Preaching at TEDS, Dr. Richard Mouw gives an illuminating illustration warning about the dangers of pietism. He recounts a oft repeated illustration about knowing Abraham Lincoln. I’ve reproduced it as he gave it below. Imagine a professor at Harvard University who knows everything there is to know from the public record about the life and career …
Nearly every preacher makes it a priority to make his sermon “relevant” to his audience. The difficulty with this aim is that it often assumes that “relevant” and “interesting” are synonymous. In other words, a sermon must be relevant in the sense that it must capture the audience’s attention and imagination, leaving them with a …
Rhetoric, so far as this is taken to mean the art of persuasion, i.e. the art of deluding by means of such beautiful semblance (as ars oratoria), and not merely excellence of speech (eloquence and style), is a dialect, which borrows from poetry only so much as is necessary to win over people’s minds to …
