Craddock has written a number of books, including The Pre-Existence of Christ, As One Without Authority, Overhearing the Gospel, The Gospels, commentaries on John and Philippians, Preaching, a commentary on Luke and a collection of sermon-related anecdotes. Craddock has also contributed articles to various journals.
Preaching style
There are at least three major features of Craddock's new homiletic that distinguish it from traditional homiletics. First, instead of using a traditional deductive approach, in which three points are named and illustrated, in his sermons, Craddock advocates an inductive style. Critiquing traditional homiletics—called the "old homiletic"—Craddock turned toward induction, in which the preacher re-creates for the listener the inductive process of study used to create the sermon itself. A second unique feature of Craddock's new homiletic is that a sermon should seek to create an experience for the listener, rather than attempting to gain the listeners' assent through sermons using deductive, linear logic. As a result of Craddock's inductive model, the role of the listeners fundamentally changes: no longer are listeners passive recipients of a conclusion already reached by the authoritative preacher, to which they must acquiesce. Rather, in Craddock's scheme, the listeners are active participants in the sermon by virtue of the sermon form itself, which enables the hearer to "finish" the sermon that is intentionally left open-ended. A key assumption of this model, as Craddock notes, is that listeners share a common universal experience, ensuring that the listener's mental processes will work in the same way as the preacher's, thus recreating the same type of experience. This assumption would be later challenged by, among others, John McClure. Third, Craddock emphasizes that the form or genre of the biblical passage to be preached should shape in some way the form taken by the sermon. While Craddock does not require that a sermon slavishly adhere to the biblical form—a psalm need not be preached entirely as a poetic sermon—he argues that various biblical forms seek to accomplish a variety of rhetorical aims; as such, the sermon should attempt to "do what the text does" in both the "what" and the "how" of the text. Often characterized as preaching with a style that is "folksy," Craddock is known for using humour in sermons. Newsweek ranked him as one of America's greatest preachers. Craddock's new homiletic has influenced further generations of homileticians who have developed new sermon forms while holding to certain values found within the new homiletic: narrative preaching, phenomenological preaching, and conversational preaching, to name a few.
Craddock was born in 1928 to Fred, Sr. and Ethel Craddock. He had three brothers and a sister. Craddock married Nettie Dungan in June 1950, upon his graduation from Johnson Bible College. They had two children, John and Laura.
