To celebrate our new hours, we’re putting 10 different products on sale each Saturday in May. We’ve selected a variety of resources—commentaries, collections, study resources, and more—so there’s something for everyone. There are only two Saturdays left in May; don’t miss out on these discounts!

Among today’s deals, we have:

Charles Spurgeon Collection (149 vols.)

Regularly $499.95—call or email us for the sale price!

This collection is an invaluable tool in both sermon preparation and biblical understanding. The Charles Spurgeon Collection (149 vols.) offers over 3,550 sermons from one of the most gifted speakers and blessed Christian leaders of our era. Also included are many of Spurgeon’s commentaries and lectures, his autobiography, The Sword and the Trowel, and much more.

N. T. Wright Collection (57 vols.)

Regularly $429.95—call or email us for the sale price!

N. T. Wright has had a profound influence on the Church, and his writings are popular worldwide. The N. T. Wright Collection combines 34 of his most beloved works to offer a collection rich in theological depth, engaging in tone, and compelling in biblical wisdom.

These aren’t the only products on sale! Phone in to hear about the rest of today’s sale items.

In addition to these discounts, for every $100 you spend, choose from a selection of free books. Your sales associate will give you all the details.

Call us at 1-800-875-6467 or email us before 6 p.m. (Pacific) to hear about this week’s deals!

If you’re looking to purchase a base package, now is the time. Through May 20, you’ll save 15% on any base package purchase. Just use coupon code SPRINGSALE at checkout to get your discount.

A massive library at a remarkable price

Not only is buying a base package a great investment—when you look at the pure volume of resources you’re getting, it’s an incredible deal.

For example, Gold contains nearly 1,100 resources. If the average book spine is about 1 ½ inches wide (and many of these resources are much larger), this library would stand nearly 138 feet tall—8 feet taller than Brazil’s Christ the Redeemer statue! That’s a library your home office most likely wouldn’t fit, a library that would cost you thousands of dollars in print—about $21,000, to be exact. Just imagine adding the additional 900 resources in Diamond (a $52,500 print value total), or the additional 1,400 resources in Portfolio (a $78,000 print value total).

With Logos 5, not only are you getting volume and value; you’re getting a custom-built library created for better Bible study. We’ve handpicked the most useful, in-depth commentaries, lexicons, language and grammar tools, and more to make sure you’re getting the most value for your money. Instead of trying to pull together the perfect library piece by piece, pick from one of our carefully crafted base packages. There’s a library that’s right for everyone.

Make the most out of your library

Normally, it would be nearly impossible to search your entire library for a passage or topic—but not with Logos 5, which allows you to search your entire library in seconds. Not only that, it makes your resources even more useful with features like:

• Timeline
• Clause Search
• Bible Facts
• Sermon Starter Guide
• Search Suggestions

Get 15% off base packages

You have only a few days left to save! Enter coupon code SPRINGSALE at checkout to get your 15% discount. Get Logos 5 today.

Last year, we remembered his birthday with 10 dynamic quotes. Here are 10 more powerful quotes, taken from his “Be” series of commentaries.

1. “Each member in the body of Christ is important (1 Cor. 12:12–31), and we all need one another and to minister to one another. Since there’s no competition in the work of the Lord (John 4:34–38; 1 Cor. 3:5–9), there’s no need for us to promote ourselves. The important thing is that God receives the glory.” from Be Available: Judges

2. “‘Christ died,’ is only a fact in history, like ‘Napoleon died.’ The Gospel message is that ‘Christ died for our sins’ (1 Cor. 15:1–4, italics mine).” from Be Comforted: Isaiah

3. “Impatience was one of Israel’s besetting sins, and God was helping them learn patient obedience; for it’s through ‘faith and patience’ that God’s people inherit what He has promised (Heb. 6:12). God is never in a hurry. He knows what He’s doing, and His timing is never off.” from Be Strong: Joshua

4. “When believers have a godly ministry that exalts the Lord and obeys the Word, they are only too glad to bring their tithes and offerings to support it. A worldly ministry that seeks only to fulfill its own ambitions does not deserve the support of God’s people.” from Be Determined: Nehemiah

5. “If people can be sensible about these everyday matters, why can’t they be sensible about eternal matters, especially since the consequences are much more tragic?” from Be Decisive: Jeremiah

