G. A. Studdert-Kennedy, reflecting on the reaction of an average man hearing the Apostle’s Creed in church, said;

I can imagine a man feeling, as I did, that behind those great symbolic words there ought to lie an answer to the vast question of the world’s soul; and I can imagine him turning to the theologicas, or going into a theological library. . . . I can imagine him banging the books on the table, or throwing them into a corner . . . and going away muttering to himself, “Good Lord of Love and Beauty, what’s the use of all this in a world of starving souls?”^[1]G. A. Studdert-Kennedy, The Wicket Gate (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1930), pp. 232-33.

That kind of question is often raised, not only by people listening to the recitation of the Creed in a liturgical church, but also by people listening to a sermon in an evangelical, free church setting. The sermon is loaded with quotations from the Bible, technical theological terminology, and doctrinal concepts, but the listener never hears the connection these things have with life.

Spurgeon warned against the tendency to load preaching with material irrelevant to life. He advised his students that

the great problems of sublapsarianism and supralapsarianism, the trenchant debates concerning eternal filiation, the earnest dispute concerning the double procession, and the pre or post millenarian schemes . . . are practically of little concern to that godly widow woman, with seven children to support by her needle, who wants far more to hear of the loving-kindness of the God of Providence than of these mysteries profound . . .; (and) she is the type of hundreds of those who most require your care.^[2]C. H. Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1955), p. 75.

Referring to a minister he knew whose sermons failed to connect with life, he said:

He is great upon the ten toes of the beast, the four faces of the cherubim, the mystical meaning of badgers’ skins, and the typical bearings of the staves of the ark and the windows of Solomon’s temple: but the sins of business men, the temptations of the times, and the needs of the age, he scarcely ever touches upon. Such preaching reminds me of a lion engaged in mouse hunting.^[3]Ibid., p. 76.

Spurgeon called preachers who engaged in that kind of preaching “microscopic divines” who are involved with “sacred miniature painting” and “holy trifling.”^[4]Ibid.

 

The Need for Application

A sermon needs to achieve application to life because of human nature. Real life for most people does not revolve around decoding Egyptian hieroglyphics, Babylonian cuneiform, or biblical Hebrew and Greek. It revolves around such things as the delicacy of a baby’s hand or the deformity of a baby’s body; a happy reunion or a painful separation; a warm handshake or a “cold shoulder”; a good night’s sleep or a troubled tossing and turning; a recovery from sickness or a devastating diagnosis; an encouraging report card or an “F”; receiving a promotion or being passed over; an amply stocked kitchen or concern about the next meal; a ripe old age, a lingering illness, or a premature death. Since this is the stuff of life, surely Fosdick was right in reminding preachers that most folks do not “come to church desperately anxious to discover what happened to the Jebusites.”^[5]Harry Emerson Fosdick, “What Is the Matter with Preaching?” Pulpit Digest 63 (September-October 1983):8.

Application is needed in the sermon, not only because of the nature of human beings, but also because of the nature of biblical preaching. If we derive our concept of preaching from the Bible itself, a biblical message has two points of reference: the “prior biblical revelation” and the “present actual situation.” That is the form of preaching that developed in the emergence of the synagogue during the intertestamental period. The Jewish people in exile found themselves worshipping corporately on the Sabbath. However, they were without a central dimension of worship -the sacrificial system. New ingredients were needed for worship. One possibility lay in the acceptance of an increasing amount of literature as sacred scripture. A pattern of worship gradually emerged in which the law and the prophets were both read on the Sabbath day. When Hebrew ceased to be the commonly spoken language, an interpretation became necessary as a supplement to the reading. Although this interpretation could be expanded into a detailed exposition, it usually assumed the character of a rather informal lecture. Thus originated the sermon in the synagogue.^[6]For more information see George Foot Moore, Judaism vol. I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), pp. 303-7.

The synagogue sermon, then, had an “exegetical element, “in which the scripture was read or something was said with reference to scriptural text, and a “prophetic element, “in which the relevance of that scripture for the current time was explained. It was “customary to expound the lesson read in the services. In the Jewish church this developed into a hortatory address, very near to a modern sermon.”^[7]W. B. Sedgwick, “The Origins of the Sermon,” The Hibbert Journal 45 (January 1945), p. 162.

Since the distinctive concept of the early believers was their faith in Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah, they felt no compulsion to change other dimensions or elements of their worship. The content was new; the forms could be old. So the early Christian sermon followed the same forms as the synagogue sermon. “The origin of the Christian sermon, like nearly everything in the early church services, is to be found in the Synagogue.”^[8]Ibid.

