I wanted to comment on comments made by Chris Spinks and Steve Cook on an earlier post. I had originally written a nice response to this while sitting in the Vilnius airport. Unfortunately, our plane boarded before I could get it posted, and I have not been able to find an Internet connection for my laptop here in Kiev. I have now found a nice Internet cafe, so I will write another response. This one may not be as cogent, due to the nice glass of absinthe I had about an hour ago.

Steve wrote:

I hear you saying that part of your scholarship is to deal with these “scriptural” layers of the text, and what I am putting out is that in doing so, you of necessity are doing theological interpretation at a minimal level at least. Your are engaging a text whose existence is owed to the historical community’s valuing of it as Word/Witness to the transcendent. There is an inherent “theological” dimension to this text’s preservation until this very day and its existence in your hands.

I would agree with this, and I certainly pay attention to the theology that is in the text. But that seems to me to be a purely descriptive task. When I talk about doing theology, what I mean is the process of making statements (truth claims) about God and reality. To me, simply reading the text is not the same. The text may make such truth claims, but unless I affirm or deny them I am not actively doing theology.

Chris said:

With the biblical texts we have “theological” dimensions to contend with in the preservation and the reading. And, I would contend that as members of the same church that both preserved and continues to read these texts, these theological dimensions are closely related if not actually the same.

I agree that it is the same community, but that does not seem to be theology in the sense I am using it here. Perhaps the problem is a difference in our definition of theology.

One place I think Chris and I may agree (although I think we need to define some terms) is that the reading of the text does have an effect on us. This is one place I think reader response criticism has it right, although I would want to focus only on responses that have some actual connection to the content of the text. Just by reading a text, we are being effected in some way, and I would venture that the Bible’s nature as Scripture means that at least some of that effect is theological in nature. But I would still content that this is something different than the active doing of theology, which seems to me to be a more conscious activity.

I look forward to hearing further comments from Steve, Chris, and anyone else who wants to jump in. I doubt I will get to respond before Friday, however. This Internet cafe is several blocks from our apartment in Kiev, so this will probably be my only visit.

Next post in the series: Bracketing Theology

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