Killing the lecture! A better way for preaching?
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Abraham Kuruvilla’s A Vision for Preaching is a wonderful, refreshing book. The work is an exposition of one statement:1
Biblical preaching, by a leader of the church, in a gathering of Christians for worship, is the communication of the thrust of a pericope of Scripture discerned by theological exegesis, and of its application to that specific body of believers, that they may be conformed to the image of Christ, for the glory of God—all in the power of the Holy Spirit.
I will focus on two aspects; (1) the thrust of the passage,2 and (2) how to apply scripture.
The sermon—bullet or buckshot?
Like many pastors, I read Haddon Robinson’s book Biblical Preaching at seminary. In that classic tome, Robinson explained his “big idea” approach to preaching:3
A major affirmation of our definition of expository preaching, therefore, maintains that ‘expository preaching is the communication of a biblical concept.’ That affirms the obvious. A sermon should be a bullet, not buckshot. Ideally each sermon is the explanation, interpretation, or application of a single dominant idea supported by other ideas, all drawn from one passage or several passages of Scripture.
Kuruvilla is against this approach. The sermon, he argues, is not an argument in service to a particular “point” in the text. That is the “old” homiletic,4 where “the point” drives the structure of the sermon:5
Craddock’s wry observation (noted earlier) in this regard is worth repeating: ‘The minister boils off all the water and then preaches the stain in the bottom of the cup.’ Thereby, sermons turn out to be ‘didactic devices,’ more about arguments to persuade listeners to buy into these propositions, and less about texts and what they (or their authors) are doing. All this may even imply that once one has gotten the distillate of the text, that is, the reduction of the text into one or more propositions, one can abandon the text itself.
This, Kuruvilla insists, is not the way. Instead, the sermon is about what the author is doing with the passage. The preacher is a tour guide, a docent,6 and his role is to point out what the biblical author is doing with the text—not to re-package it into a “point” or “big idea” to be argued to the congregation.7 The text is not a plain glass window the preacher points through towards some “big idea” beyond. Rather, it is a stained-glass window the reader must look at.8
So, Kuruvilla argues, the author is doing something with the text. There is a layer behind the onion of the simple words. For example, pretend my wife says, “the trash is full!” She is indeed telling me the trash is full, but she really wants to move me to action—she wants me to take the trash out!9 So, Kuruvilla’s point is there is no “big idea” or “big argument” or “series of points.” There is only the preacher as tour guide, showing what the author is doing, in his context.
Application
This means, for Kuruvilla, application is always based on the theology of the passage.10 “Specifically, the ‘theology’ in the “theological hermeneutic” proposed here is pericopal theology, not biblical or systematic theology.”11 Each text has a message for God’s people. It might be more than one “big idea.” Whatever the passage communicates, whatever the author is doing with his message, that is the basis for application.12
Ironically, Kuruvilla manages his best explanation of his view (his “Big Idea,” perhaps!) in an academic article, not in this book:13
What is needed in the pulpit, then, is a creative exegesis of the text undertaken with a view to portraying for listeners what the author is doing—pericopal theology—enabling their experience of the text + theology.
The sermon is not a lecture; “my three points this morning are on the screen!” The sermon is where the pastor pulls back the curtain and show what he found behind it in his own study.14 This is the great challenge—to structure sermons in an engaging, inductive way to let the congregation “see” the theology of the passage.
Kuruvilla’s book is a tour de force. It is a breath of fresh air from the redemptive-historical and other biblical theology approaches that seek to impose a framework for application into each text. Bryan Chapell recommends we use “gospel glasses” to see redemption in every text.15 This is incorrect—some passages just are not about redemption, and to make them so will rip them out of context.
1 Abraham Kuruvilla, A Vision for Preaching: Understanding the Heart of Pastoral Ministry (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2015), p. 7.
