Philippians and Philemon: Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible

Systematic theology is always in need of careful and fresh study of the biblical texts to free its own work from philosophical straitjackets and hardened orthodoxies and to keep it faithful to its task of reclaiming the gospel for ever-new times and places. Similarly, biblical studies are in constant need of the reminder that these texts are not merely of historical and literary interest but are the Scriptures of a community of faith that returns to these texts again and again for theological and spiritual sustenance and direction. John Calvin,
it should be recalled, wrote his Institutes of the Christian Religion as a guide to the study of Scripture, and Karl Barth intended his multivolume
Church Dogmatics as a work of sustained attentiveness to the scriptural witness as living word of God, an attentiveness necessarily incomplete and always subject to correction by new and better understandings of Scripture. —from the preface