A Little Housekeeping

I've added a few new bloggers to my blogroll & removed a few who I found I haven't been paying attention to. New to my blogroll are two chaps from Victoria Harrison, who has just newly started blogging, and Matthew Davidson who I just discovered was a blogger. Also new is Bernard Brandt, whose poem I borrowed a few days ago. For anyone who I know personally, if you've an active blog, I'm more than pleased to link to you.

I've also put a link up to a very exciting publishing project, the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. Though the idea germinated among protestants, the project has taken on a admirably thorough ecumenical character. I'll wrap up this post with a quotation from the General Editor, Thomas Oden:

Almost everyone I talk with about the project responds positively, wondering why this was not done fifty years ago or more. I do think this is a ripe time among the several different audiences--Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant evangelical--and for different reasons.

Among Roman Catholics there has been since Vatican II a fixation on the documents of Vatican II, so much so that they have tended to forget their patristic grounding. If you go back to Roman Catholic scholarship of fifty and one hundred years ago, you will see constant reference to patristic writers. Now, I'm very pleased with much that Vatican II did, but I think that they have tended during this period of opening the windows to the modern world--aggiornamento--to lose something of their exegetical roots.

The Orthodox have always been committed to patristic exegesis, but they have generally focused on Eastern exegesis. They've had such riches in the Eastern tradition that they have not felt a need to go into Western tradition. I think there is a growing awareness of the Western tradition on the part of the Orthodox, and they are ready to look further into the history of exegesis.

Evangelicals have entered into the world of historical-critical scholarship in a fairly healthy way, but it has left them hungry, with a sense of something essential missing. I think there is a growing awareness among them that the work of the Holy Spirit in the period between Augustine and Luther, and even before Augustine, in the Eastern tradition, is largely a closed memory.