2 I will routinely use the phrase “passage,” whereas Kuruvilla prefers “pericope.” His definition is more expansive than normal. “Though the term is usually applied to portions of the Gospels, I use it in this work to indicate a slice of text in any genre that is utilized in Christian worship for preaching. In other words, a ‘pericope’ is simply a preaching text, regardless of genre or even size. It is through pericopes, read and exposited in congregations as the basic units of Scripture, that God’s people corporately encounter God’s word,” (Ibid, p. 116).
3 Haddon Robinson, Biblical Preaching, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001), p. 35.
4 “The modus operandi of the ‘old’ homiletic is to put the text through a grinder and then preach, in points, the pulverized propositional products that come out of the contraption,” (Kuruvilla, Vision, pp. 95-96).
5 Ibid, p. 99.
6 “… we must reconceive the role of preachers. I propose the analogy of a curator or docent guiding visitors in an art museum through a series of paintings Each text is a picture, the preacher is the curator, and the sermon is a curating of the text-picture and its thrust for the congregants, gallery visitors. A sermon is thus more a demonstration of the thrust of the text than an argument validating a proposition. A creative exegesis of the text is undertaken in the pulpit with a view to portraying for listeners what the author is doing. The sermon unveils the author’s agenda. The distillation of the text into points and propositions is thereby obviated. Instead, as Long describes, the preacher is a “witness” of the text, to the text—equivalent to my analogy of the preacher being a curator of the text-picture,” (Ibid, pp. 103-104).
7 “Thus, for the longest time, preaching has been conducted as a forensic argument that proves the putative proposition of the text for the congregation—an act of reasoning, a parceling of information, and an appeal to the cognitive faculties of listeners to bring them to a rational conviction about that proposition,” (Ibid, pp. 100-101).
8 Abraham Kuruvilla, “Time to Kill the Big Idea?” in JETS 61.4 (2018), 831.
9 This is actually Kuruvilla’s own hypothetical example from his conversation with Hershael York on York’s Pastor Well podcast. “Episode 36: Abraham Kuruvilla discusses hermeneutics and the gift of singleness,” (19 August 2019). Retrieved from https://equip.sbts.edu/podcast/episode-36-abraham-kuruvilla-discusses-hermeneutics-gift-singleness/.
10 “What the pericope affirms in its theology forms the basis of the subsequent move to derive application,” (Kuruvilla, Vision, p. 121).
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid, p. 122.
13 Kuruvilla, “Big Idea,” 842.
14 Ibid, 843.
15 “A preacher who asks the following basic questions takes no inappropriate liberties with a text: What does this text reflect of God’s nature that provides redemption? What does this text reflect of human nature that requires redemption?” (Bryan Chapell, “Redemptive-Historic View,” in Homiletics and Hermeneutics, ed. Scott Gibson and Matthew Kim [Grand Rapids: Baker, 2018], p. 16).
Tyler Robbins 2016 v2
Tyler Robbins is a bi-vocational pastor at Sleater Kinney Road Baptist Church, in Olympia WA. He also works in State government. He blogs as the Eccentric Fundamentalist.
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I’ve been reading Vision for Preaching since yesterday and you are right, it is a tour de force on preaching, documenting the history as well as the motivation.
Just thinking abouthis thread over the last couple of days…
Robinson, to his credit advanced the art of preaching exponentially through his teaching and his example.
Prior to Robinson, the prevalent homiletical model was developed by James Braga. His was based upon classical forms of western rhetoric. Braga type preachers emphasized words in a passage. The sermons didn’t really expound the text as much as they expounded words. The sermons were not so much expositions of the text as they were systematic theologies built on the words. Having said that, some truly great preachers used this method. The two I’m most familiar with are J. Don Jennings and Steven Olford. If you’ve never heard Olford preach, you owe yourself!
Robinson improved homiletics because he taught that a given text had an inherent big idea. Rather than chase words across the Bible, a preacher should discover the big idea in a text and preach THAT. .This method opens up the meaning of given texts to audiences. In high school, the first preacher I ever heard who applied this method consistently was Chuck Swindoll. At the time I was being exposed to Sword of the Lord type preachers. Compared to them, Swindoll was a breath of fresh air who made the meaning of the text clear and who applied it well.
