This old text: an analogy for biblical interpretation.

Abstract

The PBS program "This Old House" provides a useful analogy for envisioning and understanding contemporary, critical, responsible interpretation of Scripture. Thus if we are renovating a house we live in (i.e., working with the biblical text which we inhabit) we will need to make extensive investigations into its many past features and study its aesthetics as well (historical and literary study of the text). However, our current, particular, and situated existence as a family will be the major driver in our choices for renovating, and those will need study and consultation as well (ideology and pragmatic studies). The essay reviews how the Bible has been approached as Scripture across three main periods of pre-critical appropriation and then explains, with consistent reference to the analogy, what changes in Modernity and beyond as well as what remains stable. It concludes with a consideration of the interface between biblical studies and biblical spirituality.

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The challenge and purpose of this article is to offer a map of contemporary biblical studies and biblical spirituality. I wish to show a schematic way of locating the various ways of interpreting the text, but also the more fundamental and messy integration of the moves. This is one map, drawn by a professional scholar with years of studying the biblical text and the many stories of its reading; it is drawn from the perspective of post-twentieth century interdisciplinary seminary and university study, drawn by one who relishes the excitement of a rapidly changing field and also loves and respects the biblical text. I offer it to colleagues who know these features well, anticipating conversation about this arrangement. But it is voiced primarily for students and others who are not so familiar with many of these things and who find current biblical studies confusing.

A Basic Analogy: Old House, Old Text

The basic idea arises from the PBS show "This Old House," one of a number of similar programs that show home construction and renovation in process. Over the several episodes spent on any given house, we can see a whole habitat "redone" and learn about the many processes involved. The physicality of the building process seems useful for talking about living in and being shaped by the biblical text. To get the detail and the feeling for the analogy, it would help to watch a few segments of the program. I will assume that knowledge rather than proffer it here, rather placing my emphasis on the textual analogue. Like every analogy, this one is imperfect, its basic flaw being rooted in the incompatibility between language and tactile materials. But by the time the analogy fails, perhaps it will have accomplished its task. And the point, in any case, is to stimulate thinking about how to approach the wonderful challenge of reading the Bible, specifically as Scripture.

Recently scholars have discussed biblical studies in terms of three worlds: that behind the text (historical processes), that within the text (literary matters), and that before the text (advocacy stances; [Schneiders 1999: 97-179]). It is a useful maneuver, but certain criticisms have shown the oversimplification of the tripartite division, since they weave among all three worlds simultaneously, granted in varying proportion. For example, all feminist criticism starts before or in front of the text, with a clear purpose of working to re-situate the position of women in contemporary society. While some feminist scholars work by exploring historical factors, others concentrate on narratological issues, and still others deal with ideologies. The three "worlds" can seem to collapse in a confusing way. It is the collapse that makes visible the need for a more complex model, and yet the heuristic benefit of something more schematic remains as well. Hence the analogy.

Before thinking in detail about the text, let us consider the old house. We need to see ourselves as the family actually living on site as the work is done, collaborating actively on the project itself. The house is a given, and we must take it seriously, respect its complex reality; to disregard relevant factors will not eliminate their impact. Let us suppose it was built in the early eighteenth century, with certain construction materials, under pertinent codes, by certain people and not others, for specific owners who had their purposes and expectations; it was erected, let us say, in South Carolina, in some part of a town--Charleston, with particular weather, topography, ecology, and so forth. Then, over time and for many other reasons more complex than we will ever uncover, things happened. Old owners died, new dwellers took possession; and changes were made. The house is already a product of all those processes and more as we live there and continue to reshape it and be shaped by it.

But our planning actually starts less with all of the past factors, important though they are, than with the present. Our particular lives as current inhabitants have precedence in this construction project. In the PBS series, the frequent reference to what the owners want and how their desires and values (and money!) move the project may seem at first unsuited for biblical studies. But as we reflect, it becomes clear that our situation and modes of understanding are quite different from those of many others who have shared the Bible in its long past, and also from certain of our contemporaries. As we talk over our wants and needs, we must investigate, as fully and intentionally as possible, what we want, why, how it works, what it requires; and we surely need to acknowledge the impact of our preferences on various others; we can see how limited are all our plans, no matter how wonderful. The choices we make in regard to the house will serve our own interests and further our aims, consume our energy and resources; why would they not?

We need to consider who "we" include: with whom are we living, and for what purposes larger than our own individual aims? How are our choices affecting, including others--and which others--or not? What values do our selections about construction embed and promote, in addition to the choices that are idiosyncratically ours? Particularities will limit us unavoidably; the question is, will our choices be narrow and tending toward exclusivity or aimed to be more inclusive and socially responsible, granted from our situated stance? Again, it is a moment to realize that we are not able to talk about simply ourselves or just the house; as we engage the house, we will co-inhabit its richness. As we live in it, the house will, in a sense, live with us. Our lives will be meaningful in relation with the choices we make about our dwelling-place.

Understanding the Past of the Biblical Text and Its Interpretation

With the construction process and the present inhabitants positioned, let us shift back to the more traditional historical order common in biblical studies and think about our many predecessors. Here our focus will be upon how earlier inhabitants of the "old house/old text" understood their own lives spent within its being. Like the original building of our house, the original "biblical processes" involved in the generating of the biblical text are a vast study of their own. This quick sketch can only drop hints. Before discussing critical study, which is the main focus of this piece, we will touch quickly on what preceded it: first in the biblical period itself and then in the hundreds of years of what is called pre-critical appropriation.

The Biblical Period

The narratives which have become the Bible are themselves a product of a community's or an individual's deep sense and subsequent reflection upon how God was at work in their lives; such experience was shaped into language. The many particulars of how religious experience becomes story becomes text becomes canon are immensely varied, depending on what portion of the biblical text we have in mind. So a group of oppressed people experienced a liberation, and sang of it and talked about it (Exodus 1-15); a prophet fell asleep on a boat in a storm (Jonah 1); a woman with a terrible spinal deformation found herself healed after an encounter with a holy man, and she then told and retold the story (Luke 13). Without lingering at this point of biblical birth and formation, it is clear that later participants, still within the biblical period, reused older stories, reset them in fresh contexts. The old story of liberation from foreign servitude became useful again when a family or a nation had the opportunity to return from some kind of experience of exile to an alien place from all that they loved as familiar (Ruth I; Isaiah 40-55). Another weary prophet falls asleep in a boat as a storm rises (Mark 4:38). The narrative of the woman healed became, perhaps, a story retold among other people suffering from illness or physical constraints (John 5). Interpreters lovingly and respectfully adapted old narratives for fresh purposes, perhaps not knowing in detail whence the stories had come. In the case of the Bible, this period of flexible reuse, where narratives are both carefully kept and also creatively adapted, lasted longer than has commonly been supposed. But at some point early in the common era the tradition became Scripture and canon was generally set for each Testament (Carr). The texts became basically stable, and the community of believers began to translate, annotate, paraphrase, explicate, comment upon the materials rather than to adapt the actual texts themselves.

