Church Teaching: Content without Context

Yesterday God removed the bitterness from Bill’s heart. As we sat together with some twenty others in our final session on “Communicating the Word in a Classroom Setting,” Bill described his deliverance. He told of his confidence after five years of Bible training, of his eagerness to teach a class, and of the bitterness that took root when his church elders denied him a teaching role. “But now,” he said, “I understand. They were right. I thought of teaching merely as disseminating information, just telling others what the Bible says. I didn’t realize that it’s far more than that.”

A terribly crucial question for those of us who know that the Scriptures speak with God’s voice is this: how are we to communicate the Scriptures in such a way that God’s voice may be clearly heard?

Much preaching and teaching is based on the assumption that if the Bible is talked, if the information it contains is passed on, God will use that information to convict, convert, and edify. All we need to do is to explain what the Bible says. In this we accept uncritically our culture’s concept of education. We see teaching the Bible as a matter of formal instruction in which the communicator speaks to a silent majority whose role in the communication process is to hear passively but believe actively what the teacher/preacher says.

But this approach blindfolds us to the life-changing reality that Scripture portrays. By uncritically accepting the educational assumptions of society, we leave no room for the possibility that God has his own distinctive theories of communication.

In seeking a communication theology, it’s good first to affirm the uniqueness of the Word we are to teach. This is no subject like history or sociology in which the student can validate his learning by passing a written test. Our learning of the Word of God can be validated only by a transformed life.

This is a point that Paul makes often in the pastorals. Writing Timothy of the need to teach sound doctrine, Paul reminds him that “the goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and sincere faith” (1 Tim 1:5, NIV). To Titus he speaks of “the knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness” (1:1). We are not given the Scriptures simply so we can know; we are given them so that we can be transformed. Love, godliness, the very likeness of Jesus, is to develop in us as we shrug off the old life and discover in the living Word a radically different life-style that is ours “in Christ.”

The only teaching that can rightly be called “Bible teaching” focuses, not on processing information, but on hearing and responding to God’s own living voice.

In our society we know how to process information. We know how to disseminate ideas. But how do we communicate a written Word that, through the Spirit’s illumination, becomes a living Word calling us to be renewed? We need to remember that through most of human history, God communicated with men in a variety of ways but not in written form. Dreams, visions, tradition, prophets, seers, Creation itself, were some of the “various ways” (Heb. 1:1) in which God spoke. Not until Moses, c. 1400 B.C., did God choose to give a written Word. Remembering that, we can catch the significance of Deuteronomy 6. We can picture Moses looking over the Jordan toward the land of promise, and hear with fresh insight his instructions to Israel for communicating the revelation they had been given in written form. We can recognize Deuteronomy 6 as highly important for a theology of communication.

1. The communicator. The first aspect of the communication process that Deuteronomy touches on is the person of the teacher. “These words, which I command you this day, shall be in your heart” (6:6). This is not a demand for perfection in the teacher. It is the expression of a great reality. Because Scripture focuses on the creation of a life-style of love and godliness, verbal statements cannot adequately portray it. God’s truth must be restated in humanity to be grasped and understood by the learner.

When Charlie and Barbara joined our Tuesday-night Bible study, they were churchgoers but not, in Barbara’s words, “real Christians.” After six months with us, both met Jesus Christ in a vital, transforming way. “What was it that convinced you?” I asked them one evening. “Well,” Barbara answered, “we just had to keep coming back because we’d never known love that was so real.” The love of Jesus they experienced in the teaching/learning setting communicated Jesus’ reality to them.

This is not a new idea. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, says that God the Holy Spirit transfers words once chiseled in stone to “tablets of human hearts” (2 Cor. 3:3). There these living letters from Christ may be known and read by all men (3:2). So too Paul often urges, “let me be your example in this.” And he does not hesitate to urge young Timothy to “set the believers an example in speech and conduct, in love, in faith, in purity” (1 Tim. 4:12). The Word in the abstract, heard in a formal setting marked by the isolation of teacher and learner from the realities of daily life, must always suffer some distortion. In our communication, the Word heard must also be the Word seen for it to become the Word practiced (cf. Phil. 4:9).

2. The hearing community. “And you shall teach them [the words] diligently to your children” (Deut. 6:7). This does not mean that the only place in which the Word can be taught is the family. Rather, God’s locating teaching in the home reminds us that the hearers of the Word hold in common a family identity.

A significant New Testament expression of this reality is seen in Ephesians 3:14–19. In this prayer Paul points out that it is from God’s nature as Father that “the whole family of believers … derives its name.” Because he is Father, we are Family. Moving on, Paul asks that the Spirit will work in our inner beings, that we “being rooted and established in love” will “together with all the saints” experience the love of Christ and become filled with “all the fullness of God.” In this context, what is the love in which the community is to be rooted and established? The family’s love for one another. When rooted in love, we are enabled “together” to experience Christ’s love and grow.

As Charlie and Barbara continued to meet with us, God began to disciple them. Charlie was a money-motivated businessman, a builder and developer. He became troubled about some of his business practices. As he shared his tension, there was no drawing away from him by the group. He was fully accepted, cared for, prayed with, and supported as he worked through the practical implications of godliness in business. Charlie increasingly heard and responded to the Word we experienced together in the group.

