The strengths of deductive homiletics are obvious: studied, sturdy, sharply pointed. But the weaknesses of deductive homiletics are also obvious. You can’t hug a skeleton. You can’t hold hands with a bone. And points are hard to pick up without getting cut, and that cutting can seem at times like the splitting of hairs on the heads of angels dancing on the heads of pins, or what Sigmund Freud called “the narcissism of small differences.” In this not much has changed since the “plain preaching” tradition of the Puritans, when a sermon was made up of diligent exegesis, a rigorous theological
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