The Pre-Critical Period (ca. First to Sixteenth Century)

The long pre-critical period of Jewish and Christian reading of the texts is, again, a whole story unto itself. Though there are similarities in Jewish and Christian hermeneutical procedures as well as texts in common, there are substantial and important differences between these groups as well. For Christians, the Christ event is central and focalizing, though at best the aim is to read the Jewish Scriptures as fully and respectfully as possible. But since this long pre-critical era is still somewhat prefatory to the main subject at hand--though of great interest to many interpreters--let me characterize it schematically and simply. The common quest was for interpreters to make tangible and meaningful the various ways in which biblical texts showed God's activity in the lives of later (that is, post-biblical) believers. Another way to put that is to say that the whole pre-critical effort to read Scripture sought various ways to show how past tradition remained vital and helpful for present readers. This story can be well told with four major periods, the fourth giving way visibly to a fifth, which is still emerging from its matrix (Grant with Tracy). Since the fourth-modernism--and the fifth--postmodernism--will compose most of this essay, let me sketch very briefly the first three eras, salting in a few practitioners for texture, and suggesting ever so briefly the distinctive characteristics of the eras.

Antiquity (ca. second to seventh century). The first of our phases, from early Church to late antiquity, rising almost seamlessly from the biblical period itself, is well-represented by certain Church Fathers (e.g., Irenaeus), by Origen of Alexandria, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Jerome, Augustine, John Cassian (representing a diverse desert praxis) and Columcille (representing Irish monasticism). All are united in a concern to re-articulate the significance of the Scripture, which for the earliest of them was the Hebrew Bible and eventually specifically Christian texts, in terms of the Christ event, itself utterly focal and key to all that God has done and will do. This process, though ultimately maintaining the value of the Hebrew Bible, rerouted much of it foundationally, so that Jesus becomes the key to the older narratives. Appropriation was worked out in a set of ways, including allegory and typology, to show meaning as phased or multiple: starting and rooted in some literal/historical sense but flowing (in whatever way) into other more significant spiritual levels called allegorical, tropological, and anagogical. So Jonah becomes in various aspects a foreshadowing of Jesus as prophet or raised from the dead, and also an exemplum of souls in flight from God. The effort in this period was to pitch biblical texts against the backdrop of the most urgent life-issues; assuming, as these interpreters did, that Scripture is God's word to Christians, the challenge was to engage that word as intensively as possible within the context of the God-quest (Hauser & Watson).

The Middle Ages (ca. eighth to sixteenth century). The long medieval period can be investigated in terms of giants like Bernard of Clairvaux, the school of St. Victor, the monastic/scholastic work of Thomas Aquinas, the writings of lay Beguines like Hadewijch of Brabant, and mystics like Catherine of Siena and Meister Eckhart. Such diverse interpreters continued the struggle to draw from and explain the levels of meaning in Scripture; though allegorizing remained popular throughout, the literal sense began gradually to achieve more importance, though by our standards the interpretation is still very "accommodated." This period also saw the growth of a practice of dealing with the interpretive tradition--glosses, commentary, and postillae--instead of with the biblical text itself, a situation which both shrank the Bible's scope and made its consideration ponderous and somewhat rote. Finally, the displacement of the almost implicit and long-popular Platonist assumptions about meaning by Aristotelian categories organized biblical texts into discussion frameworks that would eventually shunt the meaning quest into abstract territory, leaving much of the text's richness overlooked (McAuliffe et al.).

Renaissance and Reformations (fourteenth to sixteenth century). A fundamental shift can be glimpsed in our third period, early Renaissance through the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. This short but complex period can be examined in the work of holy and humanist scholars like Desiderio Erasmus, Thomas More, and John Fisher; by Martin Luther of the Reformation, and by Counter-Reformation Catholic mystics like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. We see now a fresh turn toward making the human more central--or better, re-situating the God/human relationship so that certain human cultural factors--e.g., history and science--are more visible, receive more attention; this move will eventually erode the tendency to consult the tradition with an automatic assumption of its authority. The story of Jonah's flight from God is factored into seven steps that many sinners take while resisting God's will (Gardiner). The broad aims of the period led to handling the text with more precise instruments, to a more critical reliance on those instruments and their insights, to a search for meaning that valued the human aspects of the tradition, and to a consequent devaluing or diminishment of various authorities. These demotions included divine causality, papal authority, arbitrary textual interpretations, and imposition of scholastic categories--in each case questioning the entrenched validity of those claims and making way for fresh insight.

The whole pre-critical period (our first three eras) is filled with insight about the experience of being Christian in relation to God and in solidarity with others. Though we can dismiss the readings as naive, as not sufficiently grounded by our standards, as carried by and carrying assumptions that are not ours--still, nothing can take away from the best of the writings as deeply insightful about the human condition and urgent about drawing near to God. But what is salient here is that as current inhabitants of "this old house/text," we cannot live as though we did not know many other things that these "ancient greats" did not. We must live in the world that is ours, and it is to the modern period--slipping into the postmodern--that we now turn. Our map is basically about the world shaped by historicity, eventually by an awareness of the complex workings of language, and all the more recently, by a realization of the power and limitations of the "reading," or interpreting, subject.

Some Constants in the Interrelation of Scripture

But since the analogy under construction maintains the importance of the Bible as Scripture, let me name five factors that, remain important--great variety in method notwithstanding--as the pre-critical world gives way to the critical. First is the ongoing quest to understand and articulate exactly how appropriation works in its various dimensions: How can experience-distilled-into-language from hundreds of years ago remain vital for later readers? The insights of one era are useful for the reflection of later interpreters, though a critical sorting needs to occur regularly and even very classic insights need fresh evaluation. Second, the search for meaning that is responsible, accessible, reliable, valuable, apt, and authorized continues to be sought personally and individually but not outside a social and ecclesial context. It is not carried on with complete objectivity, as though the Bible were a problem to solve, but always experientially, participatively, self-implicatingly--whether that is acknowledged or not. The interpreter seeks to appropriate the text and to be appropriated by it as well. Third, the commitment to the biblical canon implies that a set of ancient and classical texts remains privileged, normative, and identified as a primary place where God's self-disclosure with believers and believers' self-integration with God can occur. Related to a Christian commitment to canon is the "dual authorship" of the Bible. Christians acknowledge and derive from the Bible both God's communication (authoring) and also recognize the human authoring and production of the texts. A fourth constant is reflection on how, specifically, the Scripture signifies. Early interpreters spoke of the "literal" meaning of the text (which over time has included lexical meaning, historical referents, authorial intention, cultural contexts of early readers/producers, the canonical matrix); but they also urged that Scripture signifies "more deeply" by something most consistently called the "spiritual level," rooting in analogy with the lives of later readers. For our contemporaries the sense of layers is less useful than the image of the web. Fifth: Each era needs to enunciate these matters in relation to the broad intellectual/cultural currents of the time; those cultural factors cannot be disregarded out of a false respect for the past. Though there has been much of it in the past, the Bible is not at its best, now, when asked to prooftext, to buttress, to contribute simplistic examples--i.e., to do anything that resists its complexity.

