Readings for Preaching: The Preacher in Conversation with Storytellers, Biographers, Poets, and Journalists

by Cornelius Plantinga

Publisher:

Eerdmans

, 2013

Overview

In Reading for Preaching Cornelius Plantinga claims preachers who read widely will most likely become better preachers. He argues that good reading generates delight, and the preacher who enters the world of delight goes with God. Good reading can also help tune the preacher’s ear for language—his primary tool. General reading can enlarge the preacher’s sympathies for people and situations that she or he had previously known nothing about. And, above all, the preacher who reads widely has the chance to become wise.

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Contents

• Introduction to the Conversation
• Attentive Illustrations
• Tuning the Preacher’s Ear
• Whatever You Get, Get Wisdom
• Wisdom on the Variousness of Life
• Wisdom on Sin and Grace

Top Highlights

“The reading preacher will discover that great writers know the road to the human heart and, once at their destination, know how to move our hearts. To the preacher, knowledge of what stirs human hearts is golden and not at all because heart stirring is a good project all by itself. After all, some hearts can be stirred by masochistic sex or sentimental dreck. No, the preacher wants his heart stirred because he will then have some idea how the power and beauty of the gospel might be presented so that the hearts of his brothers and sisters may also be moved.” (Page 6)

“Everything depends on whether the quotations and phrases serve to make the gospel of grace sound more urgently alive or whether they serve merely to make the sermon more aesthetically pleasing.” (Page 5)

“To recall an image of John Calvin, the preacher is someone the church sends to the Bible week by week to dig up part of its treasure and bring it to us in the Sunday sermon.” (Page 9)

“She taught us that poets are like preachers: they study how to say a lot in few words.” (Page xii)

“Reading gives me more substance to bring to Christian life and to Christian preaching. The thoughtful preacher gets a little bigger each time she reads. But, yes, along the way she will also discover a story, an incident, a saying that is striking enough to belong in a future sermon. If the preacher is a persistent reader, she will discover illustrations that may turn out to be more than mere embellishments. If well chosen and well placed, illustrations can become serious business within a sermon. In any case, good illustrating requires a high degree of attentiveness in the preacher whether she illustrates from her own thought and experience or from her program of reading or from somewhere else.” (Pages 22–23)

Praise for the Print Edition

Jesus once said we are to love God with all our mind—I know of no one who does this better than Neal Plantinga. He seems to be incapable of crafting an uninteresting or unedifying sentence. To be able to learn from him how to stock a mind for greater preaching is beyond price. Whatever this book costs, it’s not enough.

—John Ortberg, senior pastor, Menlo Park Presbyterian Church

Plantinga’s sympathetic understanding of the preacher’s ‘daunting task,’ combined with his concrete guidance for enhancing homiletic skill, makes this a valuable resource for new and veteran preachers alike.

—Publishers Weekly

Product Details

• Title: Reading for Preaching: The Preacher in Conversation with Storytellers, Biographers, Poets, and Journalists
• Author: Cornelius Plantinga
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Print Publication Date: 2013
• Logos Release Date: 2014
• Pages: 147
• Era: era:Contemporary
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
• Subjects: Preaching; Books and reading › Religious aspects--Christianity; Christianity and literature
• ISBNs: 9780802870773, 0802870775
• Resource ID: LLS:RDNGFRPRCHNG
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-30T02:36:00Z

About Cornelius Plantinga

Cornelius Plantinga is a Christian theologian and is President and Charles W. Colson Professor of Theology at Calvin Theological Seminary. Plantinga has an AB from Calvin College (1967), a BD from Calvin Theological Seminary (1971), and a PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary (1982). His dissertation was The Hodgson-Welch Debate and the Social Analogy of the Trinity. Plantinga is an ordained minister in the Christian Reformed Church, and is the brother of the Christian philosopher, Alvin Plantinga. Cornelius is also an avid defender of social trinitarianism.

(From Theopedia.com. Freely redistributable under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.)