Is Every Sermon About Christ?

Start with the text both sides will quote at you. On the evening of the resurrection two disciples walking to Emmaus are joined by a stranger they do not recognise. They tell him their hopes are dead. He calls them slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken, asks whether it was not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and then to enter His glory (24:26), and then, beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, explains what was written in all the Scriptures about himself (24:27). Later the same evening he tells the eleven that everything written about him in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled, and he opens their minds to understand (24:44-45). That is three statements in one chapter, and their scope is not modest. Moses, all the Prophets, all the Scriptures, the three divisions of the Hebrew canon.

This much is settled, and you should say so plainly in any church that is arguing about it. Every Christian tradition that has ever existed holds that the Old Testament is Christian scripture and that it bears witness to Jesus. Augustine put it in a form the church has repeated ever since, in his questions on the Heptateuch: the New is hidden in the Old, and the Old is made plain in the New. Luther, in his preface to the Old Testament of 1523, called the scriptures the swaddling clothes and the manger in which Christ lies. John 5:39 has Jesus telling his opponents that the scriptures they pore over testify about him, and John 5:46 that Moses wrote about him. Nobody in this lesson denies any of that, and a student who comes away thinking that one side of the debate does not believe Christ is in the Old Testament has misheard it completely.

What Luke does not tell you is just as important, and it is where the argument lives. He does not list the passages Jesus used. He does not say whether every passage speaks of Christ in the same way, or some passages directly and others only as part of a story that ends in him. He specifies a content, that the Christ must suffer and enter his glory, and that repentance and forgiveness will be proclaimed in his name to all nations (24:46-47), which could mean that the scriptures as a whole testify to the Messiah's work, or that each part does. And Luke records a conversation, not a sermon. So the verse that every Christ-centred preacher quotes establishes the goal of scripture beyond dispute and leaves open the question this lesson is about: what does it require of the man who stands up on Sunday with one passage in front of him?

Put the question precisely, because it is usually argued imprecisely. It is not whether Christ is in the Old Testament. It is three narrower questions. First, may the light of the New Testament shape what an Old Testament passage is said to mean in the sermon, or only what it is said to point towards? Second, must every sermon, on every text, arrive explicitly at the person and work of Christ? Third, if it must, by what routes may it travel, and what keeps the routes honest? Two serious schools answer those three questions differently, and each has excellent reasons. You will hear both at full strength before you decide anything.

The school has a birthplace, and knowing it explains its passion. In the Reformed churches of the Netherlands in the nineteen-thirties and forties a sharp controversy broke out over how to preach the historical narratives of the Old Testament. On one side were preachers who used the characters as examples, the exemplary method: Abraham's faith to be copied, Lot's worldliness to be avoided, David's courage to be imitated. On the other side Klaas Schilder, Benne Holwerda and M. B. van 't Veer argued for preaching the narratives as moments in the one history of redemption, asking first what God was doing at that point in his plan. The argument ran alongside the church conflict that divided those churches in 1944, and it would be largely unknown in English if Sidney Greidanus had not written his doctoral dissertation on it, published in 1970 as Sola Scriptura: Problems and Principles in Preaching Historical Texts. The redemptive-historical school in the English-speaking world shares the convictions of the Dutch redemptive-historical side, and through Greidanus it inherits that argument directly, though Clowney and Goldsworthy drew more on the biblical theology of Geerhardus Vos and, in Goldsworthy's case, of Donald Robinson at Moore College.

Its leading voices in English are three. Edmund Clowney taught practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and became its first president. His Preaching and Biblical Theology of 1961 argued that a preacher must place every text within the unfolding of God's revelation before applying it, and his Preaching Christ in All of Scripture of 2003 shows the method at work in sermons. Graeme Goldsworthy taught Old Testament and biblical theology at Moore Theological College in Sydney. His Gospel and Kingdom of 1981 traced the kingdom of God through the Bible as God's people in God's place under God's rule, and his Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture of 2000 argued that the gospel of Christ is the hermeneutical centre from which every text must be read. Sidney Greidanus taught preaching at Calvin Theological Seminary, and his Preaching Christ from the Old Testament of 1999 is the most careful methodological statement of the school, followed by volumes on preaching Christ from Genesis, Ecclesiastes, Daniel and the Psalms.

