In addition to their own jarring polemics and personal misfires, the New Atheists failed to realize that religion, especially Christianity, was the proverbial branch upon which they were sitting. For example, the freedom of expression depends on a number of assumptions, that there is objective truth, that it can be discovered, that it is accessible to people regardless of race or class, that belief should be free instead of coerced, that people have innate value, and that because of this value they should not be silenced. Every one of these ideas assumes the kind of world described in the Bible and mediated across centuries of Christian thought. Not one of these assumptions can be grounded in a purposeless world that is the product of only natural causes and processes.  

Though it’s not always clear when a movement is over, there are many indicators that suggest this is the case of the “New Atheism,” a cultural wave that rose in the 2000s and aggressively attacked religion in the guise of scientific rationalism. Despite the name, the New Atheism wasn’t really new, at least not in the sense of presenting new arguments. Instead, leveraging the global shock of 9/11, New Atheists pushed an anti-religious mood along with a vision of a society free from the cobwebs of religion, defined by scientific inquiry, free speech, and a morality not built on God or religious traditions. 
In 1996, prominent New Atheist Richard Dawkins articulated this mood in his acceptance speech for the “Humanist of the Year” Award: “I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils,” he said, “comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.” There was a commercial aspect to the New Atheism, with bumper stickers and T-shirts carrying well-worn slogans, such as one coined by Victor Stenger: “Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.”  
Though, at the time, it grew into somewhat of a cultural force and platformed a group of minor celebrities, the New Atheism now seems to have run out of steam. Divided by progressive politics and haunted by the obnoxious tone of many of its own founders, the movement is being devoured by other ideologies. Concepts like freedom of expression, scientific realism, and morality without God have all met their antitheses, often in clashes featuring the New Atheists themselves.  
One watershed moment was a conflict over the role of science. Just last year, the American Humanist Association revoked Richard Dawkins’ “Humanist of the Year” award for his long history of offensive tweets. For example, Dawkins told women who experience sexual harassment to “stop whining” and parents of babies with Down syndrome to “abort and try again.”
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In dealing with the text of Scripture, Lucas offers a lesson for preaching: hold the line. “The line” in his metaphor refers to Scripture’s plain instruction. He urges us against deviating above the line, saying more than the Bible says, and below the line, saying less than the Bible says. Below the line, we might imagine such errors as liberalism, partisan neo-evangelicalism, church-growth pragmaticism, etc.; above it, fanaticism, pietism, emotional Pentecostalism, etc. Against all of these deviations, our expository emphasis should be on the plain teaching of God’s Word.

