Organic preaching?
5 05 2008Just now I am writing about Bavinck’s theology of organic inspiration. Richard Gaffin’s excellent God’s Word in Servant-Form: Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck on the Doctrine of Scripture has been a brilliant help.
Gaffin summarises Bavinck as follows:
Bavinck is opposed to an isolated, atomistic approach to the words of Scripture that would find in each a divine message detached from the context and the focus of Scripture in all its parts on Christ. He does not, however, reject plenary, verbal inspiration as such. Far from it, he in fact intends to say that the Spirit’s inscripturating activity, with the strictest authorial effect, extends to the last detail of the text.
Bavinck has a great theological description of Christ as the ‘organic centre’ of all divine revelation: all revelation before Christ points towards him, all revelation after Christ radiates forward from him.
My question is this: if you believe in organic inspiration (a la Bavinck), what does that look like in your preaching? I suspect it probably means you won’t preach sermons that, while they may be exegetically based, take an ‘atomistic, detached’ approach to the text. By that, I mean that if your text does not explicitly mention Jesus, neither will you.
The thing is, when I first started studying homiletics, exegesis etc, I found a lot of people who said I had two choices: (1) always preach the text, which means not always preaching Christ; and (2) always preach Christ, but you are not always being exegetically responsible. I tended to choose the latter, as preaching Christ is always better than preaching anything else.
The beautiful thing I have found with organic inspiration is that it gives you a theologically robust Biblical model whereby you can preach sermons that are simultaneously exegetical/expository and utterly Christ-centred.
It is a real shame that (as far as I am aware) only one of Bavinck’s sermons was ever published. If I was a betting man, I would bet that his preaching was amazingly expository and richly Christ-centred. His written theological works certainly are full of Jesus.
Isn’t God good?
Ignorance of the Scriptures, says Jerome, is ignorance of Christ. Which tells us something about the Scriptures. Our Lord did say “they speak of Me” - and more, He speaks of Himself in them.
How interesting… this morning I was finishing off a chapter which included the following Bavinck quote:
‘If Scripture is the account of the revelation of God in Christ, it is bound to arouse the same opposition as Christ himself who came into the world for judgment and is “set for the fall and rising of many” (Luke 2.34)… Christ bore a cross, and the servant [Scripture] is not greater than the master. Scripture is the handmaiden of Christ. It shares in his defamation and arouses the hostility of sinful humanity… The believer’s confidence in Christ increases along with their confidence in Scripture and, conversely, ignorance of the Scriptures is automatically and proportionately ignorance of Christ (Jerome).’
- Reformed Dogmatics, 440.