Their case, at its strongest, runs like this. First, the dominical argument. Jesus himself, after the resurrection, taught his disciples to read Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms as speaking of him (Luke 24:27, 44), and the apostles preached that way: Philip began with Isaiah 53 and told the eunuch the good news about Jesus (Acts 8:35), Paul reasoned from the scriptures that the Christ had to suffer and rise (Acts 17:2-3), and from morning to evening persuaded them about Jesus from the Law of Moses and the Prophets (Acts 28:23). A Christian preacher who reads an Old Testament passage as if the resurrection had not happened is reading it as Jesus told the Emmaus disciples not to.

Second, the canonical argument. The Bible is one book with one divine author and one story, and the meaning of any part is finally fixed by the whole. All the promises of God are Yes in Christ (2 Corinthians 1:20). God spoke in many ways through the prophets, and in these last days has spoken by his Son (Hebrews 1:1-2). The prophets themselves, Peter says, searched carefully into the salvation they foretold, and were told they were not serving themselves but you (1 Peter 1:10-12). If that is right, then a sermon that stops at what the human author grasped has stopped short of what God was saying, and the Christian preacher has the advantage the prophets longed for.

Third, the pastoral argument, and it is the one that drives the school's urgency. A sermon on an Old Testament narrative that does not reach Christ will almost always become a moral lesson, because once God's saving action is removed from the centre, the only thing left to preach is the human example. Abraham becomes a model of faith, Joseph of integrity, David of courage, and the congregation goes home with a list of virtues and no Saviour. Writers in the school often put the test this way: a sermon on David that a synagogue or a mosque could hear without objection and preach without changing a word has not yet become a Christian sermon, however true each of its sentences is. Goldsworthy put the same point in terms of the gospel: if the person and work of Christ is not the interpretive key, the preacher has nothing to offer a sinner but more instruction, which is what the sinner cannot keep.

Fourth, the method is not a licence. Greidanus is emphatic that the preacher must first hear the text in its own historical setting and literary form, and only then trace the lines from it to Christ, and he names seven roads that the New Testament itself authorises: redemptive-historical progression, promise and fulfilment, typology, analogy, longitudinal themes, New Testament references and contrast. The next lesson works through them. He warns as firmly as any critic against allegory and against forcing Christ into a text by a word association. Clowney drew the point as a diagram: the preacher moves from the event in its own time to the truth it embodied for Israel, and only then to the fulfilment of that truth in Christ, and he warned that moralism skips the fulfilment while allegory skips the truth the event embodied in its own time. The school, in its own self-understanding, is the discipline that prevents both errors, not the error itself.

Its modern popularisers have carried it into thousands of pulpits. Tim Keller's Preaching of 2015 argued that every sermon should preach Christ, not as an appendix but as the resolution of the problem the text itself raises. Bryan Chapell, whose fallen condition focus you met in the previous module, belongs to the same family. And behind them all stands the Puritan William Perkins, whose Art of Prophesying of 1592 ends with a sentence the school loves: preach one Christ by Christ to the praise of Christ.

The critics are not liberals who doubt that Christ is in the Old Testament. Their best spokesman is Walter Kaiser, an evangelical Old Testament scholar who served as president of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, has written more on the Messiah in the Old Testament than most of the school's defenders, and has argued for decades that the Old Testament is held together by a single promise-plan of God that culminates in Christ. His The Messiah in the Old Testament (1995) and The Promise-Plan of God (2008) are books by a man who wants Christ preached. What he rejects is a method, and his objection to it is an argument about meaning, not about Christology.

His case, at its strongest, runs like this. First, the argument from authorial meaning. God spoke through human authors to real hearers, and what a passage means is what God said through that author in that text. In Toward an Exegetical Theology (1981) Kaiser argued that the interpreter must not import later revelation to determine the meaning of an earlier text, and he proposed instead what he called the analogy of antecedent scripture: the theology that informed the author when he wrote, the promises and covenants already given, is the legitimate context for reading him. When a preacher uses the New Testament to say what Genesis 22 means, he has, on this view, replaced what God said through Moses with what the preacher knows from Paul, and however orthodox the result, it is not exposition of Genesis 22. On Kaiser's view, reading the New Testament back into the Old in this way puts a meaning into the text rather than drawing it out, which is what the word eisegesis describes.

