Interview with Rick Phillips on the Reformed Expository Commentary Series

Tim Challies interviews Rick Phillips, one of the editors of the fairly new Reformed Expository Commentary series, which is written from a Reformed perspective and geared for pastors and studious laymen.

Tim Challies: Tell me about this Reformed Expository Commentary series: Why did you decide to produce this series of commentaries? With so many commentaries available, what niche did you anticipate this series filling? What makes them unique?

Richard Phillips: First of all, most preachers and Bible-study teachers know that while there are usually an abundance of academic commentaries available, there often is very little of use that goes beyond exegesis to exposition (that is, that goes beyond answering the technical questions but actually proclaims and applies the passage). What is available is always worth its weight in gold. So we hope at least to partially fill this need with a series that (d.v.) covers the whole Bible. Secondly, when it comes to the commitments that we cherish, there is actually very little available elsewhere. Mainly, I am referring to a Christ-centered reading of the Bible and a vigorously Reformed doctrinal stance. I remember doing a paper in seminary on Jacob wrestling with God in Genesis 32, and not finding a single commentary in the seminary library that made any reference to Jesus Christ from this passage. So we want to provide robustly Reformed and Christ-centered commentaries to the church. Thirdly, we believe that the theology of the church is best performed in the pulpit of the church. We are grateful for the work of many outstanding and faithful academics, but we also want to see the church pulpit play a more vocal role in biblical theology.

Read the whole interview at Challies.com.

Check out the free PDF of chapters 1–5 of Phillips’s Hebrews commentary.

Here are the books currently available in the series:

• Esther and Ruth by Iain M. Duguid
• Zechariah by Richard D. Phillips
• Galatians by Philip Graham Ryken
  
• 1 Timothy by Philip Graham Ryken
• Hebrews by Richard D. Phillips
  
• James by Daniel M. Doriani

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