Illustrations and Arguments

While reading Christ-Centered Preaching before my Old Testament Survey class, I came across a section explaining the logic of and need for illustrations in sermons. Many pastors (according to the author) seem to shy away from illustrations because they think they are less meaty than arguments alone. The idea is that we learn best when we learn through experience, rather than through arguments and abstractions alone. Put another way, until you know how to apply it, you don't really know it.

Then it struck me that most of us approach the Bible expecting a series of propositions and principles. Even when we don't expect them, we do expect to just extract them from the text. Obviously, the stories are only there to contain the principles, like a shell around a nut, and it's often just too hard to crack that nut. The frustration we experience when we just can't "apply" a passage or when we begin to realize that the biblical authors weren't nearly so concerned with chronology as we are is rooted in this attitude: "Why doesn't it just come out and tell me what it means?"

The reality is that the Bible, like most writing outside of the modern West, teaches through experience. We are meant to experience the events of the Bible vicariously, to pay attention to the cues in the text to understand what's important. Why is that? That's how we truly learn and understand, not merely through memorizing propositions. The focus on a purely propositional approach to knowledge seems to be a legacy of Enlightenment rationalism, a bane of human existence. We are only now beginning to understand what stories are for again (Lewis, Tolkien, Chesterton, and Macdonald seem to have written in response to this need). I think most of the time we're completely missing the point of the Bible, especially the Old Testament (this class is completely blowing my mind, in a very, very good way).

Another problem we run into is that of bias- the biblical writers had very specific purposes for the texts they wrote, and organize all of the information they present to make their points. There is no attempt at indifference or objectivity. We object to "biased" account, but our objection is truly a hollow one. Everything we do has a "bias" to it, a perspective or agenda that governs how we do it. The question is not how to get rid of bias, but which bias is the true one.