In the past two days I have shared D A Carson’s five points on the diversity of biblical genre.  Now to some specific genre and what their design might suggest about God.

Carson suggested the following: There are lessons to be learned about God from the occasional nature of the epistles.  Paul never gave his summary of doctrine.  He is always found to be, in some way, responding to a felt need of some kind.

Carson suggested that differences in Paul’s letters reflect differences in occasion, rather than maturation of Paul.  (His support for this suggestion is the timing of the letters.  Paul had about 16 years post-conversion before he wrote any of the epistles, then in the latter part of his “career” he wrote his letters.  We would expect significant maturation if he began as a naïve new believer, but he didn’t.)

So God address particular churches with particular needs, carefully applying the message of the gospel to each.  He gave the example of Paul’s different approaches to circumcision in respect to Timothy in Acts 16 and Titus in Galatians 2.  The difference here was a different occasion/circumstance.  In one the exclusive sufficiency of Jesus was at stake.  In the other it was about avoiding an unnecessary obstacle to ministry.  Occasionality is important and it is in the multiplicity of books that we find the full picture.

Implications for our preaching?  I would suggest four for now:

1.    We should seek to preach specific gospel presentation to specific audiences, rather than generic gospel presentations to undefined audiences.

2.    We should seek to help listeners grasp the occasional/situational context for an epistolary passage, rather than treating the epistle as some other form of writing (the systematic treatise comes to mind).

3.    Since there is no “gospel in a vacuum” presentations in the New Testament, we should try to avoid this all too common phenomena in our preaching.  Be sure to concretely apply the gospel to the lives of those listening.

4.    We should be very careful to preach a single passage with the full force of its own message, but always being sensitive to the fuller picture of the teaching of the other epistles and books.