Characterizing the Present

As we cross into the modern period, whatever date we assign to that fluid border, fundamental assumptions about biblical interpretation shift tectonically in response to changing socio-political circumstances. The modern period, in a sense, rushes to make up for its neglect of the human causative factors by rendering them not only central but near-absolute. The "old text" can seem for moderns a different book than it had been in earlier use. Reaction against excessive and arbitrary spiritualizing of the text and against simplistic claims of divine authoring and authority, coupled with diverse challenges of new learning, called for radically different ways of reading. Increasingly professional interpreters wished to account for the Bible in terms of human/historical causality rather than attributing all to God, and the quest for such understanding seemed best taken from the hands of religious or believing interpreters and assigned to the investigations of learned academicians. The point is not that many modern scholars were not believers; they often were and are. But the interpretation of the Bible was no longer seen primarily as a quest for holiness or a gift of the Holy Spirit. Over time the Bible ceased to be approached distinctively as Scripture and was asked to take its place among other classics to be studied in terms of its "genetics" and other plainly discernible features. This shift is neither good nor bad; rather, it has benefits and deficits, but it had to come, was unavoidable. Nor can the change of consciousness that marked the modern period be reversed or ignored; it must be utilized creatively. We will look at this period in three phases, which will overlap by the end, as our insights peek around the corner into a new cultural moment. Any serious, scholarly work with the Bible involves drawing usefully and skillfully on all these aspects and their sub-components in a way that integrates them around the "interpreting I/we." It is only for practical purposes of clarity that they are split out here.

Worlds behind the Text: History-based Studies

The "old literary" studies are often called "historical-critical," since they root in a new awareness of history and in a willingness to engage the text with various critical methods, neither of which was prominent before the modern period (Barton; Knight). It is important to remember that both these designations, "old literary" and "historical-critical," are umbrella terms, under which shelter a number of methods. These studies, which have dominated the field of professional biblical studies from the seventeenth century or so until the mid-twentieth century, are best characterized as interested in all the processes by which the text came to be. Their interest is not unrelated to what the text is and how it is theologically meaningful, but the route is via "genetics," or the multiple processes of composition and growth. If we shift to our house for a moment: This phase of reconstruction of the house we live in involves painstaking study of its past: when it was built, how it was built, who was involved; "old literary" study will examine old procedures for doing virtually everything in the house, including electricity (and its antecedents), plumbing (and its forebears), the choices of room size, the tasks to be done in them, the hierarchy of those serving or served, materials used--and so forth.

So far as our text is concerned, included here is search for the various components of its reference and production worlds: the studies of history, archeology, topography; there is a great interest in the comparative investigations of how the ancient neighbors of the biblical peoples lived their lives, wrote their literature, dealt with their deities. Foundational, of course, is the study of the Hebrew and Greek languages, their cognates, and philology in general. Part of what makes these "historical studies" also literary is the ancient Greek and Hebrew languages in which they were (and remain) available; textual criticism is the name of the highly specialized study that investigates the relationships among members of the various families of manuscripts and readings. A recent addition to this sort of study is the small umbrella of social scientific study--most familiar are sociology and anthropology--which investigate longitudinal patterns of living, generic economic and social factors, gender-linked issues, and the like, often by analogy with groups that are not historically cognate with biblical peoples but resemble them in other important ways.

The "old literary/historical-critical" moment emerged for biblical studies when scholars noticed that the Pentateuch was fairly obviously not written by the one person--Moses--at one time--after his own death. The presence of repetition, with all its variables, caught the eye of these men (as they all were): the same story told twice, extraneous details stuffed in where they were not needed, contradictions, variations--all suggested the presence of multiple hands. By this time the sense of God as the author had shifted to allow for questions about the human authors to emerge in meaningful ways. Practitioners of Pentateuchal source criticism (a more descriptive name for what was once called [old] "literary" criticism) scrutinized the texts and hypothesized (eventually) four authors, gave them names, dates, contexts, and typical characteristics. Source criticism had its day in other parts of the Hebrew Bible as well, though never so dramatically as in the Pentateuch.

Another question asked was about "packaging": what standardized shapes or forms do some of the sections of a text take--e.g., legal material, psalms, miracle stories--and under what specific cultural conditions did these forms emerge? That is, form critics classify various and recurring templates which govern texts and hypothesize life-circumstances under which such patterns must have been meaningful. The contemporary social-science methods are heir to the legacy of form-criticism, though the link is not always particularly clear. These scholars draw implications of various sorts from their studies, which, for example, show the effects of biblical peoples' basically pre-industrial economy, patriarchal society, honor-shame culture. Such features have left powerful traces within the text, if we are alert to them.

Once chunks of material had been ordered in terms of writers, dales, recurring characteristics, basic shapes and life-settings, a series of questions arose about how the materials had been combined. If we think about our "old house," these questions can become clear. As the builders we have hired begin to take the old house apart--to work specifically with their hands on its "old literary" fabric, they can observe pretty well how earlier modifications had been made: windows added, doors changed, rooms partitioned, and the like. The record is there for those with skill to see. Biblical critics in both testaments can point to the same process, here called redaction: How did a later writer, for example, insert into a perhaps once-positive story of monarchic Israel the ominous hints that things would not, by 587, have gone very well? How did the evangelist Matthew incorporate into his later gospel some of the healing stories that Mark had used earlier in his, and what changes did he make in it as he did so? Scholars claim to be able to discern the workings of redactors at a macro-level, where whole chunks of discernibly borrowed material are set into a new place, or where new material is worked in around older material. Their expertise can point out micro-changes, sometimes within half a verse. Redaction studies are not simply textual, since their aim is to hypothesize the historical circumstances that account for textual features. But only recently have a more diverse set of social science disciplines queried more broadly for matrix factors which assist redaction studies. The study of tradition-history is closely linked with redaction studies; in fact, it may be considered the other side of the redaction coin. Think "old house" for a moment: If a redaction critic can tell you exactly how the new oak stairs have been filled into a house that started as a one story structure and can show you what was altered to make a place for the stairway, the tradition-history scholar can tell us where the oak came from, can perhaps locate it both in terms of where it grew, and may even know enough to say that it was retrieved from a stairwell in another home in the neighborhood that was torn down and "cannibalized" around the turn of the century. Do we have to know all of that in order to climb the stairs? No, of course not; but are we specially appreciative of the old treads as we make our way to the second floor? I hope so!

