Thursday, June 23, 2005
11 Quotes
I'm working on my essay final for my Theological Hermeneutics class. Final, as in you won't have to read me blog about it anymore.

Anyway, I thought perhaps I'd share some of this good stuff. This is all from The Art of Reading Scripture. Emphases are mine.

  • "Whenever we pick up the Bible, read it, put it down, and say, 'That’s just what I thought,' we are probably in trouble. The technical term for that kind of reading is 'proof-texting.' Using the text to confirm our presuppositions is sinful; it is an act of resistance against God’s fresh speaking to us, an effective denial that the Bible is the word of the living God" (16).

    --from “Teaching the Bible Confessionally in the Church” by Ellen F. Davis.


  • "Yet the Old Testament clarifies the fact that the Bible as a whole is relentlessly theocentric. Its pervasive focus is not salvation, either personal or corporate, but rather revelation of the nature and will of God. From a biblical perspective, salvation is a subcategory of revelation – or better, salvation is a consequence of revelation fully received" (21).

    --from “Teaching the Bible Confessionally in the Church” by Ellen F. Davis.


  • "If there were not God, we could not of course exclude the theater of the absurd from the analogy; our situation would be precisely that of characters in a sequence with no outcome and therefore no plot. But the drama we inhabit is not absurd: it has an author with intentions. The author of our play has not written the third act, but when he does, he will do it as the same author who wrote the first two" (32).

    --from “Scripture’s Authority in the Church” by Robert W. Jenson.


  • "To experience the authority of Scripture, this is the chief thing to do: Hang out with Scripture, on a particular corner, the corner where there is a little crowd gathered around someone telling about the resurrection" (36).

    --from “Scripture’s Authority in the Church” by Robert W. Jenson.


  • "The long, ramshackle narrative of Israel with its promising starts and unexpected twists, with its ecstasies and its betrayals, its laws, its learning, its wisdom, its martyred prophets – this long narrative is retold and reevaluated in the light of what early Christians regarded as the concluding chapter God had written in Jesus Christ" (56).

    --from “Uncovering a Second Narrative” by David Steinmetz.


  • "The kind of interpretation practiced by Francis was not merely mental. His reading was emobodied, and an embodied reading is perhaps the only kind of reading that is finally appropriate to these texts, which are about, and are intended to provoke, changed lives" (100).

    --from “Christ was Like St. Francis” by James C. Howell.


  • "Nevertheless, this new mode of postmodern rationality is frightening to some Christians. They find it frightening because they have completely succumbed to a one-sided objectivism out of a deep-seated fear of the dangers of relativism. Without an objective and infallible source of meaning, so their reasoning goes, the truth claims of the gospel seem to be undermined. Hence, their response is to ground Christian belief in an infallible text, an infallible experience, or an infallible magisterium.

    "It is time that we recognized this foundationalist way of thinking for what it is. In its Christian guise, it represents not the strength of faith but the result of a faith that has lost its nerve. The Christian Scriptures set themselves up not so much as truth claims to be defended by philosophical foundations but as witnesses to the transforming power that no truth claims itself can contain. The gospel is not a ‘foundation’ to render our traditional notions of rationality secure but a remaking of everything, including rationality itself" (112).

    --from “Reading the Scriptures Faithfully in a Postmodern Age” by William Stacy Johnson.


  • "By becoming one with humanity in Jesus of Nazareth, God has determined not to be God without us" (115).

    --from “Reading the Scriptures Faithfully in a Postmodern Age” by William Stacy Johnson.


  • "Perhaps most importantly, our loss of familiarity with Scirpture is morally convenient… Such debates [e.g., the historicity of Jonah] do not put my own character at risk, whereas the force of the story is to challenge my refusal to be personally open to God’s work of transformation" (145).

    --from “Embodying Scripture in the Community of Faith” by L. Gregory Jones.


  • "What constitutes a holy people? In other words, what is the nature and discipline of a community capable of hosting the presence of God in its midst (cf. Lev 9:6)? For that is what holiness is. It is hospitality toward God, living in such a way that God may feel at home in our midst" (173).

    --from “Critical Traditioning” by Ellen F. Davis.


  • "Jesus treies to get his adversaries to think outside the box, to conceive of the resurrection as a transformation, not just continuation of life as we know it” (226).

    --from “Reading Scripture in Light of the Resurrection” by Richard B. Hays.

    • posted by Peter at 8:08 PM
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