Passion in the Pulpit: How to Exegete the Emotion of Scripture
Book Review • Vines, Jerry, and Adam B. Dooley. Passion in the Pulpit: How to Exegete the Emotion of Scripture. Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2018). Kindle. 209 pp. $18.99.
Read time: 7 min
Introduction
Seminaries today train preachers to parse Greek verbs and diagram Pauline logic, but how many teach ministers to exegete emotion? Passion in the Pulpit: How to Exegete the Emotion of Scripture fills that gap with a theologically driven call to recover the pathos of Scripture. In this volume, Jerry Vines and Adam B. Dooley offer a timely challenge to the homiletical status quo, arguing that expository preaching must articulate the truth of the biblical text and embody its inspired emotional tone.
Vines, a seasoned pastor and two-time president of the Southern Baptist Convention, draws from over two decades as senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida, and a long-standing commitment to biblical inerrancy and pastoral formation. Dooley, a Ph.D. graduate in preaching from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, currently serves as senior pastor of Englewood Baptist Church in Jackson, Tennessee, and brings academic precision to the project. Together, they call preachers to embrace a Spirit-led emotional fidelity in the pulpit, insisting that biblical passion is not theatrics but a theological imperative. While Vines and Dooley present a theologically rich and rhetorically sound case for emotionally faithful preaching, their overcorrection in certain areas and conflation of personality with pathos weaken an otherwise compelling contribution to homiletics.
Summary
In Passion in the Pulpit, Vines and Dooley set out to defend the proposition that expository preaching must embody not only textual accuracy but also the Spirit-inspired emotional tone of Scripture. They contend that contemporary preaching has often neglected biblical pathos, either due to the rise of intellectualism in homiletics or out of fear of revivalist emotionalism (17–18). The book’s central thesis is that biblical exposition is incomplete without emotionally faithful preaching—preaching that embodies and evokes the emotive intent of the inspired text (26). Vines and Dooley seek to recover “biblical passion,” not as a display of personality or performance but as a theological necessity derived from the very design of Scripture (17).
The book is written primarily for pastors, preaching students, and homileticians concerned with the rhetorical and affective dimensions of sermon delivery. The authors aim to train preachers to discern the biblical text’s emotional contours and communicate them with integrity and effectiveness in the pulpit. Drawing on Scripture, historical theology, and rhetorical tradition—particularly Aristotle’s triad of logos, ethos, and pathos—they emphasize that emotion, when grounded in revelation, is not manipulative but transformative (25).
The book is organized in three parts. Part 1 addresses the challenge of recovering emotion in preaching. In the introduction, the authors lament the decline of pathos and call for a return to preaching that stirs the affections, as modeled by figures such as Jonathan Edwards, who intentionally crafted sermons that avoided inflectionless delivery and viewed pathos as enhancing rather than obscuring meaning (19). Chapter 1 critiques both the New Homiletic’s overemphasis on experience and conservative evangelicalism’s tendency toward emotionless exposition, proposing emotional exegesis as the missing link in biblical preaching (24–25). Chapter 2 critiques the use and misuse of Phillips Brooks’ oft-cited maxim that preaching is “truth through personality,” arguing that the preacher’s personality must be subordinated to the inspired pathos of the text (37). Chapter 3 differentiates biblical persuasion from emotional manipulation, insisting that pathos must be derived from the logos and aimed at eliciting voluntary, Spirit-wrought responses (49–57).
Part 2 focuses on discovering the emotive design of the text. Chapter 4 begins with genres, asserting that each literary form carries distinct emotional expectations, from historical narrative to apocalyptic (64). Chapter 5 examines how vocabulary and syntax reveal emotional intent, especially in poetic texts like the Psalms, where dispassionate delivery is considered “homiletical malpractice” (81). The sixth chapter urges preachers to consider “the world behind the text”—its historical and prophetic context—to recover the emotional urgency intended for its original audience (92–103). Chapter 7 turns to “the world in front of the text,” encouraging preachers to discern the sermon’s present-tense emotive effect (105–18). In chapter 8, Vines and Dooley advocate gauging emotional cues by observing how characters and God react within biblical narratives (120).
Finally, Part 3 provides practical strategies. Chapter 9 underscores that genuine pathos requires alignment between the preacher’s own heart and the text’s emotion (140–49). Chapter 10 discusses verbal techniques such as vivid imagery, repetition, and questions, all of which are modeled in Scripture (164), and Chapter 11 concludes the work with vocal strategies—volume, pace, inflection—that help preachers match the text’s emotional register (172–78). Ultimately, Vines and Dooley insist that expository preaching must aim not merely to inform but to move the people of God, calling for an emotionally compelling homiletic.
Critical Evaluation
Strengths
Passion in the Pulpit accomplishes what many homiletics texts neglect: they recover the divinely inspired emotional tone of Scripture and integrate it into a theology of preaching. First, the authors effectively establish the book’s purpose by exposing a critical weakness in contemporary preaching. They argue that “highly academic models of preaching tend, as a general rule, to downplay the importance of engaging the emotions of listeners as we preach” (17). Rather than advocating for unchecked emotionalism, Vines and Dooley insist, “[we] do not intend to argue for any passion in the pulpit but for biblical passion instead” (17). Their consistent distinction between manipulation and biblical pathos is a defining strength.
