He is Not Silent: Preaching in a Postmodern World

by R. Albert Mohler Jr.

Second, Paul says that he intends with his preaching to warn.

What does it mean to admonish? Put starkly, it means to get in one’s face. With our current ideas of personal privacy and personal autonomy, most of us today feel that no one has the right to tell us what to believe, how to act, or what we must correct in our behavior or thinking or actions.

Sadly, the failure of this task of correcting, rebuking, and admonishing has led to many churches having become little more than voluntary associations with a steeple.

Third, Paul says that the task of preaching involves teaching, or more specifically, instructing the people of God about the Scriptures and applying those Scriptures to their lives.

We must place every text we preach firmly within the grand, sweeping story of the Bible.

When we preach, we must remember that what we proclaim is not just a little story, and not just a series of little stories. It is the big picture.

this is one of the great weaknesses of so much evangelical preaching in these days. Our people can know so much, and yet know nothing, all at the same time. They can have a deep repository of biblical facts and stories, and yet know absolutely nothing about how any of it fits together, or why any of it matters beyond the wee little “moral of the story.”

From Moses to the prophets, He is the focus of every single word of the Bible. Every verse of Scripture finds its fulfillment in Him, and every story in the Bible ends with Him. That is what our people need to understand—that the Bible is not just a compendium of good short stories, but a grand, life-encompassing metanarrative of God’s work of redemption in the world.

The most important divergence between the biblical worldview and a naturalistic worldview is the place of human beings. Are we merely some kind of biological accident in the midst of a cosmological accident? Or are we, as Scripture teaches, the only creatures made in the image of God, and therefore the only ones with the ability to know God and have a sense of accountability to Him? How you answer that question will affect everything else you do in life—from sexuality to the sanctity of life to the purposefulness of our labor to the meaning of life itself.

This is, quite literally, the most basic and most fundamental of questions: Are we made for a purpose, or are we the accidental product of a chaotic universe?

Why is it that so many Christians can have their faith rocked in the wake of a natural disaster? Why are they left asking the question “Where was God?” as if God somehow messed up by allowing this to happen? Why are so many Christians driven to shocked despair when elected officials don’t bring the results they expected, or when the culture continues its march into depravity despite their best efforts? The reason is because those Christians do not understand the fall.

Rather than being creatures who worship God in the perfection of Eden, naked and unashamed before Him, we are now reduced to weaving fig leaves together to try to cover our own nakedness. We are ashamed, because we cannot even look at ourselves without understanding that we are marred by a deep and profound corruption.

If we think we are essentially good—or even morally neutral—beings, we delude ourselves. The fall explains why we are who we are, why we do what we do, why we hide what we hide. It explains why human society is as it is, why entertainment is as it is, why our spouses are as they are. It explains why our children do not need to be taught how to sin, and why we have locks on our doors. It explains why we are never satisfied, never content, never truly at peace.

Every time we preach, we need to create dissonance in the minds of our hearers. We need to declare our wretchedness, our sin, and our powerlessness, and we need to admit frankly that we can’t solve this problem. And then we proclaim the gospel. We show our people how God Himself did what they were wholly unable to do. We tell them that the problem of sin was only solved when the sinless Son of God died on the cross as a substitute for His people.

Many of our people are dying of spiritual starvation because they do not know the Bible’s whole story, and thus they do not find themselves in the story. True, they know many little stories. They have a bag of facts. But a little bit of knowledge is not a big picture. As we preach, we need to bring every text into accountability with the big story of Scripture.

One of the most lamentable developments of the last several centuries has been theology’s transformation into an academic discipline more associated with the university than the church.

As many observers have noted, today’s pastors are often pulled in many directions simultaneously—and the theological vocation is often lost amidst the pressing concerns of a ministry that has been reconceived as something other than what Paul intended for Timothy. The managerial revolution has left many pastors feeling more like administrators than theologians, dealing with matters of organizational theory before ever turning to the deep truths of God’s Word and the application of these truths to everyday life. The rise of therapeutic concerns within the culture means that many pastors, and many of their church members, believe that the pastoral calling is best understood as a “helping profession.” As such, the pastor is seen as someone who functions in a therapeutic role in which theology is often seen as more of a problem than a solution.

role and responsibilities of the pastor. Today’s pastors must recover and reclaim the pastoral calling as inherently and cheerfully theological. Otherwise, pastors will be nothing more than communicators, counselors, and managers of congregations that have been emptied of the gospel and of biblical truth.

the pastor must learn to discern different levels of theological importance. I identify three distinct orders of doctrine in terms of importance.

