Jun 4, 2013

Christ-Centered Homiletics or Human Author-Centered Hermeneutics?

I don’t get excited about reading too many dissertations, but here’s one I hope to tackle soon. In 2011 Jason Allen, president of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on The Christ-Centered Homiletics of Edmund Clowney and Sidney Greidanus in Contrast with the Human Author-Centered Hermeneutics of Walter Kaiser.

Any preacher committed to authorial intention and preaching Christ has no doubt wrestled with this question. I certainly have. That’s why I’m curious to read the discussion and find out how and why Allen reaches his conclusion:

Only one way to God exists, through Christ, but one can find many legitimate ways to preach Jesus from the Old Testament. In fact, many ways occur that one can consistently and faithfully preach Christ from the Old Testament without the interpreter ever having to contort a passage or abrogate the author’s intended meaning.

If you get around to reading it before I do, let me know what you think. Here’s one review that has generated quite a bit of discussion recently.