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Big Idea of Biblical Preaching, The: Connecting the Bible to People

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This book is required for Preaching I at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. It has some good examples of how to do good preaching (homiletics). It is also in honor of famous preacher Haddon Robinson, a professor emeritus.

Being a collection of essays, there are a number of famous names, including Bruce Waltke, Paul Borden, Bruce Shelley, Scott Gibson, and others.

The book is divided into 3 sections: first is why a single idea lands the biggest punch, the second is the biblical and theological power (foundations of exegesis and how to do some exegesis and how to apply to preaching), and the third is communicating the point.

This is also a book that applies Haddon Robinson's book, Biblical Preaching. The first section is two essays, one of which asks questions Robinson poses ("What is the big idea?" "What are the subject and the complement?"), and then applying this to be text-centered and audience-focused. Then, the sermon is developed with examples, illustrations, it is applied, proved, or explained, for development, and constantly re-iterated (repeated) for force. There is also necessity for the preacher to know his people and is clear, and applies theological and biblical principles, applying the right texts to address pertinent issues.

The second part of the text looks through how to do proper exegesis (for instance in Old Testament sources and challenges, such as poetics or wisdom literature, or New Testament challenges like defining the right texts and limiting the text) and applying this to preaching. In addition, Borden's essay in this section tries to address the issue of finding the big idea within a narrative. Then Terry Mattingly has an essay on 'exegeting the culture,' dealing with the issue of the audience, being composed of cultures and subcultures, to be pertinent, relevant, and clear in communication. Bruce Shelley then has the final essay in this section to relate the biblical theology's grand theme to the big idea: Christ. This leads into "What shall we do?"

The final section starts with an essay by Sunukjian on developing a flow in a sermon, applying Robinson's methods (inductive and deductive preaching, applying, proving, or explaining propositions, etc.) Joseph M. Stowell III has an essay on "Preaching for a Change," where the preacher must have his life and doctrine the same, that teaching (patient instruction) must come with preaching, and that application must be grounded in the text. He is concerned with the process (of sanctification) rather than the product (perfect holiness) in the lives of individuals, transforming them through preaching in and about many contexts (regarding individuals, small groups, local contexts of regions, all humanity, etc.) John Reed writes an essay on finding the right questions to ask in the sermon as well as finding good illustrations. Gibson wraps up the text restating the major points, and shows how flexible (adaptible) this method is.

Talking about preaching with a friend a few years ago he kept on saying, Haddon Robinson, make sure you read Haddon Robinson. The book 'Biblical Preaching' arrived, and every word was worth reading. In this collection of essays in his honour there are is some good material: not every word is worth reading. There are two essays though that caught me and I wanted to read carefully. One was by Terry Mattingly on understanding our advertising film saturated culture. His thesis about the need to read the signals coming out from the TV and cinema and then deal with them in preaching was worth a whole book. He started off with what happened when he mentioned the film Thelma and Louise in a seminary class - a lot of fun. The other great essay was by Paul Borden on how to get the main exegetical idea from the stories of the Bible and then how to turn this into a sermon. He goes into lots of useful details about the process, which could be used in a class. Pity there wasn't space for him to give a concrete example. I liked Bruce Waltke's analysis of Proverbs showing how there is a central idea and effectively reminding us all not to get too bogged down in source and form criticism. And the other essays, they're fine....but not much new.

This is a collection of around 10 articles all on the subject of preaching. Though it won 1999 Book of the Year from Preaching Magazine, I'm not sure what the fuss is about. Some of the articles are indeed interesting, such as the one about researching one's own culture in addition to the biblical culture. We will be unable to connect our listeners to the text if we are not knowledgeable about the situation and culture of our listeners.

This book is a tribute to Haddon Robinson, and the contributers don't let you forget that. Many of them re-explain "Big Idea" preaching, so that you end up reading the same thing several times.

Anyway, there are some good points. The main gist of the book is that Big Idea preaching is a philosophy which can be applied to almost any biblical passage and any preaching method.