Dialogical interpretation from ancient text to contemporary preaching

Dialogical interpretation from ancient text to contemporary preaching treats the sermon not as a simple transfer of an ancient message into modern terms, but as a disciplined conversation between a text and a congregation. Its two movements are to establish what the text asked people in antiquity to believe and do, and then to explore how an encounter with it helps people today clarify what they can believe and how they should act. The method makes room for connection and disagreement alike: the ancient text can illuminate present experience, but its authority does not require preachers to affirm every implication it contains.

The Two Movements of Interpretation

The first responsibility is historical and interpretive: explain what a passage invited its ancient readers or hearers to believe and do. The second is contemporary and practical: help a present-day congregation consider its own beliefs and response. The sermon therefore does not leap directly from a biblical sentence to a modern application. It gives the text’s original context a hearing before asking what the present encounter makes possible, difficult, or necessary.

This approach treats preaching as conversation rather than a one-way movement from “then” to “now.” The ancient text is not simply a storehouse of ready-made modern answers, and the present congregation is not asked merely to reproduce an ancient world. Instead, the encounter presses the congregation to name its own convictions and identify appropriate actions. That work can continue even where a passage contains elements the preacher cannot responsibly endorse.

Analogy and the Difference Between Surface and Deeper Meaning

Analogy is one common way to connect ancient and contemporary experience. The preacher recognizes differences in culture and worldview while identifying experiences that can be compared across time. A passage’s surface meaning may depend on assumptions no longer shared; its deeper significance may nevertheless address an enduring question or experience. The distinction allows a sermon to make a genuine connection without pretending that ancient and modern worlds are identical.

The account of Jesus’ ascension illustrates the method. At the surface level, the story presupposes a three-story universe, with an underworld, the earth, and heaven above, and depicts Jesus ascending from earth to heaven to take his place at God’s right hand. Modern scientific understanding does not share that cosmology. The deeper claim, however, is that Jesus has sovereignty over every other ruler, authority, dominion, and power, including Satan, demons, and Caesar. A preacher can therefore question the ancient cosmological picture while affirming the passage’s claim about divine authority through Jesus. The analogy works by distinguishing the text’s historical representation from the theological point it makes through that representation.

The method carries a caution: analogy can misrepresent the text’s theological or ethical force if it treats a troubling feature as though it were an expression of God’s purposes. A contemporary application is not automatically faithful simply because it draws a parallel between past and present. The preacher must examine what the proposed connection would ask the congregation to accept.

Criticism When a Text Is Ethically Troubling

The account of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5:1–11 poses a particularly sharp problem. They claim to have given the full price of a property to the church’s common treasury, but after they lie, God strikes them dead. The passage can encourage truthfulness and the sharing of goods for the community’s welfare; at the same time, its portrayal implies that God kills them for their deception. The author of this commentary regards that implication as a misrepresentation of God, whom he understands as unconditionally loving and willing people to live in relationships of love.

For that reason, the preacher is called to name the theological difficulty rather than conceal it beneath an application about honesty or generosity. Failing to criticize the passage could leave congregants with the impression that God commits murder and that murder might be sanctioned in certain settings today. In this case, the author says that a minister may need to preach against the text: the sermon can identify its useful concern for truth and mutual care while refusing to attribute its violent implication to God.

Criticism does not end the conversation. The passage’s difficulty can make a present congregation articulate what it believes about God and why it cannot affirm the text’s apparent portrayal. The author states that he would not preach the passage itself, but would preach good news from God arising through conversation with it. The interpretive task thus includes both careful attention to what the text says and a reasoned account of where the preacher must dissent.

Historical Difference and the Risk of Anachronism

Dialogical interpretation depends on respecting a text’s integrity and otherness. Exegesis begins by asking what the text asked people to believe and do within its own historical, literary, and theological settings. Anachronism occurs when readers import present-day issues, beliefs, assumptions, values, or practices into an ancient passage as if those things had belonged to its world. In turning a text into a mirror of contemporary life, readers can mistake their own priorities for the passage’s original meaning.

