In 1980 Klaas Runia outlined a number of criticisms being leveled at the whole concept and practice of preaching in the church.1 The attack was seen to be coming from social scientists, communication theorists, and theologians. Runia saw it as warranting a measured response in defense of the traditional practice of proclaiming the word of God. But there are hard questions about preaching that we need to address, for even in evangelical churches the centrality of the sermon, and the method of its delivery, have come in for criticism and much modification.

Runia quotes P. T. Forsyth as saying: "It is, perhaps, an overbold beginning, but I will venture to say that with its preaching Christianity stands and falls."2 There is no doubt that we are faced with the hard questions of the nature of preaching and its importance. Do we capitulate to the modern theorists and theologians, or do we press on and preach the traditional Sunday sermon even if it seems that in numbers of regular listeners we are losing ground? Of course not all congregations are dwindling, and there are always the spectacular success stories to spur us on and to provide us with role models. But how do we determine the nature of success, and what criteria do we use to establish the effectiveness of preaching?

Evangelical Protestants stand in a long and venerable tradition, going back to the Reformation, of the centrality of preaching in the activities of the gathered congregation. We could appeal to the practice of the Reformers, the Puritans, and the leaders of the evangelical revival, not to mention the great preachers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are stirring accounts of men like John Wesley, George Whitefield, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and, more recently, Campbell Morgan, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and Billy Graham, whose preaching to thousands was profoundly effective in the conversion and edification of so many. We have to ask about the stimulus for this activity through which multitudes have been converted to Christ. Can it really be simply a passing phenomenon destined to become outdated as we enter a more technologically oriented age of electronic communication media?

One of the real gains of applying the method of biblical theology is that it enables us to understand the biblical teaching on any given topic in a holistic way. We are not dependent on a few proof texts for the establishment of a doctrine or for understanding the nature of some important concept. We can look at what lies behind the developed concept as we may have it in the New Testament, and ask what is really impelling it into the prominence it seems to have. We can observe the various strands that give this doctrine its texture and its richness. We can then better evaluate the importance it should have in the contemporary church.

The standard manuals on preaching rarely deal with the subject from the point of view of biblical theology. There may be many reasons for this, but one of them would be the comparative neglect of biblical theology among evangelicals and the outright suspicion of it among many non-evangelicals. This is a regrettable state of affairs and somewhat hard to understand. After all, the common conviction of evangelicals is that the Bible is the word of God and that we have a commission to proclaim it. Yet for some reason, the obvious perspective of the unity of the Bible, the overall message of biblical revelation, seems to become submerged under a mass of lesser concerns.