A guest editorial by Christian historian William De Arteaga. Readers are invited to respond by including respectful comments on the article page.

This editorial was updated in January 2021 under the new title, “Why So Many Evangelicals and Pentecostals Were Beguiled by False Prophecies about Trump and his Second Term.”

Recently, the Mark Galli’s op-ed piece in Christianity Today created uproar among Evangelical Christians.[1] He asserted that President Trump should be removed from office for his lack of moral character. Many Christians were offended, but many others affirmed his view as theirs. It seems clear that most Evangelicals understand that Trump is a deeply flawed and a personally immoral person. The divide then is between those who find this to be disqualifying for the office of President, as the Rev. Galli, and those to whom Trump’s immorality is lamentable, but not important as President. This latter group strongly believes that Trump has been called by God to be President in spite of his character flaws. For his defense, the “Forever Trump” Christians cite his pro-family and pro-Christian tilt in the White House, and especially his court nominations, Supreme Court and lower courts, and his across-the-board support of Israel as indicators that this is true.

When criticism is given about Trump’s behavior, as in his shameless boasting,[2] lying or insulting tweets, the Forever Trumpers often cite that biblical heroes, men and women called by God, were often imperfect, or had some deep areas of immorality. For instance, Samson could not resist pagan women and destroyed the fullness of his ministry with this sin but still carried out much of God’s call on his life.

To be transparent, I side with the Rev. Galli’s opinion.[3] Galli commented the following week that the mass of email and letters disagreeing with his op-ed followed this line of thought, and refused to argue or discuss the specifics of Trump’s immoral or arbitrary acts.[4] Like Galli, I too have found that the Forever Trumpers most often do not bother to defend Trump’s action or irrational tweets, but rather cite the biblical injection, “do no touch my anointed” (1 Chr 16:18).

The acceptance of this disjunction between Trump’s personal morality and intemperate, rude, uncharitable tweets, etc. and his support by most white Evangelical Christians[5] is due in part to a series of prophecies, by a previously unknown prophet, Mark Taylor, which were assisted by Mary Colbert, an influential Christian writer and editor. This prophetic message and a belief that Trump was especially called out by God has been reinforced among Charismatic Christians by Mr. Steve Strang, CEO and President of Strang Communications, which publishes charismatic books and the influential Charisma magazine.[6]

Donald K. McKim, ed., Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters (Leicester: InterVarsity, 2007), 1106 pages, ISBN 9780830829279.

This book is a revised edition of the Historical Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters (1998). In concept, the work is ingenious—I know of no other work that treats major figures in the interpretation of Scripture in this way. With respect to the working out of this concept, however, the Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters has a number of serious drawbacks. Whether one can overcome these drawbacks, of course, will largely depend on how much one already knows, but that is an especially unfortunate way to have to read a reference work.

The Dictionary consists of more than 200 articles on “major biblical interpreters”, introduced by a series of overviews of interpretive trends within different periods, divided (where applicable) between North America and Europe. The quality of the articles is often very high, although it is hardly consistent. All the article writers were naturally drawn to their subjects’ work, but there are times when a bit more objectivity would have helped. Indeed, some of the articles are too adulatory for a dictionary—for example, the over-long article on Brevard Childs, written by one of his students, is a shameless mixture of hagiography and apology. (The “studies” listed at the end of that article exclude the works of Childs’s detractors, although he had several. Other articles in the Dictionary follow a much more objective policy with their bibliographies.)

The historical overview articles are uneven in quality. The articles on “Biblical Interpretation in Europe in the Twentieth Century” and “Biblical Interpretation in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries” are extremely tendentious: they seem to have no other object than to paint historical criticism as a fall from faithful reading practices. They attempt to make this case in the usual way: by associating everything undesirable (from the writers’ viewpoint) with the Enlightenment, even to the point of attributing the “modernist” concern for authorial intention to a (supposed) nineteenth-century development. (Unfortunately for the authors of these articles, other entries within the same volume set the record straight on some of this nonsense—e.g., the article on John Calvin speaks in very clear terms of the sixteenth-century reformer’s devotion to authorial intention as the primary hermeneutical goal.) These two articles sometimes get the more value-neutral facts wrong as well—e.g., Schleiermacher and Lachmann are credited with the idea that Mark was a source for Matthew and Luke (p. 62), but those early source critics argued only that Mark gave the clearest representation of the original gospel narrative that underlay all the synoptic gospels. In short, readers should look elsewhere if they want a reasonably objective history of biblical interpretation in these periods. It is especially unfortunate that articles like this can make it into a reference work. The editors of reference works usually set ground rules to avoid problems of this type.

