What makes a good preacher?

Robert Capon on good preachers: “I think good preachers should be like bad kids. They ought to be naughty enough to tiptoe up on dozing congregations, steal their bottles of religion pills, spirituality pills, and morality pills, and flush them all down the drain. The church, by and large, has drugged itself into thinking that proper human behavior is the key to its relationship with God. What preachers need to do is force it to go cold turkey with nothing by the word of the cross – and then be brave enough to stick around while it goes through the inevitable withdrawal symptoms. But preachers can’t be naughty or brave unless they’re free of their own need for the dope of acceptance. And they won’t be free of their need until they can trust the God who has already accepted them, in advance and dead as doornails, in Jesus.”

via @JustinHolcomb

We have had a rapid emergency of an all-instant society: instant therapy, instant religion, instant food, instant friends, even instant reading. Instancy is one of the main teachings of our present information environment. Constancy is one of the main teachings of civilization.

Neil Postman, Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979), p. 76 (via dompascarella)

Since we are victims and not really sinners, what we need is affirmation and support, and so on. The language slips and falls out of place. It becomes therapeutic rather than evangelical. It must be trimmed more and more so as to not give offense. In thesis 21 of the Heidelberg Disputation Luther says that a theologian of the cross “says what a thing is”, whereas a theologian of glory calls the bad good and the good bad. This takes out the claim that language and its proper use in matters theological is a fundamental concern of the theologian of the cross. Luther’s words suggest that the misuse or slippage of language in this regard has a theological root. When we operate on the assumption that our language must constantly be trimmed so as not to give offense, to stroke the psyche rather than to place it under attack, it will of course gradually decline to the level of greeting-card sentimentality. The language of sin, law, accusation, repentance, judgment, wrath, punishment, perishing, death, devil, damnation, and even the cross itself - virtually one-half of the vocabulary - simply disappears. It has lots its theological legitimacy and therefore its viability as communication.
A theologian of the cross says what a thing is. In modern parlance: a theologian of the cross calls a spade a spade. One who “looks on all things through suffering and the cross” is constrained to speak the truth. The theology of the cross, that is to say, provides the theological courage and conceptual framework to hold the language in place.
Gerhard Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross
When a woman marries a man, she’s trusting that for the rest of her life he won’t hit her, cheat on her, rape her, or kill her; that he’ll work hard, pay the bills, love their children, finish the race well, and walk with Jesus ‘til the end; that is she gets sick, he’ll look after her; that if she is dying, he will be faithful to her. It is a terrifying thing for a woman to trust a sinful man.
Mark Driscoll
The cross, that is, is not quiescent or dead. The cross is itself in the first instance the attack of God on the old sinner and the sinner’s theology. The cross is the doing of God to us. But that same cross itself, and only the cross, at the same time opens a new and unheard-of possibility over against the sinner’s old self and its theology. That means that a theology of the cross is inevitably quite polemical. It constantly seeks to uncover and expose the ways in which sinners hide the perfidy behind pious facades. The delicate thing about it is that it attacks the best we have to offer, not the worst…The preacher-theologian must know this and learn how to use the word of the cross in that combat.

Gerhard Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross

The mad mob does not ask how it could be better, only that it be different. And when it then becomes worse, it must change again. Thus they get bees for flies, and at last hornets for bees.

—Martin Luther

Let the wife make the husband glad to come home, and let him make her sorry to see him leave.

Martin Luther