Giving Blood: A Fresh Paradigm for Preaching

by Leonard Sweet

Every culture is a complex adaptive system of networks and narraphors. Within that semiotic universe, text and context are woven as warp and weft of a single tapestry. God designed the Scriptures to serve both an original purpose and a present purpose. These are not separate. The discipline of historical context is integral to the integrity of transmitting the text today.2 No text exists in isolation from other texts or from the overarching biblical message. Semiotic exegesis discerns how any text functions in the wider biblical context. Some meanings we discern by taking out our exegetical magnifying glasses. Others we pick out by examining a text with a theological fish-eye lens, as Bryan Chapell puts it.3 The best expositors use both lenses, knowing that a magnifying glass can unravel mysteries in a raindrop but fail to detect a storm gathering on the horizon.