6. “The biggest thieves of all are the lazy people who could work but won’t, the people who consume what others produce but produce nothing for others to use. The ‘sluggard’ and the ‘slothful man’ are mentioned at least seventeen times in Proverbs, and nothing good is said about them.” from Be Skillful: Proverbs

7. “‘Be still, and know that I am God’ (Ps. 46:10) is a wonderful antidote for a restless spirit. The Hebrew word translated ‘be still’ means ‘take your hands off, relax.’ It’s so easy for us to get impatient with the Lord and start meddling in matters that we ought to leave alone. He is God, and His hands can accomplish the impossible. Our hands may get in the way and make matters worse.” from Be Committed: Ruth & Esther

8. “There is true consolation in our faith, but it is not dispensed in convenient doses like cough medicine. It can be shared only by those who know what it’s like to be so far down in the pit that they feel as though God has abandoned them. If you want to be a true comforter, there is a price to pay; and not everybody is willing to pay it. Paul wrote about this in 2 Corinthians 1:3–11.” from Be Patient: Job

9. “For some people, life may be monotonous and meaningless; but it doesn’t have to be. For the Christian believer, life is an open door, not a closed circle; there are daily experiences of new blessings from the Lord. True, we can’t explain everything; but life is not built on explanations: it’s built on promises—and we have plenty of promises in God’s Word!” from Be Satisfied: Ecclesiastes

10. “The fact that God devoted an entire book of the Bible to the subject of holiness would indicate that it’s an important subject, one that we dare not ignore.” from Be Holy: Leviticus

You can find all these quotes in the 27-volume Warren Wiersbe’s Old Testament “Be” Series, a powerful and readable commentary collection. The “Be” series expounds on Scripture in Wiersbe’s pastoral voice—it’s as much devotional literature as it is verse-by-verse illumination.

We also have the Warren W. Wiersbe Collection (17 vols.) on Pre-Pub. This collection is packed with enriching books like:

• 50 People Every Christian Should Know: Learning from Spiritual Giants of the Faith
  
• The Bumps Are What You Climb On: Encouragement for Difficult Days
• Old Testament Words for Today: 100 Devotional Reflections from the Bible
• And 14 more

Get this collection while it’s on Pre-Pub and save a bundle!

That’s why we’ve decided to create the Spurgeon Commentary: Galatians. When we created this resource, we had a few goals in mind:

• Organize Spurgeon’s work into commentary format, curated and made accessible by verse and chapter
• Tag content—such as illustrations—to make it easier to find in the Logos platform
• Update Spurgeon’s language for readability
• Highlight the content that’s most applicable to a modern audience

If you already own Spurgeon content in your Logos library, you may be wondering why you couldn’t just perform a search in Logos to find what you’re looking for. Of course, a search could turn up some of the same content, but this hand-edited resource provides content that a search would not. For example, the Spurgeon Commentary: Galatians picks up on allusions in Spurgeon’s writing, whereas a search for a particular verse range would find only explicit citations.

This resource also labels whether Spurgeon is writing for an expository, illustrative, or applicable purpose, so that if you’re looking for a particular kind of content, you can find it more easily. It draws together Spurgeon’s substantive comments on a verse and includes links to the source in his writings, so you can get to the original context. This format also works seamlessly with your other commentaries—it’s tagged with the same data types.

There has been so much interest in this resource that it’s already under development—but you still have the chance to get it at the Pre-Pub price.

Pre-order the Spurgeon Commentary: Galatians today!

We would love to make Logos available in every language, but we don’t have the in-house language skills to support more than the Spanish versions we currently offer.

If you’re a bilingual Logos user, we’d like your help in translating our software to your native language.

The plan

Our commitment to you is this: if you and other volunteers translate at least 90% of the software, we’ll publish it. You’ll be able to switch between languages in the program settings. Work on more than 20 languages is already underway; the first ones are German, Dutch, Portuguese, Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Korean, and French.

In addition, we’d like to do complete localization for a handful of languages: translating not only the software itself, but also everything that accompanies it—help files, datasets, web content, and service emails. (Hiring bilingual customer-support staff, too.)

If you’d like to read more about this project, see what Bob Pritchett, our CEO, said in the forums.

What you can do

Translators—we need lots and lots of translators. You don’t have to be a professional translator or programmer. You just need to be willing to invest a little time to translate the software you love into your native language. We’ve partnered with Crowdin.net to keep everything organized on this huge endeavor. If you’d like to translate, visit Crowdin, create an account, and get started.

