2025 Books of Note by Cory Thompson
When it comes to reading, I don’t always have a well-thought-out plan. Obviously, the bulk of my reading relates to whatever sermon preparation I’m doing throughout the week. But I always have a stack of four or five books that I’m working through in a given month sitting on my office desk, and a couple more at home that I’m reading. Although I have a broad interest in all things Bible and theology, I tend to gravitate toward books on Christology, ecclesiology, and the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament.
Patrick Schreiner, in The Transfiguration of Christ: An Exegetical and Theological Reading, addresses the importance of the Transfiguration and what it communicates about the Lord Jesus’s true humanity and true deity. Schreiner rightly asserts that the Transfiguration has been largely overlooked in the Western Church and in modern biblical scholarship. He seeks to recapture the pivotal importance it plays in the narrative of the Gospels, as well as its high Christological emphasis. His basic thesis is that “the Transfiguration reveals Jesus’s double sonship. In the transfiguration, both the future glory of the earthly and suffering messianic Son and the preexistent glory of the heavenly and eternally begotten Son are revealed” (4).
An interesting development in scholarship over the last decade is the recovery of the Great Tradition and its interpretive methods. Schreiner draws on the early patristic toolbox to examine the meaning of the Transfiguration. He first utilizes the quadriga, also known as the fourfold sense, to examine the event. This method looks at Scripture through four lenses: literal (historical), spiritual (typological), tropological (moral), and anagogical (eschatological).
He then employs a Trinitarian grammar to understand the brilliance of the Transfiguration. Using this method, Schreiner examines “how God is light in himself and how God’s light shines forth through the Son and the Spirit” (56). This is done in conversation with the early church creeds. By doing this, he suggests that the interpreter “will be better equipped to understand the glorious signs” (56).
In Schreiner’s examination of the “three sayings” of the Transfiguration, he applies a christological grammar via the Chalcedonian Definition. This includes drawing from four christological rules: 1) the Son is truly God and truly man without confusion of those two natures, 2) the Son is truly God and truly man, but in one subject, 3) the Son is doubly begotten, and 4) the “net profit” of the incarnation is not a decrease of the Son’s divinity but an exaltation of his humanity.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, and it deepened my understanding of the importance of the Transfiguration. The methodological approach with regard to the church fathers and the early church creeds was illuminating. Although I am somewhat wary of what appears in recent years to be an uncritical approach to the hermeneutics of the early church fathers, Schreiner carefully and responsibly applies the hermeneutic to understand the meaning and glory of the Transfiguration.
I decided to do something crazy in 2025. In August, I started preaching through the book of Leviticus. When I first announced this, there were audible groans in the congregation and looks of confusion (Seriously!). For obvious reasons, this biblical book is difficult for Christians to read and understand. Although Leviticus has been well represented by commentaries from Gordon Wenham and Allen Ross, I might never have decided to preach through the book if it weren’t for Jay Sklar’s commentary: Leviticus: Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries. Leviticus in the Zondervan Exegetical Commentary was just recently released by the same author.
There are two aspects of this commentary that are helpful in understanding and preaching through this book. The first is Sklar’s approach, particularly as it relates to laws that seem completely irrelevant to today’s Christian. Sklar advocates that the laws are a window into the heart of the Lawgiver; they show what God values. If we take an obvious law, such as the prohibition of murder, it tells us that God values life. A more obscure example from Leviticus is the law prohibiting Israel from reaping the corners of the field or gathering the gleanings of the harvest (19:9-10). This part of the harvest was to be left for the needy, revealing that the Lawgiver values generous care.
Second, after each commentary section, Sklar makes the connection to the New Testament and the gospel. He understands that “the story of Jesus not only corresponds to the story of the Old Testament; it raises it to an entirely new level of meaning and significance. If what we see in the Old Testament is an acorn, what we see in Jesus is a magnificent oak. This is especially true for the themes of Leviticus” (73).
The full implications of Jesus as truly God are accentuated in David Capes’s book, The Divine Christ: Paul, the Lord Jesus, and the Scriptures of Israel. This book is a more accessible update of his scholarly monograph, Old Testament Yahweh Texts in Paul’s Christology. The book’s premise is to demonstrate a high Pauline Christology, as evidenced by Paul’s frequent attribution of YHWH texts to Jesus.
Capes surveys the standard practice in most English translations of the Old Testament, which translates several Hebrew words using the English word “Lord.” YHWH is typically distinguished as “LORD” (all caps). In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, many of these Hebrew words are translated as kyrios, including YHWH. Capes argues that the early Jewish Christians understood that some instances of kyrios in the Septuagint that refer to YHWH are actually speaking of Jesus. To make this point, he explores several Pauline texts in which Jesus is referred to as Lord. Capes demonstrates that these references have important Old Testament backgrounds that give kyrios a meaning far beyond “master”; it means YHWH.
Capes further shows that in the so-called undisputed letters of Paul (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon), there are thirteen Old Testament YHWH texts that Paul quotes. Of those thirteen, five have Jesus as the intended referent. After reading this book, you will gain a whole new meaning to the confession: Jesus is Lord.