These more general and then several text-based but very historically-oriented studies are the workhorses of "old literary/historical" criticism. They raise excellent questions, in some cases far better than the "answers" provided thus far. They show us how to proceed in order to look for better information about the past. Before leaving these studies, which remain crucial for all biblical study, it is important to stress that scholars working in these fields need to be as up-to-date as possible with the wider socio-cultural fields that can assist them and with some of the literary theoretical and ideological currents that are prevalent. That is, they cannot work simply from the assumptions, procedures or results of older scholars, or even from the text exclusively, assuming an untroubled relation between what was and what remains, between what was lived and what perdures as literary record. Contemporary historical scholars need appropriate historiography in order to do their urgent job well.

A last "old literary" method that requires mention here may seem misplaced: theology! We will discuss theology elsewhere as well. But here, scholars have retrieved the content of the texts as the theology of the hypothesized writers. Again, the question is apt: What is the religious value center of the Priestly author, of the Deuteronomist, of Isaiah? How does each articulate the normative expectations between God and people? What can be said about Luke's view of the emergence of the new Jesus-based community from its Jewish matrix? How is Paul's urgency about ethics related to his sense of living in the end times? In each case, biblical language articulating broader views can be underlined. But how theology is to be established is more complex as well. A later reader cannot always simply distill it from the text, unproblematically. Many other factors need to be considered. But the Bible is not simply a museum to visit in order to investigate a past; nor is it simply a transcript of the past. It is literature, amenable to literary questions, and it has for many readers the status of a revelatory text, crucial for the lives of contemporary believers. To return to our analogy: It is the house in which we dwell, and to know about its past is important, as is interest in its aesthetics and awareness of our own needs and desires. To those concerns we may now turn.

Worlds within the Text: Literary-based Studies

Though the very term "Bible" (Greek ta biblia, the book[let]s) stresses literature, "old literary" critics have been accused, neither unfairly nor inaccurately, of having overlooked much of that heritage in their tendency to disregard aesthetics and poetics and the capacity of much of the Bible to function beautifully and powerfully as language and story and to rely heavily on imagery for meaning and discourse. The return to these features of the text (which had actually not been completely disregarded) happened well past the midpoint of the twentieth century (Exum & Clines; Green). This phase of biblical criticism was born from what the study of English literature in general called New Criticism, a mode which also turned against efforts to explain texts primarily (or at all) from external factors. At the start "new literary studies" expressed itself somewhat polemically in relation to the "old literary" criticism, urging peers to disregard older historical questions for issues visible "within the text." Just as it can be said that the "historical" moment rushed to make up for some fifteen centuries of disregard in a couple of hundred years of attention, it is also true that several decades of intense literary study have struggled to right the balance thrown out of alignment by those centuries of historical emphasis. But quickly now scholars are struggling to make appropriate use of literary criticism and historical studies together, surely the correct approach, difficult though it would seem to be. In just a few decades the general appreciation of rhetoric, style, characterization and texture has become more sophisticated. We can sample such efforts usefully. Like its "old literary" mate, the term is a general one, comprising a number of sub-fields and endeavors.

This is again a useful moment to turn back to the "old house." In many episodes a great deal of time can be spent on the aesthetics of the house featuring materials required to make it beautiful. Our choices for our home will become more informed as we learn about color and texture of flooring, about the impact of lighting, and other accessories. Some of the concerns are large: Will there be a few spacious and airy rooms, or many smaller and cosier spaces? Will sunlight flow into rooms or not? Will there be a preponderance of wood paneling or a series of pastel planes? Some questions are smaller: How are the stairs to be curved? How will a particular motif--perhaps a distinctive Celtic carving--be present ubiquitously, replayed in the tiles as well as in wood garnishes? How will the house nestle within its gardens, the grounds enhance the house? Though we can appropriately focus upon these features as simply aesthetic, we can as well see that they are linked to the pasts of our house and to many features pertinent to the values of current inhabitants. Why is a beautiful old door from the former structure painstakingly stripped and revarnished, made lovely again so that it can continue to welcome visitors? Is it worth it to completely redo the plumbing of our old house, or can we make the old piping choices serve adequately? Will one of us owner/inhabitants of the house be working from as well as living there, so that office space is needed? Do we well anticipate the needs of a growing family as we choose white carpeting throughout the house? They persuade our living, will have a profound effect on the quality of life, but there is more involved than simply "taste." The many "literary features" of your house can be seen as hidden but powerful codes, may be looked at without reference to other factors, but that is not the best way to proceed.

The terrain of the First Testament differs substantially from that of the Second Testament, notably in the size, scope and accessibility of materials; also utterly distinctive is the latter's singleness of focus upon Jesus the Christ, with no analogue in the Hebrew materials. Hence, we need to characterize the testaments separately here. Second Testament literary studies, at least those centering on the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles, call themselves narrative criticism. Narrative criticism scrutinizes and organizes features like time and space, characterization factors, plot functioning, position of the narrator and other speaking voices, and governing values operative within the text. Narrative studies claims to eschew historical questions, though practitioners actually assume a good deal of the standard and agreed-upon information about the evangelists' communities, while coding those entities more as implied readers than as historical groups. This general sort of literary study has generated wonderful insights into the artistry of the gospel texts and has helped us distinguish how, for example, Jesus is sketched variously by the evangelists, how his opponents are variously drawn, how women are included (or not) in the narrative. It is possible to classify some of the rhetorical studies of Paul's letters as "new literary" as well, though at best, they also draw upon historical studies to describe speech categories and norms typical of the period. In some cases, "new literary" study calls for a stance detached from the reader's life, but probably not at its best edge and certainly not as it is currently developing. The signal contribution of these general literary-sensitive studies has been to make freshly visible the narrative beauty and even complexity of the text, and at best, these interpreters are trying to name their philosophical grounding.

