Book Reviews -- By: Anonymous

Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 28:2 (Jun 1985)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous


Book Reviews

Malachi. Gods Unchanging Love. By Walter C. Kaiser, Jr. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1984, 171 pp., $6.95 paper.

This latest study from Kaiser’s pen is an attempt to apply the principles developed in his earlier work Toward an Exegetical Theology (Baker, 1981) to an entire OT book.

The volume contains a section-by-section commentary on the book of Malachi, two appendices, a bibliography, and indices that include Scripture references, names and subjects. Appendix A (pp. 111-145), entitled “A Suggested Outline and Work Sheet for a Syntactical-Theological Analysis,” takes the reader step by step through the process that Kaiser himself utilized in producing his commentary. Included is a syntactical block diagram of the entire book of Malachi in both Hebrew and the author’s own English translation. Kaiser’s purpose is to provide the reader with guidelines for applying this method of study to other sections of the OT. In Appendix B (pp. 147-157), entitled “The Usefulness of Biblical Commentaries for Preaching and Bible Study,” Kaiser discusses characteristics of good co,n-mentaries and the advantages of their proper use. He notes that the most serious defect in many commentaries is that they may give “a descriptively accurate commentary on the text while avoiding any responsibility for the problem of helping the church appreciate what may legitimately be derived as normative from that same text” (p. 154).

One of Kaiser’s purposes for writing the commentary on Malachi was to rectify this deficiency and to provide a model of the type of commentary that he feels is urgently needed by the Church. In his preface Kaiser argues that “exegesis has not finished its task when it has told us what the text meant to the writer of many centuries past: it must continue to work to the point of saying how those exegetically derived meanings yield legitimate principles that can be applied to contemporary listeners in a summons for action or response” (p. 9). Kaiser contends that a commentary should be written in a style that renders it useful to both the lay reader as well as the pastor scholar. He offers this volume as a “prototype of what we trust will be a whole new breed of commentary writing” (p. 9).

In the reviewer’s opinion Kaiser has done an admirable job in accomplishing what he set out to do. His volume provides a useful and up-to-date commentary on the book of Malachi that not only discusses the lexical, syntactical and theological problems of the original text but also consistently attempts to bridge the historical gap by applying the message of the book to the contemporary reader by means of “principlization.” Part of Kaiser’s method is to formulate “homiletic keyw...

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