Preaching Post-Christendom

Preaching Post-Christendom

“Preaching in the post-Christendom church, then, does well to recover a sense of apologetic - articulating the fundamentals of the faith clearly, simply, and hospitably to an audience no longer predisposed to assimilate the Christian story readily. In a fast-paced, message-bombarding, consumerist milieu, the sound bite reigns. In response, preachers are challenged to undertake theologically rigorous personal study to hone their own beliefs, as well as their understanding of the beliefs of the church, so that they can articulate those beliefs in crisp, clear ways that invite further discussion and deeper engagement.” Christine McSpadden, Preaching Scripture Faithfully in a Post-Christendom Church, The Art of Reading Scripture (Eerdman’s: Michigan) 2003 at 129.

Reading this passage this week brought a few thoughts to mind. Nearly everyday I click on a set of blogs that I have marked in my bookmarks to see the latest and greatest. Over the course of time I’ve noticed that the most popular ones concentrate on “current issues” in the church. These usually involve “inclusive” language in Bible translation, which translation is best, “Word” preachers and their calls for money, or the latest political issue that is going to sink the church. Very, very few blogs actually deal with the text of scripture. I’ve thought about becoming “more relevant” on this blog, but I’ve decided to stay on the McSpadden road. There is a great need in the church for the gospel to be preached in “crisp, clear ways” that actually engage the hearer. That’s the real endeavor here.

Along the same lines is the question of podcasts. This week a friend of mine emailed me and advised me to begin doing podcasts on the blog. She wrote that she downloads sermons from blogs and listens to them while she cleans the house, does the laundry, goes on errands, etc. No doubt audio preaching is a good thing, but I guess I’m trying to do more. As Rich Tatum of Pneumablogs once wrote, he is more interested in readers than numbers on his blog. Instead of my readers multi-tasking my essays with a lot of other stuff, it’s my hope that at least some of you will sit down with a cup of coffee and the Word and look for “further discussion and deeper engagement.” One of my favorite preachers was Kenneth Hagin because when you left his meetings and later looked at the text, you knew exactly what it said and what it meant. That’s really the only way that we become “rooted and established in Christ.”

As an aside to this, a few weeks ago I began reposting some of my essays on another “Christian” blog platform. The first set involved this series on Jesus’s Descent into Hell. When I last looked at the viewer figures, I saw that a blog essay entitled, “Kudos to Applebee’s,” about a manager being nice to a church group had 20 times more visitors than my “Jesus Descended into Hell” post.

Official Church Bible Translations

In my home church the pastor doesn’t use any particular Bible translation. On any given Sunday, we may hear from the NIV, King James, Amplified, or even (Egad!) The Message. Given his preaching style, he is usually moving to the next thought or the next cite the moment I finally get to the scripture. Frankly, I hate that. I don’t use the NIV, King James, Amplified or (Egad!) The Message, and he doesn’t give me time to figure out the differences between the translations. Consequently, when I leave the service I don’t have a clue of what the Word actually says and I am more prone to remember some truism that might not be true or even a joke.

In the face of the proliferation of so many translations, it’d be a great help for the pastor to designate a semi-official translation for the church. That way the congregation can follow along with him and actually learn more of what the Word actually says. If he wants to emphasize what another translation says, all he has to do is read the church’s translation and then compare it with the other one. In doing this, the congregation would be better learned in the Word.

NASB v. RSV

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that I had settled on the RSV as the main English translation that I’d use for the blog. I decided on the RSV because my Greek-English New Testament uses the RSV and that just made things easier. Right after I said that my Cambridge RSV came in and it is a printing disaster for a Bible of that quality. Many of the pages of the New Testament look like someone’s laser printer started running out of ink. Footnotes and Greek cites are virtually unreadable on those pages. I emailed Cambridge and they said that they could replace it, but only with another translation. I also read last week that Reginald Fuller, one of the RSV translators, didn’t even believe in the corporeal resurrection of Jesus. Given all that, I decided to go back to the drawing board.

I decided to settle on the NASB, updated version. The NASB is somewhat of a counter translation to the RSV which many found to be too liberal (can’t say I disagree). It is basically an updated American Standard Version (ASV) which many said was the best literal translation ever produced. One good thing about the NASB is that it uses the latest finds in Greek manuscripts which actually is a big deal when compared to the formulation of the King James Version. (many folks wouldn’t use the King James if they read about how the Greek manuscripts upon which it is based were put together)

More than a few, including a lot of preachers, don’t like the NASB because they say it is too “wooden.” This is because the translators decided to favor accuracy over readability in dealing with the syntactical differences between the Koine Greek and English. Since the essays I post here are more about accuracy than readability and I usually add my personal translations, the NASB should do well here.