Following the lead of Haddon Robinson, a generation of preachers has been urged to detect the one ‘big idea’ in a passage of Scripture (the ‘exegetical big idea’) and then turn it into a proposition (the ‘homiletical big idea’) which will form the basis of the sermon.

It is time to subject this appoach to a bit of critical thinking.  I do so here with the help of: Abraham Kuruvilla, ‘Time to kill the big idea? A fresh look at preaching’ (JETS 61.4 (2018): 825–46).

I have also consulted: Gerald Hiestand, ‘The Main Point of a Passage Should Not Always Be the Main Point of Your Sermon’.

1. History of the ‘Big Idea’

Precursors of ‘big idea’ preaching can be found in the teaching of Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian.

Indeed, 19th-century homileticians such as John Broadus and (I would add) Robert Lewis Dabney echoed this approach by calling their approach to preaching ‘sacred rhetoric’.

Charles Simeon:

‘Apply the word of God to the hearts and consciences of your hearers, presenting the main truth contained in your text.’

J. H. Jowett:

‘I have a conviction that no sermon is ready for preaching, not ready for writing out, until we can express its theme in a short, pregnant sentence as clear as a crystal. … I do not think any sermon ought to be preached or even written, until that sentence has emerged, clear and lucid as a cloudless moon.’

Henry Grady Davis:

‘A well-prepared sermon is the embodiment, the development, the full statement of a significant thought. … Because a sermon is a developed thought, that thought is central to the sermon.’

John Stott asks for preachers to look for the

‘text’s dominant thought … because every text has a main theme.’

Grant R. Osborne:

‘The pastor/teacher should … determine the single point the writer has been trying to develop. … We are true to Scripture only if we develop the ‘big idea’ (Robinson’s term) that the author intended.’

Sidney Greidanus:

‘The theme of the sermon is a summary statement of the unifying thought of the sermon. … It seeks to articulate the message of the sermon in one short sentence.’

Donald R. Sunukjian:

‘The expositor must first condense the teaching of the passage into a single sentence which will summarize and unify his entire message.’

Tim Keller: ‘A sermon must be like an arrow, streamlined and clearly driving at a single point, a single message, the theme of the passage.’

Many other respected names could be added, including those of Bryan Chapell and John MacArthur.

The assumption is that behind every text of Scripture lies a single truth that can be expressed in propositional form and turned into a sermon.

2. Big Idea Methodology

There are two stages.

(a) Distilling the text.  In the words of Simeon, the preacher’s task is to ‘reduce [the] text to a simple proposition.’  It is a process of ‘crystallisation’, of deriving a general principle, or timeless truth, from the text.  It is a process of ‘boiling off’ the incidentals of the text in order to arrive at what is essential.

Craddock introduces a note of doubt when he refers to this as:

‘boiling off the the water and preaching the stain at the borrom of the cup!’

The problem is, of course, is that God has not chosen to give us his Scriptures in propositional form.  So we are in danger of dishonouring him and them by forcing them into something they are not.

Take, as an example, what two writers do with 2 Samuel 11-12.  Exegetical idea: ‘David learns to accept what the grace of God gives him and what the grace of God does not.’  And the ‘timeless proposition’: ‘Believers must learn to accept what God’s grace has given them and what that grace has not.’  But this is the neglect the particularites of the text (the ‘big idea’ could have come from a lot of different places in Scripture).

‘All this to say that the text is not merely a plain glass window that the reader can look through (to discern some Big Idea lurking behind it—“the underlying …principle behind the text”). Rather, the text, with all the nuances of its language, structure, and form, is a stained-glass window that the reader must look at.’

Therefore:

‘The interpreter must…pay close attention to the text, privileging it, not just to discover some kernel
hidden in it, but to experience the thrust and force of the text qua text, in toto and as a whole—the text irreducible into any other form.’

‘Big idea’ thinking in preaching is analagous to Schenkerian analysis in music.  Such analysis supposes that a tune such as (say) ‘Over the rainbow’ can be reduced to a simple essence (in this case, a descending scale).

