Is Christ-Centered Preaching Dangerous? | Theocast

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Everyone, before the podcast gets started, we just wanted to say sorry. We had a little bit of a technical difficulty with our recording, and so the audio isn't as good as it normally is, but the content should be the same.

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Thanks for being patient with us, and we hope you enjoy the podcast. Hi, this is

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John, and today on Theocast, Justin and I are going to discuss an article entitled,

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Four Ways Bad Biblical Theology Warps Sermons. We hold to biblical theology, a redemptive historic understanding of scripture, so we're going to walk through each four of his criticisms and maybe offer some explanation or a different perspective on it, and then in the member's podcast, we're going to explain where this type of an article may have come from and how it tends to be pietistic in its nature.

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We hope you enjoy. Stay tuned. A simple and easy way for you to help support Theocast each month is by shopping at Amazon.

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Everything you buy there, they'll take a portion of it and donate it to our ministry. To learn how to sign up, just go to theocast .org

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slash give. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

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Conversations about the Christian life in the world and news and the internet and blogs from a reformed perspective.

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Today, your hosts are Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, and I'm John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

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That's just north, I'm sorry, south of Nashville, and so if you want to visit, come visit.

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If you want to visit Asheville, North Carolina, you can visit Asheville who removed the

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N, so they wouldn't have to be Nashville, North Carolina. Justin, it's good to be with you, my friend.

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We took a week off for Thanksgiving and I've come out of my tricky coma and back and eating healthy and all that good stuff, so how are you doing?

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Doing well, man. I'm glad that people have tuned in to hear us break down culture in the news, circling back to what you said a minute ago.

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That's why people love us because we're so relevant when it comes to those things.

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It's Theocast and Al Mohler. Those are the news that they go to. That's right. Current events, man.

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That's why people tune in. That's right. I'm doing well, sitting here first week of December. Kind of crazy that it's already that time of year.

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This would be the time when we would do a pro -con in our little introductory segment here, and I'm going to do one that is maybe mildly of interest for some people.

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So I am for Christmas music. I think it's enjoyable. I'm all about holiday festiveness and the like, and there are certain songs, of course, that theologically may be good in thinking about the incarnation, but also are just seasonally enjoyable, so I'm all for that, and I am not one of these people that gets really worked up when folks start playing

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Christmas music in October or November. So my con is all of the, like, even though I know it's done in good fun, all of the comments and the snarkiness about the appropriate date to start playing

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Christmas music, I'm just kind of against that whole conversation. I think there's freedom in the Lord Jesus to start playing Christmas music whenever you want, and if you really want to press me on the issue, we celebrate the incarnation, the perfect life of Christ, the death and resurrection of Christ all the time as Christians.

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Last time I checked. Well, Justin, you do know that Jesus was not born on December 20th.

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You can have Christmas in July for all I care, you know. I mean, go for it. Christmas should be in July.

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Go for it. I mean, all year long, dude. Jesus was not born. Keep that Christmas spirit all year long. There is freedom to do it.

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Jesus was not born on December 26th. You're blowing up the liturgical calendar,

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John. You need to calm down. I mean, here we are in the first week of Advent.

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You're just wrecking that for people. I know, man. What's wrong? Man alive. Anyway. My son was reading.

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Go ahead. No, I was going to say, I mean, while we may not talk about news and current events, and we might not be up to date on all of our calendar, this and that, we have, in a more serious way, met this morning to do a podcast about the greatest news in the history of the world.

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So we're all about the news of Christ coming to redeem and save those who were lost.

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And that's related to what we talk about all the time, obviously. But I don't know if you're ready, John.

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I may cut you off and run right over. I mean, you were probably going to say something so winsome and hilarious, and now you're not even going to have opportunity to do it.

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But why don't you set up for us what we're going to talk about today and explain our motivation in doing what we're doing this morning.

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Absolutely. Well, Justin and I love talking about the gospel, about the

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Bible, Christ resting in Christ, obviously. We have kind of centered our entire podcast around the theology of Christ and resting in Christ and Christ -centered preaching.

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So throughout our different segments, we break them up. We've done in the past episodes called

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Dazed and Confused, where we clarify parts of the Bible that often are misinterpreted or people have had traditional understandings that would, we think, counteract what the

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Bible is actually teaching. So you can go to our website and listen to some of those. Once in a while, we'll hop on here and do a

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Hot Topic when it's around some kind of a theological issue. And then one of the things we like to do is kind of...

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Or a cultural issue. Or a cultural issue, yeah. Politics was one of them that was related to theology because people were being told if they voted one way, then they were not a

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Christian. So you can go back and listen to that. So we like to categorize certain things when someone will ask me about a particular theologian.

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One real popular right now is John Piper. We get a lot of people asking us what we think about John Piper or David Platt or some of these guys.

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So we have categories that we like to discuss things and we have what's called heretical. This is heretical teaching.

