Lecture 1-3: Why This Matters for Preaching
Lectures 1-1 and 1-2 have made an academic case: biblical theology is a distinct discipline, defined by tracing revelation's own unfolding process rather than reorganizing its content by topic. This lecture asks a more practical question, and a harder one to dismiss: does any of this change what happens on a Sunday morning? The claim of this lecture is that it does, and that the difference is not cosmetic. A preacher who can locate Christ only in verses that mention him by name has access to a small fraction of the Bible's actual testimony to him; a preacher trained to trace the storyline can show a congregation Christ in a psalm, a law code, or a genealogy without forcing the connection — because, on the model this course follows from Luke 24, the connection was already there before the preacher found it.
This is not a claim that biblical theology makes sermons easier. In some respects it makes them harder, because it removes the shortcut of finding one verse that states a truth directly and simply explaining that verse. It replaces that shortcut with the slower work of showing a congregation where a text sits in the story and what that placement means. The lecture argues the slower work is worth doing.
이 16분으로 얻는 것
- Explain, using Luke 24:27, why the model of preaching this course commends is not "add a mention of Jesus to every sermon" but "show where a text already sits in the story that leads to him."
- Summarize Edmund Clowney's case, in *Preaching and Biblical Theology*, for why a sermon that never locates its text within the larger redemptive-historical story has left its central interpretive task undone.
- Summarize Graeme Goldsworthy's argument, in *Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture*, for treating the whole Bible — not only texts that mention Christ explicitly — as Christian Scripture in this sense.
- Explain Ephesians 4:11-12 as a description of the pastoral office's actual purpose, and connect that purpose to why this lecture cares about method and not only content.
- Identify at least one danger of preaching that forces a Christ-connection a text's own storyline does not support, alongside the danger, named already in earlier lectures, of never making one at all.
Beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he explained to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. — Luke 24:27
World English Bible
He gave some to be apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, shepherds and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, to the work of serving, to the building up of the body of Christ; — Ephesians 4:11-12
WEB
3.1 Luke 24:27 as a preaching model, not only a historical model
Chapter 0 already introduced Luke 24 as this course's working model for reading Scripture as one connected story, using verses 44-45, where the risen Christ "opened their minds" to understand the Scriptures as a whole. Verse 27, on the same road, describes the method by which he did it: "beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he explained to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself." The verse is doing real interpretive work that a casual reading can miss. It does not say Jesus found and explained the handful of texts that name a coming messiah outright — Isaiah 53, say, or Psalm 110. It says he worked through "all the Scriptures," beginning from the Torah itself, and found the things concerning himself distributed across material that, read the way a topical index reads it, contains no messianic prediction at all: legal codes, genealogies, wilderness narratives.
This is the New Testament's own warrant for the kind of preaching this lecture commends, and it is worth being precise about what it warrants and what it does not. It does not license a preacher to insert Christ into any text by verbal association or clever wordplay — a move Vos himself, cited in lectures 1-1 and 1-2, would call an abuse of typology rather than an application of it, and which chapter 9 addresses directly when it takes up typology's controls. What Luke 24:27 licenses is the claim that the connection between an Old Testament text and Christ is, in the relevant cases, already there in the storyline itself, waiting to be traced rather than manufactured — which is exactly why the exercise takes the patient method of biblical theology rather than the quick move of forcing a phrase to sound Christian.
3.2 Clowney: the sermon's undone task
Edmund Clowney, longtime president of Westminster Theological Seminary, made this course's central pastoral case in Preaching and Biblical , first published in 1961 and still assigned in preaching courses that draw on the Vos tradition. Clowney's argument is that a sermon which explains a text's grammar, historical setting, and immediate application, but never places that text within the larger movement of redemptive history the text itself belongs to, has performed careful exegesis while leaving undone the interpretive task Scripture's own storyline requires. A sermon on the bronze serpent in Numbers 21, for Clowney, is not finished when it has explained the plague of serpents and Israel's complaint in the wilderness; the text's own later history — Jesus' own use of the image in John 3:14-15 — is part of what the text is, for a Christian reader holding both Testaments together, not an optional add-on supplied afterward by a preacher looking for relevance.
Clowney is careful, and this lecture follows him, to distinguish this claim from the charge sometimes leveled against redemptive-historical preaching: that it turns every sermon into a version of the same message, regardless of the text. The complaint has force against bad practice — sermons that reach the phrase "and that points us to Jesus" by the same three moves regardless of what the actual text says — but it is not a fair description of Clowney's actual method, which insists the connection be traced from the particular text's own content and location in the story, not imported as a formula. A biblical-theological sermon on the bronze serpent and one on the Passover lamb should not sound interchangeable; each text reaches its own connection by its own route.
