The Gospel Coalition recently published an interview with Owen Strachan, assistant professor of Christian theology and church history at Southern Seminary’s Boyce College, about Christ-centered preaching. Strachan states in the interview that Christ is the apex of Scripture, but preachers should be careful to enrich their sermons with examination of linguistic and historical context. He explains:
The theological language that is used to talk about this idea is that Christ is the hermeneutical key that unlocks all your interpretation of the Bible. So, you start from there, but where you go from there can take you to very different places. You can either end up in a sort of reductionistic style of preaching where you’re so jazzed up about finding types of Christ in the Bible that a lot of your sermon seems to center around that idea.
Or, you can do a form of preaching that very much plumbs the original context of the text, it gets into the history, it gets into the nitty-gritty stuff – what various events and institutions in the Old Testament, for example, would mean – and so you’re unearthing that context. And then you’re explaining the actual theological point to that text; you’re bringing christocentric hermeneutics to bear as you conclude and sweep everything together.
Audio of the entire interview is available at The Gospel Coalition Blog.