Of the making of commentaries…

… there seems to be no end, and that’s a very good thing. Why?

Because not only do we continue to learn new things and adapt new approaches to Scripture, but pastors and teachers are in constant need of commentaries on the Bible that make sense of the text in ways that help church life.

D.A. Carson’s Pillar Commentary series is designed for that very purpose: exegetical rigor and church life.

No commentary in the entire Pillar series does this better than Roy Ciampa and Brian Rosner’s The First Letter to the Corinthians (Pillar New Testament Commentary). Perhaps you are like me in going to Gordon Fee’s classic commentary on 1 Corinthians first … and so like me perhaps you are wondering if there’s something that updates it. Ciampa and Rosner do just that.

The commentary is complete; it is theologically informed; it is pastorally judicious. A distinctive feature of this commentary, and I have to say I tried to do the same in my (soon to be published) James commentary, is to focus on the biblical and Jewish context of the book instead of chasing down parallels that will be, well, just parallel lines from different cultures.

The unity of this letter is formed around four themes: the Lordship of Christ, worldwide worship, the eschatological temple, and the glory of God.