Preaching What Kind of Text?

Hebrews opens with a sentence every preacher should keep in view: 'On many past occasions and in many different ways, God spoke to our fathers through the prophets.' God did not speak in one register. He told stories, gave laws, inspired songs and laments, compressed wisdom into proverbs, sent prophets with oracles, gave four accounts of his Son, wrote through apostles to churches with problems, and opened heaven in visions. Paul's claim in 2 Timothy 3:16 is that all of it is God-breathed, and all of it is useful. Since the scriptures Timothy knew from infancy were the scriptures of Israel, 'All Scripture' there includes the genealogies, the purity laws and the songs of lament.

A genre is a kind of writing, recognised by its form and by what readers expect from it. Everyone reads genre without thinking about it. Nobody reads a recipe the way they read a love letter, or a newspaper report the way they read a proverb. The difficulty with the Bible is that its genres are ancient, some of them unlike anything in modern life, and that a preacher can easily treat every passage as if it were the same kind of thing, usually as if it were a letter, a series of propositions to be extracted and applied.

Two scholars made the case for genre-shaped preaching in the late 1980s. Sidney Greidanus, in The Modern Preacher and the Ancient Text (1988), argued that genre is part of the meaning, not decoration around it, and that a preacher who ignores form will misread content. Thomas Long, in Preaching and the Literary Forms of the Bible (1989), pressed the point further. He asked preachers to work out not only what a text says but what it does, and how its literary form does it, and then to ask how a sermon might say and do the same in a new setting. A lament does not make an argument about suffering; it gives a sufferer words. A parable does not state a doctrine; it ambushes its hearers. A sermon that turns either into a list has said something true and done something different.

The rest of this lesson takes the main kinds of writing one at a time. It cannot be complete; every genre has books written about it. Fee and Stuart's How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, mentioned in the Hermeneutics track, gives a chapter to each and is the best single next step if you can obtain it. Here the question is always the same: what is this kind of writing built to do, and what does that mean for the sermon?

Narrative is the commonest form in the Bible, and the one most often preached badly. Biblical narrators show more than they tell. They rarely stop to say whether an action was right, and when they do it matters, as with the refrain in Judges: 'In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes' (Judges 17:6 and 21:25). That sentence is the narrator's verdict on everything around it. So the first mistake to avoid is treating every character as a model. Gideon's fleece in Judges 6 is not obviously a pattern for seeking guidance, Jephthah's vow in Judges 11 is a horror, not an example of commitment, and David with Bathsheba is not on the page to be imitated. The narrator's question is what God is doing among these people, and the characters are often how he shows you what they are doing to themselves.

The second mistake is to strip the story out and preach the points. Stories work by tension and release: a problem, complications, a turning point, an outcome. A sermon on a narrative can follow the same shape, retelling the story so that the hearers feel the tension before they are told how it resolves. That is not entertainment. It is letting the text do to the congregation what it did to its first hearers. Module 4 takes up the shapes a sermon can take, including the narrative shape that Eugene Lowry called the homiletical plot.

The Gospels are narrative with an extra layer. Each evangelist arranged his material with purpose, so the question is not only what happened but why Mark, Matthew, Luke or John placed this episode here. The storm on the lake in Mark comes immediately after parables about the hidden kingdom and opens a run of mighty acts; Matthew places the same event after sayings about the cost of following Jesus. Comparing the Gospels' placement of a story, which a free tool can show you in parallel columns, is one of the fastest ways to see what each writer is emphasising.

Parables have their own long debate, and the student should know both sides. For most of the church's history, parables were read as allegories, every detail standing for something. Augustine's reading of the Good Samaritan is the famous example: the wounded man is Adam, the robbers are the devil and his angels, the Samaritan is Christ, the inn is the church and the innkeeper is the apostle Paul. In the 1880s and 1890s the German scholar Adolf Jülicher argued in his study of Jesus' parables that this was a mistake: a parable makes one point, and the details are there to make the story work. Jülicher's view dominated for most of the twentieth century and rescued the parables from ingenious nonsense.

Later scholars have argued he went too far. Jesus himself explains the parable of the sower detail by detail (Mark 4:13-20), and many parables use stock images, a king, a vineyard, a feast, that Jewish hearers would immediately connect with God and Israel. Craig Blomberg, in Interpreting the Parables (1990), proposed that a parable typically makes one point for each of its main characters, often two or three. Klyne Snodgrass, in Stories with Intent (2008), defended a measured place for allegorical elements controlled by Jesus' own setting. The settled ground is this: a parable must be read in the setting the Gospel gives it, its details are not a code to be cracked, and its sharp turn, the moment the hearer is caught, is usually the heart of it. Preach the turn.

