5 Resources You Need to Succeed in Seminary

5 Resources You Need to Succeed in Seminary

When I began seminary 7 years ago, I was ignorant of the tools that would help me succeed in the classroom, the pulpit, and now postgraduate studies.

Logos’ Back-to-School Sale includes dozens of discounted resources, all hand-selected by scholars and pros at Logos who’ve been there and done that.

Here are five products that I highly recommend to ensure you make it through another grueling year of seminary, or that you could recommend to your students.

1. Surviving and Thriving in Seminary: An Academic and Spiritual Handbook

This recent book by Danny Zacharias and Benjamin Forrest is exactly what I wish  I had read before beginning my own seminary journey. Those three years of study were grueling for me personally, and for my family, and a book like this would have helped me through the process. The advice given here is not limited to academic concerns, but covers the spiritual and relational preparation necessary to flourish when training for ministry.

2.  An Introduction to the New Testament

David de Silva’s book is a Gold Medallion winner, and for good reason. This introduction treats the New Testament as a set of texts written primarily in response to pastoral issues. The discussion of individual NT books is exceptional, including exegetical, historical, text-critical, and sociological issues. But even more important to the seminarian is the robust bibliographies included for each book; these are essential when crafting essays and developing ideas for a thesis.

3. Lexham Methods Series

I sincerely wish that this series had existed when I was in the midst of my second and third year of seminary. These recently released volumes are essential reading for anybody in seminary. They are the ultimate beginner’s guide to the major interpretive methods of biblical exegesis today. The presentation is well-organized and accessible, and the books give a solid foundation through in-depth analysis of key issues in textual criticism, linguistics, literary, social, and historical approaches to biblical interpretation.

4. The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew

David Clines’ work was not yet finished when I started seminary, but the published entries were highly sought after in our library. This is the essential dictionary for Hebrew exegesis, and a necessary complement to BDB and HALOT. The three together will inform your exegesis and bolster your bibliography, demonstrating your familiarity with the best resources available for interpretation of the biblical text.

5. International Critical Commentary Series

Exegesis is hard work, but with the ICC series you have a mentor sitting beside you throughout the entire process. I’ve used these commentaries for close to a decade now, and they are still my first go-to when diving deep into biblical texts for my doctoral dissertation (i.e., Cranfield’s Romans). The commentaries cover the major issues of interpretation including linguistic and textual, archaeological, historical, literary, and theological. The price tag for these on Logos is hard to beat, especially considering the payback they will give you for many decades to come.