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The Preaching of Jesus: Gospel Proclamation, Then & Now

Reviewed by Dave Faulkner.

Sitting in the Baptist church where my wife found faith, I once endured a preacher telling us that we should have more preaching like Jesus. He then proceeded to argue – without a shadow of a doubt and without a shred of evidence – that Jesus’ preaching utterly conformed to Reformed expository models. We have to put up with a lot of tosh in terms of the claims made about preaching like Jesus.

William Brosend, an American Episcopalian professor of Homiletics, is rather more nuanced. This book begins with an exposition of Jesus’ preaching in the Synoptic Gospels that leads him to claim that there were four elements to that preaching: it was dialogical, proclamatory, careful with regard to self-reference and it was persistently figurative. After that introductory chapter, he dedicates one chapter to each of these elements. Each chapter then ends with a sermon from another preacher that illustrates that approach.

The book is well-written and helpful, even when I did not agree with all of Brosend’s conclusions. Although sometimes, to be fair, it was his illustrations and the assumptions and values he makes as someone in a ‘mainstream’ American denomination that sometimes grated with me. He draws particularly on Marcus Borg, who is altogether too sceptical a scholar for my tastes. However, he is also lauded by Ben Witherington III, a far less sceptical New Testament scholar, whom I greatly admire! The four major themes would make excellent discussion both for trainee preachers and for any preachers undertaking a refresher course or further study.

Overall, then, this is a book to be read with profit and which will stimulate your preaching ministry. If you are of a more conservative theological persuasion, you will want to fillet certain parts, but do not let that put you off reading it. You will gain much from it, whatever your convictions.