Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink. Instead I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete. (2 John 1:12)

Students seem to have difficulty just engaging in a face-to-face interaction—and I don’t even mean normal eye contact. I mean engaging in an exchange. . . . There are some fundamental skills they just don’t have. (Robert Duran)[2]

Only the sense of hearing can do justice to the way God is simultaneously with us and beyond us. (Walter Ong)[3]

Preaching Is the Presence of the Great Shepherd

The presence of the Good Shepherd in preaching, an obvious excellence of preaching, is sometimes referred to as the “Incarnational Principle.” Unfortunately, this principle has often been associated with the immanentism of Liberal and Process theology—a call to social activism. Because the eternal Son came in the flesh, taking to himself a complete human nature, except without sin, the presence of a live preacher, called and commissioned by the Lord as his ambassador, is the most suitable medium for communicating God’s Word. So the secular dilemma of coordinating transcendence and immanence is obviated, not only by the covenantal character of God’s revelation but by the Incarnation. The One who inhabits eternity becomes a man and enters history. Thus in preaching, the transcendent Lord is immanent through the living announcement of his gospel Word.

Joseph is the first type of the Shepherd in Scripture (Gen. 49:24). Moses and Joshua follow the pattern of the shepherd-leader. Just prior to his death Moses is concerned “that the congregation of the LORD may not be as sheep that have no shepherd” (Num. 27:17). Israelite kingship is instituted after this model, and the great shepherd Psalms (Pss. 23; 80) are penned by the “sweet psalmist of Israel” (2 Sam. 23:1), David, who prefigures the ministry of the Good Shepherd in his royal capacity (2 Sam. 5:2; 7:7). The great failure of Israel’s shepherd-kings points to the need for the true Shepherd of the sheep, as Israel’s kings serve themselves and leave God’s people without a shepherd (1 Kings 22:17). How glorious are the words of Isaiah’s prophesy of the coming of the Great Shepherd of the sheep: “He will tend his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms; he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young” (40:11). This Shepherd will build the temple of God (Isa. 44:28). He will feed the sheep of the Lord’s flock: “I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd” (Ezek. 34:23).

When he comes, he assures us: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27). His words, which are the words of the entire Scripture (1 Pet. 1:10–11), are the food upon which his sheep feed. He appoints overseers to shepherd his people by the preaching of his Word: “Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood” (Acts 20:28). The Great Shepherd calls his undershepherds to lead his people (1 Pet. 5:2, 4). The preached Word given to the apostles is the voice of the Good Shepherd after the ascension: “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (John 6:63). At the heart of the ministry of his undershepherds, then, is the communication of the voice of the Shepherd to his sheep: “the sheep follow him, for they know his voice” (John 10:4). This is the task of preaching, as the resurrected Lord emphatically told Peter: “Feed my lambs” (John 21:15).

The One who has visited his people in history continues to visit them through his Word and Spirit in the person of the preacher. Nothing can replace that personal presence and that living voice.[4] The preacher ministers to a people whom he knows personally by name, even as their Shepherd knows them (John 10:3). He preaches the One who laid down his life for his sheep (John 10:15; 1 Cor. 2:2). He impresses them with the reality of the kingdom of God. In his famous treatise The Religious Affections (1746), Jonathan Edwards notes the importance of preaching in this regard:

And the impressing divine things on the hearts and affections of men is evidently one great and main end for which God has ordained that His Word delivered in the holy Scriptures should be opened, applied, and set home upon men, in preaching. And therefore it does not answer the aim which God had in this institution, merely to have good commentaries and expositions on the Scripture, and other good books of divinity; because, although these may tend as well as preaching to give men a good doctrinal or speculative understanding of the things of the Word of God, yet they have not an equal tendency to impress them on men’s hearts and affections. God hath appointed a particular and lively application of His Word to men in the preaching of it, as a fit means to affect sinners with the importance of the things of religion, and their own misery and necessity of a remedy, and the glory and sufficiency of  a remedy provided; and to stir up the pure minds of the saints, and quicken their affections, by often bringing the great things of religion to their remembrance, and setting them before them in their proper colours, though they know them, and have been fully instructed in them already.[5]

