The Four Pages of the Sermon, Revised and Updated: A Guide to Biblical Preaching
The Four Pages of the Sermon, Revised and Updated: A Guide to Biblical Preaching
eBookThe Four Pages of the Sermon, Revised and Updated - eBook [ePub] (The Four Pages of the Sermon, Revised and Updated - eBook [ePub])
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Overview
Doing justice to the complexity of the preaching task and the questions that underlie it, author Paul Scott Wilson organizes both the preparation and the content of the sermon around its "four pages." Each "page" addresses a different theological and creative component of what happens in any sermon. Page One presents the trouble or conflict that takes place in or that underscores the biblical text itself. Page Two looks at similar conflict--sin or brokenness--in our own time. Page Three returns to the Bible to identify where God is at work in or behind the text--in other words, to discover the good news. Page Four points to God at work in our world, particularly in relation to the situations described in Page Two. This approach is about preaching the gospel in nearly any sermonic form. Wilson teaches the ‘what’, ‘why’, and ‘how’ of sermon construction, all rooted in a theology of the Word.
This completely revised edition guides readers through the sermon process step by step, with the aim of composing sermons that challenge and provide hope, by focusing on God more closely than on humans. It has been largely rewritten to include an assessment of where preaching is today in light of propositional preaching, the New Homiletic, African American preaching, the effect of the internet, and use of technology. A chapter on exegesis has been added, plus new focus on the importance of preaching to a felt need, the need for proclamation in addition to teaching, and developing tools to ensure sermon excellence. New sermon examples have been added along with a section that responds to critics and looks to the future.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781501842405 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Abingdon Press |
| Publication date: | 09/18/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Sales rank: | 244,420 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
FOUR PAGES: GRAMMAR AND THE PREACHING SCENE
It makes a huge difference whether preachers and teachers of preaching believe God acts and that Jesus is alive. The gospel, as understood here, assumes these truths and from them offers four grammatical principles to undergird sermons. Grammatical rules are generally not seen; they operate beneath the surface and below the radar, and the same is true of these components that undergird biblical preaching. We will call them Pages: Page One is trouble as identified in the Bible and Page Two is that trouble in our world. Trouble is whatever leads to death or puts the burden on humans to do something. By contrast, with grace, God accepts that burden in Christ. Page Three is grace in the Bible and Page Four is grace in our world. All biblical preaching can be helpfully analyzed in relation to these four. They are of relatively equal weight (though in faith grace is stronger), hence we may think of them as constituting four quarters of a biblical sermon, though arrangement and distribution may vary. In the same way that good grammar allows a sentence to make sense, these four elements enable the gospel to be preached as good news. They generate movement: from bondage in Egypt to the promised land, crucifixion to resurrection, sin to redemption, brokenness to healing, and so forth. Grammar makes for effective communication. Gospel is needed to nurture the church.
From a theological point of view, it is hard to argue with these four. If there are other standard grammatical options in sermons, they are not of the same priority. For instance, a sermon may discuss world history, social customs, or world affairs, but in general, if the subject does not already fit one of our categories, it is theologically neutral and of less value. Of our four theological elements, can any be safely ignored? Trouble speaks to human need in the Bible and today — we cannot save ourselves. If we could we would not need a Savior. Grace speaks to God's help, in the Bible and today. All together they speak of change, renewal, salvation, and empowerment. None is dispensable and all four facilitate the gospel.
These Four Pages commonly appear without order in sermons throughout time, though sequentially they make sense. Trouble to grace represents a biblical redemptive pattern, moving from a state of sin or brokenness to salvation or liberation. Preachers who have never conceived of the gospel in these terms, nonetheless typically use our Pages, though they may drift onto them like cars on black ice, often without warning or control. Overall sermon excellence starts with recognizing them, examining how each functions, and how together they provide measurable standards for teaching, practice, and evaluation, something homiletics sadly lacks.
