aBeLOG
Welcome to the aBeLOG, a series of (hopefully!) fortnightly posts on all matters homiletical. I intend to touch on whatever grabs my attention regarding preaching—issues contemporary and ancient, ideas hermeneutical and rhetorical, personalities conservative and liberal, publications antiquarian and avant-garde. Essentially, I’m going to follow my own homiletical olfactory instincts up rabbit trails and after red herrings. Comments are always invited and appreciated.
Pericopal Theology Distinguished
I have, in previous posts, discussed the entity I label “pericopal theology,” the theology specific to a particular pericope, representing a segment of the plenary world in front of the canonical text that portrays God and his relationship to his people. Pericopal theology is, in my conception, the crucial intermediary in the sermonic move from text to application.
Pericopal theology differs from systematic or biblical theology (at least as they are commonly defined).
The Aqedah (Genesis 22)
The Aqedah is the term given to the account of the “sacrifice” of Isaac by Abraham. The word is derived from the Hebrew verb ‘qd which means “to bind”—thus referring to the binding of Isaac at the altar of his sacrifice.
Then they came to the place of which God had told him;
and Abraham built the altar there and arranged the wood,
and bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood.
Genesis 22:9
The account of Abraham’s trial in Genesis
Pericopal Theology
A couple of months ago, I had written about the importance of the pericope in preaching. (By “pericope” I mean the manageable chunk of the biblical text employed in a sermon—i.e., a preaching text.)
And several weeks ago, I had talked about the world in front of the text, God’s ideal world, segments of which are portrayed by individual
Growing, Pericope by Pericope
It is not often that one gets to see the fruit of one’s ministry labors. But by God’s grace, I got to taste a delicious specimen the other day, in the form of an email from one of my former students, Michael. He always kept pestering me about when my Mark commentary would be done. When it came on the market, Michael was one of the first to buy a copy, and he promptly began teaching through it in his SS class for Young Marrieds at a local church.
Here’s his email (slightly
The World in Front of the Text
It is by the regular weekly encounters with pericopes of Scripture that life change is addressed, so that the people of God may be aligned to the will of God. As pericopes are sequentially preached from, the resultant transformation of lives reflects a gradual and increasing alignment to the values of God’s kingdom (his ideal “world”). In other words, what is being sought in the weekly homiletical undertakings of the church is corporate and individual alignment with
The Pericope in Preaching
“Pericope” refers to a portion of the biblical text that is of manageable size for a given preaching event in the worship gathering of the church. In other words it is a preaching text. It is through pericopes, read and exposited in congregations as fundamental units of Scripture, that the community of God corporately encounters the Bible. Indeed, it is impossible to conceive of a gathering of the faithful that does not implement such a reading and interpretation of
Preaching is Spiritual
One of the key elements in my definition of preaching comes at the end: “all in the power of the Holy Spirit.” “All,” i.e., the communication in a worship gathering of Christians, the discernment of the biblical idea by theological exegesis of Scripture, and the application of that idea to the specific body of believers to conform them to the image of Christ for the glory of God. All. Every part of preaching is to be Spirit-directed and Spirit-controlled.
Abe Kuruvilla is the Carl E. Bates Professor of Christian Preaching at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, KY), and a dermatologist in private practice. His passion is to explore, explain, and exemplify preaching.