Essays in honour of Haddon Robinson

Talking about preaching with a friend a few years ago he kept on saying, Haddon Robinson, make sure you read Haddon Robinson. The book 'Biblical Preaching' arrived, and every word was worth reading. In this collection of essays in his honour there are is some good material: not every word is worth reading. There are two essays though that caught me and I wanted to read carefully. One was by Terry Mattingly on understanding our advertising film saturated culture. His thesis about the need to read the signals coming out from the TV and cinema and then deal with them in preaching was worth a whole book. He started off with what happened when he mentioned the film Thelma and Louise in a seminary class - a lot of fun. The other great essay was by Paul Borden on how to get the main exegetical idea from the stories of the Bible and then how to turn this into a sermon. He goes into lots of useful details about the process, which could be used in a class. Pity there wasn't space for him to give a concrete example. I liked Bruce Waltke's analysis of Proverbs showing how there is a central idea and effectively reminding us all not to get too bogged down in source and form criticism. And the other essays, they're fine....but not much new.