This can easily be seen by a cursory glance at the New Testament record of the earliest Christian sermons. In his sermon on the Day of Pentecost, Simon Peter observed what was happening at the time and said: “This is what was spoken of by the prophet . . .,”^[9]Acts 2:15 (NASV). and then he quoted from the prophecy of Joel. He was interpreting the current event in light of the prior scripture. Similarly, Jesus went into his hometown synagogue at Nazareth, opened the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, read from it, and then said: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”^[10]Luke 4:21. The pattern repeated itself during Paul’s missionary journeys. His pattern was to go first into the synagogue to preach, hoping there to find Jewish people ready to accept Jesus as the culmination of the Old Testament prophecy. It is not unusual, then, to read the sermon in the synagogue at Antioch of Pisidia^[11]Acts 13. and find Paul referring now and again to the history of Israel recorded in the Old Testament writings and then addressing the present situation of his hearers in light of his references to their scriptures (Acts 13:14-41).

The pattern, then, for biblical preaching appears clearly in the pages of the Bible itself. The picture emerges of a “bi-polar construct of biblical preaching.” Biblical preaching has, on the one side, a reference point in the biblical revelation; it has, on the other side, a reference point in the present situation of the hearer. The preacher works “between two worlds,” and a truly biblical sermon “bridges the gulf between the biblical and modern worlds, and must be equally earthed in both.”^[12]John R. W. Stott, Between Two Worlds (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1982), p. 11. Biblical preaching is pictured in the following diagram:

The Bi-Polar Construct of Biblical Preaching

Prior Biblical Revelation   <——————The Preaching Arc——————>   Present Actual Situation

Biblical preaching, then, is achieved when the preacher effectively fuses together the prior biblical revelation and the hearer’s present situation, thereby constructing “the preaching arc.” By definition, then, biblical preaching must achieve application of the biblical truth to the hearer’s life. But how do you find the “connection”? How do you determine the relevance of your Sermonic text to your hearers’ lives?

 

Finding the Application

At this point we arrive at what has been called “the crisis of preaching.”^[13]Rudolph Bohren, Preaching and Community, trans. David E. Green (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1965), p. 79. It is the challenge of fusing together responsibly the prior biblical revelation and the present actual situation. Too often “somewhere between the text and the sermon an accident takes place. There is a great gulf fixed between the text from the past and the sermon for tomorrow, and no one can jump across it.”^[14]Ibid., 83.

That gap has been call “the dilemma between text and sermon.”^[15]Ibid. One horn of the dilemma is the “tendency to absolutize history.”^[16]Ibid., p. 88. This is the approach of the preacher who carefully isolates his text from the larger Christian theological framework, exegetes with exacting detail the grammar and syntax of the text, reconstructs the historical setting and meaning of his text, and relays that to the congregation. Having exposed the historical particulars of the text, he fails to go on to any meaningful interpretation of the relevance of the text for his congregation. The sermon actually is oral exegesis, as if the historical and linguistic dimensions of the text were the crux of the sermon. Having answered the question “What did it mean?” he feels no need to answer the question “What does that (the original meaning) mean?”

The other horn of the dilemma is “the tendency to abstract from history through existential interpretation.”^[17]Ibid., p. 94. This is exhibited in the preacher whose sermon interprets the text existentially without any regard for his study of the critical, historical, and exegetical study of the text. Such an approach assumes that “after the text has been buried by historical criticism, it is to be brought to life by existential interpretation.”^[18]Ibid., p. 86.

The method seems merely to be revealing to its own schizophrenia: on the one hand it alienates the past through historical criticism; on the other hand it dissolves the past through existential interpretation. It succeeds in utilizing precisely what it denies: a double sense of scripture, the literal (to be grasped through historical criticism) and the mystical (to be gained through existential interpretation).^[19]Ibid., p. 86-87.

So, it seems, either way the preacher goes he is hooked on the horns of the dilemma. He either absolutizes the original meaning of the text or abstracts its contemporary meaning from its original meaning. He is impaled on the pole of the prior biblical revelation, getting bogged down in the minutia of etymologies, grammatical forms, syntactical relationships, and reconstructions of the textual situation; or he is impaled on the pole of the present situation, stuck with contemporary problems, having no biblical answers to get him off the hook. On the one hand, the message may never get to life and it will remain an exercise in oral exegesis. On the’ other hand, it may never get to the Bible, and the message will remain a rootless dialogue between preacher and people. Neither is biblical preaching.

