I had October 15 highlighted on my calendar for several months as a day to be awaited with great expectancy. Finally, it arrived and the much-anticipated event happened: the ESV Study Bible was released and arrived (several days before the release date!) in my mailbox. After perusing it over the past few days, my early review may be summarized in a word that probably fails to do justice to the weightiness of the subject matter: Wow! I cannot imagine a better gift to local churches (other than faithful elders) than the one given to us by Lane Dennis, Justin Taylor and our dear colleagues at Crossway.
By sheer weight and volume, the ESV Study Bible is impressive just in its appearance, but delve inside and you will be greeted by the very best and most faithful of evangelical scholarship. Small wonder John Piper has called the theological breadth and faithfulness of this study Bible "breathtaking." Obviously, we at CBMW are far from alone in our anticipation of this product; this morning, Crossway announced that pre-publication demand has far exceeded its first printing run of 100,000, such that a second printing of an additional 50,000 copies is already in the works and a third will soon follow.
The scholars who contributed to the ESVSB's 20,000 study notes and more than 100 articles included numerous CBMW council members, board of reference members, and frequent contributors, including, Wayne Grudem, John Piper, Bruce Ware, Tom Schreiner, Andreas Kostenberger, J.I. Packer, Joshua Harris, S.M. Baugh, R. Kent Hughes, Vern Poythress, James Hamilton, Daniel Heimbach and Lane Dennis, among others.
The ESVSB takes a decidedly complementarian position on texts that are pertinent to gender roles in the home and church. For example, S.M. Baugh, New Testament professor at Westminster Seminary California, wrote the study notes for the book of Ephesians. Of Ephesians 5:22-33, Baugh writes, "The first example of general submission (v. 21) is illustrated as Paul exhorts wives to submit to their husbands (vv. 22-24). Husbands, on the other hand, are not told to submit to their wives but to love them (vv. 25-33)." Baugh then carefully unpacks, in verse-by-verse fashion, the structure of that section of Ephesians, pointing out the significance of the original language where pertinent. He also provides a helpful chart-the study Bible is filled with these-that offers biblical principles of marriage "at a glance." These color charts alone are profoundly useful teaching aids and typify the entire ESVSB package.
For more information on the ESV Study Bible, please see http://www.esvstudybible.org/. Tomorrow, Gender Blog will feature an interview with CBMW Board of Reference member Tom Schreiner, who served as the New Testament editor of the study Bible.