Since First Testament scholars have a more heterogeneous set of materials to deal with, "new literary" methods do not classify quite so neatly for their endeavors. Certain early and still very insightful studies pointed out in the general and formalistic features in Hebrew narrative, similar to those just mentioned: How is plotting accomplished? How are characters constructed in terms of epithet supplied by narrator, by other characters' comments, also by their own speech?

How do temporal and spatial factors both within the story and at the readers' level contribute to meaning? How best to account for the effects of the narrating voice, or of all the discourse, for that matter? Studies of Hebrew poetic texts have investigated the impact of parallelism and of rich imagery. Legal scholars have studied features such as order of materials, repetition, framing devices (e.g., chiasm and inclusion), wordplay, and so forth, all to lay bare more usefully the aesthetics of the language. "New literary" scholars have minimized some of the tidy patterns appreciated by form critics in order to call attention to the riot of diversity among prophetic utterances and to the play of imagery and allusion across forms, and so forth. Much is well-observed, and the gain has been immeasurable. These efforts were not called "narrative" criticism in the thicker part of the Bible but went under names like narralology (depending on their degree of sophistication), rhetorical criticism, poetics, all sharing a primary (though not quite exclusive) interest in the text's language world itself. A huge realm of language study is the play of intertextuality, the skein of links and the patterns of reuse among language of the various biblical passages (much utilized in pre-critical phases).

It has been suggested that the artistic moves of the storyteller or the narrating voice are the source of theology here: Markan reticence about the reign of God is simply narrative technique; John's tendency to foreshadow and to draw Jesus speaking dialogically with interlocutors is adequate explanation for what has served as theology; Priestly theology is discernible simply in the alphabet of liturgical pro--and prescription. It seems more balanced to seek information carefully from the matrix culture as well, insofar as it can be known; and a sophisticated sense of ideology is invaluable as well. One of the legacies of literary studies has been the discovery of the importance of the situated reader, who brings to reading and interpretation many filters which will work busily whether we own them or not.

Advocacy Stances: Reader-centered Studies

Before leaving these two major moments in criticism, the "old and the new" literary, with their intersecting but distinct historical and aesthetic dimensions, it is worth reiterating how much they have shown us about the text and how indispensable is their study. But it should also be clear, as we prowl the site of "this old house," that they are inadequate separately and even together to account for all there is. Thus we need to consider the realm we may call "reader aware," comprising overlapping methods of pragmatics, reader-response, reception studies, ideology and/or advocacy criticism. As before, this general descriptor includes varied moves.

What marks this aspect of study as different from the two worlds we have just visited is a tendency to cross our historical and literary borders in a much more obvious way. To isolate historical and literary factors is not any longer very adequate or useful, except temporarily and for heuristic purposes. This third major way of reading texts wants to call attention to, to make explicit, even to privilege the multiple worlds of "owner-users" that have constructed and inhabited our biblical text during its long life, particularly in the present, it seeks to make visible the generations of "ghosts" who have had and continue, in a sense, to have an impact on what is extant and in use--whether we acknowledge them or not! This aspect of interpretation draws attention to the interaction between ourselves and the many other interpreters of our Bible (Segovia & Tolbert).

Again, since this may seem abstract, let us start with the analogy. Every house, and especially an old one that has been around and inhabited for a long time, embeds the residue of its owners' values and life circumstances, some deliberately chosen, others enacted without consciousness or option. Let us suppose that our house was built by a family wealthy enough to desire and have servants--which is probable, else the house would not likely have survived. We may see evidence of such class structure in small rooms at the top of the house, approached by a narrow back stairway with fewer and deeper steps than we find at the front of the house. Perhaps our house was, in a subsequent remodel, insulated by asbestos, a substance used commonly in one era but more recently found to be highly toxic. When the house was built, windows were held to a minimum, since the more panes of glass, the more drafts; so rooms tended to be dark. Perhaps the largest and most attractive room in the house remains the kitchen, with its large cooking space and stone flooring; and the rooms we are most eager to tear out and open up are the several small parlors nearer the front of the house. Finally, we are glad that our house sits on several acres of land, site of gardens and orchards, though we notice many nearby houses stand on smaller plots. So even from the house itself--and the more if we delve creatively into the history and culture of the area--we can learn a lot about the values and interests shaping the lives of everyone in our neighborhood: the wealthy merchant who built it, his impoverished daughter who remodeled it later to include boarders, the servants who toiled up the back stairs after a hot summer day in the kitchen, the neighbors who shared the garden produce. Once our eye is trained and we are thinking about both the history "behind the house" and that inscribed "within" its fabric, we can read the social record of race, class, ethnicity, gender, caste, and so forth. Meaning is not utterly inherent either in past facts or in present features, though we negotiate it in relation to these. And to the extent that we make ourselves knowledgeable about such things in the matrix culture as well as in the house itself, there is plenty to see. Past choices do not so easily vanish, even if we wish to modulate some of them--or to prefer some over others from our own authentic lives.

Another sea-change in interpretation arrives from the fact that the modern era, with its base assumptions, is giving way to viewpoints characterized as postmodern (starting in the late twentieth century and stretching ahead of us now), incipient and inchoate though this fifth period is. But even to characterize it generally is to be confronted with its implications for interpretation. Postmodernity is most frequently characterized by the destabilization of many former tenets: certainty of knowledge; reliability of processes of inquiry; stability of meaning. Postmodernity, rather, highlights constructedness of meaning, constant play of indeterminacy. Borders blur. Not only the products of language but language itself is radically indeterminate. What was once privileged and seemed wholly competent now enters into contestation with the formerly suppressed voices, as old bases of preference are examined critically. Many more points of view are included, even welcomed; a once-vaunted objectivity becomes not only undesirable but impossible.

As we think about our "old biblical text," whose story does it tell? We may think of it as a thick book, but of course it records just a sliver of what it might, covering hundreds of years as it does. Who sponsored it and why? and how? Whether we are looking at the text primarily, to observe that it favors males, named characters, powerful rulers or leaders, and ethnically Israelite insiders over women, crowds, peasants, and foreigners; or whether we make use of the many social-scientific fields of study which investigate these same factors in contiguous times and places or even in those which can function analogously by other criteria (i.e., in other pre-industrial, patriarchal, honor-shame societies), the values residue is clear. It matters whether some of our old stories were told around the campfire by wise bards, sung by women, or composed to please powerful kings. Were the stories about Jesus recited and shaped in the heat of the crises that would eventually differentiate Jew and Christian, told to make tangible some of the strains within Judaism before the split over Jesus became so divisive? Or perhaps were they shaped as cautionary for a second-generation of church leaders? As virtually all of the Hebrew Bible narratives were shaped, the "others"--Canaanites, Philistines, Babylonians--were made alien, and the assertions about such opponents are distorted in a variety of complex ways, typically to denigrate and lampoon their nature-based and pluritheistic religions. As the prophets struggled to put into words their frustration in preaching God's ways and preferences to a resistant population, an image repeatedly reached for was that of marriage, where the wife plays the role of adulterous partner to a righteously sorrowing or angry husband. The gender imbalance became stock and was taken into the Book of Revelation, where it referenced the Great Harlot--whether Babylon or Rome or Jerusalem herself, but always the female is made abject. In short, the biblical text embeds, subtly or not, value systems which were part of the culture when the narratives were written. The most notable of these in current study are the ideologies surrounding sex and gender, race and ethnicity, caste and class, nature and the body. It is not as if writers could have avoided such matters; clearly they could not. But we need to be alert to the presence of what is there--ranging from obvious to subtle.

