Bible commentaries as a platform for polemical debate: Abraham Calovius versus Hugo Grotius

The seventeenth century was riddled with incessant theological controversies . Viewed with the benefit of hindsight, all these disputes seem like wasted energy. By strengthening disagreement, they could not but lead to more sharply demarcated confessional boundaries.
Since time immemorial, the Bible had stood in the centre of public debate as the most important and even — according to the Reformers — as a unique source of information for all matters pertaining to dogma, rites and Church organization. Commentaries on the Bible therefore played an important role in confessional dialogue. In this area, discussion was usually more thoughtful and balanced, but here, too, the defence and vindication of one’s own confession was the dominant impulse.
Against the backdrop of this continuous struggle, it is easy to see why the exegesis of the Dutch humanist and jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) still elicited a massive refutation more than two decades after his death. The instigator was a German, Abraham Calovius (1612-1686). Following in the footsteps of a famous predecessor , Martin Luther, he taught theology at the University of Wittenberg. In this paper, I will deal with the exegetical methods of Grotius and Calovius and then venture some remarks regarding the function of the biblical commentary in the seventeenth century