The Reformation
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 60, No. 1 – Fall 2017
Managing Editor: W. Madison Grace II
Biblical Preaching: The Development and Delivery of Expository Messages, 3rd Edition. By Haddon W. Robinson. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014. 256 pages. Hardcover, $22.99.
Haddon Robinson is a household name among homileticians, and his book Biblical Preaching has been a staple among homiletical instructors for decades. Thirty-four years have passed since Robinson first published Biblical Preaching. Why publish a third edition? Robinson has served as a pastor, a seminary president, and as a professor of preaching, most notably at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He notes that the impetus for the revision centers on the feedback he has received and is most concentrated in the improvements made to exercises intended to reinforce the book’s content. What has not changed is Robinson’s basic philosophy and method of expository preaching and his hallmark emphasis on the “big idea.”
The book is designed for homiletical instruction. It is a practical text intended to expose the reader to expository preaching and instruct the reader on how to execute expository preaching. In this effort Robinson succeeds masterfully. The book’s multi-decade life span and circulation in the hundreds of thousands testify to this success.
Biblical Preaching has been so successful because it is efficiently thorough, refreshingly perspicuous, and appropriately simple. Robinson is thorough in that he guides the reader through his ten-stage sermon preparation process, instruction on sermon delivery, a sample sermon and evaluation, and a plethora of student exercises and discussion questions for further reinforcement. Every chapter begins with a visual chart isolating the reader’s location in the ten stages. Robinson then harnesses the power of repetition to reinforce his content with visual charts that display new concepts at the beginning of each chapter and with definitions of these concepts at the end of each chapter.
The heart of Biblical Preaching is Robinson’s thesis that the expository preacher should communicate the concept or idea of the biblical text. The biblical text can be divided into natural thoughts units that each communicate one overarching idea. This is the backbone of Robinson’s homiletical thought. In the preface to the third edition Robinson recalls a diary entry, “Some preachers preach for an hour and it seems like thirty minutes; others preach for thirty minutes and it seems like an hour. I wonder what the difference is?” (ix). Robinson then writes, “I have spent my life trying to answer that question” (ix).
It appears that Robinson reveals his primary conclusion to his lifelong quest for an answer to this question when he writes, “Sermons seldom fail because they have too many ideas; more often they fail because they deal with too many unrelated ideas” (16). Therefore, Robinson shares common convictions with other advocates of expository preaching. What is distinct in Robinson’s Biblical Preaching, however, is the homiletical method Robinson articulates that seeks to eradicate the fragmentation of ideas in a sermon by shaping the sermon around one main idea, analogous to shooting a single bullet from a rifle rather than buckshot from a shotgun (16).
What sacrifices must Robinson make in order to emphasize such a specific method, and as a result, what weaknesses does Biblical Preaching contain? First, since Robinson writes with the practitioner in mind he goes light on making his case for expository preaching. Robinson acknowledges the authority of Scripture and argues that expository preaching is the type of preaching that best “carries the force of divine authority” (4). The problem is that as Robinson claims, “Expository preaching … is more a philosophy than a method” (5). Therefore, a fuller treatment of the philosophical and theological foundations that should anchor and drive one’s homiletical method would reinforce the how by addressing the why.
Furthermore, Robinson rightfully suggests that “application must come from the theological purpose of the biblical writer” (59). Discovering this purpose helps form the big idea of the sermon. Robinson then suggests the preacher take the big idea of the sermon informed by the biblical author’s purpose and determine the purpose of the sermon. The sermon’s purpose or primary application, he argues, should then shape the structure of the sermon in order to ensure the success of the sermon.
Robinson writes, “Sometimes the arrangement of ideas in the biblical passage will have to be altered in the outline. The biblical writer did not have your audience in mind” (92). I would argue that God inspired not only the substance of the biblical text, but also the structure and the spirit of it. Therefore, organizing a sermon around the structure of the text rather than the purpose of the preacher is a logical move. The expository preacher should not choose to take the biblical text’s substance while ignoring its structure when building a sermon. Doing so ignores an aspect of the inspired text and substitutes some of the text’s cargo for the preacher’s contemporary purpose.
With this one theological and methodological critique in mind, Biblical Preaching still stands today as a pillar promoting the instruction and practice of expository preaching. Students, pastors, and professors will find it both captivating to read and a boon to their own practice of expository preaching. What preacher cannot appreciate a textbook with rhetorical gems such as “each point in the outline … should be a grammatically complete sentence … Partial statements allow thought to slip through our minds like a greased football” (94)?
