Now, keep in mind, this fellow, himself a veteran of about every religious movement in Christendom at some point in his young life (“the wind-blown theologian”), was not at our conference. He was replying to the live blogging of the conference by some of our faithful folks. And his motivations are significantly less than above-board: he is just looking for a chance to take a shot at David King, really. Despite all of that, we still get a good insight into the mind-set of those promoting oxymoronic movements when we read:
Have you ever noticed that those who proclaim the centrality of the preaching of God’s Word over and above all else in the worship and life of the Church never really provide scriptural justification for their point in addition to assuming that what Paul did as an Apostle is somehow immediately relevant to the ministry of your everyday pastor?
Now, this article is found here, and it links to the article here. If you look at even the outline of what Pastor King presented, you can see how rich in biblical material his presentation really was. This comment was just a cheap shot without any substance. But in the comments section that developed, he added the following,
Your assumption (like those of the radical baptistic presbyterian David King) that Paul’s role as an Apostle is to be seen in his successors is nothing other than that–an assumption. There is no biblical passage or other relevant data to force us to conclude that we should look at the issue similarly. Aside from that, as ‘the Foolish Sage’ has pointed out so nicely, reading back the centrality of preaching as some do it today into the actions of the Apostle Paul is incredibly anachronistic and amounts really to special pleading on the part of those who are so convinced of this doctrine.
If you are looking for any interaction with texts like 1 Cor. 1:17ff, Acts 20:24ff, and the other texts that made up not only Pastor King’s comments, but were likewise addressed by Don Kistler, Tom Ascol, Burk Parsons, and myself, you won’t find them. The comments section spiraled off into some pretty odd stuff including Eucharistic issues and elevation of hosts and all sorts of other stuff men start babbling about when they don’t care too much about what the Bible has to say about God’s worship anyway. So why even bother with the initial statement? Because men who once professed a faith find it next to impossible to actually put it behind them, especially when they know they had no sound and consistent reasons for leaving that faith. It becomes somewhat of a hobby for them to take potshots at their former compatriots (and for this fellow, that’s a pretty big body of folks these days), and that is where you get a lot of the material found on blogs these days.
I could not help but noting in the lengthy comments thread that one man, well known to those who read theological threads on the Internet, known as “St. Worm,” commented,
Reformed preaching, as it stands on the whole, whether baptistic or Presbyterian wise (which isn’t too far apart), bores me silly.
It lacks imagination, epic, and myth because the Word has stagnated into words about Jesus. It has stopped being foolish and has taken on downright sensible and rationalistic tones to feed, not the soul of man, but the brain of man. The didactic dimensions of the prophetic enterprise of the pulpit needn’t degrade into lookup tables and algebra: we must recapture the fantasy in preaching.
Anyone who attended our conference, and especially those who were on the cruise, cannot help but sigh upon reading words such as these.