The temptation is understandable: preachers and commentators may want biblical authority to support values they already hold. But when a passage is made to reflect the present, its difference is diminished, along with its capacity to offer fresh ways of thinking about God. The text’s otherness is not an obstacle to contemporary preaching; it is part of what makes a real encounter with it possible.

The church in Acts and modern hopes for multicultural community provide an example. Some contemporary Christians hope for communities in which people of different racial and ethnic groups, genders, religions, and sexual orientations live together with mutual respect while retaining their differences. The commentary shares that hope but warns against reading it directly back into Acts as though the ancient community were a straightforward prototype. In Acts, the community is constituted through repentance and baptism in the name of Jesus, with Jews and gentiles living together in covenantal commitment as gentiles adopt selected Jewish values and practices. A preacher may, through conversation with the text, make a theological move from Luke’s picture toward a contemporary vision of multicultural life. Presenting that modern hope as though it were already the text’s own, however, does violence to the historical difference the method requires.

The Method in the Wider Reading of Acts

The same discipline applies to questions of authorship and to the speeches and episodes of Acts. The book’s author is not securely identified by the text: the earliest records assigning the Gospel and Acts to Luke appear in the second century, and the Bible’s references to a Luke do not establish that he wrote these books. The commentary follows the church’s longstanding custom of calling the writer Luke, while distinguishing that conventional name from what can be established about the author. It also cautions that the familiar image of Luke as a physician, inferred from Colossians’ reference to a “beloved physician,” is not accepted by major contemporary scholars and does not materially explain Luke-Acts’ theology.

Historical setting matters as well. Most scholars date Luke’s writing to 80–90 CE, but neither the place of composition nor the location of the intended congregation is known. Clues suggest an urban audience shaped by Greek culture: in one example, Luke’s Gospel describes friends removing roof tiles from a more prosperous urban house, where Mark’s version depicts them digging through the roof of a typical small-town Palestinian house. Acts moves from city to city toward Rome, and Luke invokes Greek authors as theological authorities. Such details help readers reconstruct the text’s likely setting without claiming certainty where the evidence is limited.

The commentary also warns against treating the speeches in Acts as straightforward transcripts. Most scholars, it notes, think the speeches express Luke’s theology more than they preserve the historical speakers’ exact words. Thus Peter’s interpretation of Pentecost is read as Luke’s theological account of the event and as a statement of central themes in Acts. Likewise, the vivid Lukan portrait of Paul should not be casually used to explain the historical Paul known through his letters, or the reverse; congregations should compare and contrast the two pictures.

Narrative form itself can also become part of interpretation. In Acts 11, Peter explains the events that led to the gentiles’ reception of the Holy Spirit “step by step.” The commentary presents this as a model for theological reasoning: congregations need to know not only a preacher’s conclusion, but how the preacher reached it. Working through the reasoning can clarify the minister’s own judgment and help listeners learn how to think theologically beyond the immediate controversy.

The method also attends to how speakers address particular audiences. In Athens, Paul begins by affirming the Athenians’ interest in religion, establishes a point of contact, and then develops a critical engagement with their religious ideas while offering the Realm as an alternative. In his defense before a Jerusalem crowd, he speaks in Hebrew, identifies his argument as a defense, and narrates his life, call, and mission; Luke repeats the call story in different settings to emphasize its significance while shaping each presentation for its audience. These examples show that interpretation concerns not only what a text says, but how its arguments and narrative choices work in context.

A Continuing Conversation

The sermon’s contemporary responsibility is neither to erase the distance between the ancient text and the present nor to treat that distance as a reason to stop listening. It must first understand the ancient invitation, then help a congregation decide what it can affirm and do in response. Analogy can disclose a deeper connection across different worldviews; historical attention can expose the limits of a proposed comparison; and ethical criticism can prevent a troubling portrayal from being passed on as good news.

In this account, faithful preaching includes the possibility of disagreement with a biblical passage, provided that disagreement grows from serious engagement rather than from an anachronistic substitution of modern assumptions. The conversation leaves the congregation with clarified beliefs and more accountable action. Its measure is not whether every ancient formulation can be repeated unchanged, but whether readers have listened closely enough to the text to recognize both its historical particularity and the questions it brings into the present.