Law in the Old Testament is covenant law. The Ten Commandments do not begin with a command but with a statement of who God is and what he has done: 'I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery' (Exodus 20:2). Rescue comes first, and the law is how a rescued people is to live. Any sermon on Old Testament law should keep that order. Preaching the commands without the rescue turns a covenant into a code of good behaviour.

How the law of Moses applies to Christians is one of the questions the church is genuinely divided on, and module 3 gives it a full lesson. In outline: the Reformed tradition, following a distinction found in Thomas Aquinas and set out in the Westminster Confession, divides the law into moral, ceremonial and civil parts, holding that the moral law still binds while the ceremonial is fulfilled in Christ and the civil expired with Israel's state; they point to Jesus' words that he came not to abolish the law (Matthew 5:17-19), to Paul's claim that faith upholds the law (Romans 3:31), and to his summary of the commandments in the command to love (Romans 13:8-10). Lutheran preaching reads the law above all as the word that exposes sin and drives the hearer to the gospel, pointing to Romans 3:20, where the law brings awareness of sin, and Galatians 3:24, where it is a guardian to lead us to Christ, while also using it to guide the believer's life. Other traditions, including many dispensational and New Covenant theologians, argue that the law of Moses as a whole ended as a covenant at the cross, and that Christians are bound by what is renewed in the teaching of Christ and the apostles; they point to believers being not under law but under grace (Romans 6:14), no longer under the guardian (Galatians 3:25), under the law of Christ (1 Corinthians 9:21), and to the first covenant made obsolete (Hebrews 8:13). Each tradition reads all of these texts, and Romans 7 besides, carefully, and comes out differently. Whichever you hold, the preaching task is similar: show what the law revealed about God's holiness and his care for his people, and show how it points forward, before you ask what a Christian is to do.

Wisdom literature works differently again. A proverb is a short, memorable statement of how life generally goes in God's world. It is not a promise and not a law. The clearest evidence is Proverbs 26:4-5, two proverbs side by side that give opposite advice about answering a fool, both true, each in its time. The wise person knows which situation he is in. Preaching a proverb as a guarantee does real damage. 'Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it' (Proverbs 22:6) is wise counsel about how upbringing shapes a life. Preached as a promise, it tells every faithful parent whose grown child has turned away that the fault must be theirs, and many have left churches with that wound.

The wisdom books also argue with one another, and the preacher should let them. Proverbs states the general rule that the righteous prosper. Job and Ecclesiastes test that rule against cases where it does not hold. In Job, the friends speak long and often eloquently, and God says at the end that they have not spoken accurately about him (Job 42:7). So a sermon cannot lift a fine sentence from Eliphaz and preach it as God's word without asking where the book places it. Context in wisdom literature includes the whole book's argument, and sometimes the argument between books.

Roughly a third of the Old Testament is poetry, and Hebrew poetry has its own rules. The most important is parallelism: lines come in pairs or threes, and the second line takes up the first. 'The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands' (Psalm 19:1). In 1753 Robert Lowth, in his Oxford lectures on the sacred poetry of the Hebrews, described three kinds of parallelism, lines that repeat, contrast or extend one another. Later scholars, notably James Kugel in The Idea of Biblical Poetry (1981) and Robert Alter in The Art of Biblical Poetry (1985), showed that the second line rarely just repeats; it sharpens, intensifies or carries the thought forward. Kugel summed up the pattern as the first line, and what is more, the second. A preacher who notices how the second line advances the first will usually find the point of the verse in the movement between them.

Poetry also thinks in pictures. 'The LORD is my shepherd' is not a proposition dressed up; it is an image that carries a whole world of care, guidance, danger and provision. A sermon on a psalm should spend time inside its images rather than translating them at once into abstractions. And the forms of the psalms matter. A lament such as Psalm 13 moves from complaint ('How long, O LORD?') through petition to trust and praise. Walter Brueggemann, in The Message of the Psalms (1984), grouped the psalms into psalms of orientation, disorientation and new orientation, and his scheme has helped many preachers see that a congregation in grief may need to be given the first half of a lament before it can honestly sing the second.

Prophecy is not mainly prediction. The prophets were messengers sent to call Israel back to the covenant, and most of what they said was addressed to their own generation: oracles of judgment on injustice and idolatry, calls to repentance, and promises of restoration. Micah 6 is framed as a lawsuit, the LORD bringing his case against his people before the mountains as witnesses. Amos 5:24, 'let justice roll on like a river', was spoken to a prosperous kingdom that had combined religious festivals with the oppression of the poor. Fee and Stuart estimate that only a small proportion of Old Testament prophecy concerns events still future from our standpoint, and a preacher who treats the prophets mainly as a calendar of the end times will miss most of what they said.

