My Six Favorite Books on Romans
Chapters
0:03:48 Henry Alfred the Greek New Testament
4:27 Tom Shriner on Romans
6:28 John Murray
00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)
00:00:02.580 | - Sometimes we talk books on this podcast like today.
00:00:08.080 | I love this question from Aaron Flanagan
00:00:10.120 | who writes in to ask this.
00:00:11.020 | Hello, Pastor John.
00:00:12.360 | I know you have spent much of your life studying Romans.
00:00:15.800 | That's no joke.
00:00:17.080 | Which commentaries have proven most helpful to you
00:00:20.240 | exegetically and devotionally?
00:00:23.000 | - It is true.
00:00:24.480 | I have spent a large part of my life,
00:00:26.680 | I was thinking about this
00:00:28.480 | when I heard the question,
00:00:30.040 | a large part of my life thinking about the book of Romans.
00:00:33.920 | When I was a pastor,
00:00:34.880 | I waited almost 20 years to preach on Romans
00:00:39.000 | because I felt like I needed to have a capital of trust
00:00:44.000 | in my people if I was gonna venture
00:00:46.280 | to hold their attention for eight years on one book.
00:00:50.800 | I'd say, "Oh no, this is gonna be boring."
00:00:54.000 | And so we were, we were in Romans for eight years.
00:00:56.840 | I think there are 250 or so sermons there.
00:01:00.000 | And the aim of all that attention to Romans
00:01:02.280 | has been to think Paul's thoughts after him
00:01:05.880 | and feel Paul's passions with him.
00:01:08.960 | And in that way, come into communication with the God
00:01:13.640 | who inspired Paul to write what he wrote
00:01:16.720 | and feel what he felt.
00:01:18.760 | And in that way, to come to appreciate and reverence
00:01:22.480 | and admire and enjoy and celebrate and trust
00:01:27.480 | and obey and herald the mind of God
00:01:31.360 | as he reveals himself in the book of Romans.
00:01:34.760 | So yes, I have, and I don't regret it.
00:01:37.280 | And I would encourage anybody to give themselves
00:01:40.360 | long and hard to this book.
00:01:42.320 | The first thing I need to say in relation to commentaries,
00:01:46.680 | as you might expect me to say,
00:01:48.520 | is that it is 10 times more important than a reader,
00:01:52.560 | a pastor, teacher, parent, anybody,
00:01:54.640 | look and look and look and look and look
00:01:56.920 | at the book for themselves
00:01:58.640 | or at the paragraph for themselves
00:02:01.280 | before they become dependent on any commentary.
00:02:06.080 | If you default to a commentary too quickly,
00:02:09.960 | it will deaden your capacity to see things for yourself.
00:02:15.400 | And I think the best writers of commentaries
00:02:18.600 | would agree with me on that.
00:02:20.760 | If you want to see things and savor things
00:02:24.760 | and say things with depth and joy
00:02:27.560 | and authenticity and authority and power,
00:02:30.760 | you need to see them for yourself.
00:02:33.560 | People can tell when you're a second-hander.
00:02:36.560 | They really can.
00:02:37.560 | A second-hander is a person who depends on other people
00:02:41.200 | that see what needs to be seen and savored and said
00:02:45.240 | and you're dependent and they can tell you're dependent.
00:02:48.320 | You never have the same sense of wonder and joy
00:02:52.240 | and authority and authenticity
00:02:54.720 | when delivering what somebody else saw
00:02:59.000 | rather than what you saw.
00:03:01.280 | So my first note to strike is a note of warning
00:03:06.120 | against the use of commentaries or Piper sermons,
00:03:11.320 | God forbid, online as substitutes for staring at the text
00:03:16.320 | until you see what glories are there.
00:03:21.000 | Okay, there's the warning.
00:03:22.480 | Now here's the answer to the question.
00:03:23.720 | What commentaries did I find most useful?
00:03:26.520 | Because I did, I consulted commentaries often.
00:03:30.440 | Not every Sunday because I didn't have time some Sundays
00:03:33.520 | and some Sundays it just exploded so much on its own
00:03:36.640 | that I didn't feel like I needed to, but I did regularly.
00:03:40.280 | Here they are.
00:03:41.200 | First, of all the commentaries,
00:03:44.080 | of all the books of the New Testament,
00:03:46.560 | the one that I come back to most often
00:03:48.600 | is Henry Alford, the Greek New Testament.
00:03:50.920 | Henry Alford died in the 1870s, I think,
00:03:54.000 | and wrote a commentary on all the books
00:03:55.760 | of the New Testament based on the Greek
00:03:57.440 | and I find him most helpful not because of his theology
00:04:02.080 | but because of his relentless attention
00:04:05.480 | to grammatical and logical detail.
00:04:08.280 | He tends to wrestle with the things that I understand least
00:04:13.280 | and that's where I need help.
00:04:16.440 | It seems to me that most commentaries are 90% obvious,
00:04:20.080 | like you're reading there what you would have seen
00:04:21.960 | on your own.
00:04:23.120 | It's the 10% we need help with
00:04:25.220 | and Alford regularly is helpful.
00:04:27.400 | Number two, Tom Shriner on Romans was probably the next one
00:04:31.320 | of all the modern commentaries that I consulted
00:04:35.300 | or historic for that matter.
00:04:36.800 | Tom and I think the same way about tracing the flow
00:04:41.800 | of an author's thought and therefore,
00:04:45.640 | he regularly was addressing the very things
00:04:50.160 | I was struggling with when it comes to
00:04:52.320 | how to put Paul's thoughts together in a logical flow.
00:04:57.320 | Third, John Stott on Romans.
