Theology Today

“The aim of a postliberal hermeneutics is to reposition Holy Scripture as a unique linguistic medium of God's self-communication to the human family. Its primary task is to re-present the Bible as the human medium of a divine revelation that has endured and will endure in and through the cultural metamorphoses that succeed each other as history unfolds.”

“There can be no emancipation from bondage to ideology unless there are human words which, under the inspiration of God's spirit, have the metaphorical power to evoke an awareness of the wonder, the dread, and the grace of being in the presence of the Holy God.”

“One way of exploring the contact points between social scientific criticism and canonical criticism is to examine what happens when the essence of the claims of each is carried into the territory of the other.”

“That Jesus as Son of God uses the prayer and actualizes the identity described in it does something to suffering that changes its face for those who believe in him. … Knowing ‘he has been through it’ does not give us a final explanation or metaphysic. It does give us a new perspective, experience, and stance.”

“As it attempts to grapple with the questions raised by religious pluralism and the claim that God is universally sovereign, source of creation and salvation, theology today requires a thorough exegetical inquiry into the biblical version of God.”

“The church's purpose is not its own. The church is present in the world on behalf of the God by whose grace it has been called into existence. Thus, at the heart of the church's act of self-definition is a basic theological question: What is the nature of God's presence in the world?”

“The scholar attending to the objective distance between ancient text and the modern interpreter and the believer cherishing his or her subjective intimacy with the text are both grounding their approaches in the reality of the text itself, for the text is both ancient artifict and religious classic.”