Will Willimon posts a favorable review of an essay by Fleming Rutledge about preaching. Willimon includes his own praise of biblical preaching.
Preaching is powerful when it is biblical, when it takes the biblical witness with primary seriousness, when it is first interested, not in the limits of the hearers, or in our felt needs and cares, but in what God, in power, wishes to say to us, how the Holy Spirit, in power, wants to transform us. Nothing can create the church, nothing can raise up a new generation of Christians, we believe, other than the originating, fecund, life-giving power of the word.
Good Willimon prose. I’ve read much like it.
I’ve read some of Willimon’s sermons. I’ve read a few of Fleming Rutledge.
Having done that, I am struggling to bring to my mind the kind of preaching that they are worried about. In the post and elsewhere, Willimon frets over preaching that is not biblical or that starts with human needs or human limitations. I think he has in mind the kind of preaching we find displayed on the stages of the most successful mega-churches. Preachers of such churches write books that give advice that says we need to start precisely with human questions and human limitations. Students of communications arts, they know that the audience is crucial.
So, here is what I want a homiletics professor to do. Go round up a bunch of sermons that are in the Willimon/Rutledge style and a bunch of sermons that are in that “other” category – whatever that is exactly – and show us how they are different. Show us the difference and help us – or help me at least – see what consequence in terms of the theology and teaching that comes out of the preacher’s mouth is of each kind of preaching.
Maybe I’m the only one for whom this is not blindingly obvious. But I’d read the book.
I am a part-time local pastor serving 
The doctrine of original sin is surely more humbling to man than the opposite: And I know not what honour we can pay to God, if we think man came out of His hands in the condition wherein he is now.
There shouldn’t be much difference, because surely “what God, in power, wishes to say to us, how the Holy Spirit, in power, wants to transform us” has to start where we are, which is “with human needs or human limitations”. After all God needs to speak to us as we are, and our human limitations are what the Holy Spirit wants to transform us out of. Of course if the sermon never gets beyond human needs or human limitations, or if it suggests that we go beyond them in our own strength, it is not a good biblical sermon. But a true biblical sermon, as shown in the examples in Acts, starts where the congregation is and takes them forward in God’s power.