As the Bible was woven together, at every stage of that long process, certain culture-linked values--perhaps even incompatible or conflicting ones--will have been part of the accomplishment. We may wish to reduce the Bible's theology to ideology, to suggest that fundamental teachings of the text are simply the ideologies that emerge indirectly from it, with content less determinative than authorial and narratorial modes and angles of articulation. Perhaps we need here to distinguish between "old literary" ideologies, those which lived in the cultures that produced the text, "new literary" ideologies which can be discerned in the various language structures of the text; and "reader aware" ideologies, which are the set we all bring as readers. But again, we will sense some overlap. These various ideologies crash and clash, or meld and mesh as we approach the complex narratives that compose the Bible. The thumb of the reader has been part of the interpretive picture taken from his or her angle, but that thumb was not always recognized by the photographer as local! in the past quarter-century or so, as both theory and practice expanded--i.e., as theorists became clearer about what reading entails and as diverse readers began to make their interpretations known--the myth of disinterested and objective reading has withered. In fact, it has become much clearer how the various values and viewpoints of the biblical writers pervade their narratives and surely how translators and commentators have mixed their own preferences heavily into the materials they thought they were expounding objectively. What is new is not only the recognition that readers have worldviews which structure substantially what they see but also a resolution to make use of such a feature, to foreground and exploit it rather than deny or disregard it.

So as we consider this last major interpretive category, we are in a sense returning to where we started when we affirmed that the process of living and reading our "old house/old text" starts with us. The essay has aimed to give us a fuller sense of who "we" are and to make us more conscious of where we are coming from. But how, specifically, do we seek and find meaning in Scripture, do we practice appropriation of it? Now of course the revelatory text itself took shape without us, and the Bible will outlast even the most brilliant of its interpreters. But by becoming aware of ourselves as we live within the text, we will be more likely to take proper responsibility for our readings of it, which are properly from our own idiosyncratic particularity--though they are, ideally and importantly, shaped within the many communities of other readers who share the text with us. That we make the starting place ourselves should not narrowly privatize what we do or license just anything we might feel, but it will specify and delimit it. As we become now more conscious of how our readings work, increasingly intentional about and cultivating of them, our responsibility grows apace. Again, a caveat: That we are aiming to take responsibility does not mean that we know fully what we are doing; we must know that our desires are complex and ultimately non-factorable. That those on whose shoulders we stand did not, for the most part, recognize clearly their own participation in reading should caution us against any smugness that we know our own minds and hearts fully. But since we are reading selectively, with many filters in place, the more self-aware we can be the better. We will read for particular projects, and with distinctive interests, and with multiple purposes. But since no reader now can begin to imagine that she can do all readings and claim anything like a complete or fully adequate reading, we need to choose what we are doing. Even this very schematic sketch in this analogy makes it plain that we cannot do all of it. So how will we choose our interpretive strategies well?

Since reading is so inherently social, I would like to specify the house analogy a bit more in terms of the family who both lives in the house and is directing and shaping the remodel. Though the extended group I sketch would in earlier times have seemed impossible, such is no longer the case. The couple who actually owns the home is in their early sixties, of Irish and Italian descent, the first in their families to attend college, which is where they met. They are Roman Catholic, comfortably retired from professional jobs, and the parents of four grown children who are the named heirs of the house and are in fact frequent "visitors" even now. Living in the house for the past three years has been an elderly widowed aunt of one of the daughters-in-law who came to Charleston from Japan to be near her niece; since there was room in the family home, she lives there. She is in her early seventies and comes from the generation having experienced and remembering clearly Japan's role in World War 2; she was not formally educated, her family was poor, and she struggles still with English. Her spiritual home tradition is Buddhism. Of the four children (two of whom live nearby), two are married: The eldest daughter married into a large Latino family; the youngest son is married to a Japanese woman with a family who also lives in Charleston. There are a total of six grandchildren in those third-generation families, somewhat variegated in terms of ethnic heritage and interests (some are Christian, some Jewish, some Roman Catholic, some Pentecostal) and class (one of the families is working class, the other professional).

The other two grown children of the parents who own the home are unmarried. The son is a Roman Catholic priest, heavily involved in the church's social justice community, living sometimes in El Salvador and sometimes in Baltimore; he and his Latino in-laws share interests but do not inevitably agree on the politics they enjoy discussing. The priest son is more liberal and the family more conservative about material matters. The fourth of the offspring is a daughter, once married but now divorced and in a lesbian relationship. She is "unchurched" and deeply committed to ecological issues, traveling extensively for the international group for which she works. Her family varies in its response to the situation of her lifestyle, though the partner is always made as welcome at the home as is possible by those also present. Her siblings with offspring are in occasional discussion about how the situation will be explained to their children and have not agreed about the specifics yet. Discussions about consumerism and related matters are often painful and challenging for all, dreaded in a sense but also appreciated, eventually!

Since the home is shared property, for all practical purposes, and at any given time likely to be inhabited by some of the children and grandchildren of the actual legal owners--and even perhaps by some of their friends, everyone wants and has a stake in the on-going process of remodeling the house. The goal of all of them is to make it a home, where all feel welcome, included, and respected. So good will does not lack. But discussions about specifics are complex, because of the diversity of interests in play. The parents have proceeded patiently with these discussions, knowing that they are in the best position to mediate as well as they can do some of the issues that pertain from the past, to certain of the aesthetic issues, but also to the vast medley of issues related to the current lives of those whose home the house is. A quick sampling of issues will suffice to make the point. As one of the children who lives in Charleston worked on a Civil War project in school, the role of the house (and its previous owners) became an issue: To what extent would it be helpful for all of the current family to learn and accept the legacy of shame from a past implicated in slaveholding? Some are eager, but the Japanese daughter-in-law is very sensitive about the impact that move might have on her aunt, who is perhaps already too haunted by what she knows about Japanese imperialism and the twentieth century. The priest son and lesbian daughter agree on the need to make the house as "green" as possible; their siblings remind them that the expense of such a commitment has an impact on family finances, specifically in terms of money made available for the educational needs of the children. Without quite saying that the childless pair can better afford to pay for expensive though ecologically sound procedures, their siblings hint it. Finally, the question of public space vs. private space is contentious. Is the family room to be designed for children and for adults? Are their activities compatible? Will there be sufficient young children in the house, over time, for their needs to be primary? Or is the family room divided in some way, to segregate the groups? Are all the bedrooms small, since the point is primarily to sleep in them; or are they virtual homes, especially for the priest son who has no home of his own, and for the elderly aunt who prefers spending her time alone?

