Canonical Reading and Cross-References That Honor the Passage

Canonical reading — letting Scripture interpret Scripture, holding the whole canon as a unity that the passage participates in — is an old practice that has produced some of the church's strongest preaching and some of its weakest. The strong version honors the passage. The weak version absorbs the passage into a generic message that the canon supposedly teaches everywhere.

The discipline is to know which one you are doing.

The strong version

In the strong version, the passage is read as itself first. Its writer, its setting, its argument, its texture are held with care. Only after the passage is heard on its own terms is the canon brought alongside, and the canon is brought alongside in service of hearing the passage more fully.

The cross-reference that helps here is the one that illuminates the present passage's claim. The cross-reference shows that the present passage is participating in a larger biblical conversation, and the larger conversation makes the present passage's contribution more visible. The passage gains by being situated; it does not lose itself.

This is hard work. It requires knowing the canon well enough to bring real witnesses, not just the surface-level cross-references that share vocabulary with the passage. It also requires the discipline to bring the cross-reference for the passage's sake rather than for the cross-reference's sake.

The weak version

In the weak version, the canon is treated as a flat surface across which any verse can speak to any other verse. The minister moves through five or six passages in the course of the sermon, each touching the topic, none of them given enough time to be heard on its own terms. By the end of the sermon, the original passage has dissolved into a general topical claim that "the Bible teaches" — and the supposed teaching is the minister's synthesis, not the passage's contribution.

This is canonical reading drained of its power. The passage has been used. The canon has been used. The sermon has gestured at biblical breadth without earning it.

The signal that you are doing this is when the original passage is barely visible by minute fifteen. The sermon could be preached from any of the five passages with minor adjustments. The first passage stopped being central about ten minutes ago.

The discipline

Two habits hold the line between the strong and weak versions.

Spend the majority of the sermon's time on the present passage. If you have brought three cross-references, they should each take a minute or two of careful attention, not five. The present passage is the body; the cross-references are limbs.

Use cross-references that are actually engaged in the same conversation. The test is whether the writers of the two passages would recognize themselves as addressing the same question. If yes, the canonical reading has integrity. If no, the canonical reading is the minister's own thematic project, and the texts have been recruited to serve it.

This is not a counsel of suspicion toward thematic preaching. Thematic preaching can be honest. The honest version names the theme as the minister's organizing question and lets the texts witness to it. The dishonest version dresses the minister's organizing question in the costume of "what the Bible teaches."

A working test

By Saturday evening, ask whether your sermon would be a different sermon if any of the cross-references were removed. If yes, the cross-references are doing real work. If no, they are decorative or, worse, they are doing thematic work the present passage was not asked to support.

Cut the ones that fail the test. The sermon will be shorter, the present passage will be more clearly heard, and the canonical reading will recover the depth the casual version was trying to mimic.