Marks of Good Preaching - Stable and Learned

To the Reader: If you have not already done so, please read the introduction to this series, ”Thoughts on Sermon Criticism”, before reading this article.

This is a follow up to “Straight Lines and The Reasonable Person Standard”.

Since we believe the Bible is a finished book now, we cannot conduct our own versions of Paul's practice like he did with the word "seed" (see previous article). I can say with authority that the Seed is Christ because in the progressive revelation of the Bible, the Lord eventually gave Paul that connection. But since we are not inspired, we cannot with authority draw a convoluted line from a passage to our eventual applications about wearing a suit and tie in church, listening only to sacred or classical music, having three church services per week, insisting that there is only one correct Bible translation, and so on. None of those things are authoritatively declared as the intent of any passage in the Bible, and thus any application directly to those things is just a suggestion from the preacher, and it should be presented as such. The preacher is allowed to suggest. He is allowed to apply. But he may only declare what is actually there.

Though I'm exhausted by the comparison, this was the practice of the Pharisees in Mark 7:7.

Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.
Mark 7:7

The Pharisees made straight line applications for sure. And I'm certain they made curvilinear ones. But at a certain point, application devolved into complex applications which were sometimes a reach. And then ultimately, they convoluted applications of the text to fit practices never commanded anywhere. To draw an application from a text that the text isn't closely related to it is an unsanctioned, uninspired attempt at making your statement seem authoritative as if it came directly from the Bible. This is a distorting or twisting of the text.

When Peter wrote his epistles, he was writing to people, some of which had previously read some of Paul's writings. Peter acknowledged that some of those writings were interpretively challenging. And somewhere in between Paul's writings and Peter's, some wicked men had convoluted and twisted Paul's doctrine and original intent. And Peter is warning his readers of that.

As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.
2 Peter 3:16

Notice that I am using a Bible text in its context to draw a direct line to application I am making in this article. We know what the authorial intent of Peter was in saying what he said, thus it fits with my point in writing all of this.

All too often, because some of the Bible is "hard to be understood", preachers simply make up connections in the text. No doubt they say true and moral things, but their arrival at their statements is wrestled out of the text. It's contrived rather than natural. We often call it "spiritualizing" a text. When I was a young teen, I listened to a man preach an entire sermon on the biblical "mandate" for bus ministries because Israel carried little ones and elderly out of Egypt on wagons and carts. I can say with authority what Peter said - that wicked preacher was unstable and unlearned. He wrestled that meaning out of the Bible. He was well intended, of course, but the result of textual misuse is often no different between the intentionally wicked interpreter and the ignorant one.

Another technique is called the "Little Bo Peep" technique. One can preach an entire sermon from the association of words in that poem. "Little" — God uses the base things of this world. She "Lost her sheep" — Boy, aren't the sheep of this world lost! …and so on. You get the point. Just using whatever my mind associates with a word is not — I repeat — not preaching the Bible no matter how many cross-references Thompson Chain gives you.

The solution to this is still the same today, as it was in 2 Peter 3:17.

Ye therefore, beloved, seeing ye know these things before, beware lest ye also, being led away with the error of the wicked, fall from your own stedfastness.
2 Peter 3:17

The "wicked" here being the ones who twist the Bible to make it say things it does not say. And this word wicked does not mean specifically lawless or evil. The word was used in classical Greek in its day to simply refer to that which was not customary. Peter was saying that these rogue interpreters may not necessarily have been evil-intentioned but rather that they simply weren't interpreting in the normal, accepted sense exemplified by Apostolic teaching. The solution to this according to Peter is awareness, "beware...". A Berean Christian is aware of what real Bible preaching is and should be, and they listen carefully to see if what they are being told is so according to the intent of the passage.

A pastor I know once told me, "I don't know where the sea ends and the shore begins, but I know when I'm in too deep." This is why we have to be very careful in how we apply passages of the Bible. Any crafty or motivated person can take a passage and draw it out to one thing, then another, and another until it eventually stair-steps down to the subject that came to his mind while studying and then call it "God's design." This sort of complexity doesn't always mean the preaching is intellectual. It sometimes just means the preacher is reaching for something the text doesn't support that came to his mind while preparing. You can literally associate anything with anything if you break it down far enough. That's when you're in too deep.

All of this is to say that the main point of discussing authorial intent and straight-line application is that I believe the Holy Spirits' chiefest message to the reader in a passage is known by considering the authorial intent as foundational to interpreting and applying the Bible. Authorial intent is not the only interpretive rule, or hermeneutic. This rule exists with and must be balanced with a number of other interpretive rules. But to discard authorial intent is in a way playing with fire. It can be "unto their own destruction" as Peter said. They don't even see it coming, and they really may think they're preaching biblically. Authorial intent will keep the line of application from becoming convoluted to mean things is does not mean. Authorial intent is a safety rail that keeps applications from falling into the abyss. It is a check and balance on the preacher himself and thus must not be discarded by him as a boring method.

If I'm completely honest, it is this practice of disregarding authorial intent that has damaged the reputation of the Independent Baptist movement. Many reasonable people of average intelligence can feel the same dissonance I felt in my soul (“Original Intent”) when the preaching disregards original intent. And this intuition is what often puts people off who are just searching for intellectual honesty. Truthfully, learning to interpret the Bible from original intent and keeping the lines of application straight will go a long way to correcting the stigma our movement has earned for itself.

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