Confessions of A Commentary Kid

There was a point in my college career when I started to seriously geek out about commentaries. Every serious student at a Christian college needed to pick the commentary series they would defend in a fight to the death. Mine was the NIV Application Commentary. Scholars I respected like Tremper Longman III, Douglas Moo, Darrell Bock, Peter Enns and Scot McKnight wrote some of the commentaries in the series.  Enns and McKnight especially put me over the edge into giddiness.  It was my go-to commentary series. I would sit near it in the library, ready to reference it at a moment’s notice. It was well put together in general, but I especially liked that commentary series because it was more thematic than word by word reading of the text.

For the word by word reading of the text we were assigned the Bible Knowledge Commentary. That is a commentary I would not wish upon anyone. It was assigned reading for some of my classes, and I would dread to read from bold phrase to bold phrase about Greek conjugations and parsing and (insert Charlie Brown’s teacher’s wah-wah voice).

There is a new commentary series put out by IVP called the Resonate Series and I…ahem…resonate with it. This is a commentary series that takes a more contextual approach than even the NIV Application Commentary did. It is absolutely not bogged down in the tweed scholar-speak of pale Bible scholars who never see the light of day.

I was given the opportunity to review the newly published Matthew commentary in the Resonate Series. The Matthew commentary was written by Matt Woodley, author of The Folly of Prayer (my review). Woodley does a great job of commenting on the text, which I think is what a commentary should actually do. With all of the etymological and scholarly jargon removed and a format that moves section-by-section and not verse-by-verse or word-by-word, the Resonate Series offers the reader an actual interpretation of the text in contextualized terms. This means that the commenter, in this case Woodley, is showing how the text can actually be applied to daily life and spiritual practice.

Woodley does a great job of this. In what other commentary passage on Matthew 17 would you have a parable by Kierkegaard and a story about the highs and lows of a worship experience while in Mexico? By offering this type of relatable context, Woodley is able to flesh out the deeper meaning of the story and how it applies to the reader and the Christian community, as he does in his description of the tension he experienced in Mexico:

The noise and squalor of downtown Cabo didn’t match the lyrics of “What a Wonderful World.” Instead I heard a clanging song of drunkennes, pain and lust.
But as the church of Jesus Christ we will train our ears and our eyes to hear and see both songs: songs of Christ’s glory and songs of the world’s brokenness. (180)

All this in a discussion of the Transfiguration.

While at first glance someone might say that this is actually not what a commentary is supposed to be. A modern commentary is supposed to narrow the reader’s focus on the text so that an explicit truth can be presented in a proposition. This is not, however, like many of the ancient commentaries or Reformation commentaries of the church were written. There is a big difference between Augustine’s commentary on Genesis in Confessions, Matthew Arnold’s commentary on Genesis and the Bible Knowledge Commentary’s word-by-word delineation of Genesis. At some point between Arnold and the BKC Protestant scholars lost their way. So, it is refreshing to see a commentary series that goes back to the roots of the Christian and Protestant traditions of commentary writing to offer up a text that with human words tries to express the depth and mystery of the divine Word.

Book Information

The Gospel of Matthew: God with Us
Matt Woodley
InterVarsity Press
$12.16 (Amazon)