Hearers and Doers

J. Vanhoozer Kevin

Description

The foundation of discipleship is sound, scriptural doctrine.The value of sound doctrine is often misunderstood by the modern church. While it can be dry and dull, when it flows from the story of Scripture, it can be full of life and love. This kind of doctrine, steeped in Scripture, is critical for disciple-making. And it's often overlooked by modern pastors.In Hearers and Doers, Kevin Vanhoozer makes the case that pastors, as pastor-theologians, ought to interpret Scripture theologically to articulate doctrine and help cultivate disciples. scriptural doctrine is vital to the life of the church, and local pastor-theologians should be the ones delivering it to their communities.With arresting prose and striking metaphors, Vanhoozer addresses the most pressing problems in the modern church with one answer: teach sound, scriptural doctrine to make disciples.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Christian theology
• Theology
• Christianity

Informations

• Publié par: Lexham Press
• Date de parution: 15 mai 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781683591351
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Hearers and Doers
A PASTOR’S GUIDE TO MAKING DISCIPLES THROUGH SCRIPTURE AND DOCTRINE
KEVIN J. VANHOOZER
Hearers and Doers: A Pastor’s Guide to Making Disciples through Scripture and Doctrine
Copyright 2019 Kevin J. Vanhoozer
Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225
LexhamPress.com
You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [e-mail] .
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the ESV ® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version ® ), copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked ( NIV ) are from the Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Scripture quotations marked ( NRSV ) are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Portions of chapter 7 appeared in “ Sola Scriptura, Tradition and Catholicity in the Pattern of Theological Authority ,” in Worship, Tradition, and Engagement: Essays in Honor of Timothy George , ed. David S. Dockery, James Earl Massey, and Robert Smith Jr. (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2018) . Used by permission.
Print ISBN 9781683591344
Digital ISBN 9781683591351
Lexham Editorial: Elliot Ritzema, Jeff Reimer, Danielle Thevenaz
Cover Design: Eleazar Ruiz
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction: From Doctrine (Christ for Us) to Discipleship (We for Christ)
PART ONE
WARMING UP: WHY DISCIPLESHIP MATTERS
1 The Role of Theology in Making Disciples: Some Important Preliminaries
2 Whose Fitness? Which Body Image? Toward Understanding the Present North American Social Imaginary
3 From Hearing to Doing: First Steps in Making Disciples “Fit for Purpose”
4 Doctrine for Discipleship: From Bodybuilding to Building Up the Body of Christ
PART TWO
WORKING OUT: HOW DISCIPLESHIP HAPPENS
5 Creatures of the Word: The Pastor as Eye Doctor (and General Practitioner) of the Church
6 Company of the Gospel: The Disciple as Member of the Church
7 Communion of Saints: The Disciple as Catholic Christian
8 Children of God: The Disciple as Fitting Image of Jesus Christ
Conclusion
“Now We Are Fit”: Discipleship to the Glory of God
PREFACE
H earers and Doers is intended to help pastors fulfill their Great Commission to make disciples, with emphasis on the importance of teaching disciples to read the Scriptures—“every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt 4:4)—theologically. The bulk of the book spells out more fully what “theologically” means in this context and why reading Scripture theologically is the royal road to discipleship. Here I need only to call attention to the fact that genuine faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior involves both hearing (understanding) and doing (obedience) as well as heartfelt trust.
Early on in my writing career I adopted a policy of writing one book for the church for every book I wrote for the academy. Of these, this is the third in my unofficial trilogy on the vocation of the pastor-theologian as one who builds up the church of Jesus Christ. 1 An earlier book was intended to convince pastors and laypeople alike of the importance of gaining cultural literacy—the ability to understand what’s happening in contemporary culture and how it affects us—for the sake of reclaiming Christian cultural agency: the ability to leave one’s mark on culture rather than passively submit to cultural conditioning. 2
The interests represented by these books—the pastor as theologian, theology as practical understanding, the importance of understanding culture and the prevailing “social imaginary” (I explain this in ch. 1 ), and the urgent need to make the biblical narrative the church’s control story—converge in the present work, with its focus on the necessity of doctrine for discipleship. Hearers and Doers continues to tease out the way gospel and culture relate and commends reading the Bible theologically to sustain a Christian counterculture: a being-together in Christ. The emphasis on doing is meant to remind us that making disciples involves more than knowing things. Head knowledge, either of Scripture or doctrine, is not enough to make disciples. In and of itself, head knowledge gets no further than Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “cheap grace”—a belief in the forgiveness in Christ without repentance that admires Christ but stops short of following him. Bonhoeffer describes it as “baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession … grace without discipleship.” 3
