It has seriously been suggested that preachers should sometimes preach sermons on the lives of hymn writers because they are such powerful Christian examples. The hazard is this: because biographical preaching tends to isolate biblical characters from their biblical context, it ultimately undermines the necessity of preaching the scriptures.
In spite of its long and frequent use, biographical preaching, like allegorical interpretation, does not stand up under scrutiny as a responsible method of interpreting and preaching Scripture. Given its deeply ingrained flaws, I am convinced that biographical preaching cannot be salvaged but should be abandoned so that homileticians and preachers can focus all their attention on producing relevant expository sermons.8
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1Timothy Peck, "Salvaging the Old Testament Biographical Sermon," Preaching 15/6 (2000): 28-30.
2All Biblical quotations taken from the NRSV.
3L. Berkhof, Principles of Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1950), p. 165, observes that the "evidential value and authority" of the analogy of faith depends on four factors: "(1) The number of passages that contain the same doctrine.... (2) The unanimity or correspondence of the different passages.... (3) The clearness of the passage.... (4) The distribution of the passages...."
4See the informative article by Andrew Bandstra, "Interpretation in 1 Corinthians 10:1-11," Calvin Theological Journal 6 (1971) 5-21. See also Walter Kaiser, The Uses of the Old Testament in the New (Chicago: Moody, 1985), 111-121.
5Bandstra, ibid., p. 16, and Kaiser, ibid, p. 118.
6See William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, fourth ed. rev. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 838 (tupos, meaning 6, with a reference to 1 Cor. 10:6, 11).
7Edmund P. Clowney, Preaching and Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1961), p. 80, observes: "Those who find only collected moral tales in the Bible are constantly embarrassed by the good deeds of patriarchs, judges and kings. Surely we cannot pattern our daily conduct on that of Samuel as he hews Agag to pieces, or Samson as he commits suicide, or Jeremiah as he preaches treason."
8I would define an expository sermon as a sermon which is based on a biblical textual unit and which 1) exposes the author's intended meaning, 2) as it functions in the context of the whole Bible and 3) is applied to the church here and now. Cf. Merill Unger, Principles of Expository Preaching (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1955), 33.