Editors & localization managers—we’re in search of a few people who are willing to go above and beyond. For each language, we need several people with exceptional language skills to act as editors, double-checking and approving translations. We also need one highly committed translation manager (per language) who can treat this project like a job in exchange for Logos.com credit. If you’d like to help in a bigger way, email Bob directly. Be sure to mention which language(s) you’d like to be involved with, and we’ll get you added to the right list.

Help us make Logos accessible around the world—start translating Logos 5.

In the middle of all these releases, you may have missed the 40-volume collection of commentaries on the Minor Prophets. If you haven’t yet placed your bid, here are six reasons to do so:

1. Add breadth and depth to your scholarship

C. S. Lewis famously wrote:

“Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and especially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. . . . Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.”

Even if you normally use more recently written commentaries, it’s still important to listen to voices of the past, and to understand how previous generations of Christians have discerned the meaning of the Bible for their own time and place. This makes it extremely beneficial to round out your library with classic scholarship.

Whether you’re doing academic work on the Minor Prophets or you’re planning a sermon series on Jonah or one of the other books covered in this set, make sure you get this collection to broaden and deepen your research.

2. Get access to all the citations in more modern commentaries

These commentaries have influenced generations of Bible scholars. Even if modern commentaries take a different approach from scholars of the past, there’s no escaping the influence of classic commentaries. Even modern interpretations of the Bible interact with and engage the ideas that were formed in the past.

3. Walk through the hall of fame of classic biblical scholarship

From nineteenth-century greats like F. W. Farrar and Samuel R. Driver to Puritan classics like Jeremiah Burroughs on the book of Hosea, you’ll get contributions from some of the most influential Bible scholars of the past 400 years.

4. Play a part in bringing these works back to life

Most of these books haven’t been published in print for more than a century. They’re either hard to access—rarely available in print, or available only as part of libraries—or hard to use, because they’re available only as scanned PDFs of old print books.

By placing your bid on this collection, you’ll play a part in breathing new life into these works. When we receive enough bids to cover costs, we’ll begin building the new digital editions. Logos resources are built from the ground up and fully integrate with the tools and resources in your library. This brings you more value than you could ever get in print.

5. Take advantage of this incredible price

Right now this collection of 40 commentaries is going for $30, which is just 75¢ per volume. That’s a book lover’s dream!

If you’ve had your eye on one or two of these books in print, you’ll likely pay less for them when you get them as part of this collection—plus you’ll get dozens of additional books.

After this product crosses 100%, it will move to Pre-Pub and the price will jump from the current $30 to $249.95. Don’t miss out on this amazing chance to get 40 commentaries for 75¢ per volume!

6. Get more out of this collection with the Logos edition

It’s an even better deal when you consider how useful these commentaries will be for you in Logos Bible Software. You’ll get access to these commentaries in your Passage Guide, and the commentaries link to other resources in your library—Bibles, lexicons, and more. You’ll also be able to access them on all your devices—your desktop, phone, or tablet. You’ll be able to take notes and highlights, and everything will sync together and stay up to date.

Never miss a deal like this again

Be the first to know about classic commentaries and other works by signing up to the Community Pricing email list. You’ll get a short email each morning with the newest products, so you’ll never miss out on new products at the best prices.

Take advantage of a payment plan

Choose which base package is best for you, use coupon code SPRINGSALE to lock in your 15% discount, and pay with up to 12 easy payments. You don’t have to wait to start digging into God’s Word. We’ll split your bill up into a manageable, interest-free payment plan, and you can get started using Logos 5′s smart, intuitive features right away.

Take six extra months to pay

Is Diamond or Portfolio what you have in mind? For every purchase over $1,900, we offer an extended payment plan of 18 months—that’s an extra six months to pay! You’d have to make a $1,105 price jump from Platinum to get Diamond in a one-time payment. However, when you factor in an 18-month payment plan, Diamond costs just $10.62 more per month*—that’s 658 more books for just a few extra dollars per month.

Even if you decide to purchase a base package and supplement with a couple of bundles, as long as your total exceeds $1,900, you qualify for an 18-month payment plan.

Don’t let your budget stop you from getting the base package you really want. Use coupon code SPRINGSALE at checkout, and select an interest-free payment plan today!   

