wow, thanks for this article. I have been involved in youth ministry for 25 years and have recently (past 2 years or so) begun to question the value of the typepreaching we have in most of our evangelical sermons. I have watched as young people respond in 1 of 2 ways. They either furiously take notes then confidently file them away feeling they are being discipled or they find themselves hopelessly bored and falling asleep.
I have worked hard at getting the kids to individually relate themselves and their story to God and His story. When i expressed ideas like this at my church i was met with the questioning stares that ,I feel, must have been the looks Jesus received from the pharisees.
I have recently started a church (guess why I am o longer youth pastor) and am intent on making the sermons interactive and narrative. people struggle at first as i ask them to verbally interact with what we are examining that day, after all in their church experience they aren't supposed to have their view they are to parrot the view of the pastor. He is the expert!
I look forward to more discussion on this issue.

It's wrong to think we can't understand Scripture correctly without using what someone wrote 100-1500 years ago ("historical exegesis"). Let all the books in your library be thrown out but one, and you can still understand what God is telling us in His Word. How? Because He is alive, His Word is alive, and His Holy Spirit is the teacher (not some dead theologian). Let all interpretation be approved by the Holy Spirit, and all interpretation will be exactly what He intended to say.

"Authorial intent" is everything. The question that people are slowly forgetting is: Who really is the author? It's astounding that there are people today who ignore this. It takes humility, not hubris, to correctly understand and explain Scriptures.

I got a lot of slogans from this text, and the names of several scholars. Alas, I don't see any substantial argument. I still don't know where Mr Fitch stands on meaning. Preaching feeds the imagination, but can it lead us to truth?
Can we agree that True Propositions without Experiences and Narrative are empty - but also that Experiences and Narratives without True Propositions are blind?

"Proclaiming the reality of the world"
"describe the world"
"herald of the new world"
"renarrates the world"
"unfurling the world"

Are these typographical errors or just new age doublespeak?

Two things are glaringly missing from David Fitch's approach to preaching. As I said in response to the first post, one is the Holy Spirit. This is made clear by his use of the word 'hubris' to describes the attitudes of expository teachers. Judge not, David.

The other missing piece is evangelism. Are we to assume that everyone hearing a sermon is a Christian? Can a non Christian "do the Word"? Of course not because a non Christian can't "hear the Word." So don't put the cart before the horse. The eternal destination of someone's soul depends on it.

Allow me to suggest two readings. One is
II Timothy 4. The other is Famine in the Land by Steven J. lawson.

If anyone is commodifying the Word, it is david Fitch.

Thank you for an excellent post, very well laid out and thoughtful. There were some very excellent points that have some merit. The scriptures are alive and are an account of God's interactions with His people. We must never forget that point.

But with that we must not also forget that even though some of the Bible is narrative not all of it is though. We have poetry, didactic, discourse, commandments, personal accounts, prophecy, etc. These are all valid literary mechanisms and should be analyzed much the same way you would with any other text. We are taught to treat poetry as poetry, and history as history. We must not forget that each section of the Bible is both alive and a literary mechanism that should be treated in its proper discourse.

The second thing is, and I have to agree with Jeff on this, is that the intent of the author has everything to do with the meaning of the text. We must be always striving to understand what Paul, Moses, Isaiah, and others were trying to convey. In the authors intent we learn to whom was it written, why, in what mood, the message, etc.

All these have a very important part of the message. For example, by knowing that the book of Hebrews was written to those in Rome shortly after a period of persecution and we know that the author was intending to convey a certain message we can know that what he was saying applies to either certain situations or is a universal principle. By knowing the mood, for example Paul wrote his letter to the Phillipians while in prison, we can understand his language better and we can better understand what he meant by "I am being poured out as a drink offering."

So both the authors intent and literary style play huge importance in the text and this is why expository teaching is important. Should we use it all the time, I doubt that, but we need to use it as a tool in our chest to convey the word of God to those in our congregations.

