In ten days’ time, it will have been ten years since I started blogging. Although I have some rather ridiculously huge posts on the backburner at the moment, a number of which may never see the light of day, I don’t have much time to produce anything that substantial right now. So, instead of posting much new material, for the next ten days I thought that I would post a list of representative posts from each year of my blogging.
It has been interesting to look back on my blogging. The first thing that struck me was just how much I have written: several hundreds of thousands of words. Also striking was both how much and how little my thinking has changed. I am still very much absorbed by the same questions and subjects, which is striking, given how little formal theological training I had when I began. On the other hand, there are not a few moments along the way, several in the posts linked below, where I see just how much my thinking has developed.
September 2003 to August 2004
At the beginning of my blogging career, my chief topics of interest were infant baptism, the New Perspective, the Federal Vision, and the biblical form of the doctrine of election. My positions on each of these issues have shifted somewhat over the years, although I am still in considerable sympathy with these earliest writings on the subjects.
1. A Beginning – My first ever post
2. Can an Advocate of the New Perspective be Reformed?
3. A Very Long Post on Duncan vs. Wright – Putting J. Ligon Duncan and N.T. Wright into dialogue, back in the days when a ‘very long post’ was still under 5,000 words.
4. Putting Limited Atonement in Perspective
5. Alexander Schmemann on Infant Baptism
6. Some Tentative Thoughts on Election
8. Thoughts on Scripture, Part 1 and Part 2 (see also Jumbled Thoughts on Truth)
10. N.T. Wright on Justification and Imputation: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 – A fairly detailed analysis of N.T. Wright’s soteriology, though unfinished.
11. Bullinger and the Reformed Doctrine of Election
12. Critique of Dr. Fred Malone on Baptism: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
13. Heart and Body
14. Some of the Methodology of Reductive Science
I would be interested to hear people’s thoughts on any of these posts. Which of these subjects, if any, do you find particularly interesting?
Alastair's Adversaria 
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Thank you for these summary posts, Alastair. I look forward to going through them as I have time. I largely agree with your post about “Criticism of NT Wright,” but I would point out this: Wright’s failure to interact in a careful way with scholarship on the history of theology is a deliberate one. He goes after the popular level misunderstandings of Luther and Calvin because the stakes he is playing for are the minds of the masses who hold those misunderstandings. When he faults Luther for something, it is precisely because he wants to change the opinion of ordinary folks who think that Luther taught that something. And in a sense, it makes little difference whether Luther really did teach it or not: what matters is that people are using Luther’s name as an authority for it.
But I agree with you that Wright would do better to distinguish this sort of correction from the sort of careful scholarship on historical theology that some people (misguidedly) wish he would engage in.
On another note: As another long-term blogger, I was very distressed when Upsaid deleted my archives. (I still have them on my Mac, just not online.) And like you, I have found that it is nice to have a record of my development and thoughts, as well as being able to use my archives as a resource.
Thanks, Matt. Yes, I think that you are probably right about some of Wright’s motives here. Names such as ‘Luther’ and ‘Calvin’ have come to stand for belief systems that are quite independent of what the historical Luther and Calvin actually taught and, much as it may cause some of us unease, the fictive ‘Luther’ may sometimes need to be dealt with as a distinct entity from the historical figure.
I’ve lost a blog and almost all of its contents before and, even though there was only a dozen or so pieces on it, have a sense of how frustrating it can be.
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