When we consider examples of preaching in the Bible, many of us go immediately to the New Testament—and we’re not wrong to do so. It may surprise us, though, to discover that the Old Testament is replete with early examples of expository preaching. Consider this one from Nehemiah:
All the people gathered as one man into the square before the Water Gate. And they told Ezra the scribe to bring the Book of the Law of Moses that the LORD had commanded Israel. So Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could understand what they heard, on the first day of the seventh month. And he read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand. And the ears of all the people were attentive to the Book of the Law. And Ezra the scribe stood on a wooden platform that they had made for the purpose. … They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading. (Nehemiah 8:1–4, 8)
Ezra’s preaching was far from dull, for we’re told that “the ears of all the people were attentive” to him as he both read God’s Word and “gave the sense.” He proclaimed divine truth with a sense of liveliness that any preacher would do well to imitate. John Calvin, remarking on what happens in the act of preaching, wrote,
It is certain that if we come to church we shall not hear only a mortal man speaking but we shall feel (even by his secret power) that God is speaking to our souls, that he is the teacher …. He so touches us that the human voice enters into us and so profits us that we are refreshed and nourished by it ….
… [God] calls us to him as if he had his mouth open and we saw him there in person.1
Does the average church member have this picture in mind when he or she comes to hear the Word preached? Those under Ezra’s preaching certainly did. And if we wish for this to be true in our churches, we must pray zealously that God would break into our congregations, revealing His strength by His Word to our people. Getting to this place will require the hard work of diligent exposition.
So, what are the basics of expository preaching? To answer this question, we’ll examine its definition, dangers, and lessons through a biblical lens.
A Definition of Expository Preaching
Simply put, expository preaching is preaching that begins with the Bible. This doesn’t mean that every sermon must begin with the phrase “Please turn in your Bibles to such and such a passage,” although that is a good practice. Rather, beginning with the text means that regardless of the introductory content—whether a current event, a song lyric, or a pastoral issue—it’s immediately clear to our people that the biblical text has established the sermon’s agenda. The expositor allows Scripture to frame every part of his sermon. For this reason John Stott contended that “all true Christian preaching is expository preaching.”2
Exposition is more of a method than a style of preaching. Topical, devotional, evangelistic, textual, apologetic—these are all preaching styles. But as a method, exposition can be applied to a wide variety of sermon types as the occasion demands. What’s important in exposition is that the preacher and his people are anchored to the Bible, allowing the text to establish both the sermon’s framework and content.
Looking at it from another angle, we might ask of ourselves: “Does this sermon answer the ‘So what?’ question?” Exegesis answers the “What?” of the biblical text, exposition the “So what?” As such, it’s possible to preach exegetically without preaching expositionally. True exposition bridges the gap between, for example, Paul’s first-century letter to the Corinthians and the twenty-first century Christian. It always fuses the horizons of the world in which the individual lives with the world out of which the Scriptures come.
The Dangers of Expository Preaching
Given the case for exposition made above, considering its dangers may seem odd. But even good things can pose dangers if handled improperly. As preachers, we must guard against two assumptions: on the one hand, that our message is irrelevant; or, on the other hand, that our message is immediately relevant.
With the first assumption in mind, we should realize that we will almost always be preaching to at least a handful of skeptics. As we preach, they’ll think, This is irrelevant! This is nothing but a religious man giving a religious talk. Therefore, we must strive not only to offer good exegesis (helping the listener understand the text’s meaning) but also to establish its relevance in our hearer’s world.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, September 30, 2023
You need some sense of where you’re going long term—that could be supporting missionaries, it could be sending people to pastor elsewhere, it could be planting churches or sites, it could be growing until you’re of a size to do a particular thing (though I’m wary of this last one, because growth soon becomes its own goal; growth is only good when in service of other goals). These are all valid, other things will be too, and they are a unique vision in the sense that not every church will do the same things with their limited resources.

It’s common these days to expect a church to have a specific vision, often expressed in a pithy statement about what they will or won’t be seeking to do in their location. Sometimes it’s accompanied by a mission statement—which sometimes is the same thing, but at least in business speak isn’t—though these are more common in churches that drew on a slightly older stream of business insights.
Is this a good idea? I’ve gone on record as thinking that lots of churches in the spaces I move in have missed what the church is for, and think this can be symptom of the same thing.
However, we should distinguish carefully because there is, I think, a good and a bad way to do this.
Good Vision
My late friend Zoltán Dörnyei was a Professor of Psycholinguistics who later in his life completed a PhD in Theology. One of his interests was the place of vision in the Christian life, due to his work on the importance of ‘mental imagery’ in acquiring a second language.
The scriptures tell us that without vision the people perish (Proverbs 29). In order to go anywhere and do anything, you need vision. In other words, to do something you have to first visualise it. Zoltan would teach that you needed to both appreciate the benefits of the thing you are considering and consider the costs of failure.
In church life, if the body is going to do anything—and we mean here acts as diverse as witness to their friends, move to a new venue, give their money, volunteer their time, support a project helping the poor, make friends who aren’t like them, and many more—then the elders of the church will need to articulate a ‘vision’ of why this is worthwhile as well as the potential costs of failing.
This isn’t business speak, it’s clarity and ‘leadership’. It’s also not anything super-fancy, for all you can be better or worse in how you go about it. By vision we mean simply painting a picture with words so that people understand why they might choose to take some concrete actions.
We can’t function without this, for all it can easily stray into manipulation—which is true of much of what we call leadership—where you make the vision sound compelling so that people are more likely to take those actions. That’s a tempting thing for a pastor to do, but honesty is integral for Christian leaders in these matters.
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