The living presence of the Good Shepherd in the preaching of the pastor, who is by the nature of his office an under-shepherd of Jesus Christ, is indispensable to the life of the church. The television preacher never knows his audience by name. His is not a living voice. Nor can he exemplify the self-denying love of his Master in the midst of his people, the church. How often Paul set himself forth as a model to be imitated: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1; cf. Col. 4:16, 17; Heb. 6:12). We cannot imitate an image on a screen, much less feel accountable to the man behind the image as the shepherd or pastor of our souls. “If preaching ever loses the support of personal affection fostered by pastoral care and the human touch, it is doubtful if it can carry by what engineers—who always have a sound concern for foundations—call sky-hooks.”[6]

The importance of face-to-face encounter is clearly central to the Incarnation. The face, more than any other aspect of the physical nature, reveals the person. Thus, John wanted more than any other means of communication to see his spiritual children “face to face” (2 John 12; 3 John 14). Even writing a personal letter could not replace personal encounter: “Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink. Instead I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete” (2 John 12).

The consummate reality for the Christian will be seeing the face of Jesus Christ in resurrection glory: “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18). Until then we see the reflection of that glory through the preaching of Christ from his Word, mediated by the revealing power of the Holy Spirit. Sinners cannot survive in the presence of the glorified Lamb (Rev. 20:11). Only when the believer is sinlessly perfected in the resurrection, will he be able to stand before the face of Jesus Christ (1 John 3:2).

The face-to-face presence of the preacher is a reminder of what is coming (Rev. 22:4). It is a down-payment on eschatological glory. In commenting on Haggai 1:12, Calvin says: “We may then conclude from these words, that the glory of God so shines in his word, that we ought to be so much affected by it, whenever he speaks by his servants, as though he were nigh to us face to face . . .”[7] Preaching is the primary means by which the Good Shepherd visits His people in the interim. Paul saw the preacher, not as a doctrinal lecturer, but as a pastor, who imparted his very life to the flock:

So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us. For you remember, brothers, our labor and toil: we worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you, while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God. (1 Thess. 2:8–9)

“It is the job of the preacher to make the Word of God, the Word of the prophets put into writing, a living reality for the congregation.”[8]

A word needs to be added about the locality of live preaching. The personal presence of the preacher among God’s people, the church, is accurately communicated by the English word for the local pastor: vicar. The word vicar comes from the root for vicarious, in the place of another. The pastor functions as an ambassador of his Master:

All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Cor. 5:18–21)

The purpose of his ascension was that from his exalted position he would send his Spirit (John 14:16ff; 16:7). This is the biblical means of Christ being present with his ecumenical body, i.e., the church among the nations. The World Wide Web and other forms of electronic communication have inverted this reality by seeking to transcend and, at points, even deny space and time. While these media may in one sense overcome the limits of space and time, they also forfeit the locality of personal presence which may never be transcended by creatures. In Acts we see the apostles employing what novelist Larry Woiwode calls the “footpower of the gospel.” Gospel witness is a personal matter:

In order to deliver that gospel in our age, you have to walk up to somebody, even if you’ve arrived earlier on a Concorde, and there is no proof that the spirit a Christian carries, or the Spirit who applies the gospel to a congregation, is transmitted over television. In Acts the delivery of the gospel is a personal act.[9]

D. Martin Lloyd-Jones put it well:  

There is a unity between preacher and hearers and there is transaction backwards and forwards. That, to me, is true preaching. And that is where you see the essential difference between listening to preaching in a church and listening to a sermon on the television or on the radio. You cannot listen to true preaching in detachment and you must never be in a position where you can turn it off.[10]

Throughout the history of redemption, God has personally met his people locally in the embodied reality of their daily lives. His ultimate condescension in this regard is the Incarnation. While the modern world has never been better “connected” electronically, it seems to be starving nearly to death for lack of personal and local connectedness. Thus, the local church provides this reality in a way that no other institution can. At the center of this is God’s speech in the preaching and presence of his appointed vicars. “Sound unites groups of human beings as nothing else does. . . . human community is essentially a union of interior consciousnesses.”[11] The private reading of Scripture is always also a communal reading, because the Scriptures are a covenant document uniting God’s people in all ages. Preaching accents and cultivates this communion. The worst tendencies of mass culture will be overcome by the promotion of live pastoral preaching as the center of the church’s life. There is no better antidote to the electronic dispersion of our day.