But it is surely impossible to consider such distillation as equivalent to the original piece of music:

‘Yet, traditional homiletics continues to reduce a text to what is assumed to be a textequivalent distillate—the Big Idea. But most of the Bible does not present itself in propositional Big Idea form. Therefore, to convert a text into a Big Idea is surely going to entail significant loss of its details, meaning, power, and pathos, thereby deflating the thrust/force of that text, just as my Schenkerian reduction would do to “Over the Rainbow.” Such a “lossy” reduction (of a text) is equivalent to a photo (of a person), or the theme (of a musical work), or the summary score (of a ball game), or any number of other distillations that can never substitute for the real thing.’

One problem with ‘big idea’ thinking is overdetermination.  In the musical example just given, any number of compositions could be reduced to a descending scale (‘Joy to the world’, for example).  And the same is often true of ‘big idea’ preaching – the same idea could be derived from any number of biblical passages.  This raises an important problem for the doctrine of inspiration: if my (uninspired) distillation is sufficient, why did God bother to inscripturate his word with any sort of precision?

(b) Preaching the distillate.  This is what the hearer is to remember: not the text, but the big idea.  Let the congregation take this one idea home, even if they forget all the rest of the sermon.  And the rest of the sermon is simply a development or extension of this one idea.

Stott says that the preacher must hunt for the big idea in the text, and, having found it,

‘arrange your material to serve the dominant thought. … Now we have to knock the material into shape, and particularly into such shape as will best serve the dominant thought.’

Allen:

‘Everything in the sermon leads to, flows from, develops, illumines, enlarges, or otherwise relates to the sermon-in-a-sentence.’

MacArthur:

‘Everything else in the sermon builds to support, elucidate, convict, and confront the hearer with the main truth.’

But much of Scripture is in the form of story.  And, in the words of Flannery O’Connor:

‘A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.’

So we should heed Long’s warning:

‘Sermons should be faithful to the full range of a text’s power, and those preachers who carry away only main ideas … are traveling too light.’

Kuruvilla adds:

‘If understanding is possible only with propositional Big Idea distillation, then it is impossible to experience of a piece of music, a painting, a poem, or even a person (or texts).’

To summarise:

‘Traditional evangelical homiletics seeks to reduce the pericope into a Big Idea (distilling the text) and then preach that reduction (preaching the distillate), supported by textual proofs, real-life illustrations, and practical application. This is a misunderstanding of how language functions, why texts work, and what a sermon does.’

3. A fresh look at preaching

The polemics of the Reformation, and a pseudoscientific approach fostered by the Enlightement, have together foisted on us the idea that preaching is (or should be) mainly argumentation.

Willimon complains:

‘The danger of this device is that it may encourage me to treat my text as an abstract, generalized idea that has been distilled from the text—such as ‘the real meaning behind the story of the prodigal son.’ I then preach an idea about the message rather than the story which is the message. My congregation listens to ideas about a story rather than experiencing the story.’

Hieland argues that the main point of a passage may not be directly relevant to the needs of the congregation.  For example, the main point of 1 Cor 6:12-20 is that the men at Corinth shouldn’t visit prostitutes.  But the men of a typical modern congregation wouldn’t need to be told that (still less the teenage girls in the youth group!).  We may need to consider other aspects of the text, including its premises and its logical connections.

For Hieland, the preacher should attend not only to the conclusion of the text, but how it gets there.  In the case of the aforementioned passage, the apostle, in the process of getting to his main point, makes two profound assertions: (a) the body is ‘for the Lord’, and the Lord is ‘for the body’; (b) our bodies are ‘body parts’ of Christ’s body.  It follows that our bodies are not our own: they belong to Christ: this is what can be preached to any congregation.  The instruction not to take our bodies to brothels the becomes one (but only one) practical implication.  The focus of the sermon will thus be on the logic of the passage, rather then its conclusion.

I agree with Hieland that the main point of the text need not always be the main point of the sermon.  However, in the case of 1 Cor 6:12-20, I’m not convinced that he accurately identified the main point of that text in the first place.  It seems to be that the main point is precisely the conclusion that Paul reaches in v20: ‘Therefore glorify God with your body’; but that is precisely the timeless truth that Hieland would have the preacher expound!

(a) A new form of rhetoric.  Preaching utilises a for unknown to the ancient rhetoricians:

‘The use of a normative text on which to base a sermon sets this form of oral communication apart from all other genres of address.’

