I know. We all have our particular interests. So allow me to mention how happy I was to find that James Denney's battered old commentary is still on the shelves in Aberdeen University library.
Old commentaries are not obsolete because they are old. It depends on the writer and the type of commentary. Denney's Thessalonians is his series of preached sermons at Broughty Ferry Free Church, published in 1899 with minimal alteration.
Denney's sermon manuscripts are written in small neat writing, usually 5-7 pages, and almost never a correction evident. Preaching to his congregation about God's love and Christian love he told them, and reading the minute books during my research, I learned that the good people of the church needed to be told!:
"We love because he first loved us. In whatever degree love exists in us, God is its source; it is like a faint pulse, every separate beat of which tells of the throbbing of the heart; and it is only as God imparts his Spirit to us more fully that our capacity for loving deepens and expands. When that Spirit springs up within us, an inexhaustible fountain, then rivers of living water, streams of love, will overflow on all around. For God is love, and he who dwells in love dwells in God, and God in him."
Now, yes, I will want Weima's commentary for solid and at times quite inspiring exegesis of the Greek text. F F Bruce is always still worth reading on the Thessalonians, and Gordon Fee is also within reach. But for sheer pastoral passion and homiletical force, Denney holds the floor, and deserves still to be consulted as an exemplar of pastoral theology in the service of a believing community. Oh, and by the way, as a believing critic, Denney was fully in control of New Testament critical scholarship and immersed in the New Testament text and history, and as learned in German criticism as his contemporary P. T. Forsyth - together two of Scotland's finest exponents of a theology of the cross.
Anyway, great to see his sermons to a suburban Free Church congregation, alongside the more mainstream volumes more usually found on the shelves of a University library
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