Ian Boxall teaches New Testament at St Stephen’s House, Oxford, where he is also Senior Tutor. He is the editor of Scripture Bulletin, and the author of the volume on Luke’s Gospel in the Take and Read series (Alive Publishing).

The tasks confronting the preacher in this liturgical year of Luke are complex and manifold. Some of these tasks are general issues relating to the interpretation of the biblical text, such as the relationship between the parts and the whole – an issue highlighted by more holistic approaches to the gospels such as narrative criticism. Others are more specifically related to the interpretation of Luke’s Gospel, such as ongoing questions of genre, or consideration of the precise relationship between the Gospel and Acts, with some recent appeals for ‘loosing the hyphen’ in the widely-used phrase ‘Luke-Acts’.  Still others are concerned with the ministry of preaching. How does one make the move as it were from the text – or the text in the study – to the pulpit, from interpretation to application? Or does such an articulation of the preacher’s task betray a misunderstanding of the complex processes at work both in exegesis and in homiletics, by treating application as a mere ‘add-on’ to a prior hermeneutical task? Recent trends in biblical scholarship, meanwhile, with their turn towards, on the one hand, bold theological readings of scriptural texts, and on the other, a renewed emphasis on the history of a text’s reception, seem only to compound the difficulties further.

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