Face to Face: The Importance of Personal Presence in Ministry[12]

Efficiency rules in the modern world. Advocates of electronic centralization can point to vast benefits, such as the availability of medical records to physicians. For members of the church it is a great benefit to disseminate prayer requests and other important information to the whole church through electronic means. But the downside of electronic centralization is usually framed in terms of concerns about privacy. As legitimate as this concern is, there is an even more important issue: the diminishment of local, face-to-face relationships in our churches—the privation of personal presence.

J. Gresham Machen was concerned in the early twentieth century with the tendency toward a vast expansion of federal power through bureaucratic centralization and its concomitant, the tyranny of experts. In the conclusion of his essay “Mountains and Why We Love Them,” Machen wrote:

What will be the end of European civilization, of which I had a survey from my mountain vantage ground—of that European civilization and its daughter America? What does the future hold in store? Will Luther prove to have lived in vain? Will all the dreams of liberty issue into some vast industrial machine? Will even nature be reduced to standard, as in our country the sweetness of the woods and hills is being destroyed, as I have seen them destroyed in Maine, by the uniformities and artificialities and officialdom of our national parks? . . . Will some dreadful second law of thermodynamics apply in the spiritual as well as in the material realm? Will all things in church and state be reduced to one dead level, coming at last to an equilibrium in which all liberty and all high aspirations will be gone? Will that be the end of all humanity's hopes? I can see no escape from that conclusion in the signs of the times; too inexorable seems to me to be the march of events. No, I can see only one alternative. The alternative is that there is a God—a God who in His own good time will bring forward great men again to do His will, great men to resist the tyranny of experts and lead humanity out again into the realms of light and freedom, great men, who above all, will be the messengers of His grace. There is, far above any mountain peak of vision, a God high and lifted up who, though He is infinitely exalted, yet cares for His children among men.[13]

Just as Machen warned of the tendency in our technological civilization for centralized tyranny to diminish the human spirit by undermining liberty, so ought we to be concerned with the increased power of our technologies to centralize and thus diminish human liberty and local face-to-face relationships in a similar fashion, especially in the church.

As we have seen, the Apostle John had a similar concern about the rudimentary communication technology of his day when he wrote: “Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink. Instead I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete” (2 John 12). “I hope to see you soon, and we will talk face to face” (3 John 14).

Remember that Samuel Morse’s famous exclamation of astonishment at the wonders of electronic communication, “What Hath God Wrought!” should be turned by Christians into a question. In our day the magic continues apace. Our electronic connectedness has grown exponentially. Facebook users are a prime example, growing from over twelve million in late 2006, to over three billion today. Fifty percent of Americans use Facebook. Immersion in electronic technology seems inevitable. So it seems that we should all join, or we’ll be relegated to irrelevance. But, while it is second nature to recite the benefits of this pervasive technological environment, we are hesitant, and many are even very resistant, to recognize its liabilities. I believe this is a dangerous position for church leaders, especially since the rising generation has never known any other world. Preachers have a grave pedagogical responsibility in this area if we are to harness the tremendous potential of these technologies as good stewards of God’s world. This requires constructive criticism of the electronic environment.

A wonderful example of the power of constructive criticism is the story of what the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Dana Gioia, did by raising worrisome concerns about the state of literary reading in America. Building on an alarming trend signaled by reports in the 1990s, Gioia sounded the alarm in dramatic fashion in 2004 and 2007 with reports, “Reading at Risk” and “To Read or Not to Read.” He was often criticized as a doomsayer. But because parents and educators, including the NEA, did not simply accept this as a necessary and irreversible trend, the 20 percent decline in the youngest age group surveyed (ages 18–24) in 2002 was reversed to a dramatic 21 percent increase in 2008, as presented by Gioia in a subsequent NEA Report “Reading on the Rise.”

