Urban Puritano • January 30, 2023

How to Preach Like a Puritan (Without Being One): 5 Elements of Puritan Preaching

How to Preach Like a Puritan (Without Being One)

5 Elements of Puritan Preaching

Introduction

Ever since Puritan books started to be reprinted by Banner of Truth Trust over 60 years ago, they have consistently captured the attention of a segment of the Church desiring spiritual meat as part of their regular diet. Before then, such books were only available via second-hand bookstores.

What was mostly lost to history and known only to a few readers was that the reason these Puritan books were a source of spiritual protein was that they were not books in the ordinary sense. They were, in essence, sermon manuscripts.

What made these sermon manuscripts so appealing for popular piety? Why are they still recommended for spiritual consumption among Calvinist and Reformed believers? Is there any way that the Puritan approach to preaching the Word can be reproduced in our day and age?

One answer to the last question is, “Yes!” It was given by Dr. Joel Beeke a few years ago in some talks and articles he entitled, “Why We Should and Should Not Preach Like the Puritans.” He should know. He is as close a modern exemplar of the pros of Puritan preaching as is in existence today. In these talks and articles, he provided the pros and cons about trying to imitate the Puritan approach to preaching the Word of God. I recommend the reader look those articles and talks up.

I paraphrase Dr. Beeke’s list of CONS:

Don’t Structure Sermons by Theology, but by Exegesis
Don’t Multiply Points, but Keep it Simple
Don’t Overwhelm with Application, but focus
Don’t Preach Too Many Sermons on One Text or Topic, but Keep it Moving
Don’t Preach with Too Many Cross References, but Only a Few

The PROS are as follows:

Preach Well-Rounded Sermons
Preach the Main Doctrine of Your Text Thoroughly
Preach the Whole Counsel of God Over Time
Preach in a Plain Style that Regular Folks Understand
Preach with Your Life What You Preach From the Pulpit

Dr. Beeke concludes with: pray for the power of the Spirit for Puritan-like preaching.

I would like to take Dr. Beeke’s wise counsel and take his affirmative answer a step or two further. Given that the answer is, “Yes, there is a way that the Puritan approach to preaching the Word can be reproduced in our day and age,” the next question is, “HOW does a novice or veteran pulpiteer preach like a Puritan (without being one)?

Lectures for the Clergy or Lectures for the People?

My musings have to start somewhere, so a good place to start is with a birds eye view of a typical Puritan sermon structure. Many observe 3 elements: observations, doctrine(s), and uses (or particular applications of the doctrine(s). This broad observation is, generally, true. The best and most spiritually rich Puritan sermons have often displayed these sermon divisions in one variation or another. However, there is still room to reframe the Puritan sermon structure more fully with an eye towards benefitting the people in the pews today.

In his 3 volume “A History of Preaching,” F. R. Webber illustrated the Puritan era sermon by contrasting a tree with a great stream uniting several rivers. Whereas the several rivers can unite and form a great stream, thus illustrating unity and progress, the tree illustrates many branches and limbs that the further outward they go, the further they are to what unites them. Webber states, “This rage for minute analysis was often at the expense of literary style and clearness.”

Why the rage for minute analysis? Webber states that the “sermons of Puritan times…reflect strongly the influence of the Scholastics. Scholastic theology was rejected, but the structural form of sermons has all the multitude of main divisions and subdivisions that were so popular among the Schoolmen…The aim of preaching in the Puritan era was to present every possible detail of the subject, whether it had any practical relation to the needs of the congregation or not.” Webber’s conclusion may be a bit too harsh. My bias tells me there must have been a method to their madness, not a rage for minute analysis.

Bryan Chappell gets a little closer to the truth when he notes that the Puritan era was a point of transition in the preaching tradition of the Church. The great ship of preaching was being turned from the deep waters of Scholastic education to the stormy waters of a new, self-consciously Reformation pedagogical approach many Puritans were being exposed to. Chappell notes that Puritan sermons took the lecture format for the clergy that they received in the classroom and simply adapted them for the people in the pews.