The correlation with situated biblical interpretation seems clear. The root of the issue is whose home the biblical text is, and how it is shared. What is assumed? What has already been decided--and by whom? What sets of interests has biblical interpretation promoted--whether intended and recognized or not? Who has been there longest, who has the most needed skills, whose professional commitments seem to entitle them most? These are no longer so salient as once they seemed. That the text is to be shared, must be able to serve as home for all, such as they choose to make it so, is crucial. How the parent community of Bible users--whether the church or the academy--manage their own role is sensitive. In both cases there is a clear mandate of responsibility to lead, but at the same time there is a matched urgency not to control interpretation. Interests need to be articulated, recognized, negotiated. Though the process of interpretation and appropriation is on-going, study is not an end in itself but a means to living a quality life with other creatures. The Bible is able to make a pragmatic contribution: fuller social and economic justice, liberation of former oppressed and oppressors, facilitation of a greater sense that shared creature-hood relates humans to the rest of the cosmos in ways not always understood before. In fact, its role in the undermining of those same values is a story to investigate as well.

Critical Biblical Study, Scripture, and Biblical Spirituality

Though it is increasingly common to find purely academic, determinedly secular readings of biblical texts which utilize various contemporary strategies on the text without any active interest in the Bible's sacred and canonical claims, as prominent are academics pursuing biblical studies because they affirm that the Bible is important for the life of the Church and assume that their work can have an impact there. The relevant issue here is not so much antagonism toward religion or a zest for the purely secular but rather a confusion about how faith and critical study can work together well to construct rich and sustaining meaning with the Bible. So let us conclude with a brief discussion of those critical scholar-interpreters who consciously and intentionally ground themselves and root their experience in the life-project of orienting toward the ultimate value of God. In short, I want to draw together this essay about the Bible specifically as Scripture by discussing biblical spirituality, which is a subset both of biblical studies and of the wider fields of Christian spirituality. To situate this overlapping part of the project usefully, let's visit our old house a final time (before the analogy implodes!).

Supposing that our most fundamental commitment as owners and re-builders is to live lives full of meaning in rich relationship, but as sustainably as we can manage, that huge and basic orientation, already practiced and honed by us, becomes the driving process of our lives, and of course of our live-in construction project. Decisions about everything--past, present, and future--are made in relation to this transcendent and transforming goal. How we will reshape old spaces with sensitivity to natural resources, whom we employ to do the labor and how we deal with them, what we spend for our own comfort in relation to the needs of the many people who have so much less than we do, how much technology we implant in our home: all of these decisions will be made in terms of our basic choice to live sustainably within the concentric folds of the cosmos. The house we shape will continue to form and even transform us, over time. How is an analogous participation in Scripture to be well understood?

First, such reading makes focal the revelatory nature of the text, its canonical and ecclesial status, and its proven capacities to serve well, on the whole, in the basic transformation toward God. That is our deepest human call. It is the quest that many pre-critical biblical interpreters embraced, as noted above. But living when we do, it is not possible or desirable to rewind the centuries of historical-critical work and the decades of insights from literary and readerly study, to step aside from engagement with them. That is, to appropriate the Bible as Scripture does not excuse us from any of the moves we have been talking about but brings something additional to them. The best discussion I know of this process of engaging Scripture is from comparativist Wilfred Cantwell Smith. His complex thought can, again schematically, be helpful as follows. He characterizes Scripture as a dialogical process, so a verb or adverb, not simply a noun and not reducible to a book. Scripture is a way that human beings enter into a sustained and active relation with certain classic traditions, because those are found to be deeply meaningful over time. To "Scripture" is a crucial component of what it means to be human, a claim verified by the presence of the process across time and space and among cultures. That is, as we look back at the growth of human culture, there has been a persistent choice and pattern of communities to discern, recognize, name and appropriate certain texts as privileged places where divine self-disclosure with humans is particularly intense and effective. How this phenomenon is named or described varies, but Smith's point is that we will not adequately explore our home tradition without some awareness of the complexity and ubiquity of the Scripture phenomenon.

The Christian Bible is Scripture, not simply because we know that it was named canonical at some given point(s) in time. More significant, our Bible is Scripture insofar as it is recognized to work well for communities of believers. Those who accept the Bible as Scripture do so because it allows us access to God; we do not approach God through it because it bears a particular title on the cover. Our recognition of Scripture and our participation in it does not sidestep any of the other interpretive processes we have been discussing, though it will affect--constrain and promote--which of the processes are of most interest and use to us. But to learn about the Bible is not the same as learning from Scripture though they are related. Smith urges that insofar as we are able, we need urgently to reflect and theorize about what Scripture means, seeking fresh ways to bring forth the sense of the Bible not simply as an object of study but as a dialogue partner as well, a place of access to God in a variety of ways: liturgy, lectio, hermeneutics, prayer, theology, art, justice work. To live in Scripture is more than a tactic, a method, a strategy; it is a process, even a life-commitment. This work will involve, among other things, a greater awareness of how language works to distill the transcendent in some way and how we struggle to engage that language and become fluent in it.

Related to a commitment to the Bible specifically as Scripture is the project of biblical spirituality. As already suggested, many work with the biblical text without reference to or interest in its specifically revelatory dimension; Christian spirituality can also proceed without much explicit reference to the Bible. But here I am talking about a use that makes that core text central, either to talk about spirituality within the text (so as designed by storytellers and exemplified in characters) and/or as appropriated from the text by readers. The most helpful definition of spirituality comes from the work of Sandra Schneiders, who characterizes it as the process and project of integrating one's life toward what is of ultimate concern; in the case of Christian spirituality, that end point and partner is the triune God revealed in Jesus Christ into whose divine life we are incorporated by the gift (grace) of the Holy Spirit (Schneiders 1998: 3).

