The Theological Ruminator
Exactly. Great words. Wise prof.
That really is profound, and all too true. Tell me, were you wearing a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows and smoking a pipe when you wrote this?
I wish I was that cool. That would actually be my brother-in-law, Brian.
It strikes me that the training of previous generation of pastors,those that may make up a large majority, of "senior" pastors today, were trained in an exact opposite fashion, if my experience of listening to 20+ years of sermons is any indication. Every verse is isolated and intended to have its own application. I think this has the effect of increasing biblical illiteracy because people never learn the narrative and meta-narrative of Scripture, but only individual snippets that are forgotten from one week to the next. Is there a way to effect the current church leadership here or are we stuck until they begin to retire?
I'd say stuck. But maybe I'm just pessimistic. I think people learn how to do things and if it works it's going to take a virtual tsunami to change how they go about things. Old dogs have a tough time learning new tricks most of the time.
But I'll have to say that I'm not very good at preaching from narrative thing. I see it now, but only dimly.
Someone hire an editor for that fourth comment. That guy went comma crazy!
I, didn't, really, find, anything, strange.
It's not just that a lot of pastors pick one verse and preach on it, a lot of times they use it to proof-text something. This is especially true in topical sermons, and when a preacher spews out a lot of irrelevant verses from memory it makes them look credible. I guess that's what happens when ministers try to take a systematic approach to scritpure without first studying it book by book or author by author. Really, I guess the problem is placing systematic theology before Biblical theology, instead of the other way around.
Good point, Jon. By the way, is anyone else finding my comment server (Haloscan) acting up lately?
I, for, one, hate, your, comment, thingy//?>>>
Too many comments lost that I didn't have the energy to redo. All two of them.
Yeah, I haven't had too much trouble until the last few weeks, and now it's acting up bunch. I'm not sure why - I can have blogger host my comments, but their method is a lot clunkier and slow.
Commenting by HaloScan