For our purposes, I want to just scratch the surface and suggest that the means that the Puritans used to make those adaptations were by critically fusing some older streams of thinking with some new ways of thinking. Scholastic method, rhetoric, and Ramism united in varying degrees among the Puritans to ultimately produce a spiritually robust offering to their audiences and centuries later, to us. Remember, our focus is not on Puritan theological treatises, but Puritan sermons and sermon structure. Therefore, the amount of Scholasticism in my treatment will be zero. Sorry, (not sorry) my Reformed Thomist brothers!

In general, Puritans employed 5 Elements to their sermon structure. Taken individually, they are not unique. However, these elements united as a whole sought to accomplish the communication of Biblical truth for the glory of God and for the good of His people via clear and unadulterated proclamation. Puritans were not triflers or peddlers of the Word of God. They preached as from God and in the sight of God in Christ (2 Cor. 2:17).

All sermons are works of science and craftsmanship. Puritan sermons are no exception. The 5 Elements of a Puritan Sermon are:

Introduction/Epigraph
Doctrine (Doctrinal Big Idea, Biblical Proposition, Homiletical Main point, or something similar)
Reasons (Arguments or Proofs)
Uses (Particular applications of the Doctrine)
Conclusion

First Element

The 1st Element of a Puritan sermon is the INTRODUCTION or EPIGRAPH. This element introduces and briefly establishes the rationale for the inquiry into the theme of the chosen biblical text. Like an inscription on the outer wall near the entrance to a building, an introduction or epigraph identifies the structure you are about to enter. Make no mistake: exposition of the Word of God is the function of preaching and to do so, the preacher must clearly introduce the intersection between the Biblical Text and the listener. The Bible is, after all, the Word of God and the preacher at the beginning plants the seed on what and why the text addresses the audience.

The Text’s thrust or flow of thought will be introduced and will serve to anchor the audience. They need to be anchored to the Word to perceive the biblical text’s relevance and applicability to their lives.

This requires a high level of dedication and discipline on the part of the preacher. Both towards the Word of God and towards the people of God. One description of the Godfather of Puritanism, William Perkins, was “painful.” He was known as “Painful Perkins” or a “Painful Preacher.” This didn’t mean it was painful to listen to him. Quite the contrary. What this meant was that he was painstaking in all his duties as a minister of the Word. He was diligent and methodical in crafting his messages with a pastor’s heart towards applying God’s truth to real lives.

This dual concern can and should be established at the beginning in the sermon’s introduction or epigraph. How long should this 1st element be? Dr. Steven Lawson offers some sanctified homespun wisdom in this regard. He said sermon introductions are like front porches. They shouldn’t be greater than the house itself! Puritans would generally agree. At least, the best Puritan preachers would.

The easiest way to do this is to begin broadly and end narrowly. This can be symbolically illustrated by an inverted triangle. A broad beginning can be encapsulated in an image, story, or fact that describes a pertinent life situation parallel to the concern of the Biblical text. For example, in a sermon on the Lord’s Prayer, I used the prayer practice of an eastern religion that fashioned cylinders with written petitions engraved all around it as counting as prayer if the person spun it.

From this, we move to the next step on the front porch and get personal. Establish the parallel need that is pertinent to the audience in a personal way. Personal, not emotional. Small arguments may be of value here that move, not manipulate, hearers into inclining their ears to hear the exposition of the Word. In the aforementioned Lord’s Prayer sermon, I gave a brief syllogism:

All true disciples of Jesus come to a point in their lives when they desire to learn from Him about prayer.
Every believer is a disciple of Jesus.
Therefore, every believer will at some point desire to learn what Jesus teaches concerning prayer.

Having done this, having walked up these two steps, we now narrow our focus further by explicitly announcing the texts theme. Listeners will know exactly what your proclamation’s theme, topic, doctrine, big idea, or proposition will be.

They will know your sermon’s theme by way of hearing you ask them the theme-specific question. Again, in the Lord’s Prayer sermon mentioned above, I asked: “What does the Prayer Life of a disciple of Jesus look like?”