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It's been denied by the church. The councils have obviously said this is wrong. There is what we call unbiblical.

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So it probably isn't a heresy, but we would say the Bible, we think, has greater clarity on this issue.

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And so that person or this article or this book is taking what we would say is an unbiblical perspective.

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And then we would say not helpful. Those are the three ways I've categorized them in the past, kind of how we do it here at Theocast.

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So today we're going to pick up one of these articles that seems to be circulating quite a bit. It happened about a year and a half, two years ago, where there was an explosion of criticism towards what we would say biblical theology or Christ -centered preaching, just for those that are new to the podcast.

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Redemptive historical preaching too. Right. Redemptive historical. So what we mean by that is the

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Bible, of course, is God's word, but God has structured it in such a way that it's communicating something.

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And we believe, along with the reformers and the reformed tradition, that the Bible is the story of God redeeming sinners.

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It's a redemption, and it unfolds throughout history, obviously, because the Bible is telling us a historical story.

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So it is God redeeming sinners, starting in Genesis 3, moving all the way to the end of the book.

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And it is telling us how God is doing this. So we understand this, even from looking at Ephesians 1 and 2, that God, before the world was created, had a planned, redeemed sinner.

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So we believe this. We teach this. We believe that all the scripture, as Christ says, is about Him, including the

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Old Testament, that the prophets and the law were writing about the coming and the fulfilling of Christ, using

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Israel as its means to accomplish bringing the Messiah for the whole world.

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So this is the perspective that we hold, and it became, for whatever reason, in the cross hairs of some theological institutes and certain people who,

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I think, misunderstood some of the things that we were saying. There's been some confusion.

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So what we wanted to do is kind of walk through an article that seems to be recirculating, and walk through his criticisms and points, and maybe try and bring some clarity where there has been some confusion.

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So, Justin, that's kind of where we're at. Maybe you can bring us up on the date on the article and what we're doing, and any thoughts on this.

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Sure, yeah. So the particular article that we're going to look at, and it appeared on the

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Gospel Coalition's website, amongst a number of other places. It also originally appeared on Nine Marks' website as well, written by a brother in Christ named

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Samuel Amati. And there are some things in this article that John and I think, as we make some clarifying comments,

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I mean, there are certain things that are written that we agree with. And yet, the four major headings of the article itself, the article is entitled

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Four Ways Bad Biblical Theology Warps Sermons. Four Ways Bad Biblical Theology Warps Sermons, again, is the title of the article.

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And I think our concerns today are that the headings in particular demonstrate, at least from our perspective, some misunderstanding of what redemptive historical

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Christ -centered preaching is. And just, again, to be redundantly clear, when we say that phrase, we put all those descriptors together, the kind of preaching that we are advocating for is preaching that would go to every text of Scripture and understand it in light of the main point of the whole

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Bible, which is God's plan of redemption accomplished through Christ. And so we approach every text and we ask, where does this text stand in relation to Christ and in relation to that grand point?

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As we investigate the text itself and allow the text to drive the message that we preach on any given week, we're just trying to be responsible scholars and students of the word.

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And so that's what we mean when we talk about being preachers who would preach from a redemptive historical perspective, from a

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Christ -centered perspective. And of course, nobody is going to disagree with those principles.

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The concern is we don't want to fall off the other side of the horse and make errors in the opposite direction.

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And that was the motivation for this particular article, trying to push back against redemptive historical

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Christ -centered preaching that may be unhelpful. And so, again, our aim today on Theocast is to try to advocate for that sort of preaching, redemptive historical

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Christ -centered preaching that is expositional. We want to be clear about what it is, and we want to try to have a conversation in interacting with this particular article that we hope is helpful to people.

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And what we don't want, I think, John, you and I talked about this before we hit record, we don't want people who are encountering

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Reformed theology for the first time or who are encountering legitimate Christ -centered preaching for the first time to then be scared away from it because of a piece like this.

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And so we hope that this serves people well. So I may begin, before we even get to the article itself,

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I'm going to read a quote from John Calvin to illustrate. I think

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I've not read this for John. I think I've referenced it in the past, but I trust that John's going to agree with me on this.

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This is a great quote from Calvin from his commentary on 1 John as to what the duty of a godly minister, a godly teacher is, in particular, in preaching.

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So let me just read this from Calvin, and then we'll look to the article itself. So Calvin writes, quote, As there ought to be a daily progress in faith, so the apostle, referencing

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John, says that he wrote to those who had already believed, so that they might believe more firmly and with greater certainty and thus enjoy a fuller confidence as to eternal life.

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Then the use of doctrine is not only to initiate the ignorant in the knowledge of Christ, but also to confirm those more and more who have already been taught.

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For there are still in us many remnants of unbelief, and so weak is our faith that we need a fuller confirmation.

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But we ought to observe the way in which faith is confirmed by having the office and power of Christ explained to us.