So instead of throwing up our hands and saying, “This is the way it is. We have to accept it,” we have a tremendous pedagogical opportunity to help this and the next generation of Christians to navigate the electronic environment as wise stewards of God’s providential gifts. Of course, we cannot escape the modern world; nor should we wish to. But we must live well formed lives, conformed to God’s self-revelation, in this world (Rom. 12:1–2). We must not miss this teaching moment.

When it comes to the electronic media, it is almost as if the church has taken the advice of Oscar Wilde seriously. When asked what he recommended in the face of temptation, he quipped, “Give in to it.”

But before we do, we must ask, Does the electronic environment diminish or threaten our face-to-face relationships? I believe it does. I believe we can and must do something about it. As leaders in Christ’s church, we need to turn Morse’s enthusiastic declaration, “What has God wrought!” into a question. As with all of man’s inventions, we need to understand them, how they work, their effect on our perceptions and relationships, and then their benefits and liabilities, and rid ourselves of the dangerous notion that they are just tools!

It is our pedagogical responsibility to teach the church to be discerning in its understanding of and participation in the rapidly changing media environment.

Electronic media tend to dis-incarnate and distance people from their embodied lives.  While excellent at disseminating information, electronic media tend to isolate us from face-to-face interaction. Since the pandemic, we see a dramatic increase in the epidemic of loneliness. Social media, in particular, cannot replace, and often even undermine, the fabric of personal relationships which strengthen fellowship with God and each other. Church officers need to encourage church members to ask themselves how their use of media fosters healthy relationships with God, his church, my family, my friends, my world.

Many secular researchers are sounding an alarm in this area. As we noted in chapter 1, Sherry Turkle has raised concerns about people preferring online life to real life.[14] Chris Martin raises similar concerns about social media,[15] reminding us that the internet is not just a technology, it is a philosophy of life, a worldview. At its heart is the Baconian idea that reality can be analyzed and manipulated for our own ends. The Christian is in the unique epistemological position to stand outside this way of thinking and living. Christians must not succumb to the illusion of Enlightenment dreams, that reality is ultimately manipulable and humans may take complete control. Social media not only tend to addict its users, but they also reorganize our social spaces and relationships. Romans 12:1–2 should lead us in the direction of leaving the lake whose water, as Martin begins and concludes the book, is toxic and enslaving.

Church leaders and parents are becoming aware of some of the dangers associated with online life. Mediated relationships open people up to deception about who they really are. This is a special temptation for teenagers, who are forming their identities and learning habits of human interaction. Things are expressed online that would never be expressed, or at least in the same manner, in face-to-face situations. In some cases social skills are so stunted that young people actually fear face-to-face interaction. The church has a definite advantage in this area because we believe in the vital importance of meeting together for worship, learning, and fellowship.

But as I have written elsewhere,[16] the Internet tends to rearrange and undermine authority structures. The Presbyterian church is not exempt. Members and officers make theological and personal decisions, sometimes gossiping and even slandering others, outside, or beneath the radar of, legitimate church authority. Some people even leave the church or never connect with the church, mistakenly believing that social media are sufficient.

Hence disembodied life online can promote the tendency to avoid the messy business of life in a fallen world—of sinners, saved by grace, but with many remaining imperfections, learning to live together in truth, forgiveness, and love. This is why, for example, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church has been careful to not unwittingly draw people away from local face-to-face existence by centralizing church interaction, especially through the use of social media. The Committee on Christian Education’s Subcommittee on Internet Ministries, on which I serve, often receives questions that should be addressed to local sessions or directly to individuals. We direct them back to those local face-to-face relationships with a gentle biblical admonition when appropriate. The Bible has a lot to say about the face and about face-to-face life in God’s world.

The tendency toward centralized power is a clear and present danger to the church. One of the great liabilities of mediated life is its tendency to erode the local life of face-to-face relationships.

What does the Bible teach us about the importance of personal presence? “Face” is used 382 times in the English Standard Version. In the Bible the face is most often referred to as a synecdoche representing the most intimate level of personal presence. The face is a revelation of the person, a window to the human soul. “Who is like the wise? And who knows the interpretation of a thing? A man’s wisdom makes his face shine, and the hardness of his face is changed” (Eccl. 8:1).

