The Resonate Series

I’ve been interested to see that IVP (USA) is publishing a new commentary series – the Resonate series. Here’s what they say:

‘The Resonate series recovers the ancient wisdom of Scripture and helps us understand how it resonates with our complex world. The stories and insights of each book of the Bible are brought into conversation with contemporary voices of hope and lament – the cultural messages we interact with on a daily basis. The Scriptures become a meeting ground where God speaks to the pressing concerns of our day, and we are confronted in turn with a fresh experience of God’s truth.’

‘The result is a practical, pastoral, biblically grounded and culturally conscious un-commentary that may just change the way we interact with Scripture forever.’

The executive editor of the series is Paul Louis Metzger, who also supplies the first volume, on John: The Gospel of John: When Love Comes to Town, The Resonate Series (Downers Grove: IVP, 2010).

Further information about the series is available here in a lengthy sampler.

The blurb disquiets me a little – as one who believes that Scripture is much more than ‘ancient wisdom’ that needs to be ‘recovered’ in order to ‘understand how it resonates with our complex world’. I stand by the four stated priorities for the series – biblical, theological, cultural, personal – but many commentaries stand by these things, and it feels a bit overblown to hope that this series of ‘un-commentary’ commentaries ‘may just change the way we interact with Scripture forever’.

Even so, I wish the series well, and I hope it will encourage more people to be – in the publisher’s words – ‘immersed and well-versed in these words of God’.