Jaroslav Pelikan initiates this forty-volume commentary series with his work on Acts. This commentary, like each in the series, is designed to serve the church--through aid in preaching, teaching, study groups, and so forth--and demonstrate the continuing intellectual and practical viability of theological interpretation of the Bible. Pastors and leaders of the classical church--such as Augustine, Calvin, Luther, and Wesley--interpreted the Bible theologically, believing Scripture as a whole witnessed to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Modern interpreters of the Bible questioned this premise. But in recent decades, a critical mass of theologians and biblical scholars has begun to reassert the priority of a theological reading of Scripture. The Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible series enlists leading theologians to read and interpret Scripture for the twenty-first century, just as the church fathers, the Reformers, and other orthodox Christians did for their times and places.
The Bible is the offering of and witness to a living communion-specifically, the communion of the early Christians who studied and interpreted Scripture together in the tradition of the Apostles. For any school of biblical commentary to be accurately called 'Christian,' it must remain consonant with the Apostles' exegesis, which is preeminently theological. The earliest Christian writers, the Fathers of the Council of Nicaea and others through the centuries have followed this tradition faithfully. But many interpretive schools of the modern era have not, often obscuring rather than illuminating sacred texts, turning the garden of the Scriptures into a waste of 'hyper-specialized studies.' The Brazos Commentary Series introduces itself with the assertion that 'the Nicene tradition, in all its diversity and controversy, provides the proper basis for the interpretation of the Bible as Christian Scripture..the Nicene tradition prepares one for biblical interpretation, and thus it is to theologians and not biblical scholars that we have turned.' Walking alongside the Fathers is the best way to enter the mansion of Sacred Scripture, and humble scholarship is a necessary key. Scholarship can be the handmaid of Tradition, as Pelikan's commentary on Acts, the first in the Brazos series, aptly demonstrates.
The Bible is the offering of and witness to a living communion-specifically, the communion of the early Christians who studied and interpreted Scripture together in the tradition of the Apostles. For any school of biblical commentary to be accurately called 'Christian,' it must remain consonant with the Apostles' exegesis, which is preeminently theological. The earliest Christian writers, the Fathers of the Council of Nicaea and others through the centuries have followed this tradition faithfully. But many interpretive schools of the modern era have not, often obscuring rather than illuminating sacred texts, turning the garden of the Scriptures into a waste of 'hyper-specialized studies.' The Brazos Commentary Series introduces itself with the assertion that 'the Nicene tradition, in all its diversity and controversy, provides the proper basis for the interpretation of the Bible as Christian Scripture..the Nicene tradition prepares one for biblical interpretation, and thus it is to theologians and not biblical scholars that we have turned.' Walking alongside the Fathers is the best way to enter the mansion of Sacred Scripture, and humble scholarship is a necessary key. Scholarship can be the handmaid of Tradition, as Pelikan's commentary on Acts, the first in the Brazos series, aptly demonstrates.
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