Embedded in that question is the theme; namely, the prayer life of a disciple of Jesus. The answer to the question is the burden of the preacher to proclaim. But not according to his opinion or the opinion of others. The text of Scripture must be privileged because only it is being exposited. We do so publicly by taking the last step on the stairs onto the porch proper by giving a brief literary, historical, and perhaps theological context before culminating in reading the Text of Scripture.

Upon finishing the Scripture reading, the preacher should pray for illumination, his own and his audience’s, before continuing with the 2nd element of Puritan Preaching.

Second Element

The 2nd Element of Puritan Preaching is where the preacher leads his audience into the building through the entrance into the doctrinal BIG IDEA foyer. This element is what one pays the big bucks in seminary for. As a result of intense study of Scripture, with all the hermeneutical helps and tools, the Puritan preacher translates the meaning of his chosen text into a proposition consisting of the text’s subject and what is predicated of the text. All texts have a flow of thought or a thrust to accompany its theme. This doctrinal proposition must always be what is predicated of the subject according to the text of Scripture.

Having studied the text in its various contexts, according to its discernible affordances, its legitimate grammatical, historical, redemptive historical, and theological analyses, you must distill its meaning into that doctrinal BIG IDEA that in reality is the answer to the theme related question that the text answers.

For example, in this episode, we shall illustrate the 5 Elements of Puritan Preaching by a short devotional based on Hebrews 11:39-40. The Doctrinal Proposition (Subject-Complement, Theme-Thrust, Big Idea, Main Point, etc) is: Perseverance in Faith is Fueled by Either Christ in the Promise or Christ in the Glorious Fulfillment.

The 2nd Element of Puritan Preaching, then, is at once your analysis and synthesis of the text’s meaning in nuclear form. This nucleus or doctrinal big idea (proposition) is that which the whole sermon depends. Therefore, if your distillation (analysis and synthesis) of the text’s meaning is wrong, the rest of your proclamation will be wrong.

That is why it is of utmost importance to show your work to the extent that it is relevant to your doctrinal big idea or proposition. No more, no less. You can briefly display or expand whatever contextual or theological observations or considerations may be preliminary or subsidiary to the nucleus that is your properly drawn forth doctrinal proposition. After all, no text or doctrine of Scripture is an island unto itself.

Again, in the sermon on the Lord’s Prayer, some legitimate preliminary considerations supporting the the main point of the sermon was that, in context, Jesus provoked His disciples by His example to imitate His prayer warrior lifestyle (Luke 11: 1). Having done that, He proceeded to provide them with the pattern for prayer for all His disciples (Luke 11:2-4).

In one of the most famous sermons preached on North American soil, Jonathan Edwards Big Doctrinal Idea was prefaced by a preliminary and subsidiary observation or idea. I paraphrase: Wickedness is always prone to unexpected consequences of one's own doing at God’s appointed time. This simple, yet complex, observation of the rebellious Israelites during their wilderness wanderings is further distilled into a proper Doctrinal Big Idea or Proposition: “Only the mere pleasure of God keeps wicked men at any moment out of hell.”

Edwards briefly defines what he means by mere pleasure and quickly transitions to the next element of Puritan preaching. And so do we.

Third Element

The 3rd element of Puritan Preaching is proving the Doctrinal Proposition of Doctrinal Big Idea by means of reasons and arguments. Does the text itself provide them? Yes, either explicitly or implicitly. It will usually involve a combination of textual and theological considerations.

Without this 3rd Element of Puritan Preaching, the validity of the Doctrinal Proposition would remain unproven. It would merely be an assertion drifting in the wind like a plastic bag. Many sermons are just that: words drifting in the wind like plastic bags in a parking lot.

I recently heard a putative Reformed sermon on a passage in the Song of Solomon that was little more than a string of flowery metaphorical assertions that the preacher must have thought were elegantly strung pearls instead of the popcorn on a string that they really were.