*This is an increase of $10.62 for an 18-month payment plan vs. the 12-month payment plan for Platinum.

Burns connects our modern concerns with the ancient world by exploring biblical arguments in three areas—deity, kingship, and city:

1. Attitudes toward deity: Ancient nations and empires, including Israel, were theocracies. Governments represented divine interests and powers. Not only was secularity in a modern sense unknown, but so was the notion of citizens selecting their leaders. Idolatry was a particularly heinous sin for the Israelites; other gods were mere projections of the desires of a sponsoring empire. The realms of gods and people were in a constant state of conflict and chaos. People served their gods in a frenzied way, trying to magically manipulate them in hopes of gaining prosperity.
2. The tyranny of kingship: The Bible presents emperors as representative of sinful humanity, proud in their attempts to be gods and greedy in their appetites. These kings seem far removed from our lives until we realize that we have gods of our own choosing, idols drawn from various entertainments or escapes from daily pressures. We seek idols that can satisfy our appetites and addictions. We tell ourselves that we can be anything we want to be. In contrast, the biblical model is Jesus Christ, who exemplified servant leadership by sacrificing himself for our salvation.
3. The meaning of cities: From Babel in Genesis 11 to Babylon in Revelation 18, fallen people are depicted as city dwellers. We gather together in cities to find security apart from the Creator of the world. Revelation 17–18 presents royal tyrants and the great city as the culmination of political and economic idols in our sin-filled world. In contrast, the “new heavens and new earth”—the new creation—presents the groom (Jesus Christ) with his bride (believers throughout history) sharing life together forever in another city, the New Jerusalem.

Burns’ work applies to all who seek wisdom about living in this world. Pre-order it today!

Save $50 through May 11 on the 40-volume Works of Cornelius Van Til with coupon code VANTIL13 and Barth’s Church Dogmatics with coupon code BARTH13.

Karl Barth

Born on May 10, 1886, Barth was trained as a pastor but schooled in German Protestant Liberalism. However his time as a pastor during the First World War caused him to reject his theological upbringing for a theology based upon God’s dialectical revelation. Barth first made a name for himself with his commentary The Epistle to the Romans, but it wasn’t until his unfinished 10,000-plus-page Church Dogmatics that Barth articulated the full breadth of his dogmatic vision.

For Barth, theology is a task of the church. Dogmatics seeks to say something purposeful and meaningful about God. It’s a matter of Anselm’s famous medieval dictum: “faith seeking to understand.” Church Dogmatics itself is a four-volume work divided into twelve partial-volumes. The four volumes are divided by topic: volume 1 is a theological prologue on the doctrine of the Word of God, volume 2 is on the doctrine of God, volume 3 addresses questions of creation and creature, and volume 4 is on the doctrine of reconciliation. While each volume is informed by what precedes it, it is not necessary to read them consecutively.

Cornelius Van Til

Van Til was born in the Netherlands on May 3, 1895. He earned his PhD from Princeton University, and subsequently he began teaching at Princeton Seminary. Shortly thereafter Van Til formed part of the group that founded Westminster Theological Seminary in protest against Princeton’s movement in a modernist direction. He taught at Westminster for 43 years and also served a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, where his writings have remained influential. Van Til is perhaps best known for his presuppositionalism, in which he argues that the dispute between Christianity and its opponents cannot be mediated by agreed-upon facts. Instead, every worldview is grounded on an unprovable basic presupposition. For non-Christian systems, this means their views must be critiqued according to internal contradictions that emerge from their inadequate starting point. For Christianity, this means beginning with the self-attesting self-revelation of the triune God. To this day, Van Til’s writings on apologetics are widely read and he remains highly influential in significant branches of American evangelicalism and the Reformed tradition, especially his books The New Modernism, Common Grace, The Defense of Faith, and A Christian Theory of Knowledge.

Barth and Van Til in Conflict

Those familiar with Van Til’s writings know that he was deeply opposed to theology of Karl Barth. For Van Til, Barth was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a heretic whose writings were ultimately destructive of the Gospel. In Barth’s eyes, Van Til didn’t rate much higher. On a handful of occasions, Barth took to personal correspondence to complain about Van Til’s attacks on his work. Further, it is believed that Barth was targeting Van Til in his preface to IV/2 of his Church Dogmatics when he wrote of “butchers and cannibals” who were unwilling to give his work a fair reading.