3.3 Goldsworthy: the whole Bible as Christian Scripture
Graeme Goldsworthy, an Australian Old Testament scholar, extends Clowney's case in Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture, aiming his argument specifically at texts a preacher might otherwise treat as having no distinctively Christian content at all — wisdom literature, genealogies, legal material. Goldsworthy's claim, compressed, is that every part of the Old Testament sits somewhere on the trajectory this course traces from creation to new creation, and that locating a text on that trajectory is not an optional homiletical flourish laid over a "real" meaning found elsewhere, but part of reading the text as Christian Scripture at all — Scripture read, that is, by a community that has already received the ending Luke 24:27 says Jesus supplied.
Goldsworthy's method for doing this without collapsing into the forced-connection error named above is to ask, for any given text, where it sits relative to three of the Old Testament's own major structures: the kingdom of God under a covenant king, the temple as the place of God's presence, and the pattern of exile and restoration. A wisdom proverb about honest scales, on this method, is not connected to Christ by finding a clever pun; it is connected by locating the proverb within Israel's covenant life under its king, a covenant this course traces across chapters 6 and 7 toward its fulfillment. The connection is real because the storyline is real, not because the preacher has decided in advance that every sermon needs one.
3.4 Ephesians 4:11-12: what the office is actually for
Ephesians 4:11-12 names the offices Christ gave the church — apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers — and states their purpose in a single clause: "for the perfecting of the saints, to the work of serving, to the building up of the body of Christ." The verse does not specify a teaching method, and this lecture is not claiming Paul had biblical theology as a formal discipline in view. What the verse does establish is that the pastoral office exists for the church's building up, not for the display of the preacher's learning — which is the standard against which this lecture's claim should be tested. If tracing a text's place in the story genuinely helps a congregation see more of what Scripture is actually saying, as Clowney and Goldsworthy argue, then the method serves Ephesians 4:12's purpose. If it becomes, in practice, a way of making every sermon sound alike or of showing off a preacher's training, it fails that purpose regardless of how sound the underlying method is. This lecture is a case for the method, not a case that any sermon using it is automatically a good sermon.
핵심 요약
- Luke 24:27 says Jesus, "beginning from Moses and from all the prophets," explained "in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself" — not just the handful of texts that name a coming messiah outright, but material like legal codes and genealogies that a topical index would show no messianic content in at all.
- Edmund Clowney, longtime president of Westminster Theological Seminary, argued in Preaching and Biblical Theology (1961) that a sermon explaining a text's grammar and setting but never placing it within redemptive history has left its interpretive task undone — his example is the bronze serpent of Numbers 21, unfinished without Jesus' own use of it in John 3:14-15.
- Graeme Goldsworthy, in Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture, argues every Old Testament text sits somewhere on the kingdom/king, temple/presence, or exile/restoration axes — for example, a wisdom proverb about honest scales is connected to Christ by locating it in Israel's covenant life under its king, not by a clever pun.
- Ephesians 4:11-12 states the pastoral office exists "for the perfecting of the saints... to the building up of the body of Christ" — the test this lecture applies to the whole method: it serves that purpose when it helps a congregation see more of Scripture, and fails it when it becomes a display of the preacher's training.
- Two matching failures bracket the method: never tracing a text's connection to the larger story at all, and forcing a connection — by verbal association or wordplay — that the text's own storyline will not bear, which Vos himself would call an abuse of typology.
If you remember nothing else from this lecture: Luke 24:27 shows Jesus tracing "the things concerning himself" through "all the Scriptures," beginning from Moses, not only from the texts that name a messiah outright — which is the New Testament's own warrant for the preaching this lecture commends. Clowney argued a sermon that never places its text in redemptive history (his example: the bronze serpent of Numbers 21, left unfinished without John 3:14-15) has left its real task undone, and Goldsworthy extended the case to wisdom literature and genealogies by locating any text on the axes of kingdom, presence, or exile-and-return. The test throughout is Ephesians 4:12: the method serves the church's building up, or it becomes a display of the preacher's learning — and either never tracing the connection, or forcing one the text will not bear, fails that test.
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묵상 및 토론
- Recall a sermon you have heard on a text that does not mention Christ by name — a proverb, a law, a genealogy. Did the preacher trace a connection to the larger story, force one that felt imported, or leave the text disconnected from anything beyond its own moment? Which of this lecture's two failure modes, if either, describes what you heard?
- Goldsworthy locates a text using three structures: kingdom, presence (temple), and exile/restoration. Pick a short Old Testament passage you know well and try to place it on at least one of those three axes. What did the exercise show you that a purely topical reading of the same passage would not?
- Ephesians 4:12 states the purpose of the pastoral office as building up the body of Christ, not displaying the preacher's training. Where is the line, in your judgment, between a sermon that traces a text's place in the story to help a congregation see more of Scripture, and one that uses the same method to perform erudition? What would a listener notice differently in each case?