Proclaimer Blog
‘Faith Comes from Hearing’
My spare-time reading in the last couple of weeks has, I admit, been a bit niche: a book about Bob Dylan, which argues that he has always expressed strongly monotheistic convictions and thus that his apparent period of overt evangelical belief (c.1979-81) was not just a blip in his career. (You may, or very well may not, be interested to know that the book is Stephen H. Webb, Dylan Redeemed. Despite much derision from my nearest and dearest, my fascination with Bobology won’t die.)
The author, a Christian, veers off regularly into musings of his own, and one of them (I joke not) immediately made me think of preaching. On the last page he asks, ‘why is hearing so important to us? And why do voices have the power to command our assent?’ His answer: ‘In listening to any voice … we are prompted to hear the silence out of which speech comes, and if we are truly blessed, we can hear an echo of the first voice – God’s Word – that, by speaking the world into being, gave us silence so that we might hear.’
OK, there is perhaps a little iffy theology and philosopho-babble floating around here, but the basic point is fascinating and (to me) persuasive. There is something about simply listening to the voice of another that has the effect of stilling us, silencing us, so that we may simply hear. That is a vital truth to be reminded of – especially so for we Westerners who are constantly told that voicing our own opinions is our most inalienable right, and who have been schooled by our culture to have the greatest difficulty in simply shutting up and listening to another command our assent. (And the rugged individualism of evangelicalism is at least as worldly as it is godly in this regard.)
That’s the link to preaching. Even my all-too-skimpy reading of older writing on preaching reveals that Paul’s statement in Romans 10.17 that ‘faith comes from hearing’ has loomed pretty large. Dever and Gilbert, in the first chapter of their simply titled work Preach, make much of this – as, in his own more understated way, does John Stott in I Believe in Preaching (published in America as Between Two Worlds). The point being stressed for us in such thinking is not that the Word of God has a unique power in the pulpit that it does not have in the family devotion or the coffee-shop one-to-one. It is that to hear the Word preached is to be in the position of someone invited not first of all to discover for yourself or to ask an impressive question, but to respond with faith to a message which you simply receive and to which you yourself make no actual contribution. In such a context the form of communication matches the content of the gospel of salvation achieved for us in a way that a Bible study (for all its marvellous benefits) does not quite carry off.
I suspect that sharp questions need to be asked of a Christian who always insists that they prefer participating in Bible studies to listening to sermons. There might be some unobjectionable reasons for this preference, but I have come to feel that too often the real reason is unspoken and reveals a spiritual malaise: the person prefers to encounter the Word in a context in which they contribute more than just grateful faith – i.e. one in which they can retain a feeling of control. That may well reveal the presence of a self-serving heart that secretly desires to be justified by works, whatever it may notionally assent to about grace, rather than a heart that is content always to receive with empty hands.