Scott Clark has posted an important, creative, and compelling piece on the attraction of “legal preaching.” He writes:
A legal preacher is a preacher who majors in the law to
the neglect of the gospel. In practice, he preaches nothing but law. He
thinks that mentioning Jesus periodically or even regularly means that
he’s not a legal preacher and he can’t imagine that people are concerned
about the tenor of his preaching because he doesn’t see anything wrong
with it. It’s the sort of preaching he heard as a young man and it’s the
sort of preaching he heard in seminary and it’s the sort of preaching
he admires in other preachers.
He turns every passage into a law, because he doesn’t know any other
way to read the Scripture and he doesn’t know any other way to preach.
He preaches the law and he doesn’t even know he’s doing he it, even
when, in his mind, he’s preaching the gospel. When he finds a bit of
good news in his passage, he doesn’t end with that because he doesn’t
want his people to get the idea that there are no obligations to the
Christian life. Continue at Tullian Tchividjian
