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Expository preachers have long been concerned to treat the content of Scripture with great accuracy. Interestingly, however, these same preachers have not been so interested in the form in which the text is given. Tom Long would want to encourage us to rethink this approach. Should a sermon from the Psalms, for instance, sound for like a lecture or more like a song? Could a sermon from the Psalms be sung rather than spoken? Perhaps not, at least not literally, but Long is effective in challenging us to think about how the form of our sermons could meaningfully match the form of our texts.
Long, dealing with several of the major biblical genre, asks the following five questions:
1. What is the genre of the text?
2. What is the rhetorical function of the text?
3. What literary devices does this genre employ to achieve its rhetorical effect?
4. How in particular does the text under consideration, in its own literary setting, embody the characteristicss and dynamics described in the previous questions?
5. How may the sermon, in a new setting, say and do what the text says and does in its setting?
It is this last question that can be particularly productive as the preacher thinks about new ways to form sermons that are expository not only in terms of the text’s propositional content, but also in terms of its functional shape.
Long’s hermeneutic might at points best be balanced by similar works by Walter Kaiser, Graeme Goldsworthy, Sidney Greidanus, and Steven Matthewson. Still, the dialogue is worth engaging and Long offers a valuable gulde.
Table of Contents:
Part One: The Approach
1. Learning How to Read
2. Moving from Text to Sermon
Part Two: The Literary Forms
3. Preaching on the Psalms
4. Preaching on Proverbs
5. Preaching on Narratives
6. Preaching on the Parables of Jesus
7. Preaching on Epistles
8. Sermon Notes
Excerpt: This book is about biblical preaching, and it is based upon the relatively simple idea that the literary form and dynamics of a biblical text can and should be important factors in the preacher’s navigation of the distance between text and sermon. Preachers who have sought to be open and attentive to biblical texts in their preaching have long sensed that a sermon based upon a psalm, for example, ought somehow to be different from one that grows out of a miracle story, not only because of what the two texts say but also because of how the texts say what they say. A psalm is poetry, a miracle story is narrative; and because they are two distinct literary and rhetorical forms, they "come at" the reader in different ways and create contrasting effects. What is needed, then, is a process of sermon development sufficiently nuanced to recognize and emply these differences in the creation of the sermon itself. (page 11)