Andrew > Recent Status Updates

In beginning this book, dealing with an intersection of American history and theology, I figured the author would be good at one and bad at the other. This proved correct. Decent historian, terrible theologian.
Examples: author has no understanding of the Trinity and thinks the Christian God=the Father, instead of the Christian God = the Trinity.
He argues in favor of evolution. Seems favorable to the enlightenment.

He preaches through Matthew in 89 sermons! I'm going to finish out at 150-160 sermons. I think he moves way to fast, sometimes preaching entire chapters and failing to exposit it well. Its expositional preaching from a 50k view. If you are preaching through Matthew, this book will likely not help you as the pericopes are going to be so different than what any reasonable preacher would do.

Sometimes O'Donnel is helpful, othertimes not so much. These are clearly sermons turned into commentary, but many sermons are not expositional at all. You can't exposit Matthew 9:35-11:1 in a single sermon. He does this sort of thing randomly and will take crazy long pericopes to have a topical chapter/sermon.

For every one sermon I preach, I have to read 5-6 sermons from MLJ. I think at times he broke his pericopes into such small bits that it loses it's context and becomes less helpful. When we preach over only a word or half a verse, it becomes easy to moralize and spiritualize (not saying MLJ did that).

The way Doriani is breaking up his sermons, taking fairly big chucks, makes it difficult to use his commentary unless you break it up in a similar way.
As an example, he makes Matt 4:18-25 into one sermon, whereas almost any preacher is going to make those into two different sermons. This changes concluding application and main idea for those passages.

Not a fan of the way his exposition style. Doriani essentially takes the passage and topically preaches it. His main points are not chronological (#1: v.4-5, #2: v.6-7...). His main points jump around within his pericope and it makes it hard to follow. A lot of the illustrations are a stretch on how relevant it is to the passage.