The more I think about it, I'm also going to support taking time to see how other generations of the church have interpreted this text. Take John Dunne; he was a great preacher in the English language centuries ago; it's antiquated language, very hard to read now. He'll read a text, then he'll tell how several great church people in the history of the church read it — he'll talk about how Augustine read this as meaning so-and-so, and Martin Luther. We're a part not just of a text but of an interpretation history of that text.

Preaching: How would you describe the approach to preaching you developed and wrote about in your own ministry?

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Craddock: I was taught with Witherspoon. All my sermons in seminary were symmetrical, had three points. I worked hard at that, and I think I did that well, except there seemed to be something in the process that wound down instead of winding up. I stated my main stuff early, and then fell from that into detail. Why not get people to listening and arrive at some conclusion — though we may not all be together at least we've had the opportunity to think about it?

I think my change was born in my own inability to remember my sermons. I was putting a grid over the biblical material and sermonic material that was not normal. I was preaching it and I'd look down at my material and I was in the wrong place. What's wrong with this? So on occasion, when I was asked to speak at a civic club or a Sunday School class, I would abandon my homiletical plan and talk to them. As I examined those speeches, they had as much content as the other, but they started at a different point. So one week I just said to my wife, "I think I'm going to try to preach Sunday morning like I talk to these other groups."

She was kind of aghast at what happened. People would say, "Well, that was interesting but was it a sermon?" It was a real struggle for me because I'd been doing it the other way, and I could have moved right along. So it was, first of all, running into myself in the pulpit. I had the feeling that good communications would flow normally and naturally enough that I could remember it and follow my own sermons without looking down and saying, "Oh, I've forgotten that."

So when I started teaching preaching, the campus revolution against everyone in authority was in full swing. Homiletics and preaching classes were made optional, and I struggled with the students: What's wrong with this? Why is this not working? I took a year off and studied preaching out of the frustration that I wasn't getting anywhere. It wasn't working.

I remembered my own preaching there in Columbia, Tennessee, and the changes I made in my preaching. So instead of teaching preaching classes like I was taught, maybe I can help them develop, if not like I do it, a way that they would be comfortable. So I played with that, took another year off and studied — I just had a rough transition. A lot of things I said in As One Without Authority I still hold to. I don't believe that a lot of people who give me credit for getting them started thinking a new way — I don't think many of them are doing what I thought I was doing. I don't think many of them have had the agony I went through. I just don't want to take credit for everything that's going on that supposedly is called "inductive."