Thursday, August 20, 2009

Does the Bible read you?

I really like the introductory chapter of Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, and Advocacy by Walter Brueggemann.

Here is a sample:
The practical effect of the Reformation, as far as the Bible is concerned, is to let the Bible have its own voice, without regard for or indebtedness to any established category of church interpretation. In this sense, the Reformation was indeed an act of interpretive emancipation. Luther and those who came after him in the Reformation perforce established categories of and criteria for reading that are not negotiable. They insisted with great passion, however, that their evangelical modes of Bible reading were not imposed but in fact arose from the substance of the biblical text itself. As we shall see, this practice of devising categories of interpretation that appear to be given is an onogoing issue in Old Testament theology.
Do we interpret the text or does the text interpret us?
Does our theology determine our reading of the text or does the text determine our theology?

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