What follows in this volume is the story of each of our four elements, why homiletics students, teachers, and preachers should know about them, what is at stake in each, and best practices with them. The story begins in the preaching scene today, six decades after strong winds hit the homiletical highlands.
I. THE PREACHING SCENE: WHERE WE HAVE BEEN
Four key movements have shaped the preaching scene today: propositional preaching, the New Homiletic, African American preaching, and the internet and social media.
A. Expository and Propositional Preaching
Throughout history, expository sermons have been the bread-and-butter sermons of the church. They "expose" or exegete (= draw out) the biblical meaning. Such sermons probe a text, lift up key words or verses, and give a full sense of what the text says. Typically, they move from exposition to application, from what the text said to what it says or means today, in the manner that some of Jesus's parables move from text to explanation. The first biblically recorded example of this pattern is found in Nehemiah 8:7-8, "The Levites helped the people to understand the law, while the people remained in their places. So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading."
Expository sermons traditionally are deductive, they state up front a single idea, proposition, or doctrine, and then prove or argue it. The best-known contemporary book on expository preaching is by Haddon W. Robinson, who sees so much variety in expository preaching he says it is "more a philosophy than a method." It is preaching that "communicates a biblical concept derived from and transmitted through a historical, grammatical, literary study of a passage in its context, which the Holy Spirit applies first to the preacher, then through [to the] hearers."
Propositional preaching is a larger category that includes expository elements but is not restricted to a single biblical text and might develop a topic. It relies on discursive reasoning and usually makes its case with points. They provide the movement of the sermon as in steps to a destination. Typically, there are three that give three pieces of evidence, or three ways of looking at something, or three stages in a logical argument. Three-point sermons have been around at least since the 1200s when Robert of Basevorn observed, with humor, "Only three statements, or the equivalent of three, are used in the theme — either from respect for the Trinity, or because a threefold cord is not easily broken [Eccl 4:12], or because this method is mostly followed by Bernard [of Clairvaux], or, as I think more likely, because it is more convenient for the set time of the sermon." The form became stereotyped as three-points-anda-poem. Why the poem? There could be several reasons: (1) it provided a convenient signal that the sermon was ending; (2) it presented an aesthetic, emotional, or transcendent component for the sermon; (3) it added classical rhetorical flourish so the sermon could end on a high note; and (4) the origin may connect with the influence of John Wesley, who sometimes concluded his own sermons by reciting or singing verses from his prolific hymn-writing brother, Charles.
Propositional sermons generally assume that every text contains a subject or idea that can be extracted, explained, and applied to the life and work of a congregation. Typically, the points are either driven by the biblical text, or by a teaching (i.e., doctrine) of the church, or by some contemporary topic. The points may be clearly identified, "My first point is ... ," or they may simply underpin the argument without having attention drawn to them. The purpose is a persuasive argument. The movement is accumulative (as in "Three ways to pray"), or driven by logic (as in a syllogism, if A and B, then C), or progressive (as in three steps to effective social outreach). The structure is largely mechanical, like Lego pieces, and sometimes predictable, though the points themselves may be novel. It is also somewhat arbitrary that there are three points.
1. Text-Driven Points
The points often come from Bible verses. For instance, Paul says, "I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. ... My proclamation was] with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power" (1 Cor 2:2, 4). A sermon could be structured as follows:
Paul preached:
1. Jesus Christ (i.e., risen from the dead),
2. the cross (i.e., the Savior was crucified on the cross, a foolish notion to Greeks), and
3. in the Spirit (i.e., Christ is present now).
Application in preaching occurs when the relevance of a text for today is explored. In this case, application could happen three times, once in relation to each point. Alternatively, a concluding section of the sermon could apply the significance of Christ to the life and work of the congregation.
A variation on text-driven points is verse-by-verse preaching where the order of the points is determined by the logical or chronological flow of the biblical text.
