December 31, 2014
The Pulpit
On
his web site a pastor had two erroneous comments: “Churches who do not give
prayer a high priority are churches without God’s power.” And, “A church member
not in a small group or Sunday school class is not fully committed to the
body.” During a recent sermon the speaker, an older gentleman, was substituting
for the regular pastor. He humbly said, “If I speak anything from the pulpit
that is my opinion please forgive me. A man is to get up and speak the oracles
of God and if he can’t do a little of that, then don’t stand up and speak.” It occurs
to me that many web sites and blogs have an identity problem. They give opinions,
but they do so under the guise of the pulpit — the power, respectability and
authority associated with the pulpit.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Gail;
-----This mindset that “I speak the oracles of God from the pulpit” unsettles me a bit. It is one of the reasons I’ve always tended to keep one well stretched arm’s length between me and preachers. They seem to be the bigger reason for strife, unrest, and divisions in the church. People look up to them quite less than they do angels, but far more than they do any other human. They celebrate, praise, and even glorify them, carefully swallowing every concept with the very words their preacher precisely sprinkled upon it.
-----The use of heuristics is a very dangerous social process. Yet the burden of verifying by analysis and comparison concepts revealed to us by other people is so tedious and time consuming that it would be impractical if it were not so important. By it’s import, then, a few folks carefully verify concepts they’ve been fed (the Beroeans, for example,) while the overwhelming majority accept or reject what they hear based on a great variety of non-logical procedures. These are called “heuristics”, a term difficult to pin down between how dictionaries define it and how it is used.
-----One heuristic everyone tends to use at least somewhat is to ascribe truth to whatever is said by a greatly admired and respected person. The damage caused by this idiotic human trait is almost as expansive as it is important to use, not abuse, but properly use. I automatically receive every word of Jesus as true in the way He meant it to be true (if I can discern that.) But this heuristic acceptance is backed up by the intersection of Scripture, history, portents of nature, and psychological improvements consequential to obeying Scripture. One of the many reasons I raise my entire mental being to Him is the abjectly rational way he has approached mankind. Everything He has done has been accompanied by proofs of His claims, though those proofs often require careful, persevering search. Who besides God has done that for us before stepping into the pulpit? Did Barack Obama do that for us before stepping onto the campaign platform? Did Hitler? No. These men can say fancy things like, “hope and change” and “we are the master race” and “before there can be any blessed addition, there must be some blessed subtraction” while many other influential types point at them and hype. Pretty soon multitudes are giving them the respect only Jesus, Moses, and Paul deserve.
-----Preachers have studied harder and longer and deeper than most all of us. They commit (or should be committing) more of their time to prayerful and humble seeking of godly perspectives from which come truer insights into both the Scriptures and the world. But that yet does not elevate them to the status of “oraclers from God.” Every person’s knowledge is to some extent shaped by his own biases and inclinations, and thus is fraught with at least minor distortions and unrealities. The more preaching is received as oracles from God, the greater His church is fractured by denominationalism.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
Post a Comment