“Additional Thoughts on Our Theological Vision:
Against Shallow Exegesis”
2 Timothy 3:14-17 & 1 Corinthians 9:3-12
March 13, 2022
Faith Presbyterian Church – Evening Service
Pastor Nicoletti
The Reading of the Word
We will hear from two passages this evening – first from Second Timothy 3, and then from First Corinthians 9.
Please do listen carefully, for this is God’s Word for us this evening.
From the Apostle Paul’s letter to Timothy:
3:14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it 15 and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
And then from Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth:
3 This is my defense to those who would examine me. 4 Do we not have the right to eat and drink? 5 Do we not have the right to take along a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas? 6 Or is it only Barnabas and I who have no right to refrain from working for a living? 7 Who serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard without eating any of its fruit? Or who tends a flock without getting some of the milk?
8 Do I say these things on human authority? Does not the Law say the same? 9 For it is written in the Law of Moses, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain.” Is it for oxen that God is concerned? 10 Does he not certainly speak for our sake? It was written for our sake, because the plowman should plow in hope and the thresher thresh in hope of sharing in the crop. 11 If we have sown spiritual things among you, is it too much if we reap material things from you? 12 If others share this rightful claim on you, do not we even more?
This is the word of the Lord. (Thanks be to God.)
Introduction
This morning we considered the first of our core values: Deep Exposition of Holy Scripture.
Then we focused on why the exposition of the Holy Scriptures is so important for our life, rooted in the fact that the Holy Scriptures are God’s Word communicated for us.
But we didn’t really get into what we mean by saying that we are committed to “deep” exposition of the Scriptures.
That will be our focus tonight.
And the way I want to draw that out is, in many ways, by contrasting it with its opposite – with shallow exegesis.
We believe here in the deep exposition – the deep exegesis – the deep study and interpretation of the Holy Scriptures as the foundation of preaching and teaching, and our life together as a congregation. Which means that we are against shallow exegesis.
Now, as we think of what distinguishes deep exegesis from shallow exegesis, I think there is a lot we could say. I’ll limit myself though to six things this evening – six forms of shallow exegesis that we want to intentionally resist letting become the dominant ways that we interact with the Scriptures as a church.
Now, before we start, we need to acknowledge a certain irony. This sermon tonight, on deep exegesis, will not actually display much deep exegesis. We won’t dig deeply into the texts that we have heard from. The first, from Second Timothy, provides a truth that underlies this sermon – a conviction that “all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”
The second text gives an unexpected example of deep exegesis – one among many options in which an Apostle finds something in the Bible that we might not expect from a quick or shallow reading.
But for the points I’ll go through tonight, I’ll be drawing from theological reflections from a number of texts, with the help of a number of thinkers, and I won’t be showing all of my work. This approach is necessary, I think, to keep this to one sermon instead of six or more.
But it is still ironic that I will be preaching a topical, more abstractly theological sermon, not rooted in one specific text … on why the majority of our sermons should not be topical, or abstractly theological, or not rooted in a specific text.
It is a good reminder then that my goal tonight in stating what we are for or against in exegesis is not to set down an iron-clad law for what every sermon or lesson should look like, but rather to state overall principles for how we approach the Scriptures as a whole, which will then show up in different ways in different sermons.
And so, with that in mind, we turn to six approaches to Scripture that we ordinarily want to avoid as we pursue the deep exposition of Holy Scripture.
1. Against a Kernel & Husk Approach to Scripture
And we’re going to start with a big-picture pattern, which we’ll then consider in two more specific ways.
So, the first thing that we are against is a kernel and husk approach to Scripture. [See Leithart, Deep, 1-34 for what follows]
This is an approach that is more prominent in modern hermeneutics and among modern evangelicals.
This approach can sincerely believe that the Bible is, as we said this morning, God’s word communicated for us. So far so good. The problem comes in how it believes that word is communicated.
While it is often unstated, the assumption behind this view is that the way the Scriptures communicate to us is that each text has some spiritual kernel within it. Our job, as we read the Bible is to discover, and accurately extract that spiritual kernel. And then, once we’ve done that, the rest of the text can largely be discarded. The details of the text, in other words, are not that important, except for in helping us discover that kernel.
