I remember reading that Lloyd-Jones never used a concordance because it inhibited learning scripture properly and I have tried to follow that line much of the time; but I confess that when pushed for time to prepare, concordances are useful and electronic search engines are fantastic.

I was recently provided with a review copy of Logos 5. My technical computer skills are severely limited: I was, I believe, the last person at my school to study Latin and the last person not to use a computer. I have been a Logos user for some years, however, since I discovered Luther’s works on cd-rom and then the marvel of the iPad app which allows me to carry a small library of Luther, Owen, Warfield, Newman and Barth, among others, wherever I travel.

Logos 5 certainly seems to operate as smoothly as my earlier package and also adds a number of attractive new features. For example, there is a very helpful timeline which correlates biblical and church history with the wider historical context. There is also something called the ‘sermon starter.’ With this, one can enter a biblical passage and find a whole host of suggestive word prompts, connections to online sermons on the text, and links to relevant resources in the Logos database. There is a danger here that the preacher might well let the program do a lot of the initial source collection on a particular passage; but any honest preacher knows that his horizons will always be limited by the finite resources which he has available. I thus overcame my instinctive suspicion of this and actually found it quite helpful. Use it as a tool, though: do not let it supplant thinking for yourself.

There are also facilities for collaborating online with others in your church over what are described in the publicity material as ‘multi-media worship services.’ That might well be useful to some readers but sounds a bit ghastly to me. We use an overhead in the church where I minister, for psalms, the odd bit of Charles Wesley and those Getty hymns not included in the traditional hymnal we otherwise use: does that count as multi-media worship, I wonder? And can I connect it to a gramophone??

Other good new features include a Clause Search, Topic Guide, Bible Facts. Testing these gave good results. Indeed, my intuitive, amateur reaction is that the search engines as a whole seem faster and easier to use. Again, such things can make one lazy. I remember reading that Lloyd-Jones never used a concordance because it inhibited learning scripture properly and I have tried to follow that line much of the time; but I confess that when pushed for time to prepare, concordances are useful and electronic search engines are fantastic.

I am a Logos fan, for the reasons noted in the first paragraph and, given my technological limitations and the fact that I clearly do not as yet use this product to its full potential, I am impressed with this latest version and intend to use it more proactively in sermon preparation in the future. And, of course, the range of literature available continues to expand. Logos looks set to stay; buy it and learn to use it as a supplement to your library and established study and preparation skills. I find it increasingly helpful.

Carl R Trueman is Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He has an MA in Classics from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in Church History from the University of Aberdeen. This article is reprinted from the Reformation 21 blog and is used with their permission.