Undoubtedly, this preacher was enraptured by his prior typological or allegorical analysis of the passage, but without providing an appropriately formulated proposition with evidence and proof of its validity, it was a truly inferior speech that did not rise to the heavenly level of heralding the Word of God. In other words, the Reformed community isn’t immune from preaching deficiencies it often identifies and decries in other communities.

The Puritan method behind the madness of employing proofs, reasons, and arguments to validate Doctrinal Propositions is simple, yet complex. I can only scratch the surface here as I have been doing all along. I can only illustrate the rationale of this element in Puritan Preaching by citing Isaiah 1:18 where God speaks to the prophet saying, “Come now, and let us reason together,” says the Lord, “though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are like crimson, they shall be as wool.”

The Bible itself is one long argument proving over and over again that God is both just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. Whether by His prophets or His apostles, whether in word or by deed, God has employed reasons, proofs, and arguments as a necessary means to the end of explaining Himself to us in order to unite us unto Himself. Therefore, in proclaiming His Word, use of reasons and arguments are as indispensable as they are inevitable.

Fourth Element

The 4th Element of Puritan Preaching is what most believers designate as Application. It was slightly different for the Puritan preacher of old. They called this element, “Uses.” As a result of the right preaching of the Word of God, Puritans wanted the right hearing and the right living as the supernatural consequence. Not just theology as an academic discipline, but as the art of living unto God. Puritans wanted hearers to be doers of the Word, not hearers only. Hence, the term “Uses.”

Roughly, “uses” were particular applications of a doctrinal proposition. They may have ranged from simple to complicated, referring to either internal or external responses to the Doctrinal Big Idea (Proposition). Internal uses had to do with your mind, will, and affections. Never was it a question of emotionally manipulating a person’s fluctuating feelings. Since “as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,” “Uses” had to have specificity tied to the doctrine aiming at deficiencies in our lives due to sin or ignorance. External uses are whatever things find expression in our external world or our actions. Hebrews 11 contains both internal and external realities that demonstrate that true faith pervades both worlds.

Of course, nothing said about “Uses” suggests for one moment that the role of the Holy Spirit is supplanted by the preacher, any homiletical method, or an element of a sermon structure such as this Puritan one. Unless the Holy Spirit cause the ear to be opened, the preacher can say, “Eat and drink…, but his heart won’t be with” the preaching of the Word.

This aspect of preaching captured in the Puritan “Uses” element of preaching develops with time, experience, and learning from everything and anyone around you. A man with no wife and kids tasked with preaching may have difficulty relating to those who do. He may struggle conceiving of apt “Uses” with specificity. He may be more comfortable contemplating academic abstractions rather than the down and dirty issues where real people live. Sheep, however, smell.

Some older preachers resist dedicating an element of sermonizing to the applicatory specificity of Puritan “Uses” out of the misguided notion that it is the sole domain of the Holy Spirit to do so. Well, so is opening hearts and illuminating minds, but never apart from the preaching of the Word. Why is it within the purview of sermonizing to develop and explain a doctrinal truth, but not to develop a doctrinally derived and specific applicational “Use”?

Examples of internal “Uses” are:

Of/For Information
Of/For Meditation/Adoration
Of/For Comfort/Encouragement

Examples of External “Uses” are:

Of/For Confutation or Reproof
Of/For Instruction or Correction
Of/For Trials

Fifth Element

The 5th and final Element of Puritan Preaching is the Epilogue or Conclusion. Having introduced the theme, posed the question that the text under consideration answers, read the Text, prayed for illumination for yourself and your audience, declared the doctrinal proposition, provided reasons and proofs, and provided legitimate “uses” with applicatory specificity, you are now ready to close your sermon. How can this be accomplished?

A simple summary of the Doctrinal Big Idea with thanksgiving unto God is sufficient. The Puritan Preacher can then lead the congregation in prayer.

As was stated in the beginning: all sermons are unique works of craftsmanship. Homiletics is an art and science. It requires painstaking skill even if it is a divine calling. Who is sufficient unto these things?

