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Paul's Letter to the Philippians, by Gordon D. Fee (Eerdmans, New International Commentary on the New Testament, 497 pp.; $36, hardcover)

The NIV Application Commentary: Philippians, by Frank Thielman (Zondervan, 256 pp.; $19.99, hardcover). Reviewed by Wendy Murray Zoba.

Two new commentaries on Philippians offer complementary approaches: one (Gordon Fee) primarily for readers who want extensive engagement with the Greek text and with current scholarship, the other (Frank Thielman) primarily for readers who want a reliable synthesis with a strong emphasis on application.

Fee, who serves as the general editor for the New International Commentary on the New Testament (NICNT), following F. F. Bruce and, before him, Ned Stonehouse, wrote this commentary to replace the 1955 NICNT study by J. J. Müller(which covered Philippians and Philemon in a single volume). While these two volumes may not introduce any earth-shattering disclosures, they offer a rigor (Fee) and freshness (Thielman) that can benefit students, teachers, and (especially) church leaders.

Fee "enters a plea" early on for grammar, which, he says, "counts for something." A master of detail (Fee's footnotes document the secondary literature chronologically), he goes to great lengths to present his exegetical conclusions and interpretations in light of the syntactical data: "This first paragraph is a single sentence in Greek, composed of an informational clause (v. 12), plus a compound result clause (vv. 13, 14), indicating the two ways the gospel has been advanced … ": so goes a typical bit of analysis. Anyone who has studied under Fee will be immediately reminded of his trademark "sentence flows." At first glance these syntactical diagrams might not look like much more than schematic renderings of the text. But, take my word for it, they really do tell you something about Paul's intentions and literary genius.

Fee doesn't stop there, however; indeed, he examines each passage from every conceivable vantage point: grammatically, exegetically, text-critically, hermeneutically, and otherwise. He says in the editor's preface that he is indebted to his friend and colleague at Regent College, Sven Soderlund, who edited this volume for him and who, he says, had "a keen eye for Feeisms" ("impossible sentences and various malaprops"). Those who know him and his scholarship could argue that this entire volume is, if you will, a "Feeism." His signature is all over it—from the voluminous footnotes (where he also interacts with text-critical questions and sometimes throws in a personal anecdote) to the grammatical digressions, to his confident conclusions, to his pastoral exhortations: "Here surely is a word for all seasons, if we are to be effective bearers of the gospel in our day."

Being an effective "gospel-bearer" is Fee's driving passion. And he asserts it in this commentary the best way he knows: through intense, ruthless interaction with the biblical text in a manner that leaves most of the rest of us standing in the dust—which is why this volume belongs in the library of every serious student of the Bible. Fee used to say in our New Testament seminars, "You cannot know what a text means until you understand what it meant." Here, as elsewhere in Fee's work, he helps us "know what the text meant" by means of scholarship so thorough and airtight that the reader is left to wonder how he or she could ever have seen the text any other way.

The purpose of the NIV Application Commentary, as outlined in the introduction, is "to help … with the difficult but vital task of bringing an ancient message into a modern context"—an assignment that Thielman fulfills superbly. The volumes in this series, we are reminded, are "works of reference, not devotional literature." But, I would argue, Thielman's reference work also makes good devotional reading, precisely because it emphasizes the contemporary application of Paul's letter.

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November 11 1996, Vol. 40, No. 13