Judging a Book by Its Cover

Preaching resources, like toothbrushes, are commodities that sell in the marketplace.  The resources we use for preaching preparation are not written, bound, and sold by monks who make a living raising goats.  They are written by mothers with Ph.D.s who teach seminary in the day and write late at night to make ends meet.  They are published by companies that need to make a profit or keep a denomination’s clergy retirement fund afloat.  They are posted on the web by companies who pay their authors out of advertising dollars from pop-up ads.  Like toothbrush companies who make colorful cartoon brushes for children and expensive sonic tooth cleansing systems for the well-heeled, publishing companies position themselves and design their resources to appeal to certain book buyers, or segments of the market: evangelical pastors, liberal seminary students, Baptist lay persons, conservative scholars, and so on.  Bibles, commentaries, software, web sites—all the resources we will explore here—are put together by people whose faith commitments and scholarly abilities vary widely.  Some resources are written with the assumption that the Bible should be considered infallible: they rule out any scholarship that questions, for example, whether Paul wrote Hebrews.  Others believe strongly that scripture and study resources should serve the commitments of a particular denomination.  Others still are written by ecumenical teams of scholars for whom faith is best expressed by building consensus about hard data. 

The point is this: every translation, every commentary, every web site, and every list of resources is knit together from human experiences of faith, learning, and bias.  This makes them more valuable, not less, because they engage us as brothers and sisters of a long history of the struggle to understand the faith.  We learn from them, we join them in the discussion.  We gradually become wise about identifying agendas that skew scholarship badly, and those that merely nudge it in certain directions.

Here are some of my biases.  I believe preachers have a duty to seek the best current scholarship available.  The gospel is God’s Word of redemption for today, so we do all who hear our preaching a disservice if we don’t take advantage of the best resources.  We wouldn’t stomach a new doctor who was educated using only textbooks from the 1950s.  Nor should we tolerate ourselves as preachers if we shield ourselves from contemporary scholarship.  I believe that genuine faith does not look to simplistic religion to protect it from scholarship but seeks out and engages the best work that human minds can produce.  The fruit of their work is God’s gifts to the world.

In general, the established denominational publishing houses work with reliable  scholars to develop good commentaries, exegetical resources, and preaching helps.  I know this first hand: I have been married to a professional religious studies books editor for almost twenty years.  She has worked for Abingdon Press, Pilgrim Press,  Chalice, Cowley, Morehouse, and others, and I can attest to the behind-the-scenes effort of such companies to produce the best possible resources to fund a thriving, engaged church.

Below are the links of the major mainstream publishing houses that produce reliable resources along with their historic denominational affiliation, if any:

	Abingdon Press (United Methodist): www.abingdonpress.com
	Brazos Press (Ecumenical): www.brazospress.com/
	Cambridge University Press (scholarly ecumenical):  www.cambridge.org/
	Chalice Press (Disciples): www.cbp21.com/
	Eerdmans (Reformed): www.eerdmans.com
	HarperSanFranscisco/HarperCollins: www.harpercollins.com
	Hendrickson Publishers: (broadly evangelical): www.hendrickson.com/
	InterVarsity Press (independent evangelical): www.ivpress.com
	Fortress Press (Lutheran): www.fortresspress.com
	Liturgical Press (Roman Catholic): www.litpress.org
	Orbis Books (social justice Roman Catholic): http://www.maryknoll.org/MALL/ORBIS/
	Oxford University Press (scholarly ecumenical): www.oup.com
	Paulist Press (Roman Catholic): www.paulistpress.com/
	Pilgrim Press (United Church of Christ)  thepilgrimpress.com
	Westminster/John Knox (Presbyterian) www.ppcbooks.com
	Zondervan (broadly evangelical): www.zondervan.com

Next: A word about using sources in your sermon