The Radical Resurgence

8.    Context and Content in  N.T. Preaching.

Having sought in vain for a particular concept of preaching to serve as a criterion for church and ministry, let us keep the word as a general label for the varieties of verbal ministry in N.T. times.

Only by guess and surmise do we construct a notion of what the early church services were like….. Apostles, elders, and teachers must all have preached in divers other ways, but without any hint that one kind of speech has priority.   Yet there is one genuine distinction. C.H. Dodd has demonstrated that when speaking  to non-Christians the early church did have a most specific message.  Here the “proclamation” spoke of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, followed by a summons to repent and believe.

It is clearly possible to distinguish from this those teaching processes in the church which presuppose the listener’s faith……it did make a difference to the N.T. preacher whether his listener was in the church or outside of it, a difference not only in tactics but in content.

Thus we have come upon a new dimension of definition, and a much more solid one – “proclamation” defined not by a specific office but by a specific listener, namely the unbeliever.   But this is clearly not what the Reformation meant, for the whole concern of Reformation theology  was to justify restructuring the organised church without shaking its foundations.  The Reformation retained infant baptism and state-coerced church membership, thus the distinction between believers and unbelievers, members and non-members could not become visible.  The true church had to be defined independent of its membership.  “The church is where the word is properly preached and the sacraments properly administered” is a criterion applying to the pastor and the synod, not the congregation or the Christian.