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It is therefore the duty of a godly teacher, in order to confirm disciples in faith, to extol as much as possible the grace of Christ, so that being satisfied with that, we may seek nothing else.

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And we would say to that a hearty amen, that it is the duty of any godly teacher to extol as much as possible all the time the grace of Christ, so that the saints, being satisfied in Christ, might look to nothing or no one else for their hope, for their righteousness, for their redemption.

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And so that's the motivator for us as we think about redemptive historical

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Christ -centered preaching. And so now, John, let's turn specifically to the article itself, and we're just going to take this point by point and aim to make clarifying comments on it.

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So the first way that bad biblical theology, according to the author, warps sermons, is that it can produce, number one, sermons that are

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Christ -centered, but never make moral demand. So sermons that are Christ -centered, but never make moral demand.

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I have thoughts on this, John, but I've been talking for like several minutes, but you get us started.

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So in the beginning of the article, he talks about how he got really excited in seminary about biblical theology preaching, which, that's great.

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And then says that he made some mistakes along the way, and this is one of the mistakes that he fell into, what was called bad biblical theology.

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So first of all, I would say, if this is something he found himself falling into,

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I don't know if this is a criticism of, like for instance, I've heard people say, when I became a Calvinist, I stopped evangelizing.

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Well, that's not the fault of Calvinism. That's your misunderstanding. So I would say, if you got to a point where you didn't feel the need to preach and uphold

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God's moral law, that's a confusion on your part, not a confusion on what's being taught by biblical theology.

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And I would say that a true biblical theology theologian understands the value and importance of a law gospel preaching and a law gospel distinction.

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That the gospel and Christ are useless without the law. Now, I don't know if that's necessarily what he's getting at.

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I think what he's getting at in this point is that when you're preaching, let's say a text from the

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Old Testament that is a narrative. We had mentioned something recently about Nehemiah.

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And what we tend to do is then take the passage and then make moral application for us today.

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So in other words, don't be like Nehemiah or be like Nehemiah, don't be like Daniel. And what he's getting at is that if you're only preaching in his perspective of what he is, if you're only preaching

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Christ and grace and the perspective of redemption, and you never get to a place where you're calling the listener in the pew to some moral improvement, then you are actually not preaching all of the text.

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Here's my response to that. If we are going to be faithfully preaching the text, and I mean you actually are teaching context and the authorial intent, what did the author intend its readers to hear and do with that text?

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I would argue, think about how many what we call imperative instructions, like do this, obey this, passages there are in the

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Bible. If you were to put a percentage on it, I would say very confidently, you're looking at like 5 % of the

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Bible from what you have in the Old Testament, like in Proverbs, and then what you have in the epistles, which is most of the time only about 30 % of your epistles, because Paul does a lot of introductory, then he does a lot of theology, he does a lot of Christology, and then he does a lot of ecclesiology, church theology, and then he gets into the instructions like towards the end, and it's only like 30 % of that epistle.

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So if Justin and I are going to start in Genesis and work our way through the Old Testament, all the way through the New Testament, and do what the text says, 5 % of those sermons, other than faith in Christ, believe in Christ, trust in Christ, all of those imperatives for morality are going to come up, but just as not as much as you think they're going to come up.

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Sure. Yeah, a couple thoughts here. The first is a more high -level observation that is just historically

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Reformed. I mean the 1689 Confession speaks to this, as do the other Reformed Confessions. We uphold what is known historically as the third use of the law, which means that we understand

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God's moral law, though we are not under it as a covenant of works, right? We're not condemned or threatened by it.

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We don't keep it for our justification. Though that is true, and Christ has fulfilled the law for us, the law of God, in particular his moral law, still guides our living in Christ Jesus.

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John and I both believe that. We both preach in that way, and a whole host of other guides who would be doing this kind of preaching would do the same.

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And so in upholding the third use of the law, we absolutely are going to be speaking in terms of morality and in terms of our lives with respect to things that we should be doing and giving attention to, and with respect to things that we should not be doing and we should be fleeing from.

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I know I do that in my preaching. John, I trust you do it in yours as well. And so that's one thing that we would say, a

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Reformed understanding that is redemptive historical, a Reformed understanding that is Christ -centered with respect to the scriptures, does not in any way mean that we would not make moral demands, because as we uphold the third use of the law, we certainly do.

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Now the other thing that I would say, that's something that I think Sam is raising in the article, is that we need to be preaching effectively like, okay,

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Jesus has done all of these things, He agrees with us, but then we need to help people understand like where we fit in that story and what it means for us.

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To which I would say, yeah, I agree. So for example, this coming Sunday, I'm going to be preaching from Ephesians chapter 2 verses 19 to 22, which is where Paul tells the

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Ephesian Christians that they are citizens of the household of God, right? And he's already been talking about how they were far off and they've been brought near and all these kinds of things, but they're now citizens of the household of God.

