The Minister’s Workshop: Prophetic Preaching Today

From time to time the call comes: the Christian preacher should “get back to the Bible.” A major reason for the triviality of much of today’s preaching, it is said, is the modern preacher’s failure to take the Bible seriously.

The preaching ministry must be the heart of the minister’s work. Although he cannot use his focus on preaching as an excuse for neglecting to counsel his people, to visit them in their homes, and to carry on the administrative duties of the church, still preaching remains his central function.

Protestants stand in the heritage of the Bible. This is indisputable. The problem comes in what follows. Perhaps my position leads me to be overly sensitive to anything that smacks of modern Marcionism, but the absence of the Old Testament in the thinking, talking, and writing of some Christians always astonishes me. Obviously, the New Testament is crucial to our faith. If Christian clergy were to catch the spirit of the New Testament emphasis on preaching and apply it to our own day, all Christendom would be enriched. But this is not the whole story. The Bible is more than the New Testament. How impoverished Christianity would have been all these centuries without the spiritual depths of the Psalter or the practical virtues of the Wisdom Literature. Let us turn now, however, to the Old Testament prophets, who were preachers par excellence.

P. H. Menoud, writing on “Preaching” in the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, contrasts (for the most part) the prophets with the New Testament. He feels that the prophets were not bringing news but rather were calling for a stricter obedience to the given law. In my opinion, this is a gross misrepresentation of their activity. It might possibly come from the account of the call of Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi to build the temple and give God decent sacrifices; but the essence of their message was the honor the people were refusing to give to God. This failure to honor God is certainly repeated in our situation today. It recalls Menoud’s earlier statement that the prophets’ commission to exhort the elect to remain faithful to God might be compared with the charge of the Christian preacher today.

A recent article on Christian preaching said that “the most important moments of our era occur when God’s Word is proclaimed.” Surely it is significant that the prophets so frequently begin, “Thus saith the Lord,” that Jeremiah said God’s Word was like a fire in his bones, and that John describes Jesus Christ as the Word of God. God encounters mankind through his Word, or, to put it more correctly, mankind encounters God through his Word. Dr. L. E. Toombs, in The Old Testament in Christian Preaching, notes that the prophet began his thought with God rather than man. He began with what he knew about God and moved to the needs and conditions of his hearers.

What the pulpit lacks today is the prophetic power of this divine-human encounter that begins with God, the announcement of his presence and of his will. The Christian preacher is called to preach the Gospel. But far too much “preaching the Gospel” today is trivial and irrelevant. One reason is that “preaching the Gospel” has become an excuse for ignoring the problems of today—the problems of crime and war, our youth, race relations, the poverty of a third of our citizens, the shady practices that go on everywhere, from the halls of Congress and business and labor to our schools and even our churches. Too much “preaching the Gospel” consists of soft words about gentle Jesus meek and mild, Instead of a firm proclamation of the prophetic Christ who scathingly denounced the hypocrisy of his day. The prophetic “Thus saith the Lord,” with its pronouncement of God’s judgment upon the sins of the people and nations, must be a part of our preaching.

The content of the message, the nature of the Word, cannot be overlooked. The average Christian congregation today is far more similar to the religious community in the Old Testament than to the community of believers in the New. Even a casual reading of prophetic literature will spotlight the outward maintenance of institutional religion but large indifference to the Almighty in the rest of life.

Granted, there are still many heathen around, both here and abroad, who have not heard the Good News. The command to go forth into all the world is still with us, along with the hymn about the heathen at our door. But most of the people listening to the preacher today are not waiting for the Messiah to come, and so the announcement of the Good News that he has come passes over them like water off a duck’s back. They have heard it all before, “so what else is new?” The proclamation of what God did in Palestine 1,900 years ago is not nearly so interesting as what is going on here right now. One might better stay home and catch the latest news on TV! But as the Old Testament points out again and again, God is constantly concerned with the current events among men and nations. He speaks through his prophets to declare his presence and his will, his purpose for his people and for his world.

Although it is theoretically possible to separate this prophetic preaching from the Gospel, the two are inextricably intertwined. Jesus himself was recognized as a prophet, and prophets were second only to apostles in the New Testament Church. But if we restrict our prophetic concern to the New Testament, we have missed a whole dimension of our religion. We have missed the vast riches of the divine-human encounter in the Old Testament, the whole of which is touched by, influenced by, written by, the prophetic concern. Prophetism, says B. D. Napier, is that “understanding of history which accepts meaning only in terms of divine concern, divine purpose, divine participation.” The Christian Church dare not do without this if it is to remain a vital, creative element in our society. If it is to be significant, Christian preaching must not ignore this dimension of our faith.

Perhaps we could put it this way: The proclamation of the Gospel in 1967 must be a prophetic proclamation. It must be the announcement, not simply that God, incarnate in the flesh of Jesus Christ, has sought man, but also that God, incarnate in these the least of our brethren—those who have been sold for a pair of shoes and the rental of a slum flat—continues to seek man. It must be the proclamation that Jesus Christ came into the world, not to be ministered unto but to minister, as servant, as a light to the nations. Both Old and New Testaments reflect the divine concern for comforting the afflicted; in the average church today, however, the preacher’s greater task is thought to be the prophetic affliction of the comfortable. We can hope that such prophetic preaching “will convict us in our lethargy, and will challenge us to action.”—HENRY O. THOMPSON, associate professor of Old Testament, New York Theological Seminary.

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