Ears to Hear?
The Spoken Word and the Hearing Heart
Part Two
By David Christensen
It was Sunday evening, August 23, 1868. C.H. Spurgeon stood in the pulpit of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in Newington to preach a sermon entitled “Heedful Hearing.” His text was Luke 8:18, where Jesus exhorted the crowd, “Take care how you listen; for whoever has, to him more shall be given; and whoever does not have, even what he thinks he has shall be taken away from him.” Spurgeon laid out seven ways to hear God’s Word using the alphabet to organize his thoughts. He said we must hear “attentively, believingly, candidly, devoutly, earnestly, feelingly, and gratefully.”[1]
We must learn to hear before we can hear to learn. Hearing is not only a product of the ear but a matter of the heart. God told Jeremiah, “Declare this in the house of Jacob and proclaim it in Judah, saying, ‘Now hear this, O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes to see but do not see; who have ears to hear but do not hear” (Jer. 5:20–21). The Lord went on to say through His human voice, “Do you not fear me? … Do you not tremble at my voice?” (Jer. 5:22). Hard hearts do not hear God’s Word. Hearing is a matter of the heart more than the ear, of the will more than the mind.
Jesus said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” after he told his parable of the soils (Mark 4:9). Contrary to what people think, Jesus did not tell his stories to illustrate the truth. He told his stories to hide the truth from the hard of hearing.[2] Jesus explained his purpose in telling parables by quoting Isaiah 6:9. He told parables, “So that while seeing, they may see and not perceive, and while hearing, they may hear and not understand, otherwise they might return and be forgiven” (Mark 4:12).[3] When the disciples asked him questions about the parable, then he explained the meaning to them (Mark 4:10–20). The parables tested their hearing hearts. If a person responded with a desire to learn more, then Jesus gave them more to learn. There are two different parabolic arcs that listeners follow depending on whether they hear with their hearts or just with their ears. The gravity of depravity clouds the minds of the hard-hearted, so they do not hear God’s Word and follow a downward spiritual arc. The Spirit of God counteracts the gravity of depravity to open the heart to what the ear hears for those who are learners of God’s teaching in His Word. They follow an upward spiritual arc.[4]
Hearing the Scriptures is an aptitude test for all who follow Christ. To train spiritual leaders, we must start with Christ’s aptitude test for leadership. Do you hear with a willing heart? Do you commit to learning more? Disciples are learners of Jesus Christ and learning requires a hearing heart. What are the characteristics of a hearing heart?
CHARACTERISTICS OF AURAL GROWTH
- Hearing must be communal.
The Western world has seduced the church into ubiquitous individualism.[5] Christians think of spiritual growth as a personal and private exercise rather than a communal and corporate process. Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century transformed the world from a hearing-dominant world to a text-dominant world. A text-dominant world emphasizes private reading and growth, while a hearing-dominant culture emphasizes communal and corporate growth. We can read the text in private, but we usually hear the text in public.[6] Because the Bible is readily available to read by ourselves, we tend to view spiritual growth in personal and private terms. This tendency toward private study and individualized education warps the training of spiritual leaders, resulting in deficient and incomplete preparation for church leadership.
Not so in Scripture. Gatherings for communal readings occurred throughout the first century world when Christianity was born. The average person enjoyed listening to public readings and came to know literature through aural learning.[7] In both the Old Testament and the New Testament, believers gathered to hear God’s Word read and explained.[8] Justin Martyr, in the second century, wrote that the early church gathered on Sunday, and “the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits,” followed by instruction from one of the church leaders.[9] Tertullian, said, “We meet to read the books of God.”[10] Spiritual growth was aural and communal, not private and individualistic.
We need to return to the pattern where gatherings to learn were central to growth, and hearing God’s Word was essential for learning in community. It is in community that learners can discuss, question, and interact over the information they are learning. Unfortunately, for many, reading and studying the Bible is primarily a private process. Christians assume that they can interpret the Bible by asking the question, “What does this text mean to me?” This process does not follow the biblical pattern. The biblical pattern for spiritual growth did not ask, “What does the text mean to me?” Early Christians asked, “What does the Scripture mean to us?” Peter Adam writes, “Therefore, a ‘spirituality of the Word’ will primarily be a corporate or group spirituality, and the question we should ask as we hear the Bible read and preached is ‘What is God saying to us?’”[11] If people are to learn how to lead churches, they must see how community transformation takes place, and they can only learn communal transformation in community.
