The Drama of Preaching

Preaching is dramatic. Through it, we hear the voice of the living God as he speaks to us both through the reading and the preaching of the word of God. But where do the hearers of sermons fit into the drama? This book suggests ways in which the drama metaphor may help to address age old questions about the centrality of the gospel and the place of the hearer in preaching. As God in Christ is the central character in the biblical drama of redemption, he also calls hearers to understand their role in creatively, yet faithfully living according to the biblical script. Thus, no sermon is complete until God's redemptive work is powerfully proclaimed, and his people are instructed in how they too are participating in the Missio Dei. In this work, Hebrews 11 is employed as a means of showing how God not only reveals his redemptive work to his people, but also through them. As postmodernism sets the stage of contemporary preaching, The Drama of Preaching interacts with some of the particular challenges preachers face in engaging postmodern listeners, that they might not only be hearers, but doers of the preached word.

""Should contemporary preaching direct listeners to Christ . . . [s]hould preaching safeguard listeners from both moralism and antinomianism . . . [s]hould preachers meet listeners where they live, immersed in the atmosphere of postmodernism's pluralistic relativism, and then enlist them as actors in God's global drama? The Drama of Preaching makes the case that preaching can and must, and shows us how.""
--Dennis E. Johnson, Professor of Practical Theology, Westminster Seminary California

""Eric Watkins does a superb job of integrating Scripture's own teaching about how preaching connects the drama to our discipleship in the world. This book could change a lot of preaching--and lives!""
--Michael Horton, J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics, Westminster Seminary California

""With the scholarship of a dissertation and the readability of a book, Watkins advances the theory and practice of redemptive-historical preaching. He shows how to preach Christ faithfully even as we preach morality without apology.""
--Jeffrey Arthurs, Professor of Preaching and Communication, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

""The Drama of Preaching addresses postmodern sloth by calling hearers to respond to what God is doing in Christ--a theater of reconciliation--and thus to get real.""
--Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Research Professor of Systematic Theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

""Watkins, with meticulous research and competency, has effectively addressed the issue of how the 'drama of preaching' is enlivened by understanding the 'drama of redemption' as revealed in the inerrant word of God.""
--Harry L. Reeder, III, Pastor; Teacher, Briarwood Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, AL

Eric Watkins is the pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in St. Augustine, Florida, and an adjunct in homiletics at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary in Jacksonville, Florida. He has a PhD from the Theological University in Kampen, the Netherlands. His particular interests are preaching and church planting in a postmodern context. He and his wife, Heather, have three children. His pastimes are surfing, beach volleyball, and playing guitar.