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And he then talks about how Christ is the cornerstone of the church. It's built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets.

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Christ is the cornerstone and we're all being built up now into this temple that is indwelt by the

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Holy Spirit. So I'm going to preach that and try to explain what all that means from a redemptive historical perspective with Christ at the center,

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Christ is the cornerstone. But then I absolutely plan, I haven't done any of my sermon prep yet, but in my own mind and heart,

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I'm already thinking about it. I absolutely plan to help our people understand what this means for them as they are a part of this.

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Like we are a part of the church. And then what does that mean even for how we think about the congregation and how we think about life with the saints and what

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God means to do through the church. And so I guess for me, one of the questions that I have reading this article,

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I'm just going to kind of not to bury the lead, right? In reading the article wholesale, I'm really asking the question like, who is it exactly that's in the crosshairs?

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What exactly are we speaking to? Because I think that what is being written to, with all due respect, is a caricature and a reductionistic generalization of Christ -centered redemptive historical preaching that neither you nor I, John, would advocate for.

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The kind of redemptive historical Christ -centered preaching we're advocating for would not be characterized by these things that are written in this article.

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And that's really why we're doing this podcast today. So even with point one, preaching that makes no moral demands,

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I'm kind of like, yeah, I'm not quite sure what you're talking about. Now, what we are not going to do is turn every sermon into, like half of our time is spent morally applying the text and telling our people the things that they need to be doing.

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Because I think that's actually irresponsible the other direction. You've got a text that has no imperatives in it whatsoever.

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It's all about, it's the indicative truth of what God has done in Christ. And then you turn half the sermon into, here are moral issues you need to concern yourself with.

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I actually think that's irresponsible. Yeah, that's what we call legal. We've done podcasts. It's legal preaching.

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It's moralistic preaching, which again, I know Sam would disagree with that as well.

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And so just to be charitable. Right.

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And the danger of saying that every sermon has to have a moral imperative is, again, if we are going to be preaching the text,

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I feel like if you're going to preach morality from every text of scripture, you would then have to say, you think the purpose of the

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Bible is to curb morality. And I wouldn't say that's the purpose of the

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Bible. I just have a hard time thinking. I think it's the result of our faith in Christ.

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It's an outflow. But the purpose of God's word is to direct. I mean, John literally says in his gospel towards the end, he goes,

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I write these things that you might believe. He didn't say that you might obey. Obeying is a part of our faith.

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I mean, this James and 1 John make this very clear that if you believe you will obey. Right. So it's almost like we are emphasizing morality over faith.

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And Christ -centered preaching and biblical theology is an emphasis on faith in Christ with the outflow of obedience.

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Amen. So you don't want to make the outflow the focus. You want to make the aim of scripture the focus, which is that we might believe in the

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Lord Jesus Christ and thereby be saved. Right. And so I'm with you completely. There is one exhortation that ought to be in every sermon, and that is trust in the

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Lord Jesus Christ. You know, hope in him, rest in him. And then there may be a number of other exhortations that are made depending on your passage.

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Yeah. But to make the charge that redemptive historical Christ -centered preaching can lead to sermons that don't make exhortations, like, okay, well, yeah, if it's done badly, that's true.

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But just because something can be done badly doesn't mean that the thing itself is harmful or dangerous, like you already spoke to earlier.

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Right. John, let's move on. Every Sunday is a call to repent and believe.

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Every Sunday. Repent of trusting in yourselves, repent from idols, repent from sin, and trust in Christ.

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Because in other words, if you're preaching... And cast yourself upon the mercy of God and Christ. Right. If you're preaching Christ properly, according to the text, the only response to Christ is return away from self and towards Christ.

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So I don't understand how the criticism says you have to preach morality, because morality does nothing. Christ...

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And I understand what he means. Me too. I mean, I'm even thinking about services, you know, your church, my church.

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I mean, the entire liturgy of our services is structured in such a way that we are aiming through the entire service, including the sermon, that people would be convicted of sin, that people would see their absolute desperate need for what

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Christ has accomplished in their place, and that we would be turning from sin, turning from our own notions of our own righteousness and goodness, and absolutely casting ourselves upon Christ and his sufficient work in our place.

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And what that does as our hearts are stirred, we are also alongside that, giving people handles in terms of, all right, what does life look like in the

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Lord Jesus as I live in the congregation of the saint? I know, John, that you're preaching that way, and I'm aiming to preach that way.

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And so that's where for us, as we read this article, we're just kind of like, yeah, we're not quite sure what it is that's being pressed back against.

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Yeah. So let's move to the second piece of this article, John, if you're cool with that. The second heading is that bad biblical theology would warp sermons in that it would, number two, produce sermons that don't present biblical characters as positive and negative moral examples.