Paul House asks an important question for the church today as we seek to train leaders in the twenty-first century. “What sort of education fits the Bible’s vision of ministerial preparation?” He points out that a student can achieve a seminary degree today without following the biblical pattern of communal theological education and spiritual mentorship in the context of the local church. Too many institutions are in the business of selling degrees and conforming to the latest trends in technology instead of focusing on the biblical model of communal education, which is slower and less easily commodified.[12] We need to return to the communal examination of Scripture, where leaders are trained in the context of other peers so that spiritual leaders are grounded in the local church and prepared to lead communities of faith.
- Hearing must be repetitive.
Students at Harvard College, now Harvard University, began their studies by copying and memorizing the four “College Laws.” The focus of their studies was to know God and Jesus Christ according to the first law. They committed themselves to prayer and the study of the Scriptures twice daily, and they must be able to recite sermons in the hall whenever asked. Every day at six A.M., they attended prayers, and at five P.M., they listened to the exposition of Scripture. On Saturday morning, Sunday morning, and evening, they listened to the president preach the Bible. On Saturday evening, they were tested to see how well they knew the sermon from the previous week. After graduating from college, those training for pastoral ministry spent the next two or three years under the tutelage of an experienced pastor to “read divinity.” These apprenticeship years were vital preparation for passing the licensure examination.[13]
Repetition in a group environment is a key element for leadership training. Collective memory is much more reliable than individual memory as studies have shown. Shaping individual memories into a group memory provides a stable and controlled information core for the leadership of a community. Kenneth Bailey demonstrated how modern Middle Eastern social orality controls information through repetition and communal correction. Sometimes, it was word-for-word control, and sometimes the group control was more informal.[14] The Puritans established a common theology through redundant instruction and modeling in a group environment. Any inaccuracies would be ironed out by the collective memory of the group. The collective memories would form a reliable foundation for leadership of the churches scattered around New England.
Oral redundancy involves much more than mere words. Repetition affirms and validates the spoken words through space and place–the setting and atmosphere for the instruction. The social position, age, and gender of the instructor establish the social memory. The words are confirmed by non-verbal body language, vocal sounds, speech rhythm, and tempo, all working together to form a repetitive message.[15] Oral redundancy in a group setting shapes the thinking of the potential leader by drilling into the trainee the knowledge and values of the faith community.
The Shema begins, “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut. 6:4–5). God commanded them to teach these words to their children when they sit, walk, lie down, and rise up. The words were to be symbols on their hands and foreheads and written on the doorposts of their homes (Deut. 6:7–9). Repetition through verbal and mnemonic communication was the key to effective instruction. In 4 Maccabees, there is a story about a mother who talks to her seven sons about their dead father and how he was faithful to teach them God’s Word. She says he read to them about Cain and Abel, Isaac, Joseph, and Phineas. He taught them about Daniel in the lions’ den and reminded them of how Isaiah promised that passing through the fire would not burn them. He chanted David’s psalms and repeated Solomon’s proverbs. The father reminded them of Ezekiel’s promise that the dry bones would live. This family of nine held many communal readings from the Scriptures to repeat and reinforce God’s truths in the sons’ minds.[16]
- Hearing must be text-driven.
The danger of oral communication is the ambiguity inherent in orality. Speech opens the door to “multiple truths,” depending on the listener.[17] The written text, however, acts as a preservative to protect against the infiltration of theological error and false teaching. The Scriptures were written to be read out loud so that all could hear, but the written text was a vital foundation for the spoken text. Leaders proclaimed, explained, and applied the written text in communal settings so the people could learn what God taught.[18] We can see the importance of the written text to the spoken word by noting the New Testament use of the Old Testament text. The New Testament writers quote the Old Testament directly 317 times and point back to the text 2,310 times through allusions and parallel language.[19] The result of such repetitious reading and explaining of the written Scriptures was that people were immersed in the text even if they could not read it themselves.
Communal reading of the text developed a collective control over the details of the text. The illiterate became biblically literate through oral immersion in the text of Scripture. For example, the crowd questioned Jesus about his use of a single verb in a conditional sentence in John 12:32–34. Jesus had said, “If I am lifted up” which confused the people who were well-versed in the Old Testament Scriptures. The crowd cited the Law when they questioned how Jesus could say, “The Son of Man must be lifted up.” The people believed that Jesus contradicted what they knew from the Scriptures, so they questioned his teaching. In their thinking, the Scriptures taught that the Messiah would live forever, so how could he claim that the Son of Man would be lifted up–an allusion to his death?[20] Communal Scripture reading exercised “quality control” over what teachers said about the Scriptures,[21] although, in this case, a faulty control.
