Expository Preaching—The New Golden Calf, Part 2

I wish to commend Rev.’s Todd Ruddel and Adam Brink on their engagement with my article, “Expository Preaching—The New Golden Calf.”

They clearly took time to sift through my words and made a lengthy, albeit in places cumbersome, response. I appreciate their zeal for the truth even if it means disagreement in areas. After all, “Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend” (Prov. 27:17). I wish nothing but the best for these men and consider them fathers in the faith.

            The notion of experiential preaching has long been controversial, so their response comes as no surprise. Naturally you will find sincere and godly brothers on each side of this debate. That said, I would like to respond to a few things, which will be followed by an appeal for more experiential preaching, not less.

Is “Golden Calf” Appropriate?

            As to the issue our brothers have with the title of my article, it was intentionally chosen, so I will take it up first.

            As I made clear in my article, expository preaching is not a bad thing. It is a good thing. In fact, the last subtitle in my article was, “Expository Preaching is Good—But It’s Not Everything.” In a nutshell, that is the point I’m trying to make. We have taken something good and useful, the method of expository preaching, and have made it to be everything. That is idolatry. At that point and not otherwise, it has become a golden calf.

Idolatry as described for us in the WLC Q&A 105 is quite extensive, and it includes things like “using unlawful means, and trusting in lawful means.”

Now certainly expository preaching is a lawful means of preaching, not an unlawful one. But the idea of “trusting in lawful means” was the sense in which I deployed the term “Golden Calf.” It is when the good thing, expository preaching, is no longer just a means to an end but becomes the very end itself.

To hear people talk about preaching today, one gets the sense that unless it is done in an expository way, then it’s not actually preaching, and God is not pleased with it. I’ve heard godly ministers criticized by congregants because their preaching wasn’t as expository as they demanded—even though such ministers were clearly being used by God and were clearly preaching from the Bible.

Such a standard would also fly in the face of many preachers in the past who, let’s be frank, wouldn’t pass the test of “expositor” according to our modern definition. Go read sermons by Spurgeon, Whitefield, or Augustine to see what I mean.

Expository Preaching and the Preacher

This exaggerated requirement for expository preaching also creates in the preacher the idea that as long as my sermon is nice and tidy, has all of the right points and exegesis, and follows the model of my 21st-century homiletics book, then all will be well. I’ve done my duty as a preacher. Now all I need to do is stand up and read what I’ve got written down.

This is why some of our sermons in confessional Reformed churches sound like dissertation papers being read to a PhD committee. Such “preaching” is justified because it has a clear outline and accurate exegesis.

That is the idea of “trusting in lawful means” in an idolatrous sense—because expositing the text is not all that preaching entails. This is to put an “inordinate or immoderate” trust in the method of preaching I am using, to the extent of downplaying or forgetting the other things needed for effective preaching. Preaching must include application to the conscience. It is exhortative, evangelistic, and pastoral—it is heat and light, not just light.

For our forefathers in the Reformed faith, the chief end of preaching was to move their hearers to action. It was to woo. It was to offer the Savior in a way that stirred not only the intellect but the heart as well. After all, Paul told Timothy to “preach the Word,” not just exposit it.

Expositing the text is good, but it’s not all there is to preaching. It is a means to an end, not the end itself.

Head vs. Heart

          My interlocutors also claim, “No good divinity disparages the intellect in favor of the affection.”

I totally agree. In fact, the only line in my article that I wish I could have back would be the sentence, “As important as the intellect is, it is not everything—it is not even the main thing when it comes to preaching the Word of God.” I would scratch that last part of the sentence entirely.

And yet, this leads me to my next point. The Reformed church is so heady and intellectual that the emotions are oftentimes left untouched. In fact, they are underemphasized to an unhealthy and inhuman extent. They are seen as dangerous and excessive.

Yes, the intellect is the key to the will and heart, and the two should not be pitted against each other. And yet we have so overemphasized the head that either our congregations don’t have a clue what we’re talking about much of the time, or they don’t have a clue about how to apply what they just heard to their lives. Thus, they are left unmoved. The Christian is never directed to experience, taste, and live out the Christian life as the power of the Holy Spirit moves upon them.

Herein lies the beauty (and power) of experiential preaching. This is what Increase Mather saw when describing the preaching of his father, Richard: “His way of preaching was plain, aiming to shoot his arrows not over his people’s heads, but into their hearts and consciences.”[1]

Today, there is a disproportionate concern among Reformed ministers when it comes to filling people’s heads with doctrinal knowledge, as opposed to moving their hearts and consciences. We value meaty books and big concepts, which is fine, but we run from the idea of wooing, pleading, and “shooting arrows” into the conscience of our hearers, which is not fine.