Unfortunately, there are other significant problems with the Dictionary as well. The high quality of presentation that one finds in many of the articles on individual biblical interpreters is somewhat offset by the rather tendentious selection of “biblical interpreters”. It is difficult to know why some figures were chosen for inclusion, while others were excluded. Those familiar with important names within the biblical studies guild might be very surprised to learn that there is no entry for E. P. Sanders, arguably the most important figure in the study of Paul in the twentieth century (and one of the most important contributors to historical Jesus research as well). Those looking for other major interpreters of Paul will be equally surprised to find no entry for Krister Stendahl. Omissions like these are so huge that they border on bizarre. One cannot help but wonder whether these omissions reflect a prejudice against the so-called New Perspective on Paul, a general approach for which Sanders and Stendahl might be considered the founders. (This theory finds support in the only slightly less surprising omission of two other major figureheads of the New Perspective: N. T. Wright and James Dunn—although Dunn, oddly enough, is listed as a contributor to the Dictionary.) Whatever the explanation, the omission of names of this caliber is certainly strange. Indeed, failing to list Sanders or Stendahl in a list of 100 “major biblical interpreters” is like failing to list Jackie Robinson or Ted Williams in a list of 100 “major professional baseball players”.

Donald R. Sunukjian, Invitation To Biblical Preaching: Proclaiming Truth with Clarity and Relevance (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic & Professional, 2007), 375 pages, ISBN 9780825436666.

This book is about the application of the Biblical text—moving from the Biblical text to where people live today, “the take home truth.” This book is very good on pulpit speech and will benefit every minister. While the writer is more qualified as a communication specialist than a homiletican, I do plan to use his suggestions and thoughts on pulpit speech.

Sunukjian assumes the Biblical text is accurate and tries to make it relevant. He is well read on various methodologies of preaching but has problems including other theories of preaching into his writing. For example, he looks at blocks of thoughts in a narrative but outlines it inductively and deductively, instead of letting the blocks of thoughts form the outline of the sermon without a proposition.

The second section of the book, “Look on what God is saying …to us,” deals with pulpit speech and making the sermon flow. Sunukjian says application is taking the central truth and applying it to the audience, applying the take home truth to all age groups. He suggests that after each major point the sermon should have a transitional rhetorical question. The minister should introduce the sermon by summarizing the text before he preaches the sermon.

I like what Sunukjian says about the conclusion of the sermon: “End positively on a note of encouragement and hope” (251). Such a conclusion gives hope in a hopeless world; real hope rooted in the resurrection of Jesus.

His chapter on oral clarity suggests writing the way you talk, using the active voice rather than the passive and verbs rather than nouns, and using simple and similar words.

Donald R. Sunukjian is Professor of Homiletics, Christian Ministry and Leadership at Talbot School of Theology.

The chapter on “Deliver with freedom” suggests we should emphasize the take home truth of the sermon that speaks to the needs of people. Preach without notes and use a small pulpit or a music stand. He suggests that if you write out your sermon in a manuscript, memorize your main points you will speak more clearly. “And you find that 80-90 percent of the words you wrote easily come to mind as you speak” (302).

Preachers that will benefit the most from this book are those who outline sermons propositionally. I have problems with propositional preaching because it uses a foreign methodology (to the biblical text) as a pre-supposition to interpret the Biblical text. Although Sunukjian seeks to make propositional preaching simpler, the methodology itself is the problem. Any sermon that uses the propositional method as a pre-supposition to interpret the Biblical text forces the text to say and do what things the author of the text never intended. Propositional preaching works against the ethos of the Pentecostalism.