Sin causes God’s face to turn away and our faces to hide from him in shame. Sin alienates. Electronic media may exacerbate this tendency. We may become electronic fugitives like Cain.

But for Cain and his offering he [God] had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his face fell. The LORD said to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? . . . . Cain said to the LORD . . . . Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden. I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.” (Gen. 4:5–6, 13–14)

“And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God” (Exod. 3:6). Our sin, as in Israel’s case, causes God’s judgment: “I will set my face against you, and you shall be struck down before your enemies” (Lev. 26:17); “And I will bring you into the wilderness of the peoples, and there I will enter into judgment with you face to face” (Ezek. 20:35). “For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer. But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil” (1 Pet. 3:12).

Serious confrontation in the Bible is done face to face. Festus defends Roman justice regarding Paul,

I answered them that it was not the custom of the Romans to give up anyone before the accused met the accusers face to face and had opportunity to make his defense concerning the charge laid against him. (emphasis added, Acts 25:16)

So Paul in confronting Peter: “But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned” (Gal. 2:11).

Face-to-face communication avoids the limits of mediated communication. Paul understood that distance increases the possibility for misunderstanding:

I, Paul, myself entreat you, by the meekness and gentleness of Christ—I who am humble when face to face with you, but bold toward you when I am away! — . . . . I do not want to appear to be frightening you with my letters. For they say, “His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech of no account.” Let such a person understand that what we say by letter when absent, we do when present. (2 Cor. 10:1, 9–11)

John appreciated the importance of personal presence that could never be replaced by the first century medium of written correspondence.

Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink. Instead I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete. . . . I hope to see you soon, and we will talk face to face. (2 John 12; 3 John 14)

Jesus is present with his people through the means of grace and the officers of his church. The living and true God has orchestrated the ultimate in personal presence with the incarnation of his Son. The Word took on a complete and perfect human nature in order to create a new humanity. Church officers represent his presence as his undershepherds until he returns (1 Pet. 5:1–5). The personal presence of God’s people in worship, focusing as it does on Word and sacrament, is essential to the meaning of our redeemed creaturehood.

Throughout the history of redemption, God has favored his people by his grace, characterized by the favor of his face. Now he smiles upon us through Christ. This was prefigured in the ministry of Moses and Aaron as mediators of the old covenant and consummated in the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ. “The LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you” (Num. 6:25). “And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face” (Deut. 34:10). “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6).

The one who has visited his people in history continues to visit them through his Word and Spirit in the person of the preacher. Nothing can replace that personal presence and that living voice. Pastors are called to follow Paul’s apostolic example, “I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable, and teaching you in public and from house to house” (Acts 20:20). We must know the sheep personally by name, even as their shepherd knows them (John 10:3).

Face-to-face encounter is central to the Incarnation. Because the face reveals the person, the best means of communication for John was to see his spiritual children “face to face” (2 John 12; 3 John 14). This reminds us that the word “communicate” comes from the Latin communicare, to commune, or to live in intimate fellowship with others. For John, pen and ink could only supplement personal presence.

Paul also recognized that distance can only be overcome by personal presence: “Without ceasing I mention you always in my prayers, asking that somehow by God’s will I may now at last succeed in coming to you. For I long to see you . . .” (Rom. 1:9–11). He knew his ministry to the church was incomplete without such presence: “For I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you and for those at Laodicea and for all who have not seen me face to face” (Col. 2:1). The most beautiful expression of this is found in Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians:

But we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children. So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us. . . . But since we were torn away from you, brothers, for a short time, in person not in heart, we endeavored the more eagerly and with great desire to see you face to face. . . . as we pray most earnestly night and day that we may see you face to face and supply what is lacking in your faith? (1 Thess. 2:7–8, 17; 3:10)

Public worship is all about faces: God’s face and his people’s faces. We see this in the old covenant: “Then Abram fell on his face. And God said to him . . .” (Gen. 17:3). “David sought the face of the LORD” (2 Sam. 21:1). It has always been the desire of his people to have the closest personal contact with their Lord: “You have said, ‘Seek my face.’ My heart says to you, ‘Your face, LORD, do I seek’” (Ps. 27:8).

