Greenbaggins has reviewed some commentaries here, among them Peter Leithart’s new commentary on Kings.
Apart from demonstrating that he is a young man in a hurry — he expresses his disappointment with the commentary without having read it, on the basis of the bibliography alone — he also misses an important aspect of theological development in the Church. This is understandable because Lane is a product of seminary, and modern seminaries are very much in the tradition of measuring theological development in one way, a way that certainly has its place. But when it forgets the other way (which it almost always does), trouble is brewing. Scholars are soon replaced by fussers and there we are.
There are two ways to measure a man by his footnotes and bibliography. One is to measure his footnotes and bibliography. The other is to measure how many footnotes and bibliographies he is likely to wind up in.
The two usually don’t go together, but occasionally they do — as they do in Leithart. For another rare example, C.S. Lewis was capable of writing scholarly books that showed a mastery of the literature in his field, and these books (like The Allegory of Love, or English Literature in the Sixteenth Century) are still valuable today. But he wrote another way as well, with virtually no footnotes or scholarly apparatus. These are the books by which he is chiefly remembered, and they will show up in footnotes and bibliographies for the next five hundred years or so.
Chesterton was quotable above virtually all men, and one looks in vain for him to handle the requirements of the footnote-mongers with sufficient gentleness and respect. Chesterton roisters merrily down the highway of thought, with the more precise-minded following after, picking up after him, correcting a citation here or a date there. And yet the footnoters highly respect him (now that he’s dead), and will quote him until the cows find two in the bush, as they say.
My point, and there is one around here somewhere, is that Peter Leithart has made, is making, and will make an enormous contribution to theological development in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Disagreeing with him is fine, and he is the kind of gracious Christian gentleman who welcomes that kind of thing. But patronizing him is just embarrassing.