A deepening, family kind of love in the community of saints is always essential in the communication of God’s Word. Love among the hearers creates the fertile ground into which the Word may fall and bring forth its hundredfold fruit.

3. The teacher-learner relationship. A third aspect of the Deuteronomy teaching directs our attention to the learning context. “You shall talk of them [the words] when you sit in your house, and when you walk by they way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up” (Deut. 6:7). It is hard for us to see how this picture of the informal, daily-life kind of teaching so possible in ancient Israel can apply to modern life. We seldom share our sittings and walkings and restings and risings with others, even those in our own family. Yet the principle here is clear and vital. The teaching of the words of God is essentially non-formal; in sharing and applying them we are to focus on the common experiences of life.

As Charlie told us about aspects of his business that troubled him, we were able to examine his values and priorities in the light of Scripture. Each of us, in that “family” gathering, could open up his life and invite his brothers and sisters to share his pain and joys, and God’s Word was applied as the Holy Spirit led the group to Bible passages that were encouraging or correcting.

We do not assemble to hear a lecture systematizing truth theologically: we come to hear a word addressed personally to us in our human condition. We cannot walk through each day with a teacher by our side to point out Scripture’s interpretation of each daily event. But we can bring daily events of our lives into the teaching/learning setting. In the intimacy of this sharing of daily life, the communicator can, “as a father with his children, exhort each one of you and encourage you and charge you to lead a life worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory” (1 Thess. 2:11, 12).

For this kind of sharing to develop, for people to be willing to unveil their lives, a deepening relationship of love between teacher and taught is needed. With Paul, the communicator of the Word of God must be able to say, and the learner to sense, “we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God, but our very own selves, because you had become so very dear to us” (1 Thess. 2:8).

A great trap into which evangelicals have fallen in the past has been to assume that since we have a true content, we need only make that content known. A search for a biblical theology of communication leads us to see that equal consideration must be given to the person in the communication setting. Bible teaching is also concerned with the best ways to open the ears of hearers to the living Voice of God, and with support of the hearer as he or she steps out in faith to try out the new life-style to which God in Scripture calls us all. When we do focus on persons, we find that the Bible speaks of:

• a communicator who incarnates the Word taught;

• a community established in family love as the fertile soil into which the Word is to fall;

• a teacher/learner relationship rich in love so that each feels free to talk about the realities of his daily life and to bring them under the scrutiny of the Word of God.

In view of this, how tragic the sterility of classes where strangers sit together each week in well-dressed rows, masking the hurts and clutching close the private joys while a “teacher” whom few know intimately mouths the words of truth. How tragic the pulpit where a minister, warned in seminary not to use personal illustrations or to develop intimate friendships within his congregation, announces in splendid sterility words that God has said can be truly heard only when mixed vigorously with life.

In our retreat to formal learning settings and processes, we have robbed the Holy Spirit of a vital tool with which the Father intends him to be equipped. It is not only that the Word brings life into focus; life brings the Word into focus.

It will be easy to misunderstand the implications of this brief sketch of a communication theology. I am not setting up a dichotomy: relationships versus content. Instead I am exploring the divinely ordered mix between relationships and content in the communication of the Word. I am convinced that an emphasis on relationships at the expense of content will lead to an empty humanism. But I am just as convinced that an emphasis on content at the expense of relationships has already led to a dead and deadening kind of evangelical orthodoxy.

What is needed is not so much the rejection of present contexts for teaching/learning as their revitalization. For instance, for several years I have been researching and testing a church/home educational system. It uses the traditional Sunday-school hour for both children’s and parents’ classes. But within that hour, through the training of teachers and the design of a curriculum to encourage non-formal rather than formal learning processes, a new living teaching can come.

In the pulpit, too, communication can take on a relational dimension. The Word need not be presented in an antiseptic way: the minister need not mask his humanity.

And there are ways to build the community of faith into a loving, receptive family, freed by an experience of God’s forgiveness and affirmation to deal openly with the realities of life and move together toward the promised transformation.

Bill’s confession of bitterness and testimony of release was only one indication that final class hour that God had been at work. That whole hour was a time of rejoicing. That week God had delivered one member of the class from what he described as “suicidal despair.” Another member, a troubled pastor, expressed the doubts he’d felt of God’s love for him, and that evening experienced love as members of the Body laid hands on him in affirmation and prayer. God’s Spirit laid his transforming touch on our lives—and this was only a workshop on how to teach in a classroom setting!

How can it be explained?

Certainly as God’s work of grace, his Spirit’s free and loving choice to meet us. No one can “program” God. And yet we can place in the Spirit’s hands those tools God has chosen for him to use in his renewing work: the Word of God itself, and ourselves, shaped through our relationships with one another to fit the Spirit’s hand.

I came away from this week deeply enriched. I was deeply in awe again of the quickening power of the Word of God. And I was more firmly convinced than ever that if we were all to communicate God’s Word in God’s way, many of our doubts and concerns about evangelical theology would fade to insignificance before the glorious confirmation of a Word rewritten and renewed on the tablets of human hearts.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.