Out of the Clearing!

Hello there. I'm Bob. Hanging out at Milton's place for a few days is going to be lotsa fun. I'm honored to have been asked to stand-in and hope that Milton's regular readers won't be too awfully disappointed!

Milton's purpose in blogging is in large point to encourage and edify preachers of the Word, and this purpose shall also be mine. I'm actually reading a book on the very subject: Dennis E. Johnson's Him We Proclaim. Johnson is making the case for a Christ-centered hermeneutic, contending that in fact such is the method used by the apostles in their preaching ministry after Pentecost. You can read a very nice review of this book over at 9 Marks, by the way. Here's a snip from that review:

Him We Proclaim ends in the most helpful way possible, with Johnson applying his principles to eleven texts in the Old and New Testament. For any preacher who has ever stared at a text and wondered, "What in the world am I going to do with this?" these chapters are gold. This is not because Johnson offers some magic bullet; no, there is no special trick or formula. It is simply helpful to see how he walks through a passage, accounts for a text’s historical context, accounts for where it falls in the context of the Bible as a whole, and then translates all these factors into a sermon outline.

I'm no preacher, but I listen to preaching all the time, and this sounds like a good approach to me.