Regretfully, many being trained and educated to preach today don’t take the time or exert the energy to take the fruits of their exegetical labors to translate them into a true sermonic medium. Instead, too many Evangelicals are content with chats and motivational talks. To our shame, too many Reformed are content with lectures or running commentaries. Repentance is truly in order.

One way to remedy this situation and display fruits worthy of repentance is to heed Dr. Beeke’s counsel and recommendation. The cautions of Puritan preaching notwithstanding, the PROS he lists are achievable via applying the 5 Elements of Puritan Preaching.

After all, the Puritan challenge for the art and science of authentic Christian preaching still stands: Preach one Christ, by Christ, to the praise of Christ!

Much more could be said of Puritan Preaching. Stay tuned for General Reflections on Hebrews 11:39-40: The Vindication of Faith

For Examples of the 5 Elements of Puritan Preaching in English and Spanish:

El Gran Peligro de La Incredulidad

The Gospel of the Reformation is the Gospel of the Scriptures

La Oracion Segun Jesus

Prayer According to Jesus

Take up and read: What is the Gospel? A Puritan-esque Answer

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Tom Hicks: Allegorist(?)

By Urban Puritano • August 23, 2026

The author of What Is a Reformed Baptist? gives baptism four senses — but the engine is allegory's, and his own confession already ruled on it. Tom Hicks — a confessional Reformed Baptist pastor whose very handle, @TomHicks2LCF, flies the Second London flag — recently offered on X what he weirdly called "the fourfold sense of Christian baptism." Four numbered senses, each pinned to a medieval label: immersion as a sign of union with Christ (literal); a sign of Christ's death and resurrection (allegorical); a sign of the believer's death to self and new life (tropological); a sign of the believer's passing from this world into the next (anagogical). Patrick Schreiner — author of The Four Senses of Scripture, the most prominent recent case for recovering the quadriga — welcomed it: a smile emoji and a "thank you" GIF. The gesture is light. It is also telling, and it is why this small thread from X repays a longer look. The author of the retrieval's flagship book has just cheered the fourfold method as it steps off the page. What was a claim about how biblical texts mean is now applied, with the movement's blessing, to how a sacrament means. I want to be careful not to pay this the wrong compliment. One could call the post creative and mean it warmly. It seems as if many confessional Reformed Baptists do. But the creativity is the whole problem, not a mitigating grace. A hermeneutic is a discipline: it constrains what a thing may be taken to mean and tells you when you have gone wrong. A heuristic is a generator: it prompts you to produce, and it never runs dry. The fourfold scheme, turned on baptism, constrains nothing. It generates — four slots, and an invitation to fill them. That a godly and able pastor can fill them so readily is not evidence the method works; it is evidence of what the method is. A scheme that can find its four senses in a text, in an ordinance, in a hymn, in a handshake, is not discovering four senses in any of them. It is running its apparatus, which will always yield four, because yielding four is what it was built to do. Not a bug — the feature. There is a name for the faculty at work. Pareidolia is the mind's readiness to see a face where there is only cloud; apophenia, its broader cousin, is the readiness to see connection where nothing is in fact connected. The quadriga laid over a sacrament is apophenia in its Sunday clothes — the familiar fourfold silhouette projected onto a subject that never asked for it. Baptism is not a text with a literal sense and three spiritual ones stacked above it. It is one sign, and it signifies richly: union, death and resurrection, new life, the hope of glory — all of it whole and undivided in a single thick redemptive-historical reading of the texts that give it (Rom. 6:3–5; Col. 2:12; 1 Pet. 3:21). Sorting that one meaning into four medieval bins does not enrich the meaning. It multiplies the bins. And then the thread did the argument's work for it. A reader, Mark Harrelson, noticed a gap: "5. For remission of sins. You missed that one." The fourfold scheme had left out something the Nicene Creed itself confesses of baptism — and a fifth item is an awkward thing to hand a fourfold sense. Hicks's answer has real theological content, and none of it is wrong: Christ procures remission at the cross, faith is the hand that receives it, and baptism asserts and confirms it to the believer. Hold that sacramentology; it is sound. Then watch what the method makes him do with it. Remission, he said, is "contained in the allegorical sense." The four senses did not produce