There is a way out of this trap. A true dilemma exists when “a choice or situation (exists) between equally satisfactory alternatives.”^[20]Webster’s New International Dictionary, 2d ed. (Springfield, MA: G & C Merriam Company, 1976), p. 633. In reality this is not the case with the preacher. He is not faced with a choice of either absolutizing the history by reciting textual facts or abstracting from history by simply reflecting on life. Another possibility presents itself, the possibility of proceeding through the middle in a way that will do justice to the integrity of both the prior biblical revelation and the hearer’s present situation. The task is to discover the original meaning of the text and to discern the meaning of that for the present. The challenge is to negotiate the passage between the prior biblical revelation and the hearer’s present situation, thus escaping the dilemma. You can “manage the middle” by using the thought processes represented in the following diagram and the explanation of it. Use of these thought processes will enable you to negotiate the middle between the Bible and life.

Bible
Prior Biblical Revelation – “Biblical Related Material”

Eternalize “What in this text is always true?”	Universalize “What in this text is true for all people?”	Principlize “Is there a principle behind this particular statement of the text” (may need to be done)
Contemporize “What in this is true now?”	Personalize “What in this text is true for you?”	Particularize “How does this principle apply to particular situations now?” (suggestive, not prescriptive)

Hearer’s Present Situation – “Life Related Material”
Sermon

The steps required to manage the middle responsibly are:

“Eternalize” the text by asking: “What in this text is always true?”

“Universalize” the text by asking: “What in this text is true for all people?”

“Principlize ” the text by asking: “Is there a principle behind the particular statement within this text?”

Many times the biblical statement will be a culturally conditioned particularization, provided for the people and place of the textual situation, of a general principle. In that event, you would need to strip the text of its cultural specifics in order to get at the principle behind it.

Having completed this first part of the process, you are “on the move” from the “prior biblical revelation” to the “present actual situation, “but you are not there yet. You are now in the realm of abstract ideas. These do not communicate well. So, as a correlation to each of the steps on the textual side of the message, you now take steps toward the “life side” of the message. “Contemporize” the text by pointing out the ideas in it that are true now.

“Personalize” the text by underscoring what within it is true for the hearer.

“Particularize” the message by suggesting specific ways in which the principle within the text may be applicable and implemented by your hearers.

Actually only the last step of each side of the equation is needed. It would be accurate simply to say that we first “principlize” and then we “particularize” the text. The other categories of eternalizing, universalizing, contemporizing, and personalizing are only components of the larger categories of “principlizing” and “particularizing.” It is helpful for clarification, however, to break down these large categories into component parts.

A word of caution needs to be said about both “principlizing” and “particularizing.” “Principlizing” may or may not be necessary. In some textual statements you are already looking at the principle rather than a cultural, specific application of a principle: A couple of suggestions may help identify such situations. First, if you find essentially the same thing being said in different strata of biblical literature covering different time frames and different historical situations, the very fact that what is said has been constant probably indicates that it is a principle. It is a “constant” that has survived all the variables.

On the other hand, if your exegesis of the text sheds some light on why the particular statement may have been made to the people and at the time and place of the text, then you may well be looking at a particularization for that environment or larger principle. For example the injunction of the apostle Paul to the Corinthian women that they should not cut their hair can easily be understood as a specific application by him to them of a large principle. A study of the situation in Corinth indicates that women who served as priestesses in the nearby temple to the goddess of love practiced temple prostitution as an act of worship. The way they were identified was by the way they cut their hair. Obviously, then, behind the particular statement of the Corinthian women asking them not to cut their hair was a larger principle: namely, that Christians should not dress or act in such a way as to be identified with an anti-Christian way of life.

In addition, a word of caution needs to be said about “particularizing” on the contemporary side of the equation. While you do have biblical authority for enunciating the principle, you do not have the same level of authority for dictating to your hearers exactly how they must implement that principle in their own lives. It is at that point that the priesthood of each believer comes into play and the hearer participates in the message. You may be tempted to dogmatize and pontificate the cultural mores of your time and place with the same sound of authority with which you articulate the biblical principle. But you must refrain from that. Be suggestive, not prescriptive, at this point.

This interpretative process will work for any hermeneutical approach which takes seriously the bi-polar construct of biblical preaching and is committed to the integrity of the relationship between the Bible and life. Careful use of this process, combined with responsible use of the principles of sound exegesis and hermeneutics, will enable you to bridge the gap between the text and the sermon.

Having found the relationship between your text and your hearer’s life, how do you effect the perception of it by your hearer? How do you “apply” the sermon?

