Preaching the New Testament as Rhetoric: The Promise of Rhetorical Criticism for Expository Preaching

Since the rise of the New Homiletic a generation ago, it has been recognized that sermons not only say something to listeners, they also do something. A truly expository sermon will seek not merely to say what the biblical text said, but also to do what the biblical text did in the lives of its original audience. In Preaching the New Testament as Rhetoric, MacBride looks how at the discipline of rhetorical criticism can help preachers discern the function of a New Testament text in its original setting as a means of crafting a sermon that can function similarly in contemporary contexts. Focusing on the letters of Paul, he shows how understanding them in light of Greco-Roman speech conventions can suggest ways by which preachers can communicate not just the content of the letters, but also their function. In this way, the power of the text itself can be harnessed, leading to sermons that inform and, most importantly, transform. Rhetoric was the ancient art of persuasion in the world of the NT, and of course that is what preaching is all about. In Tim MacBride's new book, he shows how very natural it is to preach the NT as though it provides us not merely with texts for preaching, but texts about ancient preaching --Ben Witherington I, Amos Professor of NT for Doctoral Studies, Asbury Theological Seminary, St. Andrews University, Scotland Tim MacBride lectures in New Testament and Homiletics at Morling College in Sydney, Australia, an affiliated college of the Australian College of Theology.…