remission; challenged, they absorbed it, folding a fifth doctrine into a slot already holding another. That is not a fourfold reading yielding its riches. It is an elastic container stretching to swallow whatever the objection supplies. If the allegorical sense can take on remission after the fact — remission, which has no quarrel with the "death and resurrection" already sitting in that bin — then the "senses" are not distinct compartments of meaning the sacrament yields. They are labels roomy enough to relabel. Press them and they expand; and a scheme that expands on demand has stopped dividing anything at all. Remission was never a missing fifth sense. It was already inside the one meaning of baptism, exactly where union and new life and hope already were. The category error is the surface. The deeper problem is confessional — and here the irony turns tragic. And the tragedy is only multiplied by however many Reformed Baptists it influences to downplay or contradict the this foundational confessional hermeneutic. Hicks is no bystander to the Second London; he wrote the book on it. In What Is a Reformed Baptist? he argues that Reformed Baptist identity is confessional identity — that to be a faithful Reformed Baptist is to hold the historic confessions, and the Second London above all. The man who taught a generation that being Reformed Baptist means holding this confession has now read baptism in a way the confession forecloses. He cannot wave the objection off, because it is his own standard, in his own book, that raises it. The Second London, with Westminster, declares that the true and full sense of any Scripture "is not manifold, but one." Those four words do logical work. "Not manifold" is a denial — not a ranking, not a subordination, but a denial — of multiple senses as such. It denies the genus. And the quadriga, a theory of four senses, is the most prominent species of that genus. The denial of a genus necessarily contains the denial of its species: deny that Scripture's sense is manifold, and you have denied, in the same breath, the fourfold scheme that is manifoldness's flagship. To confess 1.9 is to have already declined the quadriga — and having declined it for texts, one has declined it for whatever else the fourfold silhouette gets projected onto next. This is no novel reading of the phrase. It is the plain force of "not manifold," and it is how the confessional tradition treated the question. Tyndale, Perkins, Whitaker, Leigh, and Turretin did not say the spiritual senses must be kept subordinate to the literal. They said Scripture has one sense. The men who wrote "not manifold, but one" were denying multiplicity, not tidying it into a hierarchy. The confession does not only deny; it directs. Having called the true and full sense "not manifold, but one," the same paragraph says how the one sense is found: it "must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly" — Scripture set beside Scripture, read under the analogy of faith. That is the confessional method for establishing a doctrine's full meaning, baptism included: not four bins to be filled, but the gathering of every text that bears on the sign into one coherent teaching. Remission belongs to the doctrine of baptism not because it can be tucked into an allegorical slot, but because Scripture, searched and known — Acts 2:38 beside Romans 6, and the creed's "one baptism for the remission of sins" — teaches it as part of the one thing baptism signifies. The analogy of faith is intertextual, not fourfold. What was offered under the name of depth is a medieval grid standing in for the confession's own method — and standing in for it poorly, since the grid had no slot for remission until someone pointed out the lack. There is a stock reply that this is simply not what the Confession means. But asserting that "not manifold, but one" leaves room for other distinct senses is not an argument; it is the very thing to be shown, and it owes three unpaid debts: an alternative reading of the actual words "not manifold, but one"; historical evidence that the framers meant to leave a door open for distinct senses; and some account of the genus–species relation on which a man may deny multiple senses and keep four of them. Until those are produced, the four words stand. So — allegorist? Not by conviction. Despite recommending allegory to frame a spiritual sense for the doctrine of baptism, Hicks would reject the label, and the confession he wrote a book to commend rejects it for him. The charge was never that he holds allegory's creed. It is that he has borrowed allegory's engine and set it running against the very standard he taught the churches to keep. The soft retrieval of the quadriga keeps arriving at the same wall, and it arrives now in a new field. Whether the fourfold sense is offered for a passage or for the ordinance of baptism, the confessional verdict