Practical Preaching, Please

The church needs to dare to engage its preaching with the material world as it is connected to the spiritual world. It needs to cease exclusive fixation with our inner spiritual/psychic states and gaze outward from time to time at the creation and the links of causation that emerge into our view as more or less proximate to actions. We need robust teaching on matters of practice wherein second causes are not despised, but established. Liberals so-called want to make sin into mere system error; we are basically okay, but our environments are the problem, especially the social environment. We make an opposite error; we want the heart to be changed but make no development of its interaction with the material and social world.

There is a world of homiletically undeveloped ethics here. The Spirit of the world has made off with these ethical opportunities while we have been reviewing our basic historic doctrines for the umpteenth time, lest we make those dreadful errors of the fifteenth century church. We may need a second Reformation to redress our neglect in these matters. We can rebuke Johannes Tetzel’s errors while tolerating those of Charles Darwin in our very pulpits. We acknowledge the Puritan iconoclasts in our history while tolerating the worship of nature in environmentalism. Aaron’s calf today would not be golden, but green. We recognize the reprehensible militancy of the late medieval Church but not the military hubris of our own present empire. In economics we know that Scripture says our silver has become dross; we understand that in an abstract way, but not one Christian in a hundred could connect that ultimate revelation with the proximate statement of Gresham’s law and its illustration in 1965 when silver coins disappeared from circulation as dross coins were introduced. We can recite, “Render unto Caesar ... and render unto God,” but have surrendered nearly everything to Caesar since we have had no explicit instruction in discerning the difference in the claims. We have a catechism which tells us to preserve life by all lawful means, but leave Christians on their own when faced with feeding tubes and desperate surgical options at the tail end of the life span. Christians sit on juries deciding the fate of a parent charged with the crime of spanking his child. Their uneasiness has no focus. They have never been taught about jury nullification or the relevant history of William Penn in this regard.

Excerpt from "On Proximate Causes: A Neglected Aspect of Modern Reformed Preaching"