The Preacher – God’s Voice

Rev. Bill Deenick. Trowel & Sword. April 1986

Preamble: How do we see the role of a minister/pastor/preacher in today’s world? Is it a job or is it a calling? Bill Deenick writes in this article, as the title suggests, that the preacher carries a great responsibility. He doesn’t mince words. He quotes Miskotte when he writes that “under this high calling it is a hazardous thing to enter a pulpit and preach”. Why? Read it from one who took his preaching and his calling as a minister extremely seriously.

The Preacher – God’s Voice

Is it giving too much honour and authority to the ministry of the Word when we say that in his preaching the minister is God’s voice to his people, in the same way as he is the people’s voice to God in prayer?

Some may feel that it is. Ministers are only human and we are not like Rome; we have no infallible magisterium, i.e., teaching office. Not even when they speak ex cathedra, from their beloved pulpit, can our preachers claim their word to be God’s infallible Word.

Most Protestant ministers introduce their messages somewhat like this: ‘Let us meditate on this text and see what it means to you and me’, or, ‘Let us share what we may believe the Holy Spirit to say in this text’.

A man no longer deserves to be listened to (at least not in the worship service) when he is not sure that on God’s behalf he preaches the gospel.

In the January issue of T.&S. I confessed that I am tempted to lose interest and to switch off when preachers announce that they want to share with me things they have found or they believe. A man no longer deserves to be listened to (at least not in the worship service) when he is not sure that on God’s behalf he preaches the gospel.

The reasons why ministers shy away from expressing a higher view of preaching are varied. It may be that they merely want to sound a little less formal. They like the conversational style. They want to create a feeling of togetherness. We are in this together, are we not? You know something and I know something; let us see to what conclusion we may come with all of us together.

But also, the preacher in question may have a deficient view of the ministry itself. He may not consider his call to the ministry of the Word as something so very special. He himself is only one of the elders, one of the people; and he cannot see his calling in the ministry as a distinctive N.T. ambassadorship for Christ in which he is not merely one of the people or one of the elders but a man with a special mission, sent by Christ to speak the Word of God to them.

However, in the present theological climate there is one more reason why preachers may prefer to meditate on a text instead of preaching the Word of God from it. They may hesitate to identify any particular Bible verse or passage with the Word of God. They may prefer to look at their text as one man’s (Isaiah’s, Paul’s) personal testimony to their experience of the Word of God, or, as the early Church’s recollection of Jesus’ life and teaching. And they may not be prepared to consider that one man’s or the early Church’s understanding of God’s self-revelation in Christ as necessarily wholly truthful. Consequently they hesitate to present their understanding of the text as anything more than a personal insight into the mystery of God’s Word to man.

It is interesting to listen to what John Calvin has to say about the nature of the ministry. You can read it in Book IV. 3. 1 of the Institutes. He considers the preacher to be ‘as it were, God’s substitute’, representing God’s own person. God is doing his work by the lips of men. The preacher in the pulpit may be a feeble man sprung from the dust; yet, he speaks in God’s name and we are to obey his words. The preacher is only a human person like we all are; he may even be ‘inferior’ to us in certain respects, in intellect or in learning; yet, we are to listen to him as God’s servant sent to minister the gospel to us. Some church members may be better equipped linguistically or better behaved morally than the preacher; nonetheless, when he preaches the Word of God and so publicly handles one of the keys of the Kingdom, he is to be listened to and to be believed.

In Calvin’s theology the call to the ministry is a call to a very special service to God and his people. One of the keys of God’s Kingdom is entrusted to him in a special way, viz., in the public proclamation of God’s Word.

In 1972, upon his appointment as professor of pastoral theology at the Reformed Church Seminary at Kampen, the Netherlands, Dr. K. Runia in his inaugural address referred to Luther. For Luther the very essence of the gospel is at stake in the preaching of it. Unless it is preached there is no gospel. It can be written down in books and passed on in pamphlets, but it is through the living word and voice resounding throughout the world that God’s message is openly proclaimed.

Runia also quotes the well-known statement of Heinrich Bullinger, the Swiss Reformer, in the Second Helvetic Confession: ‘the preaching of the Word of God IS the Word of God’. So the German, the French and the Swiss Reformation agree on this: when the Word is preached, God himself speaks.

This high view of the ministry has not always been maintained. Under influences from outside (rationalism, romanticism, liberalism, marxism) preachers preferred to see themselves as teachers of doctrine, promoters of religion, specialists in spiritual experience, experts in moral counselling, campaigners for social justice. But wherever there was a renewal of Reformational theology preaching was again understood as administering God’s Word to his Church and to the world.

A hundred years ago Dr. A. Kuyper e.g., addressed himself to the question whether there is any difference between the preaching of temporarily licensed lay’ preachers and that of a minister, lawfully examined and called by the Church and commissioned to the ministry of the Word with the laying on of hands by the Church’s ministers. Kuyper says: yes, there is. The ‘lay’ preacher speaks as one of the people, from the midst of the congregation, for mutual comfort and encouragement; the minister has been called and commissioned to speak on God’s behalf.

When you go to church and listen to a sermon you do not listen to some Reverend gentleman offering his thoughts on some religious topic, giving you some spiritual advice. No, in that pulpit you see a servant of God, an ambassador who makes it clear what God has to say to you.

Fifty years later, G.R. Visser, in a book ‘Contact with the Church’, explains to converts who have recently joined the Church and who wonder what it is all about in the worship service: when you go to church and listen to a sermon you do not listen to some Reverend gentleman offering his thoughts on some religious topic, giving you some spiritual advice. No, in that pulpit you see a servant of God, an ambassador who makes it clear what God has to say to you. As it says in the Heidelberg Catechism: the sermon is a key. To preach is to use the keys of the Kingdom, to open and to shut the entrance to the Kingdom. Every sermon is a verdict; it finds guilty but acquits, or it condemns; it sets free or shuts out. So you see that preaching is a serious business. It is not an exercise in public relations; it is not an effort to sell a spiritual cure, to propagate an idea or a system. It is a verdict in the name of the highest judge. At the close of the sermon you ought to know where you stand, whether you have been acquitted and set free, or found guilty and shut out.