does not move. The waters are rich — rich with union, death, resurrection, new life, remission, and the hope of passing through the last judgment into glory. But that is the fullness of one sense, not the sum of four. There is a leaven here, and it is spreading. The manifold sense of Scripture, long resisted among Baptists, has unfortunately found a welcome among some Reformed Baptist pastors and seminary professors — and now it has jumped the tracks a second time, from the senses of a text to the senses of a doctrine. A fourfold sense of baptism today; a fourfold sense of the Supper, the church, the covenants tomorrow. Each step is greeted as recovery, as depth. But none of it is the confessional framing of the analogy of faith, and a little leaven leavens the whole lump. What spreads here is not a retrieval. It is a grid mistaken for a method, and a fad mistaken for a tradition. It may be someone's tradition. But not ours. Heuristic, not hermeneutic. Not manifold, but one. We distinguish. POST SCRIPT... Pastor Tom kindly unblocked me and replied to my X article: "Thank you for the post and the generous interaction. Allegory in the medieval usage was often severed from the meaning of the text and generated fresh meaning independent of the what the Word of God actually said. When the Reformers opposed allegory, that is what they opposed. But at other times, the Reformers employed allegory, but only when it was anchored in the one meaning of the text. Benjamin Keach was a faithful English Particular Baptist pastor who signed the Second London Confession of Faith. He wrote a massive interpretive tome titled Tropologia in which he proceeded to open the allegorical/typological, metaphorical, and tropological senses of Scripture. You can research it using AI and Google. He did not believe the one sense of Scripture is limited to the literal sense but expanded to typology and allegory and tropology. The same method of interpretation is evident from the preaching of Charles Spurgeon (often maligned by literalists). But these Reformed Baptist brethren didn't see any conflict with our venerable confession because there isn't any. It is found throughout our Reformed and Particular Baptist heritage. Tolle lege. The procedure of looking for the meaning of the text, how it points to Christ, how to apply it, and how it gives us hope for the future, arises from studying the way that Jesus and the apostles themselves studied the Bible. While I don't have space to work it out fully here, consider just one example from the author of Hebrews which is Paul, in case you were wondering. :) See Hebrews 12:5-6 and the manner in which the preacher handles the biblical interpretation of Prov 3:11-12. Context shows a fourfold sense. First, there is the plain sense. This is the truth that God trains or disciplines His sons. Second, there is the Christ-centered sense. God led Christ to the cross (Heb 12:2), and Christ learned obedience through suffering (Heb 5:8). He did this for us as our substitute and example. Third, there is the applied sense. God loves us, Christ teaches us how to suffer in love; therefore, in light of Christ, we can embrace suffering and persevere in love without becoming weary or fainthearted, knowing we are being made like Christ (Heb 12:11). Fourth, there is the final or heavenly sense. The goal of our training in sanctification is ultimately to see the Lord (Heb 12:14). Many other such examples of the Bible's interpretation of the Bible in this way could be shown. There is only one sense of the text. But that one sense is often though not always multilayered with many necessary implications." To which I replied: "Appreciate you for unblocking me to exchange replies. While some people decry this app, i find you get what you invest in it. Your input is greatly appreciated. I understand you may write more wherever you choose is best. My good faith yet pointed response will be a short list of where I consider you unhelpfully and sloppily blurring the lines logically, biblically, and confessionally: The first and most obvious: the 4fold sense as a tool for reading texts, versus interpreting a doctrine (e.g., baptism). A figure of speech, versus a second sense. Typology, versus invented allegory. Preaching a text, versus interpreting a text. Rejecting a method’s abuses, versus rejecting the method; illicit to overlay even the quadriga’s structure on our confession. And a big one: the implications of one meaning, versus four different senses or meanings." Please, stay tuned and be on the lookout for an episode of the Urban Puritano Podcast for a discussion of these issues.

A Tale of Two Single Senses, Part 1

By Roberto Gazga • August 9, 2026

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The Superiority of Confessional Pre-Critical Exegesis

By Urban Puritano • August 8, 2026

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