Theological blogging has been a formative thing for me since I started doing it in the Spring of 2005. This current iteration of my blogging life is the longest standing url and location I’ve been since I started blogging. My first blog was called The Stumbling Block and I used the now defunct ‘blogsome’ (WP based) as my host and platform. From that original blog I probably had ten other iterations with various urls and platforms (including Blogger, WordPress, and Typepad as my hosts). I finally settled in with this current blog in 2009, and have stuck with it since. I originally was going to use this blog to promote my work, along with Myk Habets, on what we call Evangelical Calvinism (given further clarification in our two edited volumes 2012 and 2017, respectively); but I obviously have turned it into my general theological medium.

What is it about theological blogging, that for me, is so therapeutic? Blogging, for me, represents a place where I can post my daily theological thoughts in a way that has the benefit of not only being beneficial for me, but maybe others. Writing with the idea that my own theological self-expression might also serve the dual purpose of edifying the church has always impassioned me. You see, believe it or not, I love God’s people and His church; first because I love God. And in lieu of meeting my aspirations to be involved in church ministry or being a theology professor, blogging has helped fill in that basic gap in my life and orientation. When I went to Bible College and Seminary my first intention was to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ, personally; but my second intention was to do so, so I might be used of the Lord to edify His church. Because of a variety of circumstances, mostly having to do with ‘market demands’ (i.e. what the churches are looking for in their pastors; and what Bible Colleges and Seminaries require for professorships e.g. being PhDd [which is unfortunate]), the door to full-time Christian ministry has been closed to me. But what hasn’t been closed is my passion to know God, and my desire to edify Christ’s church. This is the lacuna, in my life, that the blog has helped to fill. It has allowed me to network with many others in the theological world, and make contacts that outwith the blog would never have been made.

At a more visceral level, blogging has helped me channel my thoughts into a more constructive and articulate way, that without it they may only have remained as intangible thought-waves floating around in the sea of my synapses left undiscovered (by me). In other words, as I have in my sidebar “I count myself one of the number of those who write as they learn and learn as they write.”[1] It is as I write that, in a way, I teach myself. The writing itself brings forth notions that I have maybe subconsciously picked up through my various readings, and hadn’t actually realized were there until I simply sat down and started writing and reflecting. This is probably the most exciting thing to me about blogging, and what you’ll notice is that it isn’t contingent upon other’s approval. Blogging is indeed a moment of self-expression, wherein there is an unrestrained (pretty much) level of freedom just to write whatever I want when I want; this in itself has a liberative affect promoting further writing, reading, and reflection. And so, I write mostly for myself, at the end of the day; but I am also very hopeful that in this process it still has some sort of capacity to benefit others as well.

It is all the aforementioned ingredients that motivate me to continue blogging. I will continue to blog, Lord willing, until my fingers and synapses no longer work. I actually need to blog for my own mental and emotional well being and health. I am prone to despondency and deep turns into the self and inner-recesses of my own mind; none of these things are healthy, indeed, they have been quite destructive for me in my past. And so, blogging, at the end of the day, functions as a balm, or even a cure for this sort of despondency; as a medium it has the compellation of taking me outside of myself, and putting myself on ‘paper.’ But it isn’t simply a psychological maneuver I am referring to; NEIN. It is the THEOLOGICAL aspect of my blogging that is the succor for me. It isn’t just me taking myself out of myself and putting me on paper, it is the Lord Jesus Christ who has called me to Himself and shown me that my life is grounded in His; that my life has an ec-static reality to it, in His extra life for me. It is this extra in Christ wherein my blogging is given ultimate motivation and shape. It is my desire to know God in Jesus Christ that motivates me to write, and to continue to write; it is my desire to pursue Him with all that I am in and from Him that endures me to the writing process that is inextricable to being a ‘blogger.’ And so, I like to think that it is my theology itself, Christ concentrated as it is, that drives me to continue blogging and writing; for myself and the church.

Thus, the form of my blogging, Christ-conditioned as it is, is given material heft and trajectory by the books that this sort of Christic conditioning lead me to. I focus on historical and constructive theology, and the sorts of authors who I think do that best; because of this commitment to know God in Jesus Christ. As such my blog posts, in the main, have the sort of shape and character they do precisely because of the sort of theology I am committed to. This might seem like a self-evident explication, but it is interesting to me, as I look at my posts over the years, how the primary shape of them has mostly to do with a Christ concentrated way of thinking and writing. I take this as a gift from the Lord; I mean the focus He has built into me towards being obsessed with Jesus as the center of all theological programming; just as He is the center and teleology of all life and purpose.

Maybe this has given you a little more insight into my blogging career and why I do what I do. If you’re a reader I thank you for your support, and hopefully some of my desire to edify you all has and does take place through the variety of my various postings. Blessings.

[1] St. Augustine cited by John Calvin.