Second, the authors—especially Dooley—substantiate early their claims that “rooted in every biblical passage is an emotive design waiting to be found” (25). This thesis later guides the reader through genre, vocabulary, and syntax as a method for exegeting divine emotion. For instance, they reason:
The prophet Nathan clearly sought an emotional impact as well as a logical result when he rebuked David with the declaration, ‘You are the man!’ in 2 Samuel 12:7. Urgency, lament, and even righteous anger leap off the page when we survey Romans 1:18–32. The sarcasm of 2 Corinthians 11–12 is difficult to overlook as we observe the apostle Paul defending his apostleship. Passionate appeals woven into the biblical record reinforce instead of detract from the overall message of each passage. Preachers should highlight rather than avoid revealed sentiments like these. The aforementioned passages fall flat if we disregard the feelings that accompany their content. Ignoring the textual pathos simply is not an option. (27)
In this way, Vines and Dooley effectively prove from Scripture that for a preacher to capture “the meaning of Scripture without also communicating its heart falls short of the divine mandate to preach the Word” (25).
Third, their methodology avoids a false dichotomy between preaching’s cognitive and affective aims: “Logos without pathos will likely inform without inspiring. Equally misleading, pathos without logos may inspire without informing” (28). The authors provide a robust definition of biblical persuasion that reflects this balance: “Utilizing means to seek the desired, voluntary response revealed within the Bible’s logos and pathos in an effort to seek the glory of God and the spiritual benefit of an audience” (51).
Weaknesses
Passion in the Pulpit exhibits three potential weaknesses. First, though the authors helpfully remind preachers that biblical preaching should align emotionally with the text’s tone with persuasion in mind, the authors may overextend this argument to the point of imbalance. Obviously, a preacher would be out of line to exhibit a jovial tone when explaining symptoms of David’s spiritual depression from Psalm 42 or giddy when alluding to Jesus’ teaching on eternal punishment. Equally, who would argue for acting morose while proclaiming John’s vision of the New Jerusalem? The authors rightly call this “homiletical malpractice” (81). But why stop there? One might just as reasonably argue for text-driven sermon syntax or text-driven sermon sentence length. Where does one draw the line for being text-driven? Wisdom and not dogmatism should answer this question in the study as well as in the pulpit.
Second, the authors’ extensive critique of Phillips Brooks’ famous maxim—“preaching is truth through personality”—misfires by targeting Brooks’ liberal theology instead of engaging the rhetorical insight the aphorism actually offers. Brooks’ understanding of “truth” may indeed diverge from evangelical orthodoxy. Still, the enduring relevance of his definition rests more on how one understands “personality” in preaching and not on whether his theological understanding of “truth” is sound.
There is a third and related concern: the book consequently conflates the rhetorical category of pathos with personality. Dooley defines pathos in this way: “Pathos in preaching means the preacher embodies the spirit of the text while seeking to help his audience do the same” (27). In contrast, a preacher’s personality arguably involves much more. Personality is typically thought to entail a person’s characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, behaving, and relating to others, shaped by enduring traits, emotional tendencies, cognitive styles, motivations, values, and interpersonal dynamics. So, the book’s unfortunate conflation of pathos and personality renders the entire section undoing Brooks’ adage, at best, an academic rabbit trail that does not enhance the central proposition that the biblical text should drive the preacher’s pathos. To put it another way, whereas a preacher’s personality involves his enduring traits, unique emotional dispositions, and relational style, pathos historically speaks of how a preacher evokes and directs the audience’s emotions to move them toward conviction and action. Though partly and distantly related, the two ideas should not be conflated as they are in Vine and Dooley’s work.
Conclusion
Passion in the Pulpit reframes expository preaching as a whole-person task, calling the preacher not merely to explain the text but to embody its divinely inspired affections. Vines and Dooley have rendered a needed service to the evangelical pulpit, especially in contexts where emotion has been suspect or relegated to the domain of style. Their work challenges assumptions I had not previously questioned, pushing me to consider more carefully how my tone aligns with the emotional register of the text.
This book will serve preaching students, pastors, and homileticians seeking to recover a more holistic, text-sensitive approach to exposition. In the end, Passion in the Pulpit invites preachers to become not just heralds of truth but shepherds of the heart: those who speak the Word in a manner worthy of its divine origin and emotive design. ❖
Quote this Review
Footnote: Timothy J. Harris, “Passion in the Pulpit: How to Exegete the Emotion of Scripture,” Practical Theologian, April 10, 2025, https://www.practicaltheologian.com/blog/bookreview-pdhbk.
Bibliography: Harris, Timothy J. “Passion in the Pulpit: How to Exegete the Emotion of Scripture.” Practical Theologian, April 10, 2025. https://www.practicaltheologian.com/blog/bookreview-pdhbk.
