Almost as if he was responding to my rant on “Fortune cookie preaching” this past week, Al Mohler tackles the “Problem with preaching”, and he again displays some sort of “magic potion” approach to the Bible; that all one has to do is “Preach the Word” and people will magically flock to repentance.

Now, I DO believe that there is something holy and special and different about the message and the story that is proclaimed through the Scriptures. But for Mohler and his SBC cronies, it is all too obvious and “set” for them exactly what that is. You can hear them say, often, “It says what it says” and “means what it means”, but to hear them talk, one would think that the only thing talked about in the Bible is abortion, homosexuality, and prayer in schools, and the centrality of the Bible itself, supplanting Christ himself as the sole criteria for faith.

Mohler attacks the idea that the sermon should start with an assesment of what the audience needs to hear (more of the fallacy of the “magic potion” approach, akin to selecting one’s text by letting the Bible fall open and preaching whatever one’s finger points to with their eyes closed). He contrasts (good guy-bad guy) Richard Baxter and Harry Emerson Fosdick, and how one (the first) preached as if it were their last sermon (hellfire, “salvation before it’s too late” motif) and the other , as Mohler so smugly states it:

Focusing on so-called “perceived needs” and allowing these needs to set the preaching agenda inevitably leads to a loss of biblical authority and biblical content in the sermon. Yet, this pattern is increasingly the norm in many evangelical pulpits. Fosdick must be smiling from the grave.

Mohler actually separates here, by inference, any “sensitivity” to one’s audience; basically eschews the responsibility of the communicator to “address” one’s audience (and ironically, fails to do what the Bible itself did with it’s source material: address the community and its context). He also implies, however intentionally, that it is not possible to be both relevant and Biblical (and from the examples they set in their preaching, it seems particularly hard for the “approved” Southern Baptist sermon to do so—- anything else would be “un-American”, since it seems to me that the heart of the Biblical message is love for neighbor, for the least of these, and for justice—-to actually attempt to apply these themes to out lives today would seemingly call for some sharp and rebuking words for our president and his policies and tendencies, but this is FAR from their minds. In fact, they have set this kind of thinking and response to scripture as a kind of “pitfall”, as a sign of “departure” from the Bible into some kind of “liberal never-never land”. Well, so was aboilitionist thought. Fundamentalist preachers thundered against the idea that slavery shoudl be abolished. It was “right there in the Bible” that this was ordained by God ; the southern way of life was synonomous with Scripture.

Mohler sums it up with another ironic doozy:

The problem is, of course, that the sinner does not know what his most urgent need is. He is blind to his need for redemption and reconciliation with God, and focuses on potentially real but temporal needs such as personal fulfillment, financial security, family peace, and career advancement. Too many sermons settle for answering these expressed needs and concerns, and fail to proclaim the Word of Truth.

And what of the “keepers”, “guardians” and “interpreters” of “the Word”? The “Word of Truth” is “alternately” restricted by their narrow conservative agenda, one which also “misses the mark” and transforms the Bible into a platform agenda that adrresses surface “morality” and lets slide the monstrous corporate, nationalistic agendas that affect millions (albeit these millions are often removed from our lives…they’re “over there”…..but if one considers environmental inpacts (which the majority conservative Churches applaud the present administration’s reversal of environmental protection policies)….then one can see how “convenient” and “opiate-like” this theology really is.

And God forbid that anyone would arrive at a “Biblically based” conclusion that departs from thier “cultural Church supporting” agenda? Those who do so are simply duped by the “liberal agenda” (just like they’re NOT similarly duped by the Conservative one). Jim Wallis of Sojourners and The Church of the Saviour, both based in Washington, DC, have long striven for a “Biblical” lifestyle, and have non-partisanly sounded a prophetic call to the country to “do justice” and other similar “Speaking the truth to power” responsibilities, while encouraging and resourcing the People of God, the Church, to discern their calling to address various social ills and instead proclaim and live out “kingdom values” as if God might want us to actually TRY it. These groups are often found on the offensive from Democratic presidents as well. Jim Wallis was often critical of Bill Clinton and Lyndon Johnson. (Johnson goes back to the days when there wasn’t this mass identification of Republican/Christian and Democrat/liberal, secularist).

If the Fundamentalists truly “let the Bible speak for itself”, we’d see much more attention to passages such as “let justice rtoll down like waters” and “the least of these”. Walllis often talks about how there’s “the Bible” and then there’s “the American Bible”, with its own “canon within the canon”, avoidig and even removing all signs of “prophetic voice” where it doesn’t serve the staus quo.
As in Jesus’ day, the very religious leaders who have the loudest voices are the ones who are throwing out the baby with the bath water. They miss the deeper underlying themes and motivations of love and compassion and instead emphasize the letter (“correct belief” is more important than lifestyle and ethics) and essentially “neuter” the Gospel.