Preaching is a serious business. It is not an exercise in public relations; it is not an effort to sell a spiritual cure, to propagate an idea or a system. It is a verdict in the name of the highest judge.

All of this advances a very high view of the ministry. But do we not have to be realistic? Our ministers are only very human, limited in their talents, not always very lucid or logical in their understanding of the message or in the way they present it. Undoubtedly, at times God may use their sermons to speak to us, but can we really say (as Bullinger formulated it) that the Word of God preached IS the Word of God? Is it not more realistic to say that in its preaching the Church makes an effort (an all too human effort) to give account of what here and now it understands the gospel to mean?

Indeed, most preachers would be much more comfortable with the latter approach. It is much easier, and it sounds a great deal more humble, to say: ‘let us see what we understand of the text and what we may get out of it for ourselves’, than to say: ‘I preach the Word of God to you’.

Yet, if they are to be Verbi Divini Minister (v.d.m.), servant of the Word of God, they have no choice. Paul said to Timothy and through him to all preachers: Preach the Word’, II Tim. 2:4.

For its approach to preaching Reformation theology has taken its model from the apostolic letters. Reformed preachers address God’s people in the same way as did the apostles; not with the unique authority of the first apostles who were eyewitnesses of the resurrection of Christ and not with the special authority of the Holy Scripture, but still with the authority which the Word of God has in itself.

Preaching is not worth the trouble unless it is done with an authority that is derived from Christ himself who as the Word of God in our human flesh and condition sends out his ambassadors to represent him.

Not all Reformed preachers have expressed these principles in their sermons as explicitly and consistently as did the Amsterdam preachers of the nineteen thirties and forties: S.G. de Graaf (Promise and Deliverance) and D. Sikkel. Always addressing their congregations as: ‘Beloved in Christ’, they would make sure to introduce their message with: ‘From this text I preach the Word of God to you concerning…’  They were not the first ones to do so. Before them for a great many years J.C. Sikkel and others had done so too. They knew that preaching is not worth the trouble unless it is done with an authority that is derived from Christ himself who as the Word of God in our human flesh and condition sends out his ambassadors to represent him.

Naturally, the preacher who wants to put these principles into practice carries a heavy responsibility. He cannot just go into his pulpit with a few hastily prepared notes to address the ‘good folk here present’ or his ‘beloved audience. He will have to be sure about his exegesis, he will have to know all of his Bible well and needs to be convinced that the way he applies the Scripture is lawful and relevant. He will have to know for certain that his message is biblical through and through and that God speaks through him. Not as if he claimed infallibility for himself or for all the details of his sermon. He knows that he carries the treasure of Christ’s message in an earthen vessel. He also knows that he himself always remains subject to God’s Word in Scripture. His sermons are not above scrutiny. The elders are there to keep a careful watch over his preaching. Consequently he will have to stay close to his Bible, and especially to his text. If he has no biblical authority he has no authority at all.

It is a hazardous thing to enter a pulpit and preach.

..difficult is the path and narrow are the stairs to the pulpit.

It has been said (Miskotte) that under this high calling it is a hazardous thing to enter a pulpit and preach. It would possibly be better to say that it cannot be done but by faith and prayer, and even then with much trepidation. Because, as Miskotte also said, difficult is the path and narrow are the stairs to the pulpit. Someone once said: ‘A sermon is twenty minutes in which to raise the dead!  And Hageman wrote: ‘What happens in church is the Lord being present and speaking to his own; not a preacher speaking about what God has once said. We must give up expecting sermons to provide us with new information and expect them instead to give us resurrection and new life.

If all the above is true, the Reformation Church will have to abide by its historic position, viz., that the call to the ministry is a distinct calling, to be distinguished from all other callings in Christ’s Kingdom, also from those other callings to which the Church ordains, the offices of elder and deacon.

Of late there has been a tendency to refer to the minister by his Christian name as one of the elders: elder John and elder Archi.  We should leave that kind of thing to the Mormons. This fad for the exclusive use of Christian names in public notices I find peculiar and in English linguistically questionable; but if that is what people want I can live with it. The Lord himself and his apostles were known largely by their first names. In my own church my two ministers are known as pastor Bill and pastor Cor. I am sure that I will get used to it. In any case by the use of the term pastor an effort is made to recognise their specific calling albeit not very successfully since elders too have a pastoral calling. Lutherans and Baptists have pastors since they have no elders. The Reformed and Presbyterian Church has always had ministers. They, while being elders with the elders in their pastoral and ruling duties, have their distinct calling in their public teaching and preaching service. In this they represent their Sender and substitute for him.

To say it with John Calvin once more: ‘God does not dwell among us in visible presence so as to declare his will to us by his own lips… He uses the ministry of men by making them as it were his substitutes, not by transferring his rights and honour to them, but only doing his work by their lips…  He declares his condescension towards us employing men to perform the function of his ambassadors in the world to be interpreters of his secret will; in short to represent his own person…  He accustoms us to obey his Word though preached by men like ourselves, or, it may be our inferiors in worth…  We give the best proof of our piety and obedience by listening with docility to his servant, though not in any respect our superior’.  And Calvin concludes: “Neither are the light and heat of the sun, nor meat and drink, so necessary to sustain and cherish the present life, as is the apostolic and pastoral office to preserve a Church in the earth’.

Bill Deenick.

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