Again, I appreciate this post and I agree in the fact that the Scripture is alive and is an account of God's work, but we must not forget that it is literature and people did write it with a purpose in mind.

Blessings,

Slow down there, Richard. A non-Christian can hear the Word--if they have ears to hear. Their ability to hear depends on their ears, not our words.

Christians can't argue someone into a relationship with Jesus. But they can share their experience, explain their new view of the world. And it isn't new age double speak when David Fitch talks about "proclaiming the reality of the world."

My five-year-old daughter read a billboard this weekend for real estate. Their tagline:
"It's all about you."

A few minutes later we stopped behind a car with a similar bumper sticker. It read:
"It's all about me."

Those sentences are lies. They reflect the new age tendency that each individual can define his own God.

Why worship the God who destroyed the world in a flood? Why worship the God who allows hell to exist? Why worship the God who gives us the power to reject him? Because he is the only eternal God.

Or as my daughter put it, "Those people are silly, Daddy. Don't they know it's all about God?"

"New Age doublespeak"? "Slogans"? "Let all the books in your library be thrown out but one, and you can still understand what God is telling us in His Word"?

huh??

First off, it's God's story, lived out through real, flesh and blood people - and, in the case of Jesus, mysteriously both God and flesh&blood person. In no sense did I feel Mr. Fitch is trying to sell us anything really new, much less New Age. In fact, it is all old - even if it is being embraced by the emergent movement.

Heck, look at this quote and tell me what in it is feelgooddowhatyouwant / New Ageism / self-worship / individualism: "[Preachers are to] describe the world as it is via the person and work of Jesus Christ, then invite the hearers into this reality by calling for submission, confession, obedience, or the affirmation of a truth"

Calling. Submission. Confession. Obedience. Truth. Very elements that Jesus, the apostles and the prophets called all throughout their ministries.

Wasn't Jesus' call of evangelism (which, really, we can't distinguish too much from discipleship) a call to "pick up your cross and follow me"?

And as far as the gnosticism apparent in such thinking that we don't need a heavenly chorus of witnesses, or the wise old men teaching the young men how to live (as understood in 'historical exegesis'), I don't think much needs to be said. Does every individual Christian need to re-understand the idea of the Trinity for himself? Does every individual Christian need to come anew to the Bible to discover meaning from it for herself? Isn't this the idea of discipleship, that one would pass down what one has learned from generation to generation, ad infinitum? Isn't learning from the Church Fathers, historical theologians, the reformers, etc. just an extended view of discipleship?

Sorry, I'm not very gracious on this reply. But I believe Mr. Finch brings up some good points that need to be handled and addressed well, not shot down.

just to lighten the discussion...

a good expository preacher will always have three points... this sermon only has two! (c:

As one who did my Master's work at Dallas Theological Seminary, "The Bible is propositional truth and individual exegesis is adequate to bring out the one true meaning" and my Doctoral work at SMU's Perkins School of Theology, "Let's embrace the story and found our own journey within the journeys of those found in Holy Scripture," I, with one foot firmly on the right and one foot firmly on the left, say: Our homiletical challenge comes from holding onto the tensions from both sides and discovering the Holy and Redeeming Presence of God in those tensions.

I currently pastor a United Methodist Church and see them hungry to open the Bible and find the riches therein. I use my training in the original languages to open the worlds and stories of the Hebrews and Greeks to them, and I use my training in cultural analysis to connect our worlds and stories to those ancient ones. And people do not check out of my sermons. Nor do they take notes, thanks be to God. But they listen, deeply attentive. They question, they look at themselves, they consider the challenge before them of actually living out their Christianity in a world that has seen so little authenticity in faith walk and action.

I simply say here: David Fitch has spoken well. Engaging the mind alone leaves most souls untouched.

