Page 157 - A Dissertation for Doctor of Philosophy

Furthermore, there is the Story behind the text. Van Harn says, “Yes, the Story. The

Story with a capital S. The gospel is the good news Story of what God has done for us in the

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history of Israel and in the person of Jesus.” A Christo-Centric understanding of the nature and
function of preaching, one that centralizes the Story, is essential to Korean preaching. The

Korean church needs to heed Adma’s warning: “the moment we take our eyes off the service of

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God to serve others or to serve ourselves, our ministry suffers.”

John Piper agrees with this by saying, “It is not the job of the Christian preacher to give

people moral or psychological pep talks about how to get along in the world; someone else can

do that. But most of our people have no one in the world to tell them, week in and out, about the

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supreme beauty and majesty of God.” Attending God and revealing Jesus as Christ and Lord

in preaching pull people pulled toward both the solutions of their needs and moral formation.

Leander Keck makes it clear that preaching out of moralizing interpretation of the text is “a

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markedly unbiblical way of preaching the Bible.” Thus, Korean preaching should be

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“kerygmatic before it is didactic or therapeutic.”

27 Van Harn, Pew Rights, 48.

28
Adam, Speaking, 158.
29
John Piper, The Supremacy of God in Preaching (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book
House, 1990), 12.

30 Keck, The Bible in the Pulpit, 100. See also Sidney Greidanus, The Modern Preacher
and the Ancient Text (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1988), 163-64.
He observes that “[u]nfortunately, in overemphasizing virtues and vices, dos and don’ts, and in
not properly grounding theses ethical demands in the Scriptures, they trivialize them and turn
them into caricatures.”

31 Willimon, Integrative Preaching, 21.