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It would not, sermons would not present biblical characters as positive and negative moral examples. Yeah. Yeah, and I think some of the examples given here,

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I know from other articles I may mention, but even here where Paul says that, you know, 1

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Corinthians, right, 10, 6 took place as examples for us that we might not desire evil as they did.

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That would be the negative. Hebrews 12. Yeah. Right. He uses

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Hebrews 12, just as he says, Jesus and the apostles routinely call Christians to be like or not to be like Old Testament figures.

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And then he says Hebrews 12, 16. And then he references James here, where James encourages believers to be like the prophets

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Job and Elijah, which again, and we should, and we've done a

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Days and Confused on Hebrews 11 and 12 before, so we can do another one. But in all of these passages, one, the negative,

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Paul is using this as in a negative sense. He's saying these people hardened their hearts.

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They didn't listen to the law of God and the demands of the law of God and understood that basically they needed to repent and turn towards a faith in God's promises and God's hope.

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And Paul's application to that is, hey, don't do that. I'm on that all day.

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Every time I look at the Old Testament, and I will say, see, this does not do you well, disobeying

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God's law and trusting in your own righteousness does not do you well. I think any biblical people, and I have ever, and to the defense of the guys who trained us and trained most biblical teachers today, you know,

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Voss and even modern day guys like Sinclair Ferguson and Horton, they are not, they will wholeheartedly agree with the application of these verses saying, yes, the

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Old Testament is written as the example. It's the history of the example of you can't save yourself and not trusting in Christ will condemn and damn you.

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And so I wholeheartedly agree with that. And I don't think that's a fair criticism. The way

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I think he's really getting at, Justin, and I know you want to jump on this, is the positives. Right.

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Let me speak to the negative piece really quick before we transition. I'm with you completely. The negative examples that exist throughout the

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Old Testament are absolutely in my sights all the time, as you just alluded to, because on the one hand, we are the guys that want to get up and say the history of God's people is one of abject failure and sin in light of,

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I mean, and then God, in spite of that, is utterly faithful and keeps his promises and saves them, saves us in spite of our failure.

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You know, I mean, that is the story of God's people from all time, whether we're talking about before Christ came or sin.

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We have failed. God is faithful. He redeems us because he's gracious and merciful and kind and loving.

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And he does it because he delights to save and it honors and brings him glory, you know, in saving sinners like us.

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So of course, the negative example is something that I think we talk about all the time. You're right.

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Let's pivot to the positive example piece, because I think that's where the real rub comes. And we, just to be very clear,

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I mean, we have spoken a number of times on this podcast about the, I don't know, the imprudence of using

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Old Testament characters as moral examples. And I want to be very clear in what I mean by that.

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And John, I want you to jump in here. It's not that there is no room to ever talk about these things.

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Of course, there is room to talk about, okay, in this person, we see pride that was his downfall.

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Or in this particular situation, we see, and that's a negative example too, but in this example, like with Abraham, we see that he's commended for faith.

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Praise God. But then, you know, let's talk about Abraham's faith and how, let's talk about it honestly.

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Let's talk about how it faltered at points and how God did tremendous work in his life over decades. You know, but Abraham's commended for his faith.

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Okay, cool. You know, let's talk about Job and he's commended for being patient and long -suffering and bearing up under suffering.

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But let's look at Job and his honest wrestlings before the Lord. And let's talk about these interchanges he had with his friends.

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And let's just assess it from an objective perspective. And I'm absolutely delighted to say, to point to something in the text and say, that's good.

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That's a really good thing by God's grace that was happening right there. And then at the same time to also point out, okay, but this thing over here is not awesome.

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And let's see ourselves in this. And then at the end of the day, let's talk about the point of the message though, is why are these people in the biblical record?

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They're there ultimately to point us to Christ and they're there. They would be the first to say that they are in need of Jesus just like us.

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So what I would push back against, John, is not using Old Testament characters as moral examples in a positive way at all.

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I would push back against using them as moral examples as like the primary point of your message, which is what often happens.

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It's like 90 % of the sermon is about Hezekiah. And then 10 % is about, okay, the plan of God through the

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Davidic line and the King who would come named Christ, who would save his people and we need to trust him.

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It's like, okay, I would just invert that. It's like, I would spend less time talking about Hezekiah.

32:28

I would make the point of the message Christ and what God is doing through Jesus. And then we can look at Hezekiah underneath that banner and think about how pride is harmful and humility is good.

32:39

Yeah. Well, and I would say, if God intended us to read the

32:45

Old Testament and use these men as moral examples of what we should do, and I'm going to say this and try not to be irreverent.

32:54

I don't want to be irreverent what I'm about to say. Then God didn't really do a great job of providing a book that gives us a lot of good examples.

33:02

Just you have very few examples of men who lived a life that was morally sound and commendable outside of their faith in God.

33:16

I'm telling you right now, I've got men in my church who have lived their lives way more faithful than David, way more faithful than Abraham, way more faithful than Isaac.

