I was recently asked to describe why I blog. This is something I've thought about in the past but don't really have a good answer for. There's the standard stuff of writing to work out thoughts, to share things with other folks and to get feedback on ideas. I know folks who live in the same town as I do who read this blog and I interact with them personally on some of the topics brought up here; and the blog is helpful for that.

That answer seems less than satisfying, at least to me. It is accurate, to a degree. But it comes up short. After all, there are others who read my stuff that I've never met and don't even know about.

Even more disturbing to me is that blogging in the way I do it (short to long posts of an eclectic nature consisting primarily of opinion) is really somewhat vain. (sorry; I don't recall where I read this thought, let me know the source and I'll gladly insert a link). No, not that blogging is useless (though that's debateable) but that blogging in this manner may be a sign of an incredibly self-absorbed person.*

I'm not ready to chalk it up to self-absorption, however. I really do find value in the interaction when discussing things, however trivial they may be. And sometimes, it's just stuff I find to be funny (ahem: Horrible Christmas Music?).

[Please bear with me, I'm getting to my point.]

I'm reminded of something I read two days ago in Diarmaid MacCullogh's The Reformation. In MacCullough's section on Erasmus, he writes:

Erasmus constructed a salon of the imagination, which embraced the entire continent in a constant flow of letters to hundreds of correspondents, some of whom he never met face-to-face. In the later days of division, this proved a precedent for the letter-writing campaigns of many Protestant leaders of humanist inclinations, like Philipp Melanchthon, Heinrich Bullinger, John Calvin, and Theodore Beza, but also for the thirty thousand letters surviving from that phenomenal correspondent of the Counter-Reformation, Archbishop Carlo Borromeo. Erasmus should be declared the patron saint of networkers. (MacCullough, 94)

Which brings me to my point.

Please don't think I'm equating myself with Erasmus, or my little backwoods of a blog with some sort of Erasmian “salon”. I'd be immensely satisfied to simply be one of Erasmus' many correspondents; someone he'd give a few minutes of time to in order to answer a question or give an opinion on a point or piece of work.

I think this idea of “correspondence” starts to get to the point of why I blog in the way I do. I think blogging is a way to correspond in a single forum with multiple topics and differing audiences. For instance, I know full well that many of you had no interest whatsoever in my plumbing woes of a few weeks back. But it was interesting to me, and it seemed to be a good thing to blog about as I have friends and family (Hi Mom & Dad!) who read this blog who don't really get into some of the Greek/NT/Pastoral Epistles stuff I blog about. They can keep up with some of the day-to-day minutiae of my life without my having to go to James-Joyce-ian levels of detail. And other folks who I don't know at all benefit from that conversation — you'd be amazed at the amount of hits this blog gets from folks searching for the very part number I replaced to fix my leaky tub spigot.

So, that's one aspect of a blog as correspondence. The other side of that coin involves dialogue.

That's where someone like me — no graduate degree or training, just an interested and motivated amateur with some text-processing power under his belt — can post thoughts, ideas and questions and, if I'm lucky, someone with an informed opinion can read them and perhaps even give a quick response, typically to shove me in the right direction. (Folks like Stephen C. Carlson, Jim Davila and Marc Goodacre — thanks for this).

In the end, I think this is the primary factor in why I blog: I think, therefore I blog. To simply consider an issue only in the ethereal area of one's mind is a tragedy. Ideas develop more when they're commited to media of some sort, like paper, word docs or as blog entries. Allowing others to read them gives opportunity for feedback and development.

I don't think I'm Erasmus. Far from it. But I'd like to be someone like Christopher Eschenfelder:

[Erasmus] was a friend not merely to princes and bishops but to anyone who shared his passion for learned wisdom. In 1518 he happened to meet a well-read tax collector on the river Rhine at Boppard, Christopher Eschenfelder, who was thrilled to meet the great man and talk to him about his work. They kept in touch until the end of Erasmus's life. (MacCullough 94)

* But I did score as a 100% introvert on the Myers/Briggs inventory the last time I took the test (scored as an INTJ) so that may explain it.