Written by R. Fowler White |
Thursday, May 18, 2023
The sum of Paul’s regulations for public worship here in 1 Cor 14:26-40 is that during the ministry of God’s word, the churches were to prefer the greater gifts without prohibiting the lesser ones and to do so by following the regulations laid down by the Apostle to ensure that the ministry of God’s word was done in that fitting and orderly way that instructed and exhorted His people (14:39-40). 

As we come to 1 Cor 14:26-40, we arrive at the close of our brief series on 1 Corinthians 12-14. Paul has covered certain fundamental truths regarding the Spirit and His gifts. It is the Spirit, he declares, who brings unity to the church’s confession of Christ, its gifts for ministry, and its members (12:1-31). Moreover, he maintains, it is not any one gift of the Spirit that is indispensable to seeing our ministries thrive; rather, it is the Spirit’s fruit of love (13:1-13). If we wonder how indispensable love is to ministry, the Apostle would have us compare the greater gift of prophetic speech to the lesser gift of untranslated tongue-speech. In light of that comparison, we’re to see that the former benefits others; the latter does not and cannot benefit others unless it is translated (14:1-25). With those fundamentals as background, Paul will now sum up the regulations that will result in the edification of others during the ministry of God’s word in congregational worship. In the content of his summary, we see what amounts to evidence of an early apostolic directory for congregational worship.
Paul begins his directives with a regulation in 14:26b that applies to all ministries of God’s word in public worship: let all things be done for edification—or as the preceding context puts it: edify others, not oneself alone (14:4-5, 12). No one who delivers God’s word should hinder the instruction and exhortation of God’s people through the public ministry of that word (cf. 14:31).
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Written by Scott R. Swain |
Tuesday, January 11, 2022
He, someone not something, is the supreme subject matter and scope of Christian preaching: God the Son incarnate, clothed with the promises of the gospel, crucified and risen, ascended and coming again.

The Trinity and Christian Preaching
Recent days have prompted me to think about the relationship between trinitarian theology and Christian preaching.
The first prompt came in June while participating in the International Presbyterian Church’s Catalyst Conference in London. Over the course of three days, I had the opportunity to listen to a lot of good preaching, including three sermons from Sinclair Ferguson on the Pastoral Epistles. In the evenings, I had the opportunity to spend time with a number of IPC ministers and ministerial candidates, discussing the nature and calling of gospel preaching, as well as the current status of gospel preaching in the UK and North America. The second prompt came in July when I finished a short manuscript on the doctrine of the Trinity (which is to be published by Crossway next year). The third prompt came from research I am doing for other projects. The following are a few scattered thoughts on the relationship between trinitarian personalism and Christian preaching inspired by the confluence of these three prompts.
What Is Trinitarian Personalism?
“Personalism” is a term with specific philosophical connotations that I do not intend here. What I mean by “trinitarian personalism” follows from an insight, expressed by Thomas Aquinas in his disputation on divine power, that the term “person” is a term of dignity, which indicates two things about God’s supreme greatness and goodness.[1]
First, that God exists in three “persons” indicates that God’s manner of existing is the highest manner of existing. Specifically, the triune God is the living God; and the life he lives is a life of perfect intelligence, love, and beatitude. Second, that God exists in three “persons” indicates that God’s intelligent, loving, and blessed manner of existing subsists in three distinct, irreducible, unsubstitutable ways: as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The true and living God is the tripersonal God; and the life he lives is the life of the Father who begets, of the Son who is begotten, and of the Spirit who is breathed forth in their mutual love.
What does this rather fine metaphysical point have to do with Christian preaching? Stay with me.
Trinitarian Personalism in Patristic Exegesis
The Church Fathers display a kind of trinitarian personalism in the ways they read Holy Scripture. Three examples stand out.
The first example comes from Irenaeus of Lyon. In his dispute with Gnostic interpreters who so twisted Holy Scripture that its unified message became unrecognizable, Irenaeus argues that the main purpose of the “rule of faith” is to help readers identify the person of Jesus Christ as the handsome king to which all scriptures point. The scope or aim of Scripture, on this understanding, is not something but someone. Holy Scripture, in all its literary and historical diversity, is a book that holds forth before the eyes of faith God the Son, the handsome king.
The second example agrees with Irenaeus in seeing the persons of the Trinity as the central subject matter of Holy Scripture and (potentially) explains the origin of the term “person” in Christian theology. As Matthew Bates and others have recently argued, New Testament and early patristic interpretation of the Old Testament exhibits an ancient reading strategy known as “prosopological exegesis,” the practice of identifying otherwise unnamed or ambiguously identified characters (dramatis personae) within the drama of scriptural discourse. For example, the author of Hebrews identifies the king whom God addresses in Psalm 2:7 as Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity (Heb 1:5). This “person-centered” approach to exegesis is the “birth” of trinitarian personalism: the scriptural foundation of the church’s perception of three “persons” in one God.[2]
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Not long ago I took our daughter Debbie and two of our grown grandchildren on a memory trip to places in Canada where I grew up.
One special spot we visited was on Lake Rosseau in the Muskoka lakes region. It was once the site of a Bible conference, long since defunct, where my mother took me many summers of my early life.
As we cruised by boat along the rocky shore, I could see the old buildings derelict and deserted, but the memories stayed with me. I recalled the children’s meetings where a retired missionary woman and a college student told us about Jesus, and how at the end of that week I put up my hand to say I wanted to know and follow him.