Marks of Good Preaching - Straight Lines and the Reasonable Person Standard

To the Reader: If you have not already done so, please read the introduction to this series, ”Thoughts on Sermon Criticism”, before reading this article.

In my previous article, “Original Intent”, we dealt primarily with examining context (grammatical, historical, literary, etc.) in order to discern what the passage exists for. This is how we learn the original or authorial intent. Getting in the writer's head, and also learning how the original hearers understood the passage is an important interpretive rule. You should know that this is called by some "Inductive Bible study." And it truly is important. This is because original intent has a direct relationship to how you apply a passage for today. And we often recognize that preaching isn’t finished until the preacher has applied it.

When one takes a passage of the Bible and applies it to life today, one must be able to draw as straight of a line as possible from the intent of the passage(s) to the application one is making. By this, I just mean that any reasonable person should be able to see how the application came from the text itself, not simply from your head.

A preacher might argue that this limits the things he can talk about, preach against, and so on. Precisely. It does limit him. It may even generalize him in some instances. But it also does not silence him either. In many ways, it is a liberation of the heart to not have to figure out what to say about a word or passage, but rather let the words themselves speak. A straight line application comes from drawing a line to the application directly from the text itself. And this type of application applies no matter what culture or time period in which it is given. The application is always the same.

Additionally, there are curvilinear (curved-line) applications in which the application is related to the text. The "bend" in the line comes from the preacher applying the passage to today. By this, I just mean that the application is not exactly the same as the original hearers would have taken it because our time and culture is different now. However, it should not be hard for the reasonable person to see how you got from the text to your conclusion in a modern context. I have no issue with this because the text must be applied to us today if it is to have any purpose for us. We are not the original audience of the Bible, so the line is not always straight toward us today, it often bends slightly in order to hit us here and now.

But then there are complex applications in which the line of application bends in a variety of ways and can be honestly applied to a number of purposes for us today. Just be careful here. Complex applications are where it becomes easy for a preacher to stretch things in wrong directions based on his ability to associate almost anything with anything else, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not.

Some applications are legitimately complex for sure. But this is what makes listener discernment so important. Blind trust can make one think the preacher's point is biblical and just complex, when in reality he has stretched it to fit his own meaning.

And then there are convoluted applications. This is where it all breaks down. These are where the line from the text to the application is so twisty, jagged, and multidirectional as to not be supportable by the original intent of the passage. This is common in "concordance sermons". Those are sermons in which the preacher looked up a word he wanted to preach to find all of its mentions, and then hops from one to the next in the sermon trying to connect their meanings. Unfortunately, each passage tends to not be making the point the preacher is. They just all have the same word in common. This is a form of cherry-picking, or simply eisegesis (reading meaning into the text that the text does not intend). When a preacher uses a passage as a “springboard” this often (not always) means he is preaching a topic that the original intent of the starting passage does not necessarily support. He is using the text to prove his points rather than letting the passage(s) speak. This is one of the main weaknesses of topical preaching.

I must again acknowledge that making secondary applications (applications not directly related to the passages' intent) from a passage is not necessarily wrong, nor does it always imply a mishandling of the text. It is just often a weaker, lazier form of application, obscures the actual meaning of passages, and leads listeners to think they know what passages are about when they really don't.

Amazingly, application is one area where we often accept some degree of pragmatism, even among those who decry all pragmatism. For example, if a passage about subject X secondarily exhorts you to care more about subject Y which the passages didn't even directly address, we often just accept that as the end justifying the means in preaching. We even attribute it to the Holy Spirit when people get an application out of a sermon that we did not intend. And we shrug it off as the the Holy Spirit doing the silent preaching. And He sort of is! Who says we reject all pragmatism!? We accept the notion that even if a passage wasn't designed for a particular purpose, we're happy if someone is helped in some godly way by it.

The writers of Scripture themselves actually make secondary applications from other Scriptures. Jesus did this as well. But does that mean we should always aim to do this? Should we preach literally any application that comes to mind as we study a text? No!

Just because the Spirit uses His word in the hearers in ways we cannot, does not give us carte blanche to draw every application we can think of regardless if it had anything to do with the passage itself. We should not simply conflate our mental associations as we study with the leading of the Spirit. The preacher is the supposed to be that governed valve through which the actual meaning of the text is taught, and nothing is let through that the text is not saying. The Spirit does the rest. The preacher giving a meaning that is not in the text does not sanctify the meaning just by his preaching of it. The preacher himself is not inspired.

Perhaps if you, like the Scripture writers, were inspired of God in something you said or wrote, then any application you make from a passage becomes an authoritative use case. Except you're not inspired. I'm not either.

An example that was recently sent to me is in Galatians 3:16 regarding the word "seed." The original, authorial intent of the subject in the Old Testament was regarding Abraham's descendants (plural) in Genesis 12:7. It wasn't until Galatians 3:16 the inspired writer shows us the original intent of "Seed" was Christ, a singular descendant. That means that all of the people between Genesis 12:7 and Galatians 3:16 did not, yea could not, know the original intent of Genesis 12:7. That's correct. That is why we call the Bible "progressive revelation." It was given over time, but it has since been completed. We don't get to add authoritative meanings today that are not in the text or related texts.

My application of the text must be provable, and as straight from the text as possible, a reasonable person must be able to see how I arrived at my conclusion and that the text itself supports it.

In the next article, we will see where concordance and “Little Bo Peep” sermons take us... and it's not good.

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