While the place of worship in the new covenant is no longer limited to a geographical location (John 4), this does not mean that location is unimportant. In the new covenant, the temple is the church, wherever it meets. “What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, ‘I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people’” (2 Cor. 6:16). The writer of Hebrews sounds like the wise real estate agent, location, location, location, when he exhorts, “not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near” (Heb. 10:25). The location of worship matters, because the personal presence of God’s people matters.

The goal of redemptive history involves Christ’s and our personal presence. The consummate reality for the Christian will be seeing the face of Jesus Christ in resurrection glory. The transfiguration foreshadowed the coming glory reflected in the face of Jesus: “And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light” (Matt. 17:2). Paul looks forward to the final glory: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12). There is no better antidote to the electronic dispersion of our day than the counter-environment of the church, created by the Word of the good and great Shepherd.

Ministers of the Word must teach God’s people media wisdom (media ecology). To be good stewards of the media we must understand not only the content communicated but the nature of each medium itself—its benefits and liabilities. Electronic media are best for information, and as a supplement, not a replacement, for face-to-face, personal communication. When we know people well face to face, texting, email, and phone calls can then be effective supplements—in that order, from least to most personal, but nothing replaces personal face-to-face presence.

Our teaching should include technological etiquette. Manners in general are in a state of decay. By enumerating some of the dangers of poor manners in electronic communication, officers can head off some of the worst tendencies in the electronic environment. So many words are sent into cyberspace that would never be said face to face.

We must also encourage people to spend time with their families, developing the art of conversation. This requires some self-criticism regarding the time we spend alone on our devices.

Finally, we need to emphasize Sabbath keeping and family and personal devotions. This is the day the Lord has set aside for us to enjoy the Lord’s presence in the presence of his people. This is what forms the Christian life. Worship should be a time apart, unique in the atmosphere of reverence and awe. This is the day for absorbing and being formed by God’s Word. “Hear, O earth; behold, I am bringing disaster upon this people, the fruit of their devices, because they have not paid attention to my words; and as for my law, they have rejected it” (Jer. 6:19).

Preaching Is the Unique Power of a Living Voice

There is a concreteness and power to the voice that reflects the power of God’s voice in his created image-bearer, man (imago Dei). We note the effectiveness of orality when we read a poem aloud instead of just reading it silently on the page. So in prayer we have a sense of the reality of our communication with God when we pray aloud. “With my voice I cry out to the LORD; with my voice I plead for mercy to the LORD” (Ps. 142:1). The Bible has much to say about the power of human speech. “There is one whose rash words are like sword thrusts, but the tongue of the wise brings healing” (Prov. 12:18). The old adage about sticks and stones is more at home in a materialistic age. Anyone who knows the pain inflicted by gossip will quickly prefer a stone.

William Graham in Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion examines the oral nature of Martin Luther’s approach to Scripture and preaching. Walter Ong describes his conclusion: “Graham brings out the sensory immediacy of the oral and its communal effectiveness. Hearing a speech unites an audience, individual reading of the speech fragments them.”[17] Ong is at his best and most useful as an apologist for the oral in his book The Presence of the Word (1967). He begins: “Man communicates with his whole body, and yet the word is his primary medium. Communication, like knowledge itself, flowers in speech.”[18] He goes on to say, “The word is not an inert record but a living something, like sound, something going on.”[19] Despite Ong’s often-too-negative assessment of the written, he rightly laments the absence of the “wingèd word” in modern life. Only by the living word may persons enter into the consciousness and life of others.[20] Ong hopes that electronic media will revive our appreciation for words as sound. It is not in literate culture, however, that we are imprisoned, as Ong suspects. We are rather imprisoned in our sinful propensity to pervert all media for idolatrous purposes. Only through preaching does the Word of God have wings to fly into the hearts of the people in our day.

There is in the power of the voice, of the spoken word, a mystery, which stands as a poignant testimony against the flatness and superficiality of late modernity. Horizontally, that mystery is accounted for by the spiritual dimensions of the human soul. Vertically, that mystery is accounted for by the omnipresence of God. The Word, which he promises will accomplish everything for which he sends it (Isa. 55:11), is the power behind the change of heart referred to by Jesus as the new birth (John 3). The gospel message is equated by Paul with God’s creative word spoken in Genesis 1:

For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Cor. 4:5–6)

The staccato commands of Genesis 1 demonstrate the power of God’s spoken Word in the miraculous immediacy of his creative acts. Paul links the effect of God’s spoken Word in creation with the power of preaching in the new creation. This is the nature of the sound of the human voice as a replica of God’s voice.

