A Response to Professor Rowland

Extract

I'm grateful for your open letter, your generous comments and the critical questions you raise. Two general concerns seem to emerge, and it is to these that I shall respond here. The first is that I am too dismissive of the real value of the historical-critical method. Rightly objecting to its ‘hegemony’ in modern biblical studies, I'm in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The second is that the theological orientation that I bring to biblical interpretation is too ‘cerebral’: this makes me insufficiently attentive to the provisionality of our knowledge of God and to the particularities of a place called ‘the real world’.