2. Doctrine-Driven Sermons
Preachers through the ages have preached doctrinal sermons that might begin with a Bible verse that isolates a church teaching, and the doctrine then develops, perhaps with passing reference to several relevant biblical texts. John A. Broadus, whose Treatise on the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons (1870) is still used, provides this outline on the doctrine of the Word of God — a doctrine that is essential today for preachers to teach. His sermon addresses this question: "In what consists the glory of gospel preaching?" He gives a six-point response: "In that it, 1) is appointed by the Son of God, 2) makes known the will of God, 3) promises the grace of God, 4) is performed in the strength of God, 5) is attended by the blessing of God, and 6) leads souls to the presence of God." He cautions that six may be too many points, and that if six are used they must follow one another closely. His book would have been a boon for Puritan preachers, if not for their listeners, who had to endure as many as sixty points and sub-points in total. Broadus recommends no more than four, and offers this three-point simplification of his six-point outline: the glory of gospel preaching consists, "1) in its establishment, 2) in its subject, and 3) in its operation and effects."
3. Topic-Driven Points
Topical sermons are like doctrinal ones, but the focus is a social topic, and biblical texts may be employed at will. Ronald A. Nathan preached on the role of the Caribbean black church in Great Britain, and he based his comments on Philippians 3:13-14, "forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus." The text was not the source of his points, though the text supplied the basic image of a race:
1. Keep your eyes on the prize (i.e., don't get distracted by hate).
2. Run with the ball (i.e., the gospel is a call to lifelong commitment to truth and justice).
3. Be a team player (i.e., the gifts of the church must be offered to the community).
4. Stay within the rules (i.e., prayer and advocacy must go hand in hand).
Much African American preaching uses an underlying propositional form, and it often does so with cultural flair and innovation. Perhaps sensing that three points can be too linear or mechanical, James H. Harris gives them movement using Hegel's "thesis, antithesis, synthesis." The conclusion may often come as celebration, which Henry H. Mitchell identified as the passionate, uplifting climax of the sermon. Three-points-and-a-poem and three-points-and-a-celebration are similar in basic concept (though not when experienced as performance) — did they share a history at some point? Propositional preaching can be excellent for teaching, as in an All Saints sermon by William B. McClain: (1) Those who have gone before us were faithful; (2) "All the saints salute you"; and (3) We dare not fail them. We will return to more distinctive features of African American preaching in a moment.
Propositional sermons often aim for a strong hook in a beginning that announces the theme and the upcoming argument. Conclusions often are used as effective summaries. Authority in expository, doctrinal, and topical sermons tends to be vertical, with the preacher above the people as the teaching elder. Traditionally, if stories were used they were moralistic illustrations serving points, more addressed to the head than the heart. Today, much has changed in the propositional world. How points are emphasized can vary, story is now more frequently a shared narrative experience, and PowerPoint can add additional components.
B. The New Homiletic
Propositional preaching can be excellent for teaching — two and a half centuries later, preachers still recite John Wesley's memorable stewardship outline, "Earn all you can, give all you can, save all you can." But by the 1950s and 1960s, strong winds were sweeping the homiletical highlands, and for some people the clothes on propositional preaching were feeling a little thin. Preaching was excessively "heady," too reliant on information, argument, and intellect — too much like a lecture. The high pulpit seemed "ten feet above contradiction." Not every text has three points. Not every text can be reduced to a single proposition or concept. (Fred Craddock once compared the process to boiling tea and preaching the stain in the bottom of the cup.) Fresh alliteration, like "Pray, Prepare, Praise," did not necessarily make the weekly sermon form seem varied. Books of sermon illustrations provided stories that often seemed canned, artificial, or corny. As illustrations, they did exactly that, they illustrated, they simply added a picture to a point that was already intellectually established and stood on its own. They were not actually needed for the argument. They popularized what was said and made it more accessible. Some said they dumbed it down. What was needed in preaching was not just fresh paint on the walls, a renovation was needed that rethought the entire preaching moment. The foundation was set for the New Homiletic.
