The Scarlet Letter
By: Nathaniel Hawthorne Modernised and edited by Jim McGuiggan (2004)
By: Nathaniel Hawthorne Modernised and edited by Jim McGuiggan (2004)
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My appeal to let God speak is an appeal to saturate our teaching with the drift and meaning and purpose of the Story as it is brought to us in the Bible. I think I’m aware that that isn’t as easy as I make it sound and the more I read of wise men and women who labour in the field of Bible the more I realize that it isn’t easy for me. I think I have a real sense of things and then someone opens my eyes to entirely new ways of hearing the Bible. Then I recognize more than before that the biblical witness is not only too rich for any of us (or all of us) to embrace and that I have my inner agendas that shape the way I approach scripture and the topics I choose over the weeks and months and years. I can easily spot the agendas others pursue—they’re too obvious to miss and, I presently think, they are so often patently self-serving. I have no simple cure for me or anyone else and if we’re to be redeemed from our push for congregational “success” or “success” in polishing our holiness skills or achieving a reputation—if we’re to be redeemed from these we’ll have to be redeemed by the same One who redeems us from anything else he redeems us from.
It’s obvious that anything a socially useful atheist can say is not distinctively Christian and it has no place in a church pulpit as though it were the message given to the NT elect to feed on and to proclaim in all the ways it can do it.
But letting God speak is not the same as simply quoting reams of scripture or a mere repetition of what he said in the past in the Scriptures. Church leaders must remain true to the biblical text but they must also take the truth of the biblical text and bring it home to our lives in the 21st century. They must help us to hear the “gospel of God” (Romans 1:1), which stretches from Genesis to Revelation, in and for our day.
Our leaders must listen and watch how the Bible writers tell their Story and learn from them how to tell the same Story to a different generation facing similar but different challenges. It isn’t enough to describe what this or that text says; we must know why the writer said it and what face of the Gospel he is driving home as he deals with this challenge or that. Then, having seen how those writers did it, our leaders can learn how they can do the same thing. We need to be taught how to speak the truth of the Gospel in our day but it must be the truth of the Gospel that we’re taught to speak and not a substitute.
Yes, all our poetry, our Reader’s Digest material, all our movies and music and literature and wisdom should be called in as an aid but never as a substitute for the massive truths of the Gospel which alone are our salvation and blessing. [It was James Denney who said that no one can at the same time show himself clever and Jesus wonderful.] Bland moral exhortation, short-sighted moral goals and gentle, “after dinner speeches” laced with humour are not what we find in the Bible! Whatever wisdom we offer as something of a “rule of faith” is not to be offered as the Gospel of God on which everything else is to be grounded or it is a house built on sand.
Nor is it enough to go verse by verse describing what the words mean before moving on to another. Of course lexical and grammatical work must be done by someone somewhere or we can’t even read our Bibles much less understand them. Our truly serious and diligent leaders will work to find the heart behind all the verses and the drift of the argument and then how they can use it all for a gathered people who wait in the 21st century to be fed, inspired, moved and comforted as they go about being the NT elect of God to bless the human family.
Preachers and teachers and leaders have been given a profound privilege but they have been given a profound obligation. They have been called to hear God who spoke in the ages past for the blessing and redemption of the present and the ages to come and to make His voice heard today. This is no easy task and no little gift.
