Proclaimer Blog
The big idea and aim of the Big Idea and Aim
Anyone who encounters what we do at Cornhill quickly discovers that we’re rigorous in training students to come up with two sentences for any Bible passage that they’re teaching or preaching: a Big Idea (a.k.a. BI, or Theme Sentence) and Aim Sentence.
This practice sometimes raises some good questions, and here are a couple of them.
Isn’t it more formulaic than Scripture itself?
Of course any set of disciplines can be turned into a lifeless formula by the petty-minded, but I’m pretty insistent that our insistence on BI and Aim does not drain the life from Scripture, but actually leads the preacher to be listening out for it.
- The BI boils down to this: what is the passage actually talking about?
- The Aim boils down to this: why are these things written here in this way in Scripture?
‘What?’ and ‘why?’. These are the two key questions that precisely help the preacher not to impose his favourite framework on a text, but to discipline himself to listen for what God is actually saying there.
That’s why, for myself, I fight a little shy of asking early on in my preparation questions which presuppose looking for a certain kind of content. Some books recommend this: e.g. one good contemporary writer suggests looking for what he calls the ‘Fallen Condition Focus’ of each text. It’s far from a terrible question, but I’d always rather start with, and persist with, ‘what?’ and ‘why?’ – questions which steer me, if I follow them faithfully, to listen to this text in its own right.
What’s the basis of ‘BI and Aim’?
Well, you can find theological answers to that question. But here’s a good general answer, from God’s common grace in human life:
Every time a person uses language, that language has two inseparable features: propositional content and inter-personal action. More simply: every time we open our mouths or tap on our keyboards, there’s content (what I’m saying) and intention (why I’m saying it). These two can be analysed separately, but they never actually exist separately; they’re two ways of describing what we’re doing when we communicate. (In a previous life I researched this a bit, and should anyone be interested it’s grounded in a solid philosophy of language.)
That’s why we get Cornhillers going on both BI and Aim from day one of Cornhill. Focus on BI without Aim and you’ll get lectures pretending to be sermons; focus on Aim without BI and you’ll get lots of heat and little light. All language, including the human language that Scripture is written in, always has both. ‘BI and Aim’ is simply our way of expressing a desire to read Scripture in a way that’s faithful to how God has made us and our language.