Preaching Biblical Literature

Series Preface

The Bible is the best-selling book of all time. There are various reasons for that—it feeds us spiritually; gives us hope; points us to the Triune God; and shows us where we came from and where we are going. There’s another reason: the Bible is great literature; just plain great. Captivating narratives, wry proverbs, dark prophecies, catalogues of laws, and practical but theologically deep epistles populate its pages.
However, the literary nature of the Bible creates a problem for preaching. What’s a preacher to do with that fact that the Bible is literature? Are we supposed to create sermonic-poems when we preach psalms? Are we supposed to leave our meaning opaque when we preach certain parables? If the text is a story must the sermon be a story? What’s a preacher to do?

One thing preachers could do, and have done, is to ignore the fact that the Bible is literature. Turn a deaf ear and blind eye to its literary qualities. Feed each text into the homiletical mill and crank out sermon after sermon as uniform as hotdogs. The authors of this series reject that option. Our conviction is that God inspired not only the content of the Bible, but also its forms. Cranking out homiletical hotdogs from quirky parables, awe-inspiring miracle stories, kaleidoscopic visions, and emotive lyric poetry violates authorial intention. Ronald Allen famously quipped: “To change the form of preaching to a form not clearly representative of the text is akin to covering the cathedral at Chartres with vinyl siding.”

The authors share another conviction: preaching should be interesting. Holding an audience’s attention is largely a matter of content—showing how the ancient Word applies to today’s needs and interests—but it is also a matter of form. A steady diet of hotdogs is unappetizing.

So, how can preachers be biblical in form as well as content? That question is the impetus of this series called Preaching Biblical Literature. In trim and readable volumes, the reader will encounter methods and strategies for preaching the various genres of the Bible. We want to give preachers recipes for sermons that are as varied as the literature in the Bible itself.

Our goal is to provide succinct descriptions of these literary forms with concrete suggestions for preaching in genre-sensitive ways. Each volume is grounded in biblical and literary scholarship and applies those disciplines to homiletics. With plenty of examples in each chapter, as well as sample sermons at the end of each book, our hope is to teach and model how to preach biblical literature biblically. Here’s to stamping out hotdogs. Let’s get cooking.

Jeffrey D. Arthurs
Kenneth J. Langley