When I teach preaching courses, I tend to refer to the three types of Scripture: discourse, narrative and poetry. The various genre fit within these categories and so they give a good overview of different Biblical text types. So the principles of narrative interpretation would apply in the Gospels, Acts, historical books and so on. The principles of poetry would apply in Psalms, of course, but also other wisdom literature and poems found in historical books (eg.Exodus 15). The principles of discourse interpretation naturally work in the epistles, but that is not the only place we find discourse.

As direct communication, discourse is often the easiest type of passage to interpret, and it is usually one of the easier ones to preach. While narrative and poetry have real advantages for sermon formulation (for instance we could mention tension and imagery respectively), discourse tends to be direct instruction. With a sensitivity to the original context and audience, appropriate progression through exegetical, theological and recontextualization stages of sermon preparation, the preacher is able to formulate an attractive preaching plan for the text.

Other New Testament Discourse – Obviously the Epistles tend to be the preacher’s favorite in the Bible churches of the western world. But consider the other discourse possibilities in the New Testament. In each of the Gospels we have recorded speeches by Jesus – direct instructional communication. His Sermon on the Mount, or Olivet Discourse, or instructions to the seventy-two, etc., can all make for great preaching. Then in the book of Acts we have the speeches of Peter on Pentecost, Stephen on his promotion day, Paul in Athens and so on. In Acts it seems that the speeches do not supplement the action, but actually are the action, moving the broader narrative forward time and again.

Old Testament Disourse – Consider Joshua 1, for instance. God’s instructions to Joshua at that key moment of transition. It is part of history, part of a broad narrative, but actually those first nine verses are not a plot to trace, they are a discourse. Then you’ll find discourse in the wisdom literature, such as Job and Ecclesiastes, but arguably in poetic form throughout.  Likewise many of the oracles in the prophets bear features of discourse-driven communication, along with poetic structuring.

As preachers we may easily fall into the trap of thinking anything outside the epistles will be either narrative or poetry. This is not true, and tomorrow we’ll consider what this means in our preparation.