally unnecessary, playful rather than practical - and whose game is hide-and-seek: “such a fast / God,” as the poet R. S. Thomas puts it, “always before us and / leaving as we arrive.” The Bible speaks of God as a desert wind, too hot to handle, too quick to catch. A God who is only ever pinned down - on the cross.