I think much of our struggle with effective preaching is that we do not involve God in the process. Whether a sermon is expository, narrative, big idea or topical, if it is birthed out of a deep relationship with God, a wrestling with His message through a text, and coated in a humble prayer of service, God will use it. Too often as preachers we think we need better techniques or better resources in place of more God. It is amazing, after a sermon that I think was a dud, to listen to congregants talk about what God said to them through me. Often times I don't even think I said the words they hear, but God spoke to them and told them what they needed to hear. We can't replace God with the Bible. Often we preach as if the Bible is God, instead of part of His revelation to us. Let's not remove our focus from God's power in the proclamation of his word.

Great post David, I loved your book, and appreciate your spirit.

At its worst *expository preaching* is the popular application of "the scientific method" to help interpret Scripture. By its own premise, expository preaching derived from classic hermeneutics rules out the work of the Holy Spirit.

Greg said:
------------------------------------------------
I think much of our struggle with effective preaching is that we do not involve God in the process. Whether a sermon is expository, narrative, big idea or topical, if it is birthed out of a deep relationship with God, a wrestling with His message through a text, and coated in a humble prayer of service, God will use it.
------------------------------------------------
BINGO. I get annoyed when we preachers make idols out of our owm methods of proclaiming and explaining. I do not care how creative a "narrative preacher" is or how wellgrounded an "expository preacher" is in the biblical languages: if the Holy Spirit did not breath out the message, all that "preaching" is just a fart in the wind.

Humility in engaging the Word of God and the God of the Word is what is needed and I thought that was what David was getting at. Peace.

I love the general thesis of this. To proclaim how the reality of Jesus's Lordship should effect change in our lives is what people need. However, I don't think it is either proclaim or dig into the original languages.

What David Fitch is proposing is ultimately not new. As he points out this is much of what Jesus did. But the very premise of his argument is that it is different than what has typically been happening in pulpits recently. How are we to judge whether this "new direction" is accepatable if not by reading the text afresh ourselves to see if it supports his proposition. If all we did was listen to what others have learned, we'd never come to the conclusion that David is proposing a good thing. If they had advocated it, it wouldn't be "new" would it?

i'm not sure if the prophet Ezra and his priests would meet Mr. Fitch's standard. In Nehemiah 8:8 it says, "They read from the Book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people could understand what was being read." also i am not seeing the difference between offering an application and figuring out a best response to the word. it is also ironic to me that he discourages people from spending long hours studying the word and looking for something new, i prefer fresh, obviously he has spent many hours considering this and is making a fresh insight. shall we all just read chrysostom's homilies to our congregations? of course not, because his congregation was culturally closer to Jesus' and needed different things explained. and what of passages like the one i heard tonight, John 10? it's full of testimony, parable, history, narrative, and teaching wrapped up in a very different culture than mine. can it just be read aloud? and how do you read something aloud without deciding what the speaker might have emphasized and enunciated? what was the speaker's intent? what did the author hope for his readers? what was God's intent? what tone of voice does Jesus use when he says, "O you of little faith?" if you consult all the voices that have gone before, they disagree, so you need to weigh and pray and perhaps spend hours sorting it out before you feed his sheep.
God is good
jpu

in all honesty, if you really stand back and look at this there is a dividing line: those who are uncomfortable with anything other than full, traditional, and well-practiced expository preaching and those who are willing to do something else. I'm more in the former camp, simply because I think that there needs to be a broadening of what preaching is/can be.

this argument really has nothing to do with whether Scripture is true, relevant, etc. because how we handle it does not change it's content. That is a blessing to all humanity considering some of the liberties that have been taken in the pulpit to (for example) bolster support for the new building campaign, etc.

I like the authorial intent comments earlier--but the problem is that you can't really stop there. If you want to know why Paul wrote what he wrote, you need to know what world he lived in. Then you need to know what background he came from, which ultimately leads to the sociopolitical situation surrounding Jesus and the early church which ultimately leads to Old Testament traditions carried into the future...

perhaps most people can throw out every book but one, but you need to realize that what that advocates is something that Jesus, Paul, etc. would look at and say, "Huh? I said what?"