33:27

I mean, Daniel, we only know a little bit about his life. And of course, what you mean by that, John, in meaning more faithful than Abraham, what you're pointing to is the fact that Abraham sold his wife into prostitution effectively twice.

33:38

And David, I mean, David is a man after God's own heart, which praise the

33:44

Lord for that. And we see many good things in David's life. But next to those good things that we see in David's life are very heinous and grievous sins, abuses of power.

33:55

I mean, having a man murdered so that he could have his wife, lust and adultery and the like.

34:00

And that's not to slam David or throw him under the bus. It's just to kind of circle back. Why is

34:06

David in Scripture? What is the point of David's life? And what is it that David needs?

34:11

And what is it we can learn from David? Primarily, we are learning about our need of Christ and the

34:17

Messiah to come, who is the greater David. And secondarily, we can look at David's life and take some things away.

34:23

That's right. Right. And when you have an understanding of biblical theology, the life of David makes sense.

34:30

It's beautiful. It demonstrates God's grace, God's mercy, that even through David's absolute face plant in the asphalt,

34:41

God brings the Messiah. Amen. Yeah. How is that not a better application?

34:47

That's phenomenal. And even I'm mindful of David's last words in 2 Samuel 23. He's dying.

34:54

And he has some of those beautiful language in all the Bible about a good use of authority. Here is this man who has abused his authority, most notably in having

35:03

Uriah killed. Right. And now is speaking very eloquently to his family about the good use of authority in 2

35:11

Samuel 23. Well, what is that? God has worked in him and has taught him things. And so it's like we can honestly assess his life and say things that are much more helpful.

35:21

We don't have to turn it into the whole flannel board situation where we kind of uphold these individuals as these great models for us to follow.

35:33

And I know that Sam is not advocating for that in this article. One observation that I want to make, and this is kind of like a hit the pause button, make a public service announcement, and then we'll kind of move forward.

35:43

This is important not only in this conversation, but in any conversation about theology or really any arena of life.

35:50

But theology is what we're talking about right now. To generally speaking, to turn things into this either or proposition is just unhelpful.

35:59

You know, to create this kind of false dichotomy where it's either this or it's that is generally bad.

36:07

What we are often needing to do is hold things in appropriate tension and make the right emphasis.

36:13

And that's what we're asking for when it comes to Old Testament character, make the right emphasis.

36:19

Do not spend a lot of your time upholding these folks as moral examples.

36:25

Spend a lot of your time preaching Christ as we look at the Old Testament witness.

36:32

That's what we're saying. That's right. It's not either or. Right. Amen and amen. Should we go to the third point?

36:39

Yeah, let's do it. All right. So the next one, and speaking of the fourth point,

36:45

I'll probably speak a little bit more to the false dichotomy piece that I think is introduced in this conversation a little bit, but that's here in a minute.

36:53

Point three. So bad biblical theology would warp sermons in that it would produce sermons that sound the same every week.

37:00

It would produce sermons that sound the same every week. In particular, what

37:05

Sam is pointing out in the article is that each sermon always tends to be the same, and he says, quote, look how

37:13

Jesus fulfilled X from the Old Testament, close quote. So it's all preached from the perspective of Jesus fulfilling everything in the

37:21

Old Testament, and it makes your sermons predictable, is his argument. John, response to that?

37:27

Thought to that? Yeah, again, I've heard this.

37:35

Raised as an objection, sure. Right, and my question typically to this person is how much of a true biblical theologian have you heard preach?

37:49

Obviously, Calvin's sermons, if you've read them, they don't sound redundant.

37:55

They do not sound as if he only has one tune that he doesn't have variety.

38:03

I would say that I honestly don't know of anyone that I think is prominent.

38:09

Now, look, there might be some backwood preachers out there that no one knows who they are, and maybe some lesser known guys that are doing this.

38:18

Exactly, and maybe there's a movement. I feel like Justin and I got our finger on the pulse of kind of what's going on in the

38:26

Reformed world. We read and listen to almost everything that's out there, or we're aware of it, and I just don't see this.

38:33

I don't see men getting up, and it's basically they say the same thing over and over and again.

38:41

Anybody who's a biblical theologian loves the text, is driven by the text.

38:47

The beauty and the glory of the text just brings Christ alive, and every angle of Christ that we can see, as Paul says, when we look into the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

38:59

Well, face means the character and person of, and Jesus himself tells us that that is developed.

39:06

The character and the person of God is greater and brings a deeper development through the Old Testament. Some people, like when

39:16

I was in seminary, there's an article that came out by Dr. Richard Mayhew, and I was just reading it, refreshing it again.

39:24

He was basically saying that the New Testament is where, if you're going to preach about Christ, then preach him from the

39:30

New Testament because that's where Christ is, and that he's just a shadow in the Old Testament in the substance.