 

Making the Application

A lively discussion is occurring in homiletical circles at the present time. Some suggest a severe abbreviation or entire elimination of explicit “application” material in the sermon.

The current emphasis along this line in homiletics corresponds to a trend in secular communication theory which asserts that, in persuasive communication, indirect suggestion is often more effective than direct application and that “persuasive speeches designed to directly confront and convert an audience are, by and large, doomed to failure.”^[21]Stewart L. Tubbs, “Explicit Versus Implicit Conclusions and Audience Commitment,” Speech Monographs 35 (March 1968):14. The debate and discussion about explicit and implicit conclusion drawing parallels Marshal McLuhan’s discussion of the media, which posits that “Hot media are . . . low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. ” See Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964), pp. 22-40. Anyone wanting to investigate this subject will find help in the bibliography surrounding the McLuhan concepts. Some experimenters

have found that “overheard” persuasive communications are more effective for some listeners. In two experiments with Stanford University students, Walster and Festinger designed a communication seemingly unintended for the hearers. They discovered that when information is relevant to the listener, the “overheard” (seemingly unintended) communication is more persuasive.^[22]George Dean Dickens, “Implications for Preaching in Selected Communications Research and Experiments 1963-1973” (Th.D. disser­tation, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1974), p. 81, sum­marizing Elaine Waister and Leon Festinger, “The Effectiveness of ‘Overheard ‘ Persuasive Communications,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 65 (December 1962):395-402.

This fact is explained by the assumption that indirect communication can be more persuasive because listener defenses drop. This approach is similar to the “frequently cited tenet of the non-directive school of psychotherapy that decisions are more effective when reached independently by the client than when suggested by the therapist.”^[23]Carl I. Hovland, Irving L. Janis, and Harold H. Kelley, Com­munication and Persuasion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), p. 100. “Rhetoricians . . . have proposed that today’s listener desires to participate in a communication event rather than be lectured. To do this, the persuasive speaking context itself is often structured so as to result in greater listener participation.”^[24]Dickens, p. 134.

The trend toward “indirect” rather than “direct” approaches in contemporary persuasive communication theory has caught the attention of homileticians. Some, having evaluated the culture and its rhetorical principles, have begun to call for adaptations in preaching. Because of the changing communication trend –participative trend –a new homiletic itself is proposed.”^[25]Ibid. It is suggested that

individuals are becoming more and more reluctant to accept that kind of (explicit) application, religious or otherwise, to their daily lives. That kind of prescription implies that one person is in a position to tell others just what they should do with their daily lives.^[26]Carl E. Larson, “Factors in Small Group Interaction,” Preaching 3 (November-December 1968):19.

It is asserted that “good preaching need not make ex­plicit application, but may often serve its purpose –and more effectively so—through implicit, subtle, and suggestive application.”^[27]Daniel Baumann, An Introduction to Contemporary Preaching (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1972), p. 250. Cited by Dickens, 81. The suggestion is made that the preacher should create a communication situation in which he does not directly address the listeners with direct application of his message. Instead, he should construct the sermon in such a way that the hearer will be “overhearing the gospel.”^[28]Fred B. Craddock, Overhearing the Gospel (Nashville: Abingdon, 1978). In other words, the communicator should build the application implicitly into the message, allowing the hearer to deal with the subtleties of the sermon and infer the relevant truths of the message for himself.

However, not all communication theorists conclude that implicit application is always more effective than explicit application. It should be noted that the experiments – mentioned above were performed with Stanford students as the subjects. That leaves open the question of the relative effectiveness of explicit and implicit communication when dealing with a heterogeneous group with widely varied intelligence quotients. In another experiment

one of the important messages to be transmitted was “never explicitly stated . . . and it was hoped that the lesson would be inferred by the audience….” They report that “the implicit message influenced the more intelligent members but not the less intelligent members of the audience.”^[29]Eunice Cooper and Helen Dinerman, ”Analysis of the Film ‘Don’t be a Sucker’: A Study in Communication,” Public Opinion Quarterly 15 (1951):249. Cited by Hovland, Janis, and Kelley, pp. 100-1.

Other experiments have raised questions whether it is only the less intelligent who have problems inferring implicit conclusions imbedded within indirect communication. A significant experiment was conducted among another group of students, two thirds of who were above the national average for college students. The project was designed

To study systematically the relative effectiveness of the explicit and implicit procedures. Experimental comparison was made of two types of communication which were identical in every way except that in one the communicator drew the conclusion at the end while in the other it was left to the audience. . . .