At just this point the warning of Ong should be heeded: Spatialized

accounts of language which make it a phenomenon rather than a communication, tend to think of God himself as no longer a communicator, one who speaks to man, but as a Great Architect (a typical eighteenth century concept) . . .[21]

The Bible, of course, does not pit the idea that God is the craftsman of space over against his orality. The two go hand in hand. Proverbs 8:30 pictures the eternal Son in his relationship to the created order as a master craftsman (אָמוֹן artificer or architect). He is the great Supervisor, Builder, who superintends his creation project from beginning to end. But his voice is the instrument of his control according to Psalm 29:4–5: “The voice of the LORD is powerful; the voice of the LORD is full of majesty. The voice of the LORD breaks the cedars; the LORD breaks the cedars of Lebanon.” As Ong points out, the Kantian distinction between noumena and phenomena, intended to preserve scientific epistemology, as well as religion, has tended rather to focus attention on appearances, and thus on the visual. But sound alone, Ong maintains, penetrates surfaces.[22] “One does not produce words in order to get rid of them but rather to have them penetrate, impregnate, the mind of another.”[23] We are again brought face to face with the need not to pit space against time, sound against sight. God is the Author of them both. However, Ong’s strength is found in his assertion of the primacy of speech. We wish to make a more specific and fundamental assertion of the primacy of preaching, which is rooted in the Original Preacher, who inhabits eternity and is incarnate in time.

The biblical concept of teaching, in its relation to the effect of the voice, is captured in the word catechize (κατηχέω to instruct). It literally means to sound around or re-sound: “to sound a thing in one’s ears, impress it upon one by word of mouth.”[24] This potency of voice is used to describe the activity of the teacher of the law (Rom. 2:18) and the preacher of the gospel (Gal. 6:6). The voice of the preached Word is effective, as God blesses it through the illuminating power of his Spirit. Ong maintains that “early man” experienced words “as powerful, effective, of a piece with other actuality far more than later visualist man is likely to do. A word is a real happening, indeed a happening par excellence.”[25] “[T]he word as sound establishes here-and-now personal presence. Abraham knew God’s presence when he heard his ‘voice.’”[26] This is why we refer to the act of preaching as the “preaching moment” or “event.” Despite all the imperfections of the human messenger, God is acting in the “acoustic event” of preaching.[27]

Ong’s mistake in this context is to attribute “more reality” to the spoken as opposed to the written word, because the latter is visual.[28] He goes on to assert: “Sound is a special sensory key to interiority.”[29] Ong insists that “the book takes the reader out of the tribe.”[30] This dichotomy between written and spoken is contrary to what the Bible clearly teaches about the complementary relationship between the two.

David’s meditation on the Word in Psalm 1, among dozens of other similar passages, demonstrates that private reading may also be a powerful vehicle for interiorizing, as Sven Birkerts has pointed out of reading in general. Furthermore, as we have seen, the public reading and preaching of the written Word seals what is written on the corporate consciousness and memory of the church, which has been entrusted with the deposit of the written Scriptures (2 Tim. 3:15). As a normative covenant document, the Bible has a unique power to unite. Eric Havelock states that the Bible is unique among printed books in remaining immune to McLuhan’s critique of the printed word.[31] However, Ong’s concept of the word as event is very important to the preacher as he approaches the preaching moment—what Ong calls “the moment of truth”[32]—and considers the unique God-given power of the human voice, especially when it is used to communicate the message of God’s written Word. “No other speech has the public and yet private nature of preaching.”[33] As Dave McClellan warns: “So if revelation remains silent and visual, it loses personal force. It becomes mere information, dead with regard to its power to inspire reverence and personal presence.”[34]

The concreteness of the spoken word has no peer among the media in general. It is the primary means of human communication, because it is God’s primary way of communicating. Thus, preaching is his chosen way to address people in all ages precisely because it is unmediated by technology. Furthermore, as we have noted, biblical preaching is God’s chief antidote to idolatry. A people of the Word will accept no substitutes. The Word of God preached has no peer among spoken words. It is God’s means of imprinting his Word on the hearts and in the lives of his people.[35]

Endnotes

[1] Adapted from Gregory E. Reynolds, The Word Is Worth a Thousand Pictures: Preaching in the Electronic Age (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2001), 338–45.

