Commentaries and the ‘Unction Test’
— Iain H. Murray

In January 1996, Iain H. Murray gave an address at The Bethlehem Conference for Pastors (Minneappolis, U. S. A.) entitled ‘The Preacher and Books.’ The excerpt below is from a section in which Rev. Murray asks how a preacher is to determine which books (and particularly commentaries in this case) he should devote time to reading:

Books which have little or no ‘unction’ about them are generally of little use to us as preachers.

Of course I do not state this as a universal rule. We do not expect to find unction in biblical dictionaries and encyclopedias, for example, yet they may be very helpful and valuable. But a truly good book usually has a sanctifying influence. It does more for us than give us information. We are stirred up, made prayerful and given an increased longing to be better Christians and better servants of Christ. It is quite clear that not a few of the most eminent preachers of the past used and recommended this ‘unction test’. Whitefield, for instance, applied it to Bunyan. He thought that Bunyan and the persecuted Puritans knew what it was to speak and write ‘under the cross’ and believed that ‘the spirit of Christ and of glory’ rested on them and their work:

They in an especial manner wrote and preached as men having authority. Though dead, by their writings they yet speak: a peculiar unction attends them to this very hour . . . without pretending to a spirit of prophecy, we may venture to affirm, that they will live and flourish, when more modern performances, of a contrary cast, notwithstanding their gaudy and tinsell trappings, will languish and die in the esteem of those whose understandings are opened to discern what comes nearest to the scripture standard.¹The Works of George Whitefield, vol. 4 (London, 1771), pp. 306–7.

Spurgeon applied the same test to commentaries. In the 1880s one of the most prestigious of all new works of exposition was The Pulpit Commentary which ran into a series of large volumes. These were generally orthodox in content but they did not satisfy Spurgeon, the preacher. When the second volume on John’s Gospel appeared in 1888, with exposition by a Reverend Reynolds and homiletics by a Professor Croskery, Spurgeon had this to say in his review:

The good men who wrote the exposition and outlines have in no case erred on the side of too spiritual an interpretation. John’s gospel is a book in which the teaching is spiritual to a very high degree, and the great qualification for expounding it is not so much learning as an unction from The Holy One. We will not say that these divines know very little of unction, but assuredly we see small traces of it in their volume. The modern spirit has a tendency to dry up the Scriptures, and to leave them like the skins of grapes when all the juice has been trodden out in the wine-press. . . What they have seen and written is good of its sort, but an hour with Hutcheson is worth a month of Croskery. Commentators of the present age may be more critical than their predecessors, but they are not more edifying and improving . . . We are growing so wise that soon we will be ashamed of everything savoury and sustaining.²Sword and Trowel, 1888, p. 439. The Hutcheson to which Spurgeon refers is George Hutcheson whose folio Exposition of John was published in 1657 (repr., Banner of Truth, 1972). Spurgeon puts him in his front rank in his Commenting and Commentaries (Passmore & Alabaster: London, 1876), a very valuable guide to books published prior to that date.

Today we have many commentaries unknown to Spurgeon offered to us and, though the unction test is hardly in favour with modern authors, I do not think we need to be ashamed to use it. It will certainly save us a lot of time. Twentieth-century commentators such as R. C. H. Lenski, William Hendriksen, and others, who breathe a spirit of reverence for Scripture, are the only kind of commentators we really need. And I should add, we do need them. We cannot envy those congregations whose preachers suppose that they rarely need to turn to a commentary.