Michael Bird at Euangelion reviews a recent book on theological education. Bird’s comments here caught my eye:
in the more conservative circles in which I move, certain theologians are given to constructing a doctrine of Scripture that contains many a priori assumptions about how they think God should have given us Scripture, and then you end up with a doctrine of Scripture that will not survive contact with the phenomenon of the text (i.e its origin, transmission, reception, and interpretation). Or else, it is demanded of us biblical scholars that we re-write or even invent a history of the text to line up with theological articulation of what Scripture is, how it came into being, and how it relates to its own context by some theological magisterium. Third, meaning is arguably created by fusing together the horizons of author-text-reader which justifies a modest reader-response hermeneutic in my mind…