The Discipline of Theological Commentary
by Halden at inhabitatio dei
“One of the elements of theological discipline that has been lacking for a long time among theologians has been the consistent practice of doing commentary on Scripture.
What was once a standard practice of theologians seemingly went quite out of style during early modern times. Today of course, this lacuna is being swamped with ever-new series’ of theological commentaries. I take this to be a good thing, and hope it doesn’t just become a fad.
So now every theologian writes one biblical commentary as some sort of badge of acomplishment and then goes back to business as usual. I hope that isn’t where all this goes, but somehow I doubt that we’ll be having theologians of the calibre to church out commentaries on multiple books of Scripture along with multivolume works of dogmatic theology anytime soon.
However, one ray of potential hope that I see is actually the theo-blogosphere. What a better venue could there be for theologians to take up the discipline of regular, ongoing comentary on Scripture than through blogging? I am hoping to start doing some of this myself in my upcoming teaching work that I’ll be doing on the first epistle of John. I hope that others will take up this idea and run with it. I can hardly think of a better thing to see happening among the theology blogs that theological commentary on Scripture.”
