To enlighten or darken. . .

I will admit that of all the books I have owned over the years, the smaller category is what you would call Bible commentaries.  Of those I have kept now into retirement, the number of books that fit into the realm of Bible commentaries is even smaller.  It is not because I think I am so smart I do not need them or even because I have no interest in the minutiae of the details of the text.  I need the guidance of experts and I do not have a command of the details.  The problem is that so many books which pass for Bible commentaries fail in their primary mission.  They do not enlighten the text.  Instead, they do the opposite.  They make the meaning of the text and therefore its application darker.  For a pastor, if it won't preach, it is not worth the time spent studying it.  Pastors have limited time and they have an urgent task before them and if those hundred dollar textbooks are not pulling their weight and helping the pastor do his job, what value do they have -- except as a curiosity?

Now, to be sure, there are some commentaries that open up the text of Scripture and shed light upon what it means.  I will single out the Concordia Commentaries from Concordia Publishing House as generally more profound and helpful.  In particular, I commend authors like Thomas Winger and William Weinrich and John Kleinig.  I only wish that when you pulled other volumes from the shelf in a bookstore, you found the same kind of approach that these and some other authors take.  They know their task.  They are not there to raise unanswered questions to arouse curiosity but to address the text so that the pastor can preach it to the people.  God bless them!

Now, I thought this was a recent phenomenon.  I thought that this was perhaps due primarily to the advent of historical criticism and the textual criticism that treats the text of the sacred Word as if it were not sacred.  Imagine how wrong I was when I happened upon a quote from one of the earliest Lutherans who wrote a hermeneutics text -- Matthew Flacius Illyricus (1520-1575).  He surveyed the situation in his own time and said "Interpreters, who indeed ought to be the greatest help to the unlearned for learning the Sacred Scriptures, often darken them more than they explain them."  (If you want to read more of him, try out How to Understand the Scriptures, translated by Wade Johnston, Magdeburg Press, 2011.) 

So my advice is to be careful about spending your hard earned dollars on Bible commentaries.  They are not all the same and many, if not most, are simply not worth it to your task as a pastor or helpful to your understand as a layman.