As has been true of every moment of reading examined in this essay, spirituality is not simply private and individual but relies constitutively on the communal enterprise of responsible and dialogical interpretation and construction. It is no longer possible to construct meaning responsibly or satisfactorily without some reference to all that can be known about it, granted that not all information is relevant at any one moment. And like the other interpretive moves we have reviewed here, spirituality is integrated and holistic. Biblical spirituality understands the biblical text both as revelatory of God and as a product of human culture, in fact as a place of intense interaction among God and creation. Scripture develops "in front of the text," ideally as scholars and "ordinary readers" share experience and resources with mutual benefit. The transformative work engaged by those so working with the biblical text is a fruit of dialogue with, immersion in Scripture's profound structures of discourse from a place of deep cultural engagement.

Scholars whose specialty is biblical studies remain conscious of and intentional about the transformative purposes of reading Scripture, not losing sight of them as they bring to bear what are, in whatever particular circumstances pertain, the most relevant facets of all other biblical study. That is, though perhaps experiencing "the bends" from time to time, the practitioner of biblical spirituality makes useful and available whatever is needled from historical-social studies, from literary investigations, and from ideology considerations as well. It is not as though some parts of the study of the text are secular and some sacred, or as though some knowledge was purely practical and reconstructive and other primarily spiritual. The "doing of Scripture" with transformation more deeply toward God as one of the key attractions will reach back to explain features sociologically, make use of a patristic trope, or borrow forward from postmodern insights. How extensive must be our researches here will vary, but we need to know enough to read responsibly. What remains significant and primary is the immediacy of appropriation for transformation. It is important that those doing biblical spirituality are fluent in a coherent hermeneutics, familiar with the long history of interpretation of biblical texts, alert to the hills and valleys of textual ideology. In our home we will do best to know where is the harmful asbestos that remains, and we need to know where the support beams are lest we hack through them as we open up spaces. There is no gain and in fact only loss if we have no idea what we want to do, decide simply to disregard materials which will not cease emitting vapors because we ignore them. We may hope to simply rise above the fact that our house may have been financed with ill-gotten gains, or perhaps we may decide to offset that in some way, to factor in some ethical extra while we are complying with codes that did not exist earlier. Though some suspect that the way forward in biblical spirituality involves a return to patristic and medieval allegory and typology, I suspect rather that the key will be to find fresh ways of showing the ancient texts as deeply relevant and meaningful for contemporaries, ways that count upon meaning as a lived event rather than as a project of extraction or application. Christian appropriation, especially of the Hebrew Bible, will also need to become more broadly Trinitarian rather than primarily Christological.

The other major move practitioners of biblical spirituality need to make is to become aware of the importance of reading with others. That our reading is unavoidably ours does not make it simply ours. The Bible has been being read for some three thousand years: By biblical peoples who treasured it and flexibly reshaped and recycled it into new situations; by hundreds of years of "pre-critical" saints and scholars who drew from it in many ways some of its mystery and meaning; by modern critics who have drawn our attention in so many ways to its infinite spate of significant features. More recently, we have heard it read by poor people, by people of color, by non-educated people, by marginal people--and their insights have been made available in ways that would not have happened before. We need to read attentive to as many of these voices as we can be, again not compulsively or by self-righteous formula but because we are genuinely in need of what others have to say. Especially to the extent that our purpose in reading is transformative, that we wish to make the Bible one of the sites of prayer, justice, contemplation or nonviolent resistance, our reading will be oriented by those values. The Bible has been through a lot. It will continue to be misused, beyond a doubt. It will be ignored by many as well. And yet what it offers, many thirst for, including ourselves. A hermeneutics of love (Jacobs), not in place of our other moves but alongside them, will make the springs of refreshment available to those thirsting for them.

Works Cited

Barton, J., ed. 1998. THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION 10 BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.

Carr, D.M. 1996. Canonization in the Context of Community: An Outline of the Formation of the Tanakh and the Christian Bible. Pp. 22-64 in A GIFT OF GOD IN DUE SEASON: ESSAYS ON SCRIPTURE AND COMMUNITY IN HONOR OF JAMES A. SANDER, edited by D.M. Cart and R. D. Weiss. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press,

Exum, J. C., & D.J.A. Clines, eds. 1993. THE NEW LITERARY CRITICISM AND THE HEBREW BIBLE. Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International.

Gardiner, Anne Barbeau, trans. and intro. 1998. SAINT JOHN FISHER: EXPOSITION OF THE SEVEN PENITENTIAL PSALMS. San Francisco: The Ignatius Press.

Grant, R. M., with D. Tracy. 1984. A SHORT HISTORY OF THE INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE. 2nd edition. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press.

Green, J. B., ed. 1995. HEARING THE NEW TESTAMENT: STRATEGIES FOR INTERPRETATION. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.

Hauser, A.J., & D. E Watson, eds. 2003. A HISTORY Or BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION. Volume 1 : THE ANCIENT PERIOD. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.

Jacobs, A. 2001. Bakhtin and the Hermeneutics of Love. Pp. 25-45 in BAKHTIN AND RELIGION: A FEELING FOR FAITH, edited by S. M. Felch & P. J. Contino. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Knight, D., ed. 2004. Methods of Biblical Interpretation, excerpted from the DICTIONARY OF BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION, edited by John H. Hayes. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press.

McAuliffe, J. D., B. D. Walfish, & J. W. Goering, eds. 2003. WITH REVERENCE FOR THE WORD: MEDIEVAL SCRIPTURAL EXEGESIS IN JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Schneiders, S. M. 1999. THE REVELATORY TEXT: INTERPRETING THE NEW TESTAMENT AS SACRED SCRIPTURE. 2nd edition. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press. 1998. The Study of Christian Spirituality: Contours und Dynamics of a Discipline. JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY 6.1, 1, 3-12.

Segovia, F. F., and M. A.Tolbert, eds. 1998. TEACHING THE BIBLE: THE DISCOURSES AND POLITICS OF BIBLICAL PEDAGOGY. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Smith, W. C. 1993. WHAT Is SCRIPTURE? A COMPARATIVE APPROACH. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

Barbara Green, Ph.D. (Graduate Theological Union and University of California, Berkeley) is Professor of Biblical Studies at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at the Graduate Theological Union. E-mail: [e-mail]. She is the author of MIKHAIL BAKHTIN AND BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP: AN INTRODUCTION (Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2000); HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN? A DIALOGICAL STUDY OF KING SAUL IN 1 SAMUEL (New York, NY: Sheffield Academic Press/ Continuum, 2003); and JONAH'S JOURNEYS (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005). She is presently working on the book of Deuteronomy.