[2] Nara Schoenberg, “Tips for Conversation in an Overwhelmingly Digital Age,” Reprinted from the Chicago Tribune in the New Hampshire Sunday News, June 14, 2015, F8. Robert Duran is a communications professor at the University of Hartford.

[3] Ong quoted in Dave McClellan with Karen McClellan, Preaching by Ear: Speaking God’s Truth from the Inside Out (Wooster, OH: Weaver, 2014), 102n41.

[4] This came home to me in a very concrete way when I was on a four month sabbatical from a congregation I had served for almost two decades. The people said that they felt like the life of the church came to a halt. The presence of their under-shepherd proved more important than I had anticipated.

[5] Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2. John E. Smith, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 115–16.

[6] Gaius Glenn Atkins, Preaching and the Mind of Today (New York: Round Table Press, 1934), 30.

[7] John Calvin, Commentary on Haggai (1540-1563. Translation and reprint. Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society. 1847. Reprint. vol. 15. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1969), 343. I owe this quotation to my friend and colleague Stephen Doe.

[8] Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church: Volume 1 - The Biblical Period (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 59.

[9] Larry Woiwode, Acts (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 121.

[10] D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, “Knowing the Times: Extracts from an Important New Book by Dr. Lloyd-Jones,” Banner of Truth Magazine 317 (February 1990), 11–12.

[11] Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 122, 146.

[12] Adapted from Gregory E. Reynolds, “Face to Face: The Importance of Personal Presence in Ministry,” Ordained Servant 21 (2012): 20–26.

[13] J. Gresham Machen, Selected Shorter Writings: J. Gresham Machen (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2004), 436.

[14] Turkle, Alone Together, xi.

[15] Chris Martin, Terms of Service: The Real Cost of Social Media (Nashville: B&H, 2022). See my review Gregory E. Reynolds, “Global Pillage: Stealing Our Data, Our Intelligence, and Our Souls,” Ordained Servant Online (August-September 2022): https://opc.org/os.html?article_id=988, Ordained Servant 31 (2022): 116–19.

[16] Gregory E. Reynolds, “The Wired Church,” Ordained Servant 16 (2007): 26–34; “On Being Connected,” Ordained Servant 15 (2006): 13–15; “Princess Adelaide and Presbyterianism: The Death of Context and the Life of the Church,” Ordained Servant 15 (2006): 16–18.

[17] Ong, Review: Beyond the Written Word, 204.

[18] Ong, The Presence of the Word, 1.

[19] Ong, The Presence of the Word, 12.

[20] Ong, The Presence of the Word, 15.

[21] Ong, The Presence of the Word, 73.

[22] Ong, The Presence of the Word, 74.

[23] Ong, The Presence of the Word, 98.

[24] Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1853).

[25] Ong, The Presence of the Word, 111.

[26] Ong, The Presence of the Word, 113.

[27] Clyde E. Fant, Preaching for Today (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 157ff.

[28] Ong, The Presence of the Word, 111.

[29] Ong, The Presence of the Word, 117.

[30] Ong, The Presence of the Word, 135.

[31] Eric Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 49.

[32] Ong, The Presence of the Word, 154.

[33] Gerald Hamilton Kennedy, His Word Through Preaching (New York: Harper, 1947), 8.

[34] McClellan, Preaching by Ear, 102.

[35] Cf. Fant, Preaching for Today, 162. Quotes Thomas Aquinas: “Therefore it is fitting that Christ, as the most excellent teacher, should adapt that manner of teaching whereby his doctrine would be imprinted on the hearts of his hearers.”

Gregory E. Reynolds is pastor emeritus of Amoskeag Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Manchester, New Hampshire, and is the editor of Ordained Servant. Ordained Servant Online, October, 2023.