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Charismatic Utterance

Preaching as Prophecy

ian stackhouse

Historically, charismatic renewal has had an ambivalent relationship to preaching. Even though it has produced some outstanding preachers, at other times it has ended up ignoring preaching altogether. For instance, the other day I heard of a church service where, instead of preaching the sermon he had prepared, the preacher announced to the congregation that the Spirit had led him to abandon the sermon in favour of a time of prayer and healing. And thus ensued what can only be described as ‘a holy carnage’, as people came out in their droves to be prayed for.

To one who has hung around the charismatic wing of the Church for the best part of nearly 30 years there is nothing particularly unusual about this nor particularly wrong with it. Whatever else the charismatic movement has contributed to the wider body of Christ, it is surely this: that ability to suspend the liturgy out of an instinct of ‘Behold, I am doing a new thing.’ And maybe we should leave it there. Our preacher was simply acting out of his very best instincts for the new wine of the Spirit.

But why we cannot leave this unchallenged is because such times often bequeath something of a mixed blessing to the Church. What so often communicates to the congregation as a result of such a decision on the part of the preacher, sometimes inadvertently and other times deliberately, is that the essence of the charismatic life of the Church is by definition non-kerygmatic or, worse still, irrational. A consequence of such a move on the part of the preacher, or sometimes the worship leader, to abandon the sermon for ‘just worship’, is that Paul’s desire in 1 Thessalonians 1.5 for preaching that is ‘not in word only but with the Holy Spirit and with deep conviction’ is misunderstood as a desire for no word at all. In other words, abandonment of preaching, in the way described, sends its own message to the congregation that the deeper one goes into the things of the Spirit the less textual we need to be.

It is this false dualism that I want to correct here. Preaching, I want to argue, is the charismatic event. The Pentecostal experience of the early chapters of Acts issues forth not only in strange tongues but also in preaching in the Spirit. As has often been pointed out, the same Spirit that gave utterance to the disciples in Acts 2.4 to praise God in foreign languages is the same Spirit that enables Peter to open his mouth in Acts 2.14 in a sermon. ‘The holy wind at Pentecost is power unto speech’, as William Willimon puts it (2005, p. 25). Clearly there are times when the Spirit’s activity may well relativize the importance, and even the length, of the sermon (the homily remains largely unexplored by Baptist preachers!). Furthermore, we must be careful not to read back our own sermonic forms into the pages of the New Testament. The fact of the matter is: we don’t really know how the early Church did their preaching. Even so, we must be careful that in our pursuit of charismatic experience we do not miss the essentially charismatic nature of preaching. Preaching is not something to satisfy the rationality of our faith – as it is often regarded even in Reformed charismatic circles – so that we can then attend to the non-rational work of the Spirit.1 That way lies Gnosticism. Rather, the combination of text, congregation and preacher ought to be understood as replete with charismatic possibilities. Indeed, in so far as the Scriptures are themselves prophetic, as Walter Brueggemann has been at pains to point out throughout his writings (Brueggemann, 1989, p. 4), then, strange as it may sound, expository preaching ought to be as momentous an event as the giving of an oracle of God (1 Peter 4.11). That it so often isn’t is the fault not of preaching per se but of low expectations on the part of the preacher and the congregation.

We can perhaps see this coming together of Spirit, text and preacher most clearly in the letter to the Hebrews. Despite attempts by David Norrington and others to deride sermons and to question their existence in the New Testament, it turns out that one of the reasons we can’t find sermons is because, like searching for the hippo in the river, we are standing on it: Hebrews is a rhetorical and homiletical master class. Described by the writer himself as ‘a word of exhortation’, Hebrews does what we see Paul and his companions doing in the synagogue in Acts 13.15: namely, expounding from the law and the prophets as they are read to the congregation (Long, 1997, p. 2). Indeed it may well be that Hebrews is one long (as opposed to short!) sermon, in which the preacher expounds and exhorts, in equal measure, the deep truths arising from his initial reading of Psalm 110.

What is important to note, however, and why we mention it here, is the role of the Spirit in all of this; because, as far as this preacher is concerned, it is the Spirit who brings home to the congregation the immediacy of the Scripture. Arriving at one of the many exhortatory breaks in the letter, following three chapters of text upon text, one can almost see the preacher point his finger at the congregation as he announces, ‘So, as the Holy Spirit says, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts”’ (Heb. 3.7). In fact, it is the Spirit who for this preacher provides the hermeneutical key to unlock Scripture. Disregarding the historical-grammatical method, the Spirit instead guides us into all truth, and enables this congregation at least to see the new covenant not simply emerging from the words of Jesus but going all the way back to the Psalms and the prophets. Theologians speak about Spirit hermeneutics; this is Spirit hermeneutics at its best: taking the text of Scripture and, by the Spirit, driving it home to the hearts of the listening congregation.

