Blogging in Christ — Issue 20

One Subject

Every writer is told, sooner or later, to choose a niche. Pick a slice of the market. Name the segment you serve. Narrow the audience until it can be counted, addressed, and kept. Do not write for everyone, the counsel runs, because writing for everyone reaches no one. Specialize, and the readers who want exactly that slice will find you, stay with you, and grow your name.

The counsel is coherent on its own terms. Its terms are the problem. A niche narrows by reader. It asks who will listen, what that group already wants, and which corner of attention is still unserved. It measures a subject by its market: what is wanted, by whom, and in what form it can be delivered without losing them. The subject then becomes a servant of the segment, kept inside the slice it came for. Breadth is treated as dilution, and wandering as failure.

The herald's narrowness runs the other way. It narrows by Subject, not by segment. It does not begin with the reader's wants. It begins with the One the Scriptures testify to. And that narrowness, rightly understood, does not shrink the writing. It opens the whole canon.

The road to Emmaus shows the form of it. Two disciples walk away from Jerusalem, slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken. The risen Christ joins them, and the text says, "Beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he explained to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself." (Luke 24:27) Mark the breadth and the singularity together. Moses and all the prophets. All the Scriptures. One subject: the things concerning himself. The narrowness is not a corner of the canon. It is a Person running through the whole of it.

He says it again in the upper room, in plainer terms still: "This is what I told you while I was still with you, that all things which are written in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms concerning me must be fulfilled." (Luke 24:44) Law, prophets, psalms: the threefold shape of the Scriptures as his hearers knew them. Then the necessary movement, the suffering and the rising: "Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning at Jerusalem." (Luke 24:46-47) The Subject is not a theme the writer selects from the text. The Subject is the One the text was moving toward, and the preaching that follows goes to all the nations. Narrow the Subject to Christ, and the audience widens to the world. The two narrowings are opposites.

That is the first joint of the matter. A market niche asks the writer to be findable by being small. A herald's subject asks the writer to be faithful by being centered. The first protects the writer from irrelevance by shrinking his field. The second frees the writer from irrelevance altogether, because his field is everything the Scriptures say, held together by the One they testify to. He need not fear that he will run out of material, because he has not chosen a topic. He has been given a Person, and the Person stands in every part of the book. One Subject does not make every text say the same thing in the same voice. It makes every text speak in its own place, toward the same Lord.

The understanding itself is not a technique the writer masters. "Then he opened their minds, that they might understand the Scriptures." (Luke 24:45) The opening stands before the understanding. The writer does not open his own mind by choosing a clever angle, and he does not open his reader's mind by choosing a clever niche. Christ opens minds. The herald's work is to follow that opening: to read the text in its own place, and to let the movement toward Christ show itself where the canon shows it, rather than forcing it where it does not. A niche is a technique for being heard; an opened mind is a gift for hearing.

Paul shows what this determination looks like in practice. "For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified." (1 Cor 2:2) That determination did not shrink his letters to a single repeated sentence. It gave every subject he touched its center. The same determination stands behind the preaching Luke records: "we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God." (1 Cor 1:23-24) Jews and Greeks: the two great divisions of his world, both addressed, both stumbled or called by the same Christ. The determination to know Christ crucified refuses that bargain. It preaches the same Christ to both, and lets the stumbling and the calling fall where God puts them.

Philip at the eunuch's chariot shows the same movement from a single starting point. "Philip opened his mouth, and beginning from this Scripture, preached to him about Jesus." (Acts 8:35) Beginning from this Scripture: one passage, read where the man already stood, opened toward Jesus. The starting point varies. The destination does not. In Thessalonica the same pattern holds over three Sabbaths: Paul "reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and demonstrating that the Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead, and saying, 'This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ.'" (Acts 17:2-3) Different cities and hearers, one proclamation. The writer with one Subject is freed to begin wherever a seeking man stands, because every true beginning in Scripture can be followed to the same Lord.

This is also why the herald need not flatten the canon to keep his subject. The testimony of Jesus is the Spirit of prophecy, as the angel tells John: "Worship God, for the testimony of Jesus is the Spirit of Prophecy." (Rev 19:10) That does not turn every verse into a direct prediction, and it does not license the writer to claim that an author had a later person in view when the text speaks universally. It means the prophetic witness as a whole moves toward the testimony of Jesus, and the writer follows that movement at the pace the texts themselves set. The writer's task is to follow that gathering, not to invent it. The niche writer invents his boundary and then defends it. The herald receives his center and then follows it, text by text, in its own order.

The practical test, then, when the writer chooses his next piece, is not whether it fits his niche. The test is whether the text, read in its own place, opens toward Christ as the canon presents him, and whether the writer has let it do so without bending it to a brand. A piece that fits the niche but bends the text fails. A piece that breaks the niche but follows the text succeeds, because the writer has no niche to break. He has a Subject to follow, and the Subject is larger than any segment. The thread is not a topic. The thread is a Person.

The end of the matter is the opposite of the market's promise. The market promises that narrowing the audience will grow the work. The herald finds that narrowing the Subject to Christ grows the work in the only sense that matters: it gives him the whole Scriptures to write from, it gives him every nation to write toward, and it gives him a Lord who opens minds rather than a technique that captures them. "For of him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory for ever! Amen." (Rom 11:36) A writer who has that Subject has no need of a niche. He has one thing to announce, and the whole book to announce it from.

Write the one Subject. Let the law, the prophets, and the psalms speak in their own voices. Follow them to Christ where they lead, and no further than they lead. The audience will be whoever God sends, from whatever nation, beginning wherever they stand. The writer's narrowness is settled, and it is settled by a Person, not by a market. That is narrow enough to be faithful, and wide enough to last.