If you want intent, you need context, if you want context, then you need to dig: you need Josephus, Tacitus, the Talmud, etc. I personally feel this is the more responsible approach, regardless of how you present it to a local body in a worship gathering (insert your particulars here if you like).

I hope this seasons, not embitters, our discussion.

peace

This person is candidly wrong. There is no preaching without expository preaching.

'Nuff said,
The Kingster

Subversion (and others),

Amen! I agree that we must take it one step further and look at the historical context. I remember in my early bible college days when we studied hermenutics and also had a teaching field ed at the same time. It was horrible hearing some of the things coming out of some students mouth, almost rank heresy, simply based on the fact that they had not studied the text, looked at the background history, and looked at what the church fathers had said. Just a simple 1-2 hour study (I recommend a little more) will allow you to at least see that you may be teaching heresy.

One problem that I see with Flitch's approach and one I have seen time and time again is that he starts with what he wants to say and his life experience and than goes into the word. Through this approach one will read the text in the light they want and will pick out those things that will bolster their claims.

However, if we read the text first, study it, analyze it and than get our meaning from it, the application is clear. Again, this is a mistake that I see time again and someone will have an issue one week and read the text in light of that issue and take the text completely out of context therefore ruining the application.

I agree with some that expository preaching need not be dont every single Sunday morning, but our study of the word should be that way.

Blessings,

so let me get this straight. I can gleam anything i want to gleam from this article written by David Fitch, because, of course, it really doesn't matter what David meant. I get it! Ok this is good; I love heralding and unfurling new worlds also David. Thanks for the insight!!!!

Let me fund your imagination for a second. Post-moderns thrive on meaningless discussions that lead nowhere. Authorial intent is what is inspired by the Holy Spirit, not your own interpretation. It's not expositional preaching, or thorough study that has brought us into a society with many interpretations of scripture; its new/old ideology such as this which takes people further from the true inspired meaning of scripture. Now i understand that I could certainly be wrong in my interpretation on a particular passage. I could even bring in false personal views in my expositional preacing, but the answer isn't to throw the baby out with the bath water. The answer is to study even harder and pray even more and look into our own world view and test it against the "text" which is absolute truth in its original authorial intent.

David said, "Authorial intent is not the main issue although it may be of importance for understanding the text at certain times. What is important is the reality being unfurled about God in Christ and how we can best respond so as to live into it until He returns." Thats neat but, if authorial intent isn't that big of a deal; then how do you know there is a reality of God in Christ and how to best respond to it? Should the Spirit of God just hit you upside the head with the answer due to your own experiences and context? and if so would that not teach us to be extremely selfish and lazy and use the Spirit of God as some sort of tool to do exactly what David in his article is trying to avoid? (Make God's word a selfish commodity used to enhance individualism)

How much of the preaching done in the New Testament is expository preaching? Shouldn't the apostolic example figure into our thinking? I don't see Peter and Paul doing historical-critical exegesis and application--there is a different paradigm at play.

I appreciate what David Fitch is doing in these posts, but I have the feeling that blog posts are too abbreviated a format for those who aren't already conversant with these discussions to grasp what motivates his thinking.

"What is important is the reality being unfurled about God in Christ and how we can best respond so as to live into it until He returns."

This is nothing really knew to me. I am biased however as an expository preacher myself. Correct me if I am wrong, but is this not just Karl Barth's neo-orthodoxy repackaged in 2006? Barth elevated man and his revelation to the highest task as a theologian/Chrisitan. He also wrote:

"There is no question about it: here man was made great at the cost of God – the divine God who is someone other than man, who sovereignly confronts him, who immovably and unchangeably stands over against him as the Lord, Creator, and Redeemer….The stone wall we [young theologians] first ran up against was that the theme of the Bible is the deity of God, more exactly God’s deity – God’s independence and particular character…God’s absolutely unique existence, might, and initiative, above all, in His relation to man. Only in this manner were we able to understand the voice of the Old and New Testaments. Only with this perspective did we feel we could henceforth be theologians, and in particular, preachers – ministers of the divine Word. (Barth 1977, p. 39-40)"

So, nothing new. Man is elevated too high and his interpretation/revelation (or application in this case) is more important than anything - especially the truth of the Scripture. What matters most is how I can apply, not what the text truthfully says.