It remains to be seen how our digital age and the social media that dominate it will affect the church’s disciple-making, and young people are hardly the only ones being spiritually formed by this culture. Perhaps it’s because I am married to someone from another culture (France) and have lived in two others (England and Scotland), but I became acutely aware of the formative nature of culture on a person’s way of thinking, experiencing, and doing things long before I came across postmodernity’s focus on the kinds of situatedness (for example, historical, cultural, socioeconomic, ethnic) that allegedly affect our reasoning about reality. I do not believe that culture is uniformly evil, but I do think that it is a powerful means of spiritual formation. John Calvin rightly stipulated that self-knowledge is not possible without knowledge of God, but today we should probably add that self-knowledge also requires knowledge of the social world we inhabit.
In spite of its importance, culture too often flies under the radar of disciple-making. I think the reason is that we fail to recognize how culture forms us not only by making explicit claims or value judgments (though it often does this too) but also subconsciously—for example, by creating pictures of the good life and conditioning us to think these pictures are “normal.” 4 Culture also forms us by catching us in its web—the electronic (inter) net—and by inculcating certain habits through common practices that shape our life together. Books by Tony Reinke and Andy Crouch alert us to this everyday electronic culture and remind us that you cannot serve both God and Google. 5 Though I am greatly concerned about young people in the church, and the parents who should be on the front line of their spiritual formation, the present book is especially for pastors and other church leaders who seek to parent the parents by teaching the practical skill of hearing and doing Scripture via Christian doctrine and discipleship. 6
Hearers and Doers is not the first book to address the nature and method of discipleship, yet three emphases may distinguish it from others:
1. Its argument that the best way for pastors to “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor 10:5) is, first, to wake up their churches to the peculiar powers and principalities of contemporary culture by exposing the pictures and stories that capture our imaginations and program our lives and, second, to set out the more glorious truth of the gospel, thus redeeming the imagination and reorienting disciples so that they can walk in the truth.
2. Its insistence on reading Scripture theologically as a principal means for becoming spiritually fit (hence “through Scripture and Doctrine” in the subtitle).
3. The way in which it highlights the ironic juxtaposition of our culture’s obsession with physical fitness and the church’s relative neglect of its members’ spiritual fitness. I have previously used “diet” as a metaphor for how doctrine encourages spiritual fitness. 7 Here I expand the image and relate it to exercise and health as well. The overall aim is to help pastors view the church as a “fitness culture” and discipleship as the process of rendering believers fit for purpose.
I want to thank several groups who over the past couple of years served as “hearers” and, if not quite “doers,” then interlocutors of the original lectures on doctrine and discipleship that form the basis for the present book. As a senior fellow in systematic theology for the C. S. Lewis Institute, it has been my privilege to speak regularly at the Fellows Program in Chicago, under the able leadership of Karl “KJ” Johnson. The C. S. Lewis Institute exists to develop wholehearted disciples of Jesus Christ who are able both to articulate and live out their faith. I’m grateful to Dan Osborne, too, for his invitation to address the Pastor Fellowship of the Northeast Ohio chapter of the C. S. Lewis Institute in Youngstown, Ohio. Thanks go to Al Fletcher for his invitation to address the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Baptist Churches of Maine, and to Jack Hunter for the opportunity to speak at the New Orleans Baptist Association’s Fall Meeting in 2018. I am grateful to Jerry Andrews for inviting me to San Diego to be the keynote speaker at the 2017 Theology Conference of the Fellowship Community (which Jerry acknowledges is “the most redundant title in all Christendom”), a “covenanted biblical community” of pastors within the Presbyterian Church (USA). Finally, I’m grateful to Bob Hansen and Judy Bradish for their invitation to teach (again) in the “Christian Perspectives” adult Sunday school class that has been going for fifty-two years (and counting) at The Orchard, an Evangelical Free Church of America congregation in Arlington Heights, Illinois.
This book would never have seen the light of day without Thom Blair, an instructional designer at Faithlife, who persuaded me to record the material in part 2 for a Logos Mobile Education course, and Jesse Myers of Lexham Press, who convinced me to turn the lectures into a book. I owe my editor Elliot Ritzema a special debt of gratitude for his many insightful