Hearing must be text-driven because the text of Scripture is a guardrail against ambiguity and error. The early church read, studied, and discussed Paul’s letters, finding some parts of the letters hard to understand. It was important to read and teach accurately because those not taught distorted what the Scriptures said to their destruction.[22]
- Hearing must be experiential.
Hearing God is an incarnational event. God speaks through a person to people. As we read and speak God’s Word, we flesh it out for people to experience in a way that seeing words on paper never does. We incarnate the Word when we speak the Word. The words we hear come through the voice, personality, and character of the person speaking, making spiritual growth experiential in nature. Spiritual growth, however, can only take place if the Word of God is central to the experience of the Christian. Since God is the ultimate teacher, all leaders should be trained by experiencing God in His Word. Dietrich Bonhoeffer developed his seminary training around this basic principle. For five years (1935–1940), he directed ten small groups of students through a seminary education built around studying the Bible. Most of the men coming to his seminary, he said, were empty and burnt out spiritually and theologically. They were not prepared to lead others to spiritual growth, so he devised a training program built around Scripture and prayer. He said, “It is, though, certain that both theological work and real pastoral fellowship can only grow in a life which is governed by gathering around the Word morning and evening and by fixed times of prayer.”[23]
Sadly, many church services do not adequately train spiritual leaders, much less equip believers through Scripture. The modern worship service is often not God-centered and word-saturated, leading to biblical illiteracy and shallow spiritual lives, as Brent Sandy notes. “Rather than what humans say or sing, what God says should be most prominent in worship services. Unfortunately, in sermons, what the speaker has to say can seem more important than what God has to say.”[24] The best training for spiritual growth is for people to experience gathered worship in a place where God’s Word is central to the worship. The exposition of Scripture should model the importance of what God has to say over the preacher’s opinions. All too often, we learn more about the preacher than we do about Christ from many sermons. Even our singing should be centered around what God says to us. We teach and admonish each other as we sing in a corporate assembly. We sing God’s Word to each other. The word of Christ must be central to the worship of Christ if we are to grow spiritually (Col. 3:16).
SUMMARY
In sixteenth-century Geneva, local pastors and Christian leaders gathered every Friday afternoon to study the Bible together. They called these gatherings ‘congregations’ or ‘conferences.’ One pastor would present a message for study, but it was not a sermon. The presentation was more like a seminar, open to discussion and analysis. The men learned together through mutual instruction and correction. This dialogical process of education required humility as they learned to listen to one another in the conversational study of the Bible. John Calvin urged other towns to adopt this same practice to build theological consensus. Kevin Vanhoozer called it “table talk” and wrote, “This process of conversing together and corporate submission to the authoritative Word of God is Protestant Christianity at its best.”[25]
The early church practice of communal Scripture reading focused on spiritual formation. The first step in spiritual formation is to learn to hear God in His Word. God wants us to be good listeners. The goal of reading and conversing around God’s Word was sharply different from other communal reading in the first century world, as historian Brian Wright points out. These gatherings to read were not designed to make money, show off their oratorical skills, or gain fame like in other settings. Instead, humility in learning to become what God wanted them to be permeated the communal reading in the church. He writes:
Christians read communally so they and others would become more like Christ. It was about communal transformation as much as individual change. And so they valued the input of others. They were grateful for the people God had placed around them. And so one of the big distinctions is that Christians encouraged communal reading not as an end in itself but as a way of comprehending the text, promoting unity, of forming spiritually, of becoming like Christ.[26]
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About the Author:
David Christensen served in dual ministry for thirty years as a Bible college professor and local church pastor. He is the founder of The Rephidim Project, a ministry devoted to encouraging and equipping pastors for expository preaching. David is the author of seven books including “A Philosophy of Pastoral Preaching: Shepherding God’s People with God’s Word in One Place.” He retired as Preaching Pastor of Galilee Baptist Church in 2018 to devote himself to encouraging pastors, missionaries, and church leaders through Bible exposition and teaching the methods of expository preaching to the next generation of preachers.
[1] C.H. Spurgeon, “Heedful Hearing,” in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Sermons, Passmore and Alabaster, 1913, Vol. 59, p.265.
[2] Robert Stein, The Method and Message of Jesus’ Teachings, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1978, 39–42.
[3] The quote is introduced by ἵνα indicating the purpose of speaking in parables to the crowds. The disjunctive particle μήποτε means “lest” or “otherwise” and emphasizes the covert nature of his parabolic teaching.
[4] For a fuller discussion, see David Christensen, A Philosophy of Pastoral Preaching: Shepherding God’s People with God’s Word in One Place, Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2023, 76-78.