39:36

It makes true. John MacArthur will flat out tell you the reason he preaches 99 % of his sermons from the

39:41

New Testament is because that's where Jesus is. My argument is that Paul told

39:47

Timothy to preach all of Scripture, and that all of it is beneficial, and he didn't mean the New Testament at the moment because the

39:53

New Testament isn't fully written. Amen, and then Jesus obviously understands the point, definite article of the

40:00

Old Testament, the law of the prophets, the Psalms is him, that they bear witness about him. Yeah, right.

40:05

So I would say both of those things. The application primarily is going to be most of the same.

40:13

So if I were to change his title or his point, and his argument would be sermons that sound the same every week,

40:23

I would say sermons that have the same application every week. That would be a fair assessment because the application -

40:31

Right. The main substance is trust

40:36

Christ this week, and this is what this may look like, according to this text, an application of loving your brother, submitting to one another.

40:45

Or I would even say, yeah, I would say guilty as charged if the emphasis is the main thing that we're going to say from any

40:54

Old Testament passage is that Jesus has fulfilled it. That's true. The main thing, but it's not the only thing.

41:01

And that's where I think I would press back and say, you know, as to Sam's critique, if your sermons sound the same every week, that's more of a critique on that particular preacher that he has not rightly understood biblical theology or has not rightly understood preaching as a discipline, you know, and how to go about doing exegesis and how about even going about doing homiletics to prepare a message.

41:25

Like that's an indictment on that guy that his sermons sound the same every week, because I know for me,

41:31

John, and this is related to the fourth point of Sam's article, which we're going to get to in a minute, my sermons are driven each week by several factors.

41:39

I mean, the genre of scripture in which I'm preaching, I'm finding myself, the text itself, you know, what it says, what the main points, what the words on the page say.

41:49

And so what we're trying to do is explain those things. We're trying to explain this passage of scripture in light of the main point of the

41:55

Bible. And so, yeah, the main point might always come out, you know, in terms of it being ultimately about Jesus, that may always be there, but I trust it's going to be communicated differently.

42:05

We're going to arrive at that place in different ways, depending on the passage, depending on the emphasis and the words on the page there.

42:12

And there's going to be different kind of outworkings of it and different implications, different reflections, different meditations that are contained in our sermons.

42:19

And that to me is just part and parcel of what it is to be a decent preacher. And so I'm kind of like you,

42:26

I'm sort of like, who's in the crosshairs here? And what kind of sermons are we listening to if they literally sound the same every week?

42:36

Right. And the argument is you are not being driven by the text, as you said, and that we are.

42:42

And we're getting there. Right. We're historical grammatical preachers. Is that point four? Yeah. Yeah.

42:47

We're getting there in point four. Do you want to just go ahead and turn there? Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Because we're already together.

42:54

Three and four are very related. So, I mean, we're getting ready to just talk about this fourth piece. So the fourth way that bad biblical theology would warp sermons in the article is that it would produce sermons that so focus on the big picture that they avoid the details of the text.

43:10

Bad biblical theology would produce sermons that so focus on the big picture that they avoid the details of the text.

43:17

And so we're already kind of getting here, John. You know, even. Go ahead.

43:23

He says, rather than letting the exegesis, that means the explanation of the text, rather than letting the exegesis drive the sermon.

43:33

I've heard preachers simply identify the biblical theology theme, temple, priest, king, law, Sabbath, and so on, and then walk through scripture, the metanarrative focusing on the theme.

43:45

Unfortunately, this approach ignores the most basic preaching. What does the text say, ultimately, or biblical theology root to Jesus emerges from the exegesis text?

43:55

Well, I mean, my initial takeaway is, yeah, that is bad preaching. And I don't know, I don't know guys that are doing that.

44:02

Like, we know, we know dudes that hold to the 1689 Confession, the Westminster Standards, the three forms of unity, our

44:09

Lutheran friends who would hold to the Augsburg Confession. I mean, whatever. And none of them that we know are preaching in these ways, where it's just, it's so reductionistic, and we're not dealing with the text, or, you know, we're not, we're not, we're saying the same thing literally

44:26

Sunday after Sunday. Right, right. Right. And so this is my response to that is that when any expositor is preaching the

44:38

Bible, and I would say any Reformed expositor, listen, are there disagreements on particular texts in Scripture?

44:47

Yes, sure. The Lutherans, Presbyterians and Baptists are all going to see certain texts differently.

44:54

And that it is a little bit driven by their, their overarching confession and biblical, their understanding of certain theology.

45:02

But in the tradition of all three of these, they all understand that Christ being the point.

45:08

Reformed Baptists, Presbyterians, Anglicans and Lutherans all understand. Yeah, I didn't mean to leave out my

45:14

Anglican friends, you know, 39 Articles, whatever. Yeah, right. They all understand Christ being the point of the

45:20

Old Testament. And what we would say is every expositor has to place something on the text.

