There’s probably a lot to be said about using commentaries to prepare preaching, but I’m going to address one very narrow aspect: how I’ve developed a way of knowing which commentaries to regularly consult.
I’m a pastor but not employed by the church, I preach approximately monthly and so don’t have the luxury of lots of preparation time. I’ve read Tim Keller say that one of his messages takes about 60 hours work (40 of his and 20 of someone else’s, I understand), and it shows, but it’s not something I’m going to be able to do. I suspect most pastors who are paid by their churches feel similarly, even if they can usually give more time than I can.
I manage to spend about six to eight hours in preparation for a message. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad and don’t give it to you with the intent that you think anything in particular of the amount, it’s just what I’ve been able to make work for the particular situation I find myself in. I imagine a different situation would lead to a different amount of time. It’s a truism that more time would be good, though you do have to know how to spend that more time wisely.
One of the realities is that I can’t read six or seven (or more!) commentaries on a passage to preach on it. If I’m writing on a passage, especially academic writing, I’ll read much more widely. For the task of preaching though I need to limit myself. Over the years I’ve come to want to read four different kinds of commentaries, though this shifts a little depending on the book of the Bible we’re talking about. If I come to a book I haven’t worked in before and don’t know the commentary ‘scene’ so well it can take a little work to get the right four, but this is what I’m aiming for. It’s my ‘canon’ of voices to work with for preaching.
I don’t know how applicable this is, but I’m hoping it might help others too.
A Technical Commentary
This is a commentary that works through the text line by line or word by word, using the historical-grammatical method. It should be the most technical one you can handle in terms of how much of the original languages are present. Because this is for preaching I would want a broadly evangelical commentary most of the time. I’d read more widely for writing or thinking projects.
If the passage is linguistically difficult and I’ve not worked through it in the past, or very contentious, I might add a second technical commentary that disagrees with the first and place them in conversation in my preparation. Realistically that takes a good deal of time that I don’t always have the luxury of, but I would prefer to do this.
The aim here is to understand what the text is saying. It won’t always be that evocative for preaching—and plenty of new preachers read commentaries and say it didn’t help at all—but in my experience the more technical it is, the more it gets under the skin of the sentences and the cultural milieu, the more evocative it will be.
A Theological or Literary Commentary
This is a commentary that might take larger chunks of the text but is generally alert to either literary features or to commenting on the theological implications of the text. These are a little harder to find. Often more liberal scholars are more alert to literary features. Modern theological commentaries are harder to find, though this is changing. The series that do exist are often all over the map theologically and tend to be expensive, which is unfortunate.
Here I’m looking for something that will provoke me and make me think. It’s often helpful if they’re speculative, I’m certainly looking for some exegetical maximalism to complement the technical commentary’s minimalism.
This is much more likely to be evocative for preaching, though I’ll end up exploring connected ideas or head off at a tangent. It’s more evocative because it’s more likely to help you find Christ in the text, which is what you’re trying to do.
Sometimes this might be two commentaries, a literary one and a theological one, but I haven’t found that many books of the Bible are well resourced such that I have those options. It also might be a theological book that deals with the specific passage in question.
An Old Commentary
Something written before I was born at the very least, but I really mean before the twentieth century. Our concerns matter in preaching, but so does the ‘breeze of the centuries,’ as Lewis famously put it.
This might cover some of the previous categories as well, but I’d be looking at Calvin, or at JC Ryle on the Gospels, or some of the Church Fathers. You have the added benefit that Calvin writes gold standard technical commentaries and the Fathers wrote excellent theological ones. Ryle fits firmly in the pastoral category too.
I’m looking to be surprised and shaken out of my categories—or sometimes confirmed in them. These are the only commentaries I might quote from in my preaching, though I’m not big on quotations.
A Pastoral Commentary
Finally, I want a commentary that is heavy on application. By the time I read this I’ll have been jotting down lots of ideas on how to apply this passage and am interested to see how someone else has done so.
These tend to be commentaries written at a more popular level and I’m reading them thinking about application rather than what the passage means or the thrust of the message. I might occasionally reuse an illustration from this kind of commentary too, though in my experience my own illustrations work better for me.
If you were to read the sermons of Lloyd-Jones or Spurgeon (or whoever) then that would fit here too, though you want your outline nailed before you do to prevent the temptation to pilfer theirs. I tend not to do this for preaching, though that has more to do with my own constraints than anything else.
A Canon Collected
I’d love to have time to consult a couple in each category, but the realities of the time I have to prepare something prevent this. I also haven’t nailed that collection on lots of the books of the Bible, but it’s how I tend to focus my commentary buying if I’m buying for preaching.
Photo by Claudia Wolff on Unsplash
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