So if you ask why is expository preaching more important today, it is that we don't have the authority that preachers had in the past. The truth is that -- aside from people that have grown up in the church -- the average person in our society does not give high grades to preachers as being intellectual or even moral leaders.

Twenty years ago it would have been almost impossible to bring a case to court against a minister. Today a lawyer that's defending a minister will do every thing that he can to keep the people in the jury from thinking of him as a minister. So we have lost a lot of the base, for a lot of different reasons. What we are really trying to say is, "O.K. if I can get people to study the Bible and to see the text, I believe that the Bible is self-authenticating." If I can get you to really read it, to look at it, to hear it, to understand it, it has its own power to convince and to convict and to change people.

Therefore in a postmodern age one reason that we work with the biblical text is to have the authority of the text -- and behind that the authority of God -- behind what we say. I've always believed that, but it has become clearer to me now than it has been in the past. That is not to say that the person in the pew has to accept my view of inspiration. It is simply to say that if the Bible is what I believe it to be -- the word of God -- and that the Spirit of God answers to the Word, then if I can lay that out before them in a relevant fashion it has the power to do what my authority today can't do.

Preaching: You mentioned that expository preaching is less a form than a philosophy. Does form still play a role, and how important is that in terms of the nature of the sermon?

Robinson: I think form is important. The question is: where does it come from? One answer is that the form of the sermon, it seems to me, needs to reflect the form of text. By that I mean if I am working with a parable of Jesus, it is not the form of the parable to say, "There are three lessons about God's mercy that we learn from this story." If God had wanted to give us three lessons, He was perfectly capable, and the biblical writer was perfectly capable of saying there are three lessons. So I had to say to myself: Why, when God wanted to tell me about the seeking love of God -- say in Luke 15, the prodigal son -- why in the world did He use this story? When the religious scholar says to Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" in Luke 10, Jesus tells them a story.

It seems to me that if you and I were talking, and you said to me, "Who is your neighbor?" And I said, "Well, once upon a time there was a guy going from Boston down to Providence and he got into a wreck on the highway." You'd say to me, "Wait a minute, what is this telling me a story? I asked you a straight question, 'Who is my neighbor?' I wanted a definition." But Jesus doesn't do that. So if in my sermon I suddenly come up with a didactic definition, then the form of the sermon is not the form of the passage.