. . . All subjects heard the identical communication, but for half of them the part containing the explicit conclusion drawing was omitted.

. . . The communications were presented to groups of college students. . . .

. . . Comparison of the version in which the speaker drew the conclusion with the one in which he did not, (sic) reveals a very large difference in favor of conclusion drawing by the communicator. Over twice as many subjects changed their opinions in the direction advocated by the communicator when the conclusion was explicitly drawn as did when it was left to the audience.^[30]Hovland, Janis, Kelley, pp. 101-2.

More recently, an experiment conducted with fifty-two college students, predominately upperclassmen, yielded similar results. “The speech with the explicit conclusion elicited significantly more attitude change than the speech with the implicit conclusion.”^[31]Tubbs, p. 17. Consistent with the results of such research, a recent textbook in communications “indicates that an audience generally is more affected by an explicit conclusion, an explicit statement of purpose does not necessarily alienate those audience members opposed to that purpose, and an explicit method should prove more valuable to the less intelligent members of an audience.”^[32]Dickens, p. 90, summarizing the views expressed in Burt E. Bradley, Fundamentals of Speech Communication: The Credibility of Ideas (Dubuque, IA: Willima C. Brown Publishing Co., 1974), pp. 92-93. It is hard to ignore the following comment of Arthur R. Riel, Professor of English at Fairfield University:

I remember one Trinity Sunday: the preacher was giving us an academic talk on the Trinity. Good! But the dedicated Catholic mother can’t help thinking, “This is good, but I gotta get dinner; I hope he doesn’t go on too long.” Perhaps the preacher should have realized that this thought would be in the minds of his listeners; and anticipating that response, he could have told us all, that as we go into the kitchen or as I go to my desk to grade a set of boring papers, the Holy Trinity goes with us. What a thrilling bit of truth. But I never hear it, I have to tell myself about it, and I’m lucky I can. But still I forget, I often need reminders.^[33]Good News Letter 36 (June 1982):2.

These studies and this comment apparently indicate a preference for direct application if you intend for the listener to arrive at the same conclusion or application that you have in mind.

Faced with some research data supporting indirect application and some supporting direct application, how do you decide what to do? Perhaps the only valid conclusion is that you will have to arrive at your own conclusion about the matter.

Your answer to that question may change from time to time. Varied preaching situations may call for different approaches. There may be times when one approach will be more appropriate and more persuasive than the other. But how can you make your decision? Three factors may influence your decision.^[34]The following suggestions are made in Howland, Janis, and Kelly, pp. 102-3.

The nature of the communicator is one factor. If the hearers trust the communicator, they are more likely to accept his direct conclusions. If the communicator is suspect, they will not.

The nature of the audience is another consideration. Levels of intelligence and sophistication may indicate the hearers’ ability to deal with subtleties. Personality orientation may be significant also. Highly suggestable people may “make up their minds on the basis of conclusions presented by others” while some persons are “resistant to suggestions of others and like to make up their own minds.”^[35]Ibid., p. 102.

The nature of the subject under discussion may need to be considered. A complex idea with many ramifications or qualifications may prove too difficult for subtlety.

 

Conclusion

As you prepare your sermon you should intend that the biblical text come to expression in the lives of the hearers. This is not an addendum to the sermon; it is part of the sermon by definition (italics his). Where concretion is lacking we do not merely find a poor sermon; we find no sermon at all.^[36]David James Randolph, The Renewal of Preaching (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959), p. 89.

Therefore, after you finish your sermon preparation, but before you preach it, ask the question about the ”so-what-ness.” So what difference will it make in the lives of you hearers that they heard this sermon? If the “so­ what-ness” is not clear to you, it will never occur to them.

Reflecting on a recent fishing experience, Rudolph Bohren used the analogy of preaching and fishing.

If the hook never touches the water, I can hold my rod in the air for a long time. It makes no difference whether I have performed a careful exegesis of the text and found its proper dogmatic interpretation, it does not even make any difference whether I have put my own flesh on the hook, as long as I do not keep the hook in the water, and keep it where there are fish. Without that, all my efforts are wasted. When the water is clear you can see the trout, and the art consists in putting the bait before the fish in such a way that it will bite….Many preachers can hold the pole in the air and drown worms but they do no entice any fish.^[37]Bohren, pp. 55-56.

As “fishers of men,”^[38]Matthew 4:19. preachers must do more than “drown worms.” They must entice the fish by “putting the bait where the fish are”—by achieving an application of the biblical material to life where the congregation lives.