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PREACHING SKILLS
A Review of "Preaching with Variety" by Jeffrey Arthurs
How to recreate the dynamics of biblical genres
Brian Larson

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I have a friend who was born with little ability to taste food (now, there is someone to feel sorry for). For him, meals are nothing to get excited about, because aside from the texture and temperature, the delicacies on the plate are all much the same.

Like my friend, many of us preach as though we have little sense of taste, as though we did not sense the difference between the various literary genres in the Bible. We teach narratives like poetry, parables like apocalyptic literature. As a result we fail to draw out of the text the rich flavors that are there. The result can be flat, routine preaching.

The Scriptures, of course, are anything but flat, and that is what Jeffrey Arthurs' book, Preaching with Variety (Kregel, 2007) aims to help us appreciate. What drives Arthurs' book is this core idea:

God is both an artist and a persuader. He expresses himself with skill, and he moves audiences with purpose … .God's purposes flow out of his character just as artistry does. He is active as well as beautiful. He is building his kingdom, so the verbal artistry of the Bible is not simply art for art's sake; it is art that accomplishes his purposes. Rhetorical goals, not just aesthetic goals, lie behind the beauty and variety of the Bible.

Preaching with Variety focuses on what distinguishes the genres of psalm, narrative, parable, proverb, epistle, and apocalyptic literature, but it goes beyond that to describe how we can recreate the dynamics of these various genres in the sermon event. Arthurs argues that what goes on in each literary form should in some way be going on in the sermon. If there is emotion or metaphor in a psalm, there should be emotion or metaphor in the sermon. With the principles from this book, when you preach in the Gospels, the sermon will feel different than when you preach in the epistles of Paul, and your preaching will be richer for it.

Jeffrey Arthurs is associate professor of preaching and communication and dean of the chapel at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

Craig Brian Larson

Craig Brian Larson is editor of
PreachingToday.com and pastor of
Lake Shore Church in Chicago.

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	reader reviews

	Average Rating:  by 1 member. (Members, please login to rate this item.) Daniel DeVilder   (Registered User) Posted: December 06, 2007 I appreciate being made aware of the book. It sounds interesting. And while I understand this is a review and not an article, I would have liked some more specific examples of how a sermon was shaped by the genre. The topic is interesting enough that the review fell short! (No offense to the reviewer however!!)