New Light/Old Light—Still Alive and Kicking

In fact, the last paragraph of these brothers’ response says as much. They describe the First Great Awakening as stirring up “carnage” and “division, rancor, accusation, shattering of confidence in the Lord’s appointed means of a settled clergy and its relation to its charge rocked the Presbyterian Church, leading to schism.”

These are some pretty serious charges against one of church history’s most glorious scenes. Not stopping there, they describe it as lamentable due to “scenes of the open fields and town squares filled with hearers, excitable, ‘spiritually’ agitated, swooning, moaning, and other physical manifestations.”

Such descriptions show us that the New Light/Old Light debate continues today. That division was never just about emotion or style. It revealed two very different visions of ministry. Rev.’s Ruddel and Brink seem to think it unfortunate that the Holy Spirit was moving in such a powerful way in the middle of the 18th century, even though it led to pockets of emotionalism and counterfeits—which is expected during all revivals, including those in the early church, and which were decried by the Reformed leaders whenever it reared its head.

The Old Lights of the time roundly persecuted men such as Whitefield, Daniel Rowland, and even Jonathan Edwards, prioritizing as they did order, formality, and clerical decorum even to a fault. The New Lights, on the other hand, believed that true religion must affect the whole man—mind, will, and affections—and thus they preached and prayed for visible awakenings of heart and conscience.

New Lights did not typically reject sound doctrine or the ordinary means of grace. Rather, they longed to see those means owned and empowered by the Spirit. Figures like Whitefield, Rowland, and Edwards modeled a deeply Reformed, albeit deeply felt, theology. The tradition continued on with Samuel Davies and, later, Charles Spurgeon.

These men didn’t pit doctrine against devotion. They embodied both. To stand with them is not to abandon the intellect but to insist that experiential religion is the proper fruit of real truth. Yes, this can only be done by the Spirit of God, but God uses means—namely, unction-filled preaching—to effect such transformation.

In the words of Martyn Lloyd-Jones,

Are you explaining away the great phenomena accompanying the revivals of the past in terms of the 20^th century, and saying that the people listening to Daniel Rowland were a sort of primitive people lacking education, and just emotionalists? The apostle Paul reminds the elders of the church at Ephesus of how he preached ‘with tears.’ And Whitefield used to preach with tears. When have you and I last preached with tears? What do we know, to use the phrase of Whitefield, about preaching a ‘felt Christ’?[2]

Another Appeal for Experiential Preaching

          Although I appreciate the labors of Rev.’s Ruddel and Brink, I am more convinced than ever that we need more experiential preaching today, not less.

This is not a call to abandon sound doctrine or expository faithfulness. This is a call to recover a fuller, more biblical vision of what preaching is meant to do. In the words of Dr. Michael Barrett, “Preaching is more than simply a verbal book report; it is a God-ordained means of bringing God’s truth to bear on the hearts and in the experience of the hearers.”[3]

Experiential preaching deals honestly with the condition of the heart, speaks directly to the conscience, and presses truth upon the hearer with urgency and affection. It applies the Word to the soul with specificity and Spirit-given power.

This is what our forefathers in the Reformed and Puritan tradition meant when they spoke of experimental preaching. Such preaching emphasizes the need to know the great truths of the Word of God by personal experience, not just the head.[4] It is preaching that aims not only to interpret Scripture but to bring it home—to expose sin, exalt Christ, and compel men to flee to Him for refuge and live in accordance with the gospel.

In a time when many are content to explain the text but never apply it in a way that reaches the heart, we would do well to re-embrace this older path. As I mentioned in my last article, I believe experiential preaching is often neglected or criticized because it is scary for many preachers—for all of us, in fact. It requires more than mere study. Experiential preaching requires an utter casting of oneself on God—not merely on our exegetical acumen—knowing that unless He gives us unction and owns our preaching, all is for naught.

This is what made the preachers of the past so powerful, and it’s what we need more than ever in the Reformed world of the 21^st century.

Ryan Denton is a Presbyterian minister and evangelist (Vanguard Presbyterian Church). His work has appeared at RHB, DesiringGod, Founders, Heidelblog, The Confessional Presbyterian, and others. He has a Th.M. from Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary. You can find him on X @texaspreacher.