The New Homiletic is an innovative school of preaching that began in the 1950s and took a holistic approach to preaching. It adopted an integrated understanding of organic form, imagination, language, metaphor, narrative, image, performance, the Word as event, inductive learning, horizontal authority, social context, justice, transformation, and the like. In the subsequent decades, changing understandings affected preaching across the theological spectrum. Most of the innovation was complete by around 2008. By then, most key insights had been made. New paradigms do not just suddenly appear, they evolve, and they also do not just end. The value of the New Homiletic continues today as scholars and preachers further appropriate its teachings, and occasional books still add to it. It makes preaching experiential.
One of the new movement's first green shoots burst forth from the homiletical soil in 1958, when H. Grady Davis claimed, "A sermon should be like a tree, / It should be a living organism." Romantic ideas of organic unity had been in the air since the early 1800s and were promoted in new university Departments of Literature since the 1920s, but Davis was the first to put them front and center for preaching. He said the sermon should grow, its twigs and blossoms unfolding naturally from its inner life, rooted in the eternal Word and in "loam enriched by death." This understanding of sermon design he summarized and presented in the form of a free-verse poem. Even using the form of a poem to demonstrate what he meant by organic growth was revolutionary. It represented a radical innovation and signaled what would become a key principle in the new movement: form is not separate from function. They are related. In this case, his poem grew in the same tree-like way that sermons are to grow. It did what it talked about, it embodied what it meant. The implications are large: (1) The form of a biblical text affects its meaning. (2) The form of a biblical text affects the form of a sermon. (3) The form of a sermon affects the meaning it renders of a biblical text. (4) The form of a sermon affects the theology it expresses.
In 1969, David Randolph was the first to call the various fresh initiatives a "New Homiletic," drawing on a then-current school of biblical thought known as "the new hermeneutic." His term "New Homiletic" did not become widely used until the late 1980s, however. Terms like "narrative," "story," and "inductive sermon" became common. We can number some of the ways in which his predictions proved accurate:
1. "[P]reaching must be understood as event" in contrast to "'mechanistic' preaching which views the sermon as a construct of parts." In other words, something happens in preaching, the sermon grows, understanding deepens, people are transformed, sermons are not primarily imparting information. The sermon creates an effect, "What happened in this sermon?"
2. It is biblical, "designed to bring the word of God to expression." Its subject is "nothing other than reality as exposed by the biblical text." Randolph said, "The sermon should not be on a text but from a text. ... [It] is not to be an exposition of the text but an execution of the text." By this he meant not just that preaching should be expository, but that it should do what it speaks about and bring about the intention behind the text. Leander Keck advocated renewal of the Bible for the pulpit. The eventual publication of the Revised Common Lectionary, based on the three-year Roman Catholic Lectionary after Vatican II, did much to assist this renewal in many denominations.
3. It is theological and Christ-centered. Randolph affirmed John Wesley's purpose of preaching, "To invite. To convince. To offer Christ. To build up; and do this in some measure in every sermon." Not all scholars in the new preaching movements made this as explicit a goal as it was for many African American preachers and others, like Bryan Chapell.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
Chapter One: Four Pages: Grammar and the Preaching Scene,
SECTION I. GETTING STARTED: MONDAY,
Chapter Two: Exegesis and Sermon Unity,
Chapter Three: Introductions, Four Sentences, and the Need,
SECTION II. PAGE ONE: TUESDAY,
Chapter Four: Trouble in the Bible,
Chapter Five: Filming Trouble in the Bible,
SECTION III. PAGE TWO: WEDNESDAY,
Chapter Six: Trouble in the World,
Chapter Seven: Filming Trouble in the World,
SECTION IV. PAGE THREE: THURSDAY,
Chapter Eight: God's Action in the Bible,
Chapter Nine: Filming Grace in the Bible,
SECTION V. PAGE FOUR: FRIDAY,
Chapter Ten: God's Action in the World,
Chapter Eleven: Filming Grace in the World,
SECTION VI. VARIETIES OF SERMONS,
Chapter Twelve: Reshuffling and Varying the Four Pages,
Name and Subject Index,