Here is Brian Daley’s talk abstract from the Regent College Center for Catholic-Evangelical Dialogue conference on theological interpretation. Looks like a great conference, wish I could go. The theological interpretation movement, in my view, is one of the most fruitful efforts to understand scripture-as-scripture, avoiding the extremes of both literalistic and demythologizing heremeneutics.
Today, as a result of renewed interest in early Christian biblical interpretation, and of the widely shared sense that the historical-critical study of the Scriptures cannot, by itself, nourish the spiritual hunger of Christian disciples, many people who read the Bible as the norm of their faith and life are convinced that the only kind of interpretation that can do justice to the biblical text must be theological: a style of interpretation that takes God and God’s work in the world seriously, as the true shaper of the text and as its final meaning. Here, with the help of some of the Church Fathers, we will set out to ask what “theological interpretation of Scripture” might mean. The God proclaimed by the Christian Bible is a God who is always engaged with history, and with human beings: the God who creates, judges, heals, unifies, and steers the human race steadily towards union with Himself. Christians understand that this takes place because God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that it is in the history of creation and salvation itself that God’s Trinitarian identity has gradually become known: that what Patristic authors called “theology,” in the strict sense — speaking about God — itself becomes possible. For Christians, this takes place in the Church: the community of disciples unified by hearing and living from God’s Word, the place in which the scriptural canon is identified and its messages interpreted. Because we always live and speak in the context of history, we need to use all the tools of modern historical and philological scholarship to identify what any particular biblical text originally may have been intended to say; but we need also to hear that text in our own context of lived faith, if the text is to remain the saving Word of God for us, and not to be simply an ancient religious document. To read any particular passage of the Bible without historical and critical awareness may well prevent us from understanding its full meaning correctly; but to read it without faith, and apart from our own context within a worshipping community, keeps us from understanding that full meaning as a part of Holy Scripture, and as the Word of life.