[5] Sandy, Hear Ye the Word of the Lord, 143.
[6] Walton and Sandy, The Lost World of Scripture, 18–19; Steffan and Bjoraker, The Return of Oral Hermeneutics, xvii–xviii.
[7] Brian Wright, Communal Reading in the Time of Jesus, 39–47, 207.
[8] Steffan and Bjoraker, The Return of Oral Hermeneutics, 95. (Deut. 31:11–13; Josh 8:34–35; 1 Sam. 31:11–13; Neh. 8:7–9; 1 Kings 22:11; 2 Kings 5:5–7; 2 Cor. 1:13; Col. 4:16; 1 Thess. 5:27; 2 Thess 2:15, Acts 8:30; Rom. 10:17; 1 Tim. 4:13; 2 Tim. 2:2; 1 John 1:1, 3; Rev. 1:3: 2:7)
[9] Justin Martyr, First Apology, 1:67, cited by Abraham Kuruvilla, A Vision for Preaching: Understanding the Heart of Pastoral Ministry, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, 2015, 57; Wright, Communal Reading in the Time of Jesus, 3.
[10] Tertullian, Apology, trans. T.R. Glover, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1931, 39.3, 175; cited by Kevin Vanhoozer, Hearers & Doers: A Pastor’s Guide to Making Disciples through Scripture and Doctrine, Bellingham, Washington: Lexham Press,2019, 83; Wright, Communal Reading in the Time of Jesus, 38.
[11] Peter Adam, Hearing God’s Words, 175.
[12] House, Bonhoeffer’s Seminary Vision, 28–29. I am not arguing against the value of a seminary education. Many seminaries are grappling with these issues and working hard to make theological education more church centered.
[13] Charles Lyttle, “A Sketch of the Theological Development of Harvard University, 1636–1805.” Church History, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Dec. 1936), 309–310; Natalie A. Naylor, “The Theological Seminary in the Configuration of American Higher Education: The Antebellum Years,” History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring 1977), 18–19. College Laws of 1642: (No. 1) “Every student shall consider the mayne end of his life and studyes, to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternall life.”; (No. 2): ‘”Seeing the Lord giveth wisdome, everyone shall seriously, by prayer in secret, seeke wisdome of him.”; (No. 3): “Everyone shall so exercise himselfe in reading the Scriptures twice a day that they be ready to give an account of their proficiency therein, in theoretical observations of Language and Logicke and in practicall and spirituall truthes”; (No. 4): “All Sophisters and Bachellors (i. e. seniors and graduate candidates for the ministerial M. A.) until they themselves make commonplace (i. e.prepare their own sermons) shall publiquely repeate sermons in the hall when they are called forth.
[14] Sandy, Hear Ye the Word of the Lord, 89–91; Bailey, “Informal Controlled Oral Tradition,” 34 cited by Steffan and Bjoraker, The Return of Oral Hermeneutics, 72–73.
[15] Steffan and Bjoraker, The Return of Oral Hermeneutics, 52.
[16] Brian Wright, Communal Reading in the Time of Jesus, 101.
[17] Steffan and Bjoraker, The Return of Oral Hermeneutics, 58; Walton and Sandy, The Lost World of Scripture, 196, 204.
[18] Steffan and Bjoraker, The Return of Oral Hermeneutics, 78–79; (Ex. 24:3–4, 7; Deut. 31:11–13; Josh. 8:34–35; Neh. 8:8–9; Col. 4:16; 1 Thess. 5:27; 2 Thess. 2:15; 1 Tim. 4:1; Rev. 1:3)
[19] Brian Wright, Communal Reading in the Time of Jesus, 117–118.
[20] Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John: The English Text with Introduction, Exposition and Notes, in The New International Commentary on the New Testament, Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1971, 599. Morris argues that the Law was used here in an expansive way to refer to the broader Scriptures, and the verb ὑψωθῶ was understood as a reference to his death. They would have been thinking of Scriptures like Ps. 89:4, 36; 110:4; Isa. 9:7; Dan. 7:14; Ezek. 37:25.
[21] Brian Wright, Communal Reading in the Time of Jesus, 124, 206.
[22] … just as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, wrote to you, as also in all his letters, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction. (2 Peter 3:15–16)
[23] Paul R. House, Bonhoeffer’s Seminary Vision: A Case for Costly Discipleship and Life Together, Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2015, 115.
[24] Sandy, Hear Ye the Word of the Lord, 120.
[25] Vanhoozer, Hearers & Doers, 187.
[26] Brian Wright, “Reading Together, Early Church Style,” 64.