Again, it is important to repeat that this celebration of charismatic preaching should in no way minimize the importance of other charismatic gifts, nor to conflate preaching completely with prophecy. It is important we recognize the place for the whole panoply of charismatic gifts, including healing and miracles. This has been one of the important legacies of the charismatic renewal. Indeed, for all of our commitment to the text in preaching, there is a very real sense in which Paul admits a certain irrationality about particular charismatic gifts. What is the phenomenon of speaking in tongues, as it is commonly referred to, but a by-passing of the mind (1 Cor. 14.14)? But what is often overlooked in Paul’s adumbration of gift is not only the pastoral importance of limiting the public manifestation of ecstatic irrationality but, more importantly, the inclusion of what we might understand as preaching within this list of graces. As scholars point out, and as practitioners need increasingly to realize, the word of wisdom in that infamous list of gifts in 1 Corinthians 13 is not that specific ability to know the mind of Christ for a specific situation, any more than a word of knowledge is a specific message for the lady on the third row in a red jumper. Not withstanding God’s ability to act in such ways, it is clearly not what is being referred to. Rather, the word of wisdom in the context of 1 Corinthians 2, in particular where Paul expounds on the wisdom of the cross, is first and foremost ‘to be found among those who give spiritual utterances that proclaim Christ crucified in this highly “wisdom” conscious community’ (Fee, 1987, p. 592). In other words, at the heart of a church in pursuit of spiritual gifts is a celebration of the scandalous particularity of gospel speech. The word of knowledge that Paul places alongside the word of wisdom is not, we suggest, some esoteric gnosis but rather a fresh articulation of the grace that has freely been given to us in the gospel.

How this is done, and in what context, is a matter for debate. Again, we must be careful not to reify a particular style of preaching. But in so far as early Christianity is to some extent a spill over from the synagogue, then it is no surprise that the new wine of the Spirit manifests, to some extent, in lection, text and word. Far from being an antipathy to the charismatic, preaching ought more readily to be understood as its adjunct.

Conclusion

Just recently, on a trip home from West Wales, I happened to drive through the small town of Newcastle Emlyn. Recalling that the famous Welsh preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones was buried there, I decided to look up his grave, and sure enough, after searching for about twenty minutes, I found a very modest, inconspicuous tombstone with a simple Scripture text: ‘For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.’ Anyone who knows anything about this celebrated preacher will know that this text was his watchword; whatever else the Doctor’s ministry at Westminster Chapel represented it was the recovery of this Pauline gospel and, alongside it, the recovery of the pulpit.

What is less well known, however, is that towards the end of his life, as he came to reflect on preaching, he began to speculate as to whether preaching was in fact what the Bible understood as prophecy. For sure, we must guard against mere pulpiteering. Lloyd-Jones was aware, more than anyone, of the temptation to mere oratory (1971, pp. 13–14). But in the end, what we do in the pulpit is not unlike what the prophets did in the Old Testament: calling the people of God back to the grand themes of covenant and obedience. As P. T. Forsyth put it: ‘The Christian preacher is not the successor of the Greek orator, but of the Hebrew prophet’ (1907, p. 1). Furthermore, Lloyd-Jones foresaw that for preaching to be effective it must carry the same unction as the prophetic word. To be sure, we need to guard against mere emotionalism in the pulpit; as a Welshman, Lloyd-Jones was more aware than most of the dangers of the hywl. But that aside, for preaching to be truly gospel speech it must carry unction – the divine afflatus, to use his words (1971, pp. 304–25). And if charismatic renewal is to continue to make a contribution to the wider body of Christ it is important, it seems to me, to recapture not just the ebullience of praise but the essentially charismatic nature of the preaching ministry of the Church. Unlike other traditions in the Christian Church, charismatic renewal has the potential to espouse not only a rich doctrine of the Spirit but also a high view of the Word. But in order to do that, the notion that the Word and the Spirit are deemed to be antithetical to one another needs finally to be dispelled.

Note

1. See Deere (1996) for a good example of this odd dualism in popular charismatic understanding of preaching.

References

Brueggemann, W., 1989, Finally Comes the Poet, Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Deere, J., 1996, Surprised by the Voice of God, Eastbourne: Kingsway.

Fee, G. D., 1987, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Forsyth, P. T., 1907, Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, London: Independent.

Lloyd-Jones, D. Martyn, 1971, Preaching and Preachers, London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Long, T. G., 1997, Hebrews, Interpretation, Louisville: John Knox.

Norrington, D., 1996, To Preach or Not to Preach? Carlisle: Paternoster.

Willimon, W., 2005, Proclamation and Theology, Nashville: Abingdon Press.