45:31

Because if you don't, like when someone says we want to know the authorial intent, what did the author mean?

45:38

And we get that from the history and the grammar. Well, true. But then you are imposing upon the author his intent.

45:49

At times if you apply, be like Daniel. You're imposing that on the text because nowhere in the text are you ever told to be like Daniel.

45:59

You just cannot see that. Right. So you have to draw that from something else. We as well draw it, but we're drawing it in our defense from the

46:10

New Testament because the New Testament authors used the Old Testament this exact way.

46:16

Christ and Paul both looked at the Old Testament and said the flow of what was happening on in the old is bringing us to the application of the new, which is

46:25

Christ. So that would be my... And what you're saying, we've spoken this before, what you're saying is that to some degree, everybody comes to the text with a theological framework and a theological system.

46:39

And you're always, as much as you are trying to look at a text on its own and look at it in its immediate context, the paragraph it's in, the book that it's a part of, you're still understanding it in light of the entire canon, which

46:53

Sam in his article is advocating for. You're understanding it in light of the whole Bible and the main point. And what you're doing whenever you're talking about biblical theology and the main point of the

47:01

Bible, you're inevitably talking about a framework and a theological system. Whether that's covenant theology or progressive covenantalism or dispensationalism or whatever it may be, you've got those frameworks that are helping you orient yourself in any given passage, and that's not wrong to do.

47:18

So that's what you're saying there. An observation for me on this is, again,

47:24

I'm not quite sure who is in the crosshairs because I know for myself, for you, John, and for all the other brothers

47:30

I know of various Reform and even Lutheran traditions and confessions, I mean, people are aiming to deal with the words on the page.

47:38

We're looking at the words in front of us, the paragraphs in front of us, and we're aiming to help people understand those words in light of its immediate context and in the context of the whole scripture, the entire

47:52

Bible. And that's the work of a preacher every Lord's Day as we open God's word for our people.

47:59

And I just think it's an interesting charge. I've heard other guys say this. I mean,

48:04

John Piper even earlier this year in a message that he gave said that there are a lot of guys who hover over the text but are not actually in it.

48:13

And again, I'm kind of like, yeah, I'm not quite sure who those guys are because I know for myself, in my sermon preparation and even in preaching,

48:21

I'm regularly looking to the words and the phrases and the sentences on the page, and I'm pointing people to do the same as we understand

48:28

God's word together. And I think my last thought on that point four is, again, let's not introduce a false dichotomy.

48:37

Let's not create a tension that doesn't exist. We need not pit what might be understood as a grammatical historical approach to understanding the

48:45

Bible over and against what might be called a redemptive historical approach to understanding the scripture.

48:51

Those things are not mutually exclusive. They actually go together. Any responsible redemptive historical preacher is also preaching from a grammatical historical perspective.

49:02

We're looking at the grammar and the history and the words on the page. And so again, if people are not doing that,

49:09

I agree with the critique. But I think for me, as I even have seen this article at multiple points over the last year and a half,

49:16

I just struggle to know exactly who's being talked about. And my thought process is this,

49:22

John, and this is kind of my final thought for this regular portion of the podcast. I think that the danger that exists in the evangelical church by miles is on the side of moralizing scripture, and it is by miles on the side of not preaching the

49:38

Bible from a redemptive historical perspective, and not preaching legitimate Christ -centered sermon.

49:44

Rather, we're just going to say a lot of good things from the text, and 45 out of the 50 minutes of our message,

49:50

I mean, honestly, could be said in a synagogue. And then we're going to kind of stick Jesus in, you know, in the plane of salvation or whatever, and I think that's a much bigger problem, even amongst people who are aiming to take the

50:01

Bible seriously, than the other problem is. I think it's a much smaller error.

50:08

And so that's where I'm a little confused, too, as to the aim of the article. Like, who are we speaking to, and what are we trying to correct here?

50:15

Because as I've observed preaching, even amongst Calvinistic evangelicals, I think the other error of moralism and making it in pietism, frankly, where it's more about you and your

50:27

Christian life than it is about Jesus, I think that's a much bigger issue, a much bigger concern. That's part of the reason that Theocast even exists.

50:33

That's right. And I think moving into the member's podcast, we'll discuss this, but I think behind the article, what he's concerned with, and what he's getting at is, you are not going to preach sin.

50:47

You are going to lead people into antinomianism, where they don't obey an apathy, right?

50:54

So pietism basically is what... Yeah, that's the concern, which again, we would want to say, yeah,

50:59

I mean, lawlessness and apathy, those are legitimate things to be concerned for. But the question is, how do we speak to those things?

51:07

And what is the antidote? I mean, Paul says, he tells those who are lawless and apathetic in 1

51:16

Corinthians what his goal is, and he comes in on the gospel hard. And so, anyways, we'll move into the member's podcast.

51:24

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51:35

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51:49

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52:09

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52:27

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52:36

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