Funding from Avondale helps, too
Brenton Stacey
Public relations officer
Avondale College of Higher Education
Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia
A book co-edited by two alumni with research funding from Avondale College of Higher Education has won one of PreachingToday.com’s annual book awards.
“It preaches like a dream:” Dr Grenville Kent on reclaiming the Old Testament.
Editors of PreachingToday.com, a nonprofit ministry of Christianity Today International, divided nominated books into two categories—Enhancing the Preacher’s Skill and Feeding the Preacher’s Soul. Reclaiming the Old Testament for Christian Preaching, edited by Drs Grenville Kent and Laurence Turner, with Dr Paul Kissling, won the award in the skill category.
Readable
The book’s practical focus appealed to judge Pr Mark Mitchell, minister of Central Peninsula Church in California, USA. Chapters cover narrative, plot, characters, genre and preaching from difficult texts. Each includes a sermon as an example. The book concludes with a chapter on preaching Christ from the Old Testament. Mitchell describes Reclaiming the Old Testament for Christian Preaching as “scholarly but readable” and notes how the writers “come from a variety of theological positions within evangelicalism.”
“Rock stars”
The writers include Daniel Block, David Firth, Alison Lo, Tremper Longman, Ernest Lucas, Frederico Villanueva, Gordon Wenham and Christopher Wright. These are some of the “rock stars of evangelical scholarship,” says Grenville, a lecturer in Old Testament and arts in the School of Theology at Wesley Institute. He and his colleagues—Laurence is head of the Department of Theological Studies at Newbold College in England and Paul a former professor of Old Testament and biblical languages and director of research at the TCM International Institute in Austria—invited them to contribute because of concerns ministers were too timid to preach the Old Testament and their congregations too timid to hear it preached. The criticism: the Old Testament is morally complex and culturally remote and lacks cohesion and literary sparkle.
“In loosing the unity and the literary beauty of the Old Testament, we may even have lost its role as Christian Scripture,” says Grenville. “Liberals chucked it away and conservatives saw it as secondary Scripture but evangelicals said, ‘You can read it like a scholar.’”
Reclamation
Grenville used the funding from Avondale to help organise a theological conference at Tynalde House, a Cambridge, England-based residential centre for biblical research. The book is based on papers presented at the conference.
“The Old Testament is theologically challenging,” says Grenville, “but there’s unity with the New Testament. It reads like a book, even though some of the literary genres are unfamiliar and some of the narrative devices are daunting. Best of all, it preaches like a dream because people rarely hear it.”
Reclaiming the Old Testament for Christian Preaching is published by IVP Academic.