I think Kuruvilla has picked up the homiletical football and advanced it WAY down the field. There is a growing understanding of the literary strategies that biblical writers use especially in narrative texts, which make up most of the Bible. Kuruvilla is showing us how to take the narrative strategies of the writer and utilize them to create sermons. So his homiletic is not a western rhetorical structure (like Braga’s or Robinson’s) that is imposed on the text, but his homiletic is a process of uncovering the writer’s strategy and revealing that in the sermon. I think Kuruvilla’s work is important and is superior to what has gone before. I hope God keeps him pure and that his influence grows.
JSwaim wrote:
I think Kuruvilla has picked up the homiletical football and advanced it WAY down the field. There is a growing understanding of the literary strategies that biblical writers use especially in narrative texts, which make up most of the Bible. Kuruvilla is showing us how to take the narrative strategies of the writer and utilize them to create sermons. So his homiletic is not a western rhetorical structure (like Braga’s or Robinson’s) that is imposed on the text, but his homiletic is a process of uncovering the writer’s strategy and revealing that in the sermon.
I think this sums it up perfectly. Kaiser and Robinson have good really things to say. After revisiting them after many years, I just think they’re somehow missing - like binoculars that aren’t quite in perfect focus. It doesn’t quite do justice to the text because it essentially re-shapes, re-packages and atomizes it.
Tyler is a pastor in Olympia, WA and works in State government.
It’s been 12 years since I wrote this article, and it was probably a reaction against some of the homiletics I’d been taught: https://sharperiron.org/article/whose-outline
I would definitely enjoy perusing Kuruvilla.
Nowadays:
- Is still think that for the sake of the hearers, it’s still helpful to distill some kind of “big idea”; but I think the “big idea” can relate to what the author is doing rhetorically, emotionally, etc.; and the “big idea” doesn’t have to be a tidy statement. For example, Psalm 89 shows how the faithful react to apparent lapses in God’s promises; but Psalm 89 cannot be read isolated from the final fulfillment in Jesus Christ.
- I have a really hard time preaching short passages.
- I still think it’s appropriate to relate the passage to God’s overall redemptive plan and to state the gospel somehow.
- I still try to get the outline, pacing, tone, and rhetorical emphases from the shape of the passage itself.
- I believe that Americans tend to overemphasize the “doing” aspects of application rather than the “believing” aspects of application. But much of the Bible’s applications are trying to get you to think and believe a particular way.
Michael Osborne
Philadelphia, PA
Kuruvilla has written a journal article with a negative critique of the big idea. He has had some stout replies from several “big Idea” heavy hitters, to whom he has replied. All of these are linked on his website ( homiletix.com ) and they make for interesting reading.
In some of his replies, Kuruvilla has allowed that the “big idea” IS a helpful concept. Being able to take a section of scripture and summarize it in a sentence is a fine thing. You’ll note that Tyler’s initial post was a quote from Kuruvilla which summarized his definition of biblical preaching. There, Kuruvilla himself utilizes the “big idea”, For this reason I think that reading Robinson’s work is still quite valuable. However, Kuruvilla’s objection is that the statement of the big idea, while valuable for summarizing the theological content of a section, should not be used to give the homiletical shape to the sermon. A critical and valid distinction.
I corresponded with Kuruvilla a few weeks ago. I challenged him that, if his entire project comes down to a point of single application in a sermon (which he discusses very helpfully in his Manual for Preaching), is this a “big idea” by any other name? He said no, and referred me to the very resources JSwaim mentioned, above.
At this point, I’d say the difference is that Robinson (et al) distill the entire warp and woof of the sermon to a big idea, whereas Kuruvilla wants us to show the congregation the text (not a distillate of that text) and only then refine the theological focus to a memorable and relevant action towards Christlikeness. I’d sum it up and say Kuruvilla builds on Robinson and refines him in a more biblical way.
Tyler is a pastor in Olympia, WA and works in State government.
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