Second, the textual argument. The Old Testament prophets, on Kaiser's reading, understood what they wrote about the Messiah. He reads 1 Peter 1:10-11 as saying that they searched for the time and circumstances of the fulfilment, not for its content, which is how the BSB renders it, time and setting; they knew whom they spoke of and were inquiring when. So Christ is in the Old Testament as the conscious content of its messianic promises, in Genesis 3:15, Genesis 12:3, 2 Samuel 7 and Isaiah 53, read in their own context, and the preacher who wants to preach Christ should preach those promises as their authors meant them, rather than finding Christ by connection in passages whose authors were saying something else.

Third, the New Testament's own practice. The apostles do not only use the Old Testament christologically. Paul says the wilderness events took place as examples (1 Corinthians 10:6), and that everything written in the past was written for our instruction (Romans 15:4). James offers Elijah as a model of prayer (James 5:17) and Job as a model of perseverance (5:11). Hebrews 11 is an entire chapter of men and women held up for imitation. A method that treats exemplary preaching as a betrayal of the gospel has a quarrel with the New Testament writers, who did it without apology. The critics do not say every Old Testament sermon should be a list of examples. They say the New Testament licenses more than one use of the Old, and that a homiletic which licenses only one is narrower than scripture. Some add a further question, which Richard Longenecker put sharply in a 1970 essay asking whether we can reproduce the exegesis of the New Testament: the apostles read the Old Testament as inspired witnesses with a revelatory authority no modern preacher has, and it does not follow that every christological reading they made is a method the rest of us may copy at will.

Fourth, the practical argument, and it comes from people who sit in the pews. When every sermon must end at the cross, the critics say, every sermon begins to sound the same. The particular word of a particular passage, Proverbs 6:6 on the ant, Esther's courage, the law of the gleaner in Ruth, is hurried past on the way to a destination the congregation could have predicted from the first sentence, and a passage that God put in the canon to say one thing is used to say the thing every other passage is used to say. Abraham Kuruvilla, who teaches preaching at Dallas Theological Seminary, made this argument at length in Privilege the Text! (2013): each preaching passage has its own theology, which he calls the theology of the pericope, and the preacher's job is to bring the congregation to live that theology, which is itself a step towards Christlikeness. He gave the name christiconic to his alternative, conformity to the image of Christ through the particular demand of each text, and he argued that a christocentric method obliges the preacher to leave the passage in order to find Christ.

Fifth, the theological argument. Some critics hold that a method which makes every passage about Christ risks reducing the Trinity in the pulpit. Large parts of the Old Testament are about God the Father's dealings with his people, and the Spirit's work in prophets and judges, and a preacher who must convert every reference to God into a reference to Jesus can lose the shape of the Old Testament's own theology. And a further group of critics, within the Reformed tradition itself, have argued that the school's suspicion of example and command has thinned out application. John Carrick's The Imperative of Preaching (2002) argued from the history of Reformed preaching that the great preachers of that tradition used the imperative and the direct question freely, and that some redemptive-historical preaching had become a lecture in biblical theology that told hearers what God had done and never told them what to do about it.

The two cases are not two lists of reasons passing in the night. They press on each other at three points, and you should be able to state both sides of each.

Meaning and significance. The critics press first here. If later revelation may determine what an Old Testament text means, what stops a preacher from making any text mean anything, provided the destination is orthodox? The allegorists of the early church reached Christ too. Redemptive-historical defenders reply that they do not claim the New Testament changes what the text meant; they claim the divine author intended more than the human author grasped, and that the canon is where that intention is made known. Greidanus distinguishes reading a text in its own historical context from reading it in the context of the whole canon and of redemptive history, and he insists the first must be done before the second. They add that Kaiser's own analogy of antecedent scripture already concedes that context larger than the passage determines how it is read; the dispute is only over whether that context may include what came later. Kaiser's reply is that this is exactly the dispute, and that it is decisive: an earlier author can be informed by what preceded him, and cannot be informed by what had not yet been written.