Mr. Fitch I have read this article and the first. My view point is that I'm not sure. I'm not a person of higher education and therefore don't comprehend alot of the meaning behind what you wrote. I have enough trouble, sometimes, trying to get what God is telling. That's why I pray and read more of His word so He can help me get it.

I'm sure your article has reached many and it's comprehension, no issue. Quite frankly, God's word is now easier to understand than your article.

Respectfully Beck

Kirk,
Are you serious? I am not joking, are you serious?! Didnt Peter stand up on the Day of Pentecost and go to the Old Testment and laid out how those prophecies came true in Christ? Didnt Paul go into the Synangogues and reason through the Old Testament with the people guiding them through the text and relating it back to Jesus? Didnt all the apostles look at the text and then point it to Christ? That's expository teaching! Peter, when he was on the rooftop and he had the vision of the sheet and animals did expository thinking. He went back mentally all through the Old Testament Law and saw that to eat those things he would have violated the law. But when God said it was okay, he had to reason from the Old Testament and put it all together through Jesus to see that it was okay. Thats expositing.

We dont need to do another post to understand David's motivation, it's in his writing (author intent). He wants to make the word what he wants it to say and he doesnt want to submit to historical and scriptural authority. Plain and simple! I dont need another blog to figure that out.

Blessings,

The propositional and the experiential and the narrative CANNOT be separated, as if one may be embraced without the other. To destroy proposition and exposition is to destroy language itself. God gave the Jews 10 Commandments, not 10 Experiences.

I have a hard time listening to arguments written by those who deny me the right to make arguments of my own.

Anthony brings up a good point.

God did in fact give his people 10 commandments, but more accurately he gave them 10 "words" to be interpreted. All Scripture needs to be interpreted, it is not necessarily "plainly understandable." If so, then we could write one large commentary of the text, explaining what the author meant and move on. Hhhmm, to my understanding no such book exists. Yes, there are parts of the Scriptures that are clear, but there are others that are not. There simply is no one monolithic interpretation of the meaning of the text, as if we could just menmorize the "right" one in every situation and move on. The Scriptures are filled with a myriad of meanings and truths, somke even captured in one area of text.

Back to the 10 "words". God says, "Remember the Sabbath, and do no work." One key question that arises from the text is "What does God mean by work?" No where in any text does God give a definitive answer to the question. The rabbis argued over this point in the text, they sought to understand what God meant, some followed one line of thinking, others followed another. All this to say, merely preaching line upon line or word upon word may not help capture the full meaning of a passage. Without exploring the historical, sociological, and cultural setting, and merely relying on sola scriptura... the irony is that we may never uncover the deeper meanings and nuances of the text.

Great article, David... keep pushing us to think critically about what we are handling - the story of God's interaction with real people, in real places, in real times.

And All God's Preacher's said AMEN!!!!!

What you are expounding is exactly what has needed to be said for a long time by senior members of the clergy.

Somehow, the ABC's-123's method of line by line explanation is what has actually denigrated Scripture. Or put another way: One method is designed to teach and explain the other to serve to convict, convince and convert with compassion.

Today, the modern church in America doesn't preach, it provides seminars from the pulpit.

Thank you for this wonderful article. You have voiced my very frustration in what I am hearing in the pulpit from most.. and yes, I mean a significant majority of contemporary protestant/mainline churches today.

It seems to me that David is hitting a different target than what he says. Expositiory preaching, which is not the only method of preaching, should by its conclusion have brought the ancient text into the modern world. Any sermon that does not try to do this amounts to pastoral incompetence. Of course, pastors will have varying amounts of success at bringing the text to the present. Consistent failure to bridge the Bible text to present reality likely indicates that the pastor is not in touch with his congregation. I think that our bigger worry is how connected the clergy are with the laity.