Target Audience and Terminology in Recommendations
Target Audience
I have written these reviews for:
- Christians who are serious about understanding the Bible, about encountering God through the Bible, and about being equipped to use the Bible in lay ministries.
- Ordained and licensed ministers who wish to become better equipped to interpret the word with integrity.
- Intellectually-serious seekers for whom Bible commentaries may serve as an invitation to faith.
For the most part, I have not written these reviews for:
- casual devotional readers,
- scholarly specialists.
Consequently, I emphasize mid-level commentaries that clarify what the Bible says for the serious lay student or typical pastor.
I sometimes ignore lightweight commentaries and advanced technical commentaries unless I see some possible use for them by a segment of the target audience.
Viewpoints
Commentaries with extreme positions reflecting more conservative dogmatism or more liberal speculation than scholarship are seldom reviewed in depth. That still leaves a broad spectrum for review. I label various viewpoints roughly as follows, although I admit that I use the labels inconsistently:
1. Conservative evangelicals
- strongly support the verbal inspiration and authority of the scriptures (although usually not imagining this as occurring through divine dictation to a human stenographer),
- accept and defend the authorship claims of the Bible and of ancient tradition,
- resist explaining away what the text claims about history and the supernatural.
2. Moderate evangelicals
- adopt more complex views of authorship while still holding to the divine inspiration and authority of the scriptures,
- give heavier interpretive weight to the contrast between the ancient and modern cultural contexts,
- tend to give more respect to opinions other than their own on matters such as predestination/free will, the role of women in church and home, or the place of the revelatory and miraculous spiritual gifts in the church.
3. Moderate mainliners
- see the Bible as historically-conditioned, human descriptions of the saving and revelatory acts of God,
- no longer describe God's revelatory initiative as verbal inspiration,
- may soften traditional Christian understandings of salvation and morality.
4. Liberal mainliners
- see the Bible as the gradually evolving human search for God,
- emphasize the theologizing and politicizing by the human writers,
- engage in significant amounts of dehistoricizing and demythologizing, sometimes attempting to translate the historical and supernatural faith into a modern set of philosophical truths,
- offer alternatives to traditional Christian understandings of salvation and morality.
Readability Categories
Beginning
Easily readable. Often recommended for laity and sometimes for clergy also. Technical language is rare and not a barrier to understanding.
Developing
Contains some technical language, but it is well-explained and not too dense, or it is mostly confined to footnotes or other separate sections. Often recommended for both laity and clergy.
Intermediate
Contains some dense technical language which is not explained, but even many self-disciplined beginners can gain insights from it anyway. Recommended for serious- minded laity and clergy.
Advanced
Either the technical language and the critical views require considerable preparation in order to be understood, or the focus is not fruitful for most church members and clergy. For most of the target audience, these advanced commentaries will have limited value. I have begun to explore which advanced works may be most worth the attention of serious-minded readers.