This is a kernel and a husk approach. Now, what that kernel is can vary, and we’ll get to that next. But for now, I just want to consider the overall pattern.
This approach makes a sharp distinction between the form of the text and its content. The content is the kernel – the truth we need to receive. The form is largely irrelevant. If anything, it is seen as a puzzle that we need to deal with to get to the kernel of content that we want.
But to make that division between form and content is to read the Bible in a fundamentally shallow way … which is a problem not only for reading the Bible, but for reading almost any work of literature or of art.
Jeff Meyers gets at this in the introduction of his commentary on the book of Ecclesiastes. He gives some background to the book, he gives something of an outline of it, but then, where you would expect a summary of the book as a whole, he writes this – he says: “I cannot simply state the conclusion [of the book] for you. The purpose of Ecclesiastes can only be reached by reading it. I hope to help you read it, but there is no substitute for reading the book. It is like a poem. Poetry can be analyzed and summarized into certain basic themes or ideas a poet wants to convey, but to state the ideas in propositional form does not accurately reproduce the point of the poem. The words are supposed to change the reader in a way that cannot be duplicated by prose. Cognitive decoding may have its place, but it will not reach the poet’s desired result. An analysis of a poem can help you understand it, but only if the poem itself is also read.” [Meyers, 24]
And the same is true of the Bible. We are to analyze that dig into it, and seek to think its message through. But that can never replace the text itself, which is much more than just a husk to deliver a spiritual kernel to us.
Meyers there seems to be alluding to what Cleanth Brooks called “the heresy of paraphrase.” Brooks coined this phrase in opposition to forms of poetic criticism that sought to “distill the meaning of a poem into its essential ‘idea’ or ‘message.’” The problem for Brooks was that “A poem’s meaning […] is not just a matter of its propositional content – as if the words and form and meter and all of those exquisite aspects of craft were just decorative flourishes that could be dispensed with once you got ‘the message.’”
Instead, he argued that a poem is not reducible to paraphrase: “A poem is not just a vehicle for ideas; it means both more than that and differently than that.”
[Smith, 171-173, see also 117]
We see the same thing in our hymns. Look again at the first hymn we sang this evening – Isaac Watt’s hymn from Psalm 19. We could summarize our singing of that hymn like this: “God reveals himself in creation, but especially in the Bible. The hymn makes that claim a number of different ways, while telling us to make our voices go up and down together as we say it.”
That is a summary of the first hymn. But it is woefully insufficient. Not because it’s inaccurate, but because a hymn is not a husk that simply delivers a propositional kernel to us.
The poetry of the words matters, and they are part of the message itself. The musical aspect of the hymn matters, and it changes how we experience the poetry in ways we might not even be able to articulate. The hymn must be received as a whole, valued as a whole, and any attempt to summarize it, even if completely accurate, loses something.
And the same thing is true of the Scriptures. The text of Scripture is never a husk that just delivers a propositional kernel somewhere in the middle of it. The text needs to be received as a whole. The text needs to be studied as a whole. The text needs to be appreciated as a whole. The text needs to wash over us as a whole. And no single summary can ever completely capture the text, or what it should mean for us.
Now, it is true that we, as finite creatures, with our finite minds, often need to focus on just one thing at a time from a text. Sermons, at their core, often need to be about just one thing. That is all true. We’re not denying that.
What we’re saying is that all of the text must be taken into account when considering any aspect of it, and that even when our focus is one aspect of the text, we must remember that that does not exhaust the text, and that the form in which that aspect comes to us matters.
We are not looking to extract a proposition from the text and then move on. We want to soak in the text as a whole.
We are against a kernel and husk approach to the Scriptures and for deep exegesis.
2. Against a Purely Abstract Theological Approach to Scripture
That is a big picture pattern we want to avoid. But it’s worth pointing out in more details two common ways this often works out, which we also want to resist.
The first is that we want to resist a purely abstract theological approach to Scripture.
In this approach to a text of scripture, all we want to find is an abstract doctrine.
Now, the word “all” is key there in what we want to avoid. We are not against finding doctrines in the Scripture that can be stated abstractly. Not at all. That is in fact necessary, and important. The problem is, again, when we treat the text as only an unimportant husk used to deliver an abstractly theological kernel.
