Dear Pastor: Don’t Peddle Certainty, Offer Passion Instead

If pastors take the advice of Jason K. Allen, a Southern Baptist Seminary president, they will banish the word “opinion” from their sermon vocabulary.

In a recent blog post, Allen suggests that by avoiding five words, pastors can strengthen their sermons. You can check out his post for the other four sermon-weakening words.

But let’s focus on “opinion.” Here’s his rationale:

Preaching is to be text-based, derived from the Word of God. Thus, by definition it is objective and authoritative, and arrive as a certain, sure word. Therefore, the instinct to stipulate, “this is just my opinion” should send off alarm sirens in the mind of the preacher.

Objective and authoritative; a certain, sure word.

Allen acknowledges (thankfully) there are difficult and debatable passages in Scripture. So what should the pastor do about those? Here’s his answer:

For example, stating, “Evangelical Bible scholars are of mixed opinion on the meaning of this phrase, and after careful study, I’ve come to believe it means….” Is stronger than “Evangelical Bible scholars are of mixed opinion on the meaning of this phrase, but my opinion is…”. The former implies careful study and reflection, with a measure of confidence. The latter sounds more whimsical, less grounded and less certain…

The bottom line is, if you feel the need to offer a naked “This is just my opinion” what follows probably is not worth offering anyway.

Putting aside the obvious suggestion that only “evangelical” Bible scholars seem to count as authorities, for Allen, it very much matters how the preacher “sounds” to the congregation. The pastor needs to give the very strong impression that the audience is hearing the absolute, unadulterated truth: straight from the mouth of God, through the mouth of the preacher.

I suppose the pastor, in Allen’s view, needs to make sure the congregants are buying exactly what the pastor is selling–so to speak.

Now, in my opinion I believe that Allen genuinely believes that the pastor’s primary job is to proclaim the absolute truth of the inspired, inerrant Word of God. As a former Southern Baptist myself, and a graduate of the institution Allen leads, this language is very familiar to me. It’s tied to a conviction about what Scripture is, how truth can be ascertained through (propositional) revelation, and it funnels into a very high view of the role of preaching in disseminating that truth.

For Allen, and for many fundamentalist evangelicals, to utter the phrase, “but this is only my opinion,” muffles the sense that the pastor’s interpretation is the actual, unquestionable truth of God–as if handed down from God on a mountain or through a burning bush.

I no longer share that same belief in the Bible as the “inerrant, Word of God”–with “innerancy” defined primarily through propositional modes of language and with “Absolute Truth” understood as attainable by finite human beings. But theological differences aside, one has to wonder if Allen is not suggesting here that the business of pastors is to “peddle certainty”?

In a challenging social climate, in the midst of the business and craziness of life, many people are looking for certainty. They may have neither the time nor the desire to seek truth out for themselves. They don’t have commentaries on their shelf or seminary classes under their belt. They are bombarded with enough challenges in life. Many people are happy for the pastor to tell them the way it is: and if what the pastor says is exactly what God says, so much the better.

To be fair, I’m not a fan of wishy-washy, mealy-mouthed preaching, either. The temptation often present in liberal Christianity to reduce God to simply a better version of ourselves and to empty the gospel of its transformative power is very real and probably has been a big reason for the declining numbers in mainline Christianity.  I empathize with H. Richard Niebuhr’s critical assessment of a strand of Protestant liberalism: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

However, there is something equally problematic about pastors doing everything possible to avoid the appearance of “opinions” and to give off instead the appearance of absolute certainty. When it comes to interpreting the ancient text of Scripture and its application for contemporary life, when it comes to discerning the sacred text of Scripture and its meaning for today (much less discerning the voice of God), the brute reality is this: all you have, dear pastor, is opinion.

Interpretation is opinion. Commentary is opinion. Theology is opinion. Doctrine, in fact, is opinion. In fact, the dogma/doctrine/doxy word group has opinion, or belief, in its etymological meaning Orthodoxy means “right opinion,” or “right belief.” Granted, the “right,” or “correct,” is significant here, but it’s also significant that “opinion” is included, nonetheless.

The pastor’s opinion should not be only his or her opinion; it should be an opinion determined after much study and thought and only after consulting the opinions of others–including those that come down to us through the history of the church. But opinion it is and will remain.

Doxa doesn’t mean fact, and it never really did. We’re dealing here with mysterious, mystical realities–meanings of ancient texts that are not immediately recoverable without always a tinge of uncertainty or ambiguity of some sort and with the divine realm which always stands at least a bit outside our finite ability to capture with deadly precision and absolute mastery.

So instead of banning the word “opinion” and instead of peddling certainty, I propose an alternative. Let the pastor acknowledge that interpretation of Scripture and application of it in contemporary life will always include opinion/belief–it will always include a measure of what Kierkegaard called “subjectivity.” It is the inescapable reality of this subjectivity (and its implications for a deep spirituality) that creates the possibility for genuine passion.

Christianity, for Kierkegaard, as I’ve argued in Emerging Prophet: Kierkegaard and the Postmodern People of God, is founded on a paradox (most centrally, a God who becomes a single, individual, human being in time). It is not founded on an “objective text” that can be unambiguously interpreted with objective certainty.

While objective truth and absolute certainty may sell, only the paradox and the mystery elicits genuine passion.

The authoritarian, absolute certainty approach, which Allen commends, also has the negative result (in my opinion!) of discouraging the congregants from exploring truth for themselves. Spoon-feeding certainty to people only perpetuates spiritual immaturity.

But an approach based on “subjectivity,” which acknowledges “objective uncertainty,” ambiguity, and the presence of opinion in every sermon,  makes room for real passion. This may not be the kind of passion demonstrated by shouting and clinched fists (as in the Billy Sunday image), but it will be the kind of passion that can inspire transformative faith in God nonetheless.

Image Source (Billy Sunday Fired Up)

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