I sat there uncertain as to whether I should cry, or laugh hysterically. For 45 minutes I listened to a preacher exhort us on the evils of syncopated music. I do not have a problem with someone preaching on music from the Bible. Yet the speaker started in Exodus describing the dance of the Israelite people ground the golden calf and then spring boarded into an attack on all forms of music with a beat. How you go from Exodus to the evils of Evie astounded me. If you are going to argue this, there are far better forms of evidence in the New Testament, or other parts of the Old Testament. But to go from this passage to the preacher's eventual conclusions was not logical.

I would like to encourage all pastors to look at the reasoning involved in their sermons. I have sat under some preaching that involved such mental leaps of logic and reasoning, that one wondered if a gold medal in mental gymnastics might have been awarded. We have all heard sermons based on a verse that then made claims preposterously out of step with the actual truth of the verse. This is called bad reasoning. Yet we accept erroneous conclusions from Scripture if there seemed a good heart behind the preaching, or if the idea is true, just not in the passage the preacher picked. The lack of clear reasoning in many sermons, leads many outside observers, to see preaching, and Christianity in general, as emotional, fear mongering drivel.

To analyze the reasoning in your sermon is a very simple, short task. It does not require a degree in logic or an extensive reading of Plato, or Bertrand Russell. Thanks to the work of Stephen Toulmin, there is a clear, useful way to analyze the arguments in a sermon. This article will describe Toulmin's model for analyzing the arguments in a sermon, apply them to an actual example, and give some concluding implications for sermon preparation.

To Toulmin, an argument in a speech is defined as "movement from accepted data, through a warrant, to a claim" (Brockriede et.al., 364). The first idea that helps preachers is the idea of an argument as movement. When you put forward an argument you are trying to move your audience from one stance toward your intended goal. You want to move them from apathy to agreement, from hostility to hearing your argument. Either way it requires movement.

The next term that helps in analyzing an argument is that any argument is built on three parts. All arguments must first have data on which it is based. In preaching that data will mainly be Scripture. Second, every argument must make a claim based on that data. There are simple claims that involve no real argument, the claim is very clear from the data presented. Yet there are also arguments that are based on the same verse that come to widely different conclusions. Here the claims made from the data is not as clear. We will give examples of these later.

The final part to look at in an argument is the warrant. A warrant is what "authorizes the mental leap involved in advancing from data to claim" (Brockriede et.al., 364). In most controversial arguments, not everyone agrees with the claim made from the same data. The warrant is used to show that the leap from data to claim is justified. Imagine a deep canyon forming between your data and claim. How can you get across? The warrant is a bridge that helps you across. Or it's a magic potion, that once drunken gives you the power to make the leap from data to claim.