Van Til’s foremost critique of Barth was that Barth’s theology was anti-theistic. Barth’s theology was an overreaction against the radical immanence of God found in the liberal theologians of the day. Barth borrowed orthodox language and presented some external similarities with a Reformed point of view, but in the end was simply Modernism. God was exalted beyond the temporal world and in the process he condemned the temporal world. History was worthless. Likewise, humanity was placed with God above the temporal order in such a way that revelation—God making God’s own self known—was unnecessary. Although familiar with Van Til’s criticism, Barth himself never took up pen to defend himself against Van Til.

Interpreters of Barth have claimed that Van Til’s criticism is based on a misunderstanding of Barth’s work. They complain that Van Til tried to explain the whole theology of Barth on the basis of his earlier positions, and that in terms of philosophical systems, this was at the root of his entire system. He failed to take into account the shifts in Barth’s own thinking as he moved from his Epistle to the Romans to his mature thinking in the later volumes of Church Dogmatics. The conflicts between Van Til and Barth have been picked up and carried on by their disciples to this day.

It remains an open question whether the evangelicalism of Van Til and Barth have room for friendship or will remain foes, especially within the various branches of the Reformed tradition within the United States. Despite this, we can still be diligent in our efforts to understand the thinking of each man on his own terms by going back to the sources. Finally, we should be encouraged by Barth’s gesture to Van Til in 1962. Previously, Barth had been rude toward Van Til. However, he took a step towards reconciliation when he was visiting Princeton to give a series of lectures. Van Til used the opportunity to write to Barth: “When you came to Princeton I called up the Seminary and asked whether I could see you but was discouraged from doing so. When I looked for an opportunity to shake hands with you after your Princeton lectures [the Warfield lectures] you were hurried away. When at last I did come near to you in the hallway and somebody called your attention to my presence and you graciously shook hands with me, saying: ‘You said some bad things about me but I forgive you, I forgive you,’ I was too overwhelmed to reply.”

Save now on these pivotal works!

Get $50 off the 40-volume Works of Cornelius Van Til (coupon code VANTIL13) and Barth’s Church Dogmatics (coupon code BARTH13) through  May 11.

The dating of Easter has always been a complicated issue, going all the way back to the second century. At that time, the main divide was between those who celebrated on precisely the 14th day of Nisan (the Jewish Passover) and those who celebrated on the Sunday following the 14th of Nisan. This variance came to a head at the first Council of Nicaea (AD 325), when that assembly of bishops decided to regulate the celebration to always occur on a Sunday, or what had come to be called “the Day of the Lord” (Rev. 1:10).

A 19-year cycle of celestial calculations was developed, and this cycle, connected with the Julian calendar, has remained in use in the East. An 84-year cycle came to be used in the Western half of the empire, and so the first discrepancy (since the first Council of Nicaea) began to occur. With the assistance of the best astronomers and scientists of the time, Pope Gregory XIII revised the Julian calendar in 1582 in order to improve its accuracy. A reform of the Western lunar calendar—connected with the dating of Easter—also occurred.

Over the course of several centuries, many countries adopted this “Gregorian Calendar,” with the exception of the Eastern Orthodox Church. As a result, there can be anywhere from a one- to a five-week discrepancy between the Eastern and Western celebrations of Easter. They can also occur on the same day, and next year (2014), the celebrations for both East and West will coincide on April 20.

Even when we celebrate on different dates, the focus is much the same. Like that of Western Christians, the Orthodox celebration of Pascha is focused on the triumph of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ over death itself, freeing us from the bondage of sin and restoring our ability to have a relationship with God. The great Paschal hymn refrains: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!”

Preceded by a week of daily services called Holy Week, traditional Orthodox celebrations of Pascha begin late in the evening on Holy Saturday, and conclude at early dawn on Sunday. The midnight vigil is often followed by an Agape feast, in which parishioners share delicious foods with one another, including roasted lamb, cheeses, assorted fruits, homemade baked goods, and Pascha eggs dyed a shade of deep red.

Want to learn more about the history of the Eastern Church and its celebration of the Lord’s resurrection? I’d recommend taking a look at the History of the Holy Eastern Church (6 vols.) collection by John Mason Neale, who writes from a Western (English) perspective, as well as Melito of Sardis’ On Pascha, part of the Popular Patristics Series, Part 1 (10 vols.).