A course of lectures on preaching - Dabney - IV - Lecture 4 (The same topics continued)

Required reading
A course of lectures on preaching by RL Dabney (Available from Amazon or free here) - Read Lecture 4 (The same topics continued).

My summary
Last week Dabney began to teach us about different types of preaching by discussing doctrinal and practical/ethical preaching.

This week Dabney rounds it off with narrative preaching.

Firstly Dabney explains what narrative preaching is and how it is employed.

Then Dabney gives us some difficulties of narrative preaching including in:
(i) the recital itself;
(ii) the occasional sermon;
(iii) the funeral discourse;
(iv) the hortatory sermon.

What grabbed me
I liked how Dabney showed us the benefits of narrative preaching: 'That this method of presenting truth should be often employed, might be inferred from the fact that more than half of the revealed Scriptures is narrative or biography. God, who knows what is in man, has evidently judged this a suitable way to instruct him. Experience shows that it is the way most intelligible and pleasing to the popular mind. Nor are the reasons of this obscure. A perspicuous narrative, with its lifelike personages and successive incidents leading to their catastrophe, presents the simplest food of curiosity, which is the appetite of the mind. The truths embodied thus are more vividly apprehended. Presented in the concrete, they relieve us in the labours of abstraction and generalization, which are so irksome to the common mind. This method has all the advantage of illustration over naked argument. As the picture of a human face is more intelligible than a verbal description, or as one derives a clearer view of a region from a map of its parts than from the reading of the field-notes of its survey, so is the narrative embodying a truth more perspicuous and pleasing than a didactic statement. Would the preacher define and recommend the virtue of constancy in the right ? The history of Daniel does it better than all his definitions and arguments. Would he illustrate faith ? He has Abraham. In Peter at the cock-crowing he finds true penitence painted. Christ weeping over reprobate Jerusalem shows us compassion more distinctly than any description can.'

Embrace narrative preaching for the delight that it is.

Next week's reading
Read Lecture 5 (The text).

Now it's your turn
Please post your own notes and thoughts in the comments section below.