Moralism. Here the redemptive-historical side presses first. If an Old Testament narrative is preached for its example without reference to Christ, what makes the sermon Christian, and what does it offer a hearer who cannot follow the example? Critics reply that the charge proves too much, since it would condemn Hebrews 11 and James 5. They argue that example preaching becomes moralism only when it is cut off from grace, and that the grace of God is present in the Old Testament text itself: God delivers Israel before he gives the commands at Sinai (Exodus 20:2), and David's victory is explicitly the LORD's (1 Samuel 17:47). A sermon can be grounded in grace without leaving its passage. They add that the redemptive-historical side has its own failure mode, in which the sermon becomes an accurate account of salvation history that never addresses the will. Redemptive-historical writers answer in turn that Hebrews 11 is not a counter-example but their method in miniature, since every example in it is an example of faith in God's promise and the chapter ends by telling its readers to fix their eyes on Jesus (Hebrews 12:2); and that a sermon on David which names the LORD's victory but never says who David's greater son is has still stopped one chapter short of the story the congregation is living in.

Forced connections. On this point neither side presses first, because both own the danger. The redemptive-historical school has produced its share of sermons in which Christ was reached by a word association, a scarlet cord or a piece of wood or a number, and its own best writers condemn those sermons as sharply as Kaiser does. The critics have produced their share of sermons on Old Testament passages that would be at home in any religious gathering, and their own best writers condemn those as sharply as Clowney did. The disagreement is about where the more serious risk lies for most preachers most of the time, and that is a judgment about pulpits as much as about texts.

A middle vocabulary has grown up, and you will meet it. Some writers distinguish christocentric preaching, which looks for Christ in every text, from christotelic preaching, which holds that every text belongs to a story whose end, telos, is Christ, without requiring the preacher to locate him in each passage. Peter Enns used christotelic in this sense in Inspiration and Incarnation (2005). Defenders of the redemptive-historical school often say that this is what they meant all along, and critics often say that it concedes their point. You will need to decide whether the new word resolves the dispute or relabels it.

Settled. The Old Testament is Christian scripture and testifies to Christ; Luke 24 puts that beyond argument for anyone who accepts the Gospels. The passage must be heard in its own setting first, which every writer named in this lesson insists on. Allegory, by which a detail of the text is assigned a meaning the text gives no reason to see, is not a legitimate route to Christ, and both schools say so. A sermon that leaves its hearers with a duty and no grace has failed, and so has a sermon that leaves them with a history and no duty. Those agreements are wider than the noise of the debate suggests, and a preacher who keeps all of them will already be preaching better than most.

Not settled. Whether the light of the New Testament may shape what an Old Testament passage means in the sermon, or only where the sermon goes after the meaning is established. Whether every sermon must name Christ explicitly, or every sermon must be consistent with a canon whose goal is Christ. Whether the prophets knew the content of what they foretold and searched for the time, or searched for both. And whether the greater danger for preachers in your setting is moralism or thin application. Serious, believing, careful scholars stand on each side of each of those, with texts. This course will not pretend otherwise.

What you must decide is what your own sermon will do, and you can decide that without settling the debate for the whole church. You already have a passage and a main idea from the last module. Whatever position you take, two duties hold. You owe your hearers the particular word of this passage, the thing it says that no other passage says in quite the same way. And you owe them the place of this passage in the story that ends in Christ, because they are Christians hearing it on the far side of Easter, and a Christian congregation will hear the passage that way whether you help them or not.

Here is the work for this week. Take your passage and main idea, a notebook and your Bible. First, write two sentences on where your passage stands in the story of redemption: what God had done before it, and what he had not yet done. Second, write one paragraph showing how your passage connects to Christ in the way the redemptive-historical school would draw the line. Third, write one paragraph showing how you would preach the same main idea in the way Kaiser or Kuruvilla would, staying inside the passage and its antecedent scripture. Fourth, read both paragraphs aloud. Mark in each any sentence you could not defend from the text if a careful hearer stopped you afterwards and asked where you got it. Whichever paragraph has fewer marks is the one closer to your passage, whichever school it belongs to.

Keep both paragraphs. The next lesson gives you the routes from an Old Testament passage to Christ that the New Testament itself uses, and the two ditches on either side of the road, and you will test your first paragraph against them.