Peter Leithart helps describe the distinction between the Bible and abstract theology well.
He writes: “Theology is a specialized, professional language, often employing obscure […] terms that are never used by anyone but theologians, as if theologians live in and talk about a different world from the one mortals inhabit. […] Whereas the Bible talks about trees and stars, about donkeys and barren women, about kings and queens and carpenters.”
He goes on:
“Theology is a ‘Victorian’ enterprise, neoclassically bright and neat and clean, nothing out of place.
“Whereas the Bible talks about hair, blood, sweat, entrails, menstruation and […] emissions.”
He writes:
“Here’s an experiment you can do at any theological library. You even have my permission to try this at home.
“Step 1: Check the indexes of any theologian you choose for any of the words [just mentioned] [That would be “hair, blood, sweat, entrails,” and so on.] […]
“Step 2: Check the Bible concordance for the same words.
“Step 3: Ponder these questions: Do theologians talk about the world the same way the Bible does? Do theologians talk about the same world the Bible does?” [Leithart, Against, 51]
Now, perhaps Leithart is a little hard on theologians. You could make the case that their job is often to state abstract doctrines.
But that is not our job. Our job is to engage with the Scriptures. And that will involve doctrines, of course. But it should also, if we are to engage with the Bible deeply, involve getting into the messier nuts and bolts of life that the Bible is not shy in talking about.
And that must be true both in how we read the Bible and how we apply the Bible. We must not brush aside the concrete messy details of the text for something artificially pure and clean. But we also must not neglect applying the Bible to the concrete messy details of our lives, in order to make the sermon feel artificially pure and clean.
That is, after all, what Paul is telling Timothy in verses 16 and 17: All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” That means not only that the details of every text is profitable, but also that every text has application to the details of our lives.
And so, whether it comes to the details of the text, or the details of our lives, we are against a purely abstract theological approach to the Scriptures, and we are instead for deep exegesis.
3. Against a Moral Fable Approach to Scripture
Of course, while some of us are prone to look for abstract theology, others of us are especially looking for concrete application. And that can be good … but it can also tempt us towards another form of shallow exegesis: the tendency to treat Scripture as a collection of moral fables.
One of our members recently highlighted to me the need to avoid this tendency.
It is a tendency that wants to reduce each story of Scripture to a simple morality tale, with a neat and clean lesson for life for us to take away.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Some parts of the Bible are meant to be taken as a straightforward illustration of what we should do, or of what we should not do.
But much of the Bible is far messier and more complicated than that.
Consider Job. It is amazing to me, when you start talking about the Book of Job how many people want to pick on Job – how many want to argue that Job really did kind of deserve what he got … even that Job wasn’t really a believer until the end of the book. Numerous clear statements, along with the whole thrust of the book of Job work against this assessment, but it is still the assessment that so many Bible-believing evangelical Christians gravitate towards. Because it turns Job into a simple morality tale about knowing God, instead of letting it be a deep and complex book on the nature and mystery of suffering in this fallen world.
Or think of the Book of Jonah. In our retellings, whether in our heads, or in our children’s Bibles, we usually either omit the fourth chapter, in which Jonah pitches a fit before God that remains unresolved, or we add a fifth chapter in which Jonah repents of his fit and goes on to live a happy life of faith. Why do we do that? Well … because the book of Jonah, as it is, makes a bad moral fable. It is too complex. And so we need to simplify it – we need to turn it into a two-dimensional morality tale.
Now, as we said, the Bible does contain both good and bad moral examples for us to learn from. But that is not all it contains. We need to beware of taking texts that are rich and messy and complicated for us, and flattening them out into two-dimensional morality tales.
The Bible is not just a series of husks that each contain a moral kernel for us to take from it.
We must be against a moral-fable approach to the Scriptures, and for deep exegesis.
4. Against a Picking & Choosing Approach to Scripture
Fourth, we are against a picking and choosing approach to Scripture.
By which we mean that we are against an approach to Scripture, in our personal life or in our corporate life, where we pick and choose which parts of the Bible we will hear from, and which we will avoid – favoring the texts we like, and skipping over