Proclaimer Blog
How much history do you need?
I'm starting a teaching series at Cornhill this morning on Ezra, one of my two specialist subjects. (I always felt it was good to have two, just in case I got through the first round of Mastermind.) We've got four weeks of getting our fingers dirty in the text, but we'll spend a good deal of today wrestling with some of the back story to make sure we have got both biblical and historical context spot on. But how important is that?
- I want to say it is more important for the preacher than it is for the hearer, certainly at a detailed level. In a book like Ezra, if you are going to wrestle with the detail of the text rather than just, say, the thrust of where each passage is going, you need to have done this work. It's the only way you will ultimately make sense of some of the divinely inspired commentary that is found within the text itself. Bible books are individually inspired to be part of the canon and so should not be read in splendid isolation. Here's an example. Go look up Ezra 4.2 and the enemies' claim to worship the same God "since the time of Esarhoddon." That's a scriptural story and in order to understand what is going on you need to have some grasp of 2 Kings 17.24 ff. So, I'm not ashamed to spend some quality time making sure the students get the back story right. It will be instrumental in getting the text right.
- But here's the thing. This is not the same as ensuring all our congregations understand the entirety of the back story. Many preachers make this mistake. It may be born out of pride: "Look what I've discovered and want you to know I know." It may be born out of a misunderstanding of preaching. "Let me tell you everything there is to know." Both are misplaced, Rather, we need to give our people enough back story simply to preach the message of the text. In Ezra, for example, it will be useful for folk to see a continuity between 2 Chr 36. It will helpful to say "this is right at the end of the time of Daniel: they've been in exile 60 years or so." That's good context. But it probably doesn't need a whole heap more.
Put it this way: what the preacher needs to know as part of his preparation is not what the congregation need to hear as part of the sermon. They are not and must not be the same thing.