I think that you could make a good argument that not only should the sermon reflect the idea of a biblical text but it should be influenced by the form. So if you are dealing with narrative literature in the Old Testament then there ought to be about the sermon some element of story. Or if you are dealing with a psalm -- the psalm isn't given to teach us things as much as it is to direct people how to worship. So I have to wrestle with that literature, not only in what the psalm is conveying but how I can have a poetic element about my preaching. That is out of the philosophy that when God communicates His truth He chooses certain forms, and therefore my sermon needs to reflect that.

Preaching: As pastors deal with these narrative passages of scripture, how would you suggest they approach them for preaching? They want to be faithful to the text, they want to be expository, and yet they want to be faithful to the narrative shape of the passage. How do you suggest they deal with such passages?

Robinson: There is a small body of literature in how to interpret the biblical narrative. Robert Alter has a book on the art of Biblical narrative. He emphasizes that when you study a biblical text you need to study it in its context -- not just this story but the stories before and after -- and ask the question: why did the biblical writer put this in here?

You also have to recognize that the biblical writers give us very little description. You have this long section in the Bible about David and about Moses, but we don't know what they looked like. The writers just don't seem to tell us. They put some emphasis on action, the most emphasis on dialogue. So looking at ways of coming at narrative, I am trying to find out what the idea of this -- that is, what is the biblical writer telling this for?

I think it is a help to people to understand that behind the biblical narratives there is theology. There's a tendency to think that God gave us those stories so that we would have something to tell our kids before they went to bed. But the stories are a way of telling us about God. So as we look at the story and see it in its context and then its broader context, I have to ask, "How does this writer through the dialogue, through the action of these characters, get across his idea?"

Think about any stories. One of the things you have in any good story is detail. Detail helps to make things visual, so that if I tell you about the ghetto of New York where I grew up, I can describe it: the smell of urine in the halls, the look of the garbage in the street, glass on the sidewalks. Good stories have detail. But if you have only detail without a principle the whole thing falls flat.

So I read the details of the story in terms of its dialogue, its action, but I also have to find the principle. If I don't find the principle, I just sort of recite the story. Two dangers: one is, it will fall flat. The second danger is I can make the biblical narrative say what I think I want it to say rather than to look at the narrative and say: what is the narrator trying to get across? There is more and more literature now on narrative. Really the whole thing started basically thirty years ago. You don't have much literature on narrative in the past, and I think it's because we live in a story culture, and we suddenly recognize how much of the Bible is a story.