00:05:01.600 | This is a popular commentary,
00:05:03.120 | not a detailed one based on Greek,
00:05:06.240 | but Stott has an amazing gift for seeing patterns
00:05:11.240 | and putting thoughts together from the text
00:05:16.160 | in an organized way, often an alliterative way.
00:05:20.640 | There's a genius and a gifting that he has
00:05:24.560 | that proved illuminating over and over again.
00:05:29.200 | What is it?
00:05:30.040 | Fourth, C.E.B. Cranfield's commentary in the ICC series.
00:05:34.840 | The second volume of Cranfield's commentary
00:05:36.800 | was published the year before I became a pastor, 1979.
00:05:41.400 | And I consulted Cranfield repeatedly
00:05:44.600 | as one of the more solid, balanced representatives
00:05:48.840 | of mainline critical scholarship.
00:05:51.360 | He's British, was British.
00:05:53.420 | I find that the way the ICC commentary is laid out
00:05:57.680 | on the page with the Greek is very, very helpful.
00:06:02.280 | And Cranfield's judgments were in general
00:06:05.560 | really worth considering.
00:06:07.440 | The evangelical commentary that would be of comparable scope
00:06:11.480 | would be Douglas Moo.
00:06:13.420 | And so Moo is the go-to place of evangelical commentators,
00:06:18.420 | it seems to me, for the fullest grappling
00:06:21.280 | with issues from various angles.
00:06:23.760 | And the last one I'll mention,
00:06:26.120 | even though in one sense it stands out as foremost,
00:06:29.480 | is John Murray.
00:06:30.920 | Murray was a systematic theologian at Westminster,
00:06:34.200 | but like Charles Hodge,
00:06:36.600 | he wrote an absolutely amazing commentary on Romans.
00:06:41.200 | In one sense, I don't think any commentary
00:06:45.640 | has surpassed Murray in theological depth and precision
00:06:49.960 | on the book of Romans.
00:06:51.480 | The sentences are complex and carefully crafted,
00:06:55.880 | and they are penetrating in the depth
00:07:00.160 | and scope of their theological richness.
00:07:04.280 | So those are the six that I consulted,
00:07:07.200 | I think, most often, lest I'm forgetting something.
00:07:09.360 | And I have about 13 others on my shelf,
00:07:11.240 | but when you're under pressure as a pastor,
00:07:14.120 | you tend to just stick with your most fruitful buddies.
00:07:17.460 | And those were the ones that were stacked up on my desk
00:07:21.400 | for years and years.
00:07:23.520 | But let me close, say one more time,
00:07:25.720 | that if you don't own a single commentary on Romans,
00:07:28.880 | you are not at a loss.
00:07:31.200 | You have your Bible,
00:07:32.360 | the most precious book in the universe.
00:07:35.200 | If you read it carefully and slowly brood
00:07:39.000 | over what it says with prayer and humility,
00:07:43.040 | the book of Romans will open itself to you gloriously.
00:07:47.960 | If you look and look and look at the book,
00:07:50.240 | the treasures you will find on your own
00:07:53.880 | with God's help in humility and prayer
00:07:57.360 | and vigorous attention to what's there
00:08:00.760 | will be worth every hour.
00:08:02.680 | - Amen.
00:08:04.240 | I'm so curious about how many hours of your life
00:08:06.920 | you've spent studying the text of Romans itself.
00:08:11.000 | Do you have any idea of how many hours that is?
00:08:13.280 | - Well, I'd have to do the arithmetic, Tony, I don't know.
00:08:16.240 | Take eight years and let's see,
00:08:18.400 | 250 sermons times maybe average of 10 hours
00:08:23.400 | to prepare for each one.
00:08:25.080 | And then goodness gracious, I wrote a book on Romans,
00:08:29.280 | The Justification of God, Romans 9, 1 to 23.
00:08:31.520 | That took, goodness, a year of focused attention.
00:08:35.760 | I've preached scads of other sermons on Romans
00:08:39.200 | besides that series.
00:08:40.780 | I've taught Sunday school lessons on Romans.
00:08:44.440 | I've done blog posts on Romans.
00:08:48.000 | I've done look at the books and APJs
00:08:51.680 | with the help of Romans.
00:08:53.920 | So I would have to go back and do the math,
00:08:56.720 | but it's a big hunk of my life.
00:08:58.960 | - My word, yes, it has been.
00:09:00.320 | Thank you, Pastor John, for these recommendations
00:09:02.120 | and thank you for the model of your life here as well.
00:09:05.340 | That book that was just mentioned
00:09:06.960 | and all those Romans sermons, 250 or so,
00:09:09.960 | are all on the site right now, DesiringGod.org.
00:09:13.100 | I should say, listening to the entire series
00:09:15.420 | of Romans sermons is something of a John Piper pilgrimage
00:09:18.500 | that I know a number of DG friends have pulled off,
00:09:20.780 | listeners of this podcast included.
00:09:22.800 | It's quite a feat, but it's realistic and it can be done.
00:09:27.000 | All right, but enough talk about books, about Romans.
00:09:29.960 | We need to dive in and address Romans 8 tomorrow
00:09:32.500 | and a question about what is the difference
00:09:34.800 | between the called and the chosen?
00:09:37.680 | How do we distinguish those two groups
00:09:39.720 | or are the called and the chosen
00:09:41.720 | really one group to begin with?
00:09:44.580 | That's tomorrow.
00:09:45.420 | I am your host, Tony Reinke.
00:09:46.920 | Thanks for making the Ask Pastor John podcast
00:09:48.720 | a part of your daily routine.
00:09:50.280 | We'll see you tomorrow.
00:09:51.440 | (upbeat music)
00:09:54.020 | (upbeat music)
00:09:56.600 | [BLANK_AUDIO]