So preach an oracle first as it was spoken. Jeremiah 29:11, 'For I know the plans I have for you', is printed on countless cards and posters, and it was spoken to exiles in Babylon who had just been told to build houses, plant gardens and settle in for seventy years (29:5-10). It is a promise of a future and a hope to people who would mostly die before it came. That makes it more, not less, useful to a suffering church, but only if it is preached in its setting. Where an oracle is taken up and fulfilled in the New Testament, follow the New Testament's lead, and module 3 will give you tools for that.

The epistles are real letters to real churches, written to address particular situations, and they are built as arguments. That makes them the genre most preachers find easiest, and the one where a different mistake is common: preaching isolated verses as if they were independent sayings. A letter's meaning lives in its flow. Watch the joining words, especially therefore, and the movement that runs through most of Paul's letters from what God has done, often called the indicative, to what believers are therefore to do, the imperative. Romans 12:1 urges Christians to offer their bodies as living sacrifices 'on account of God's mercy', which is eleven chapters of argument compressed into a phrase. Preach paragraphs, not verses, and preach each paragraph in the place it holds in the letter.

Apocalyptic writing is the genre most unlike anything modern readers know. Its main examples in scripture are the second half of Daniel and the book of Revelation. It communicates through vision, symbol and number: beasts for empires, horns for kings, lampstands for churches. The text sometimes interprets its own symbols, as when Revelation 1:20 explains that the seven lampstands are the seven churches, and those interpretations are the key to the rest. Symbols are not codes to be matched to tomorrow's news; they are pictures that reveal what is really going on behind events.

On how Revelation's visions relate to history the church is genuinely divided, and each approach has serious defenders. Preterist readers hold that most of the visions concerned events of the first century, the fall of Jerusalem or the Roman Empire's persecution of the churches, which is why the book says its events must soon come to pass (1:1) and that the time is near (1:3). Historicist readers, including many of the Reformers, read the book as a survey of church history from John's day to the end, and many of them read its time periods by the pattern of a day for a year found in Numbers 14:34 and Ezekiel 4:6. Futurist readers, including dispensational and many historic premillennial interpreters, hold that most of chapters 4 to 22 describes events still to come before Christ's return, noting that John is told to write the things that will happen after this (1:19) and is shown what must happen after these things (4:1). Idealist readers take the visions as portraying the conflict between God and evil that runs through every age, without tying them to particular events, noting that each letter in chapters 2 and 3 ends by addressing what the Spirit says to the churches, plural, and that the visions repeat the same conflict in cycle after cycle. Many careful interpreters combine elements of more than one. Each can explain texts the others find hard.

There is common ground for the pulpit across all four. Revelation was written to seven real churches in Asia, some faithful under pressure, some compromised and comfortable (chapters 2 and 3). John writes to them as their brother and partner in the tribulation and kingdom and perseverance that are in Jesus (1:9), and twice the book stops to call for the perseverance of the saints (13:10, 14:12). Whatever else Revelation does, it lifts the eyes of suffering believers to the throne of God and the Lamb (chapters 4 and 5) and calls them to endure. A sermon on Revelation that leaves a persecuted congregation stronger in faith has preached it truly, whichever school the preacher belongs to.

Return to your own passage, with your exegetical notes and your main idea from the last two lessons. Four questions will tell you what its form asks of you.

First, what kind of writing is it? Name it as exactly as you can: not just narrative but a miracle story in Mark; not just poetry but an individual lament; not just epistle but a paragraph of exhortation following an argument. Remember that books mix genres. A Gospel contains narrative, parable, poetry and long discourse; a prophet can move from oracle to narrative to prayer.

Second, how does it work? Write down three features of its form you have noticed: the turn in the story, the parallel lines, the therefore, the refrain, the image, the symbol the text interprets. Third, what does it do to its hearers? Does it warn, comfort, unsettle, explain, call to praise, catch them out? Fourth, how could your sermon do the same? If the passage is a story, could you retell it so the hearers feel the tension? If it is a lament, could you give your congregation its words before you give them its resolution? If it is a letter, could you trace the argument so they see why the command follows?

Then go back to the main idea you wrote in the last lesson and check it against the form. Does it capture what the text does, or only what it says? If your passage is a parable, does your idea include the turn that catches the hearer? If it is a psalm of lament, does it leave room for the honesty of the complaint? Revise the idea if it needs it, and write one sentence beneath it beginning: because this passage is a, my sermon will. That sentence will matter a great deal in module 4, when you begin to build the sermon itself.