Christ-Oriented Expository Preaching:

Preaching the New Testament Use of the Old Testament

Kyoohan Lee

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781725277670, 9781725277663
• eBook ISBN: 9781725277687
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

This book provides an exegetical-theological-rhetorical paradigm, "the Christ-oriented approach" (Lk 24: 27, 44), that facilitates accuracy, effectiveness, and practicality in preaching the New Testament use of the Old. In providing a practical expository model, and sermon preparation/evaluation principles, this work moves beyond the level of theory into the realm of praxis, and will thus appeal to practitioners as well as to academics.

Chapter 1

Introduction

We ought at least to begin by extending to the writers of the NT the courtesy of trying to understand how they saw their task as they cited and explained the documents associated with the old covenant, the documents that they revered as hē graphē (“the Scripture”).1

Between Two Horizons

Today’s sermons encounter serious attacks from the spirit of the fallen world. The postmodern worldview, which embraces strong subjectivism and relativism, has flown into the church and mitigated the authority of the proclamation of the Word of God.2 As Steven Lawson puts it: “There is a spiritual famine in the land. A death of biblical preaching has left the evangelical movement weak, starving for spiritual truth, and susceptible to the ravages of the enemy. . . . Preaching itself is on the decline in a major way.”3

In his work, The Two Horizons, Anthony C. Thiselton remarks, “Understanding takes place when the interpreter’s horizons engage with those of the text. This merging of two horizons must be considered a basic element in all explanatory interpretation.”4 However, many biblical scholars and preachers have lost the horizon of the text, and instead accept human autonomy and subjective experience as the primary authorities for biblical interpretation. Present-day churches tend to rely on human-centered hermeneutics, because they do not think that accurate and effective preaching can be achieved by faithfully unfolding the truths of Scripture.5 The authoritative ground of biblical interpretation has moved significantly from the text of Scripture to the subjective experience of the interpreter.6

From Reconstruction To Deconstruction

A range of philosophical, theological, and cultural forces have caused this hermeneutical-homiletical crisis. First, the Enlightenment—a broad and diverse intellectual movement that embraced and lauded empiricism, rationalism, and scientific enquiry—led to the erosion of the Reformers’ doctrine of sola scriptura.7 In particular, Friedrich Schleiermacher opened the way for the contemporary era of subjectivity in religion, in which the subjective feelings of interpreters came to be a major part of biblical interpretation. Hence, interpreters’ varying opinions, derived from unreliable human experiences, have usurped what were formerly held to be objective biblical grounds.8

In the vortex of liberal theologies that followed Schleiermacher, all with their roots in the Enlightenment, the neo-orthodoxy fostered by Karl Barth and Emil Brunner paradoxically also contributed to the erosion of the principle of sola scriptura, only from another angle, since their theological method did make a radical turn from the God of Immanence to the God of Scripture.9 While Barth was trying to compensate for various Enlightenment trends with which he disagreed,10 he ended up denying biblical inerrancy, general revelation, and knowability of God through human natural capacity.11 The Barthian understanding of the Bible and revelation has since significantly influenced modern existential hermeneutics,12 in its interaction with the Enlightenment, liberal theology, neo-orthodoxy, and postmodern hermeneutics.13 Today, many contemporary hermeneutists and preachers consider human autonomy in subjective experience as the primary element in biblical interpretation, and the authoritative ground of Bible interpretation has...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Tables and Figures
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: The Self-Attesting Christ of Scripture
• Chapter 3: Hermeneutical Concerns in the NT Use of the OT
• Chapter 4: The Apostle Peter’s Pentecost Sermon
• Chapter 5: Homiletical Principles and Application Model
• Chapter 6: From Exposition to Sermon
• Chapter 7: Sermon Evaluation
• Chapter 8: Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Common Sense Common Ground Approach
• Appendix 2: A Sample Sermon manuscript
• Bibliography