First-order doctrines are those that are fundamental and essential to the Christian faith.

The pastor’s theological instincts should seize upon any compromise of doctrines such as the full deity and humanity of Christ, the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of atonement, a...

Second-order doctrines are those that are essential to church life and necessary for the ordering of the local church, but that, in themselves, do not define the gospel.

Doctrines at this level include those most closely related to ecclesiology and the architecture of theological systems.

Third-order doctrines are those that may be the ground for fruitful theological discussion and debate, but that do not threaten the fellowship of the local congregation or denomination.

Postmodernism first developed among academics and artists, but it has quickly spread throughout the culture. At the most basic level, postmodernism refers to the passing of modernity and the rise of a new cultural movement.

While most arguments throughout history have focused on rival claims to truth, postmodernism rejects the very notion of truth as fixed, universal, objective, or absolute.

According to the deconstructionists, one influential sect among postmodernists, all truth is socially constructed. That is, social groups construct their own “truth” in order to serve their own interests, but what is “true” for one group is not necessarily “true” for any other.

Our claim is not to preach one truth among many, one Savior among many, or one gospel among many. We do not believe that the Christian gospel is a socially constructed truth but the Truth that sets sinners free from sin—and is objectively, universally, historically true. As the late Francis Schaeffer instructed, the Christian church must contend for “true truth.”

As Christians, we do not present the gospel as one narrative among many true narratives or merely as “our” narrative alongside the authentic narratives of others. We cannot retreat to claim that biblical truth is merely true for us. Our claim is that the Bible is the Word of God for all—a claim that is deeply offensive to the postmodern worldview, which charges all who claim universal truth with imperialism and oppression.

When truth is denied, therapy remains. The critical question shifts from “What is true?” to “What makes me feel good?” This cultural trend has been developing during past decades, but has reached epic proportions in the last few years.

How should we approach the task of preaching in the face of such confusion? In an age when the reality of truth is itself denied, when most persons think their most basic problems are rooted in a lack of self-esteem, and when personal choice is the all-determining reality of the marketplace, how should we go about proclaiming and defending a gospel that declares to people that they are sinners in need of the one and only Savior? I would argue that at this critical time of cultural and intellectual transition, the task of preaching must be understood as an apologetic calling.

First, Christian proclamation in a postmodern culture begins in a provoked spirit (Acts 17:16).

This was the city of Pericles, Plato, and Socrates. But Paul was not impressed with the faded glory. He saw men and women in need of a Savior. This text reminds us that a proper Christian apologetic begins in spiritual concern, not in intellectual snobbery or scorn.

I fear that we have become too acculturated, too blind, and too unimpressed with the paganisms and idolatries all around us. We betray a comfort level that Paul would see as scandalous. Where is the gripping realization that millions of men and women are slaves to the idols of our age? Where is the courage to confront the idols on their own ground?

Second, Christian proclamation in a postmodern culture is focused on gospel proclamation (Acts 17:17).

The goal of apologetic preaching is not to win an argument but to win souls. Apologetics separated from evangelism is unknown in the New Testament, and it is clearly foreign to the model offered by the apostle Paul.

Third, Christian proclamation in a postmodern culture assumes a context of spiritual confusion (Acts 17:18–21).

The Athenians and their tourists loved to spend their time telling or hearing something new—but what Paul preached was simply too much. Americans today are like the Athenians in more ways than they know. Consumers of meaning just as much as they are of cars and clothing, Americans will test-drive new spiritualities and try on a whole series of lifestyles. To many, the gospel is just too strange, too countercultural, too propositional, and too exclusive. To contend for the gospel and biblical morality in this culture is to run the risk of being cited for “hate speech.” We must assume a context of spiritual confusion, and this is often now a hostile confusion. The gospel sounds not only strange but threatening to the local deities.