Preachers are different, and they preach in different ways. This is especially true of Christianity, which is unthinkable without preaching. But Christians too, if we speak of the history of Christian preaching, have preached in different ways. And the main distinction in every age has been...
Preachers are different, and they preach in different ways. This is especially true of Christianity, which is unthinkable without preaching. But Christians too, if we speak of the history of Christian preaching, have preached in different ways. And the main distinction in every age has been the distinction between preaching as telling and preaching as testimony.
Originally, for all Christian preachers, including Paul himself, preaching was precisely testimony, testimony about Christ and the Kingdom. This is not surprising, since Christianity is not a religion but life with the risen Christ in His Kingdom, and the first Christians could speak only about this. Of course, they could also talk about other things, but when asked what Christianity is, they could tell only one thing: about life with the risen Christ in His Kingdom.
Such a witness wants nothing from a person; he wants only to join him to what he himself has experienced, to make him, like himself, an inhabitant of the Kingdom by introducing him to the One who opened this Kingdom to him. So Paul, addressing the members of the Corinthian church, says that he needs nothing from them of what belongs to them; he needs them themselves, in order to make them the same inhabitants of the Kingdom that Paul himself had become by that time.
But another kind of preaching is also possible: not preaching-testimony, but preaching-telling. In the history of Christianity there was more and more of such preaching and such preachers as Christianity increasingly became a religion, acquiring the characteristic features of religion: its own ritual, doctrine, and structure.
Now preachers had the opportunity not only to testify about Christ and the Kingdom, but also to acquaint listeners with that religion, new to them, of which the preachers had begun to feel themselves adherents. Sometimes this could be interesting to the hearers, but unfortunately it often turned out that the main thing in Christianity, Christ and the Kingdom, moved into the background during such preaching.
Of course, in the early Christian age there were fewer opportunities for this kind of preacher than later, but judging by Paul's letter to the Corinthian church, they had already begun to appear: the Jewish religious tradition gave them many opportunities in this respect. Paul, as we can see, strives to set priorities so that the secondary does not obscure the main thing and does not prevent those seeking Christ from finding Him and entering the Kingdom.
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12:14 The third time - Having been disappointed twice.I seek not yours - Your goods. But you - Your souls.