(b) Authorial doings.  When authors write, they are doing something.  In the case of the biblical writers, they are projecting a world in front of the text, and calling us to inhabit that world (as Jesus Christ inhabited it perfectly).  Are we hear sermons, we are being invited to align ourselves to God’s image in Christ (cf. Rom 8:29):

‘I submit that Scripture is geared primarily for this glorious purpose of God, to restore the imago Dei in mankind, by offering, pericope by pericope, a theological description of Christlikeness to which God’s people are to be aligned.’

Further:

‘Preaching is for the transformation of lives, that the people of God may be conformed to the image of Christ. Week by week, sermon by sermon and pericope by pericope, habits are changed, dispositions are created, character is built, and the image of Christ is formed—in the power of the Holy Spirit, through the instrumentality of Scripture, by the agency of the preacher—until humanity becomes what it was meant by God to be.’

(c) Science and art.  Preaching is (or should be) both:

‘Hermeneutics for homiletics involves more than just decoding the semantics of a text to decipher and comprehend its saying (science). Additionally, it involves discerning the pragmatics of a text to infer and experience its doing/theology (art).’

Discursive language is not everything.  It cannot, for example, address the nuances of mental states and emotions.  Non-discursive formulations

‘follow laws “altogether different from the laws of syntax that govern language. … They do not present their constituents successively, but simultaneously, so the relations determining a visual structure are grasped in
one act of vision. Their complexity, consequently, is not limited, as the complexity of discourse is limited, by what the mind can retain from the beginning of an apperceptive act to the end of it.” Pictures, photographs, painting, and poetry fall into this category and differ significantly from a linear, verbal code that must be deciphered.’ (Quoting Susanne K. Langer)

In the words of Joddy Murray:

‘Non-discursive writing creates, combines, associates, juxtaposes, compares, leaps, bridges, and synthesizes
through the composition of images. … [This] acknowledges image [with words or without] as the lexicon of thought.’

Putting this together:

‘I claim that a canonical text such as Scripture is both discursive (authorial sayings with tangible information that deals less with images, and that must be deciphered: science) and non-discursive (authorial doings with intangible experiences that deal mostly with images, and that must be inferred: art).’

And adding, in a footnote:

‘In fact, most of life is lived without Big Ideas! How do we experience John 3:16? As a proposition? Quick, can you reduce all the verses of “Amazing Grace” into one Big Idea? How about a visit to the Holocaust Museum in
Washington, DC—what’s the subject and the complement of what you saw/heard/experienced? How about your spouse—can you distill your loved one into a Big Idea?’

(d) Preaching as demonstration.  In contrast to preaching as mere argumentation, the preacher is to demonstrate the experience to which Scripture is calling us.  Our calling as preachers is not to substitute something else in place of the text, but rather to demonstrate the text to the hearer.

Someone once described his role as a preacher as like that of a stagehand, holding back to curtain so that some might catch a glimpse of the divine play:

‘We, as handmaids to the sacred writ, as midwives to Scripture, want the audience to experience the text as the A/author intended. What we must preach, then, is the text, not a reduction, not a proposition, not a doctrine, not anything else.’

Let the preacher be ‘a coexplorer of the text with the flock, not chief-explainer of the text to the flock.’

Blaise Pascal was right:

‘People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.’

4. Theological focus

The preacher must, in his preparation, work to discover what it is about the text that needs to be demonstrated to his hearers.  In other words, he must work out the theological focus.  This is not the same as the ‘big idea’, and it does not necessarily need to be presented to the hearers.  It is different in derivation (it is a distillation of what the Bible author is doing, not what he is saying), structure (it is not necessarily propositional), function (it is a useful aid, not the be-all and end-all) and context (which is ‘the conception of a sermon as the demonstration of an irreducible pericopal theology’).

5. Challenge

There is a challenge to all who sit round the homiletical table:

‘Scholars—give preachers what they need to serve God’s people better with God’s word: tell us what authors do with what they say, pericope by pericope. Rhetoricians—see preaching in a fresh light, as a demonstration of the text+theology: explore how to do this better. Preachers—preach the text+theology: curate it for your listeners, so that they may be transformed into Christlikeness by the power of the Spirit. Students—engage in a deeper study of hermeneutics, language philosophy, or the pragmatics of a biblical book or two, seeking to discern what their authors are doing in each pericope: push the envelope of our understanding. And all of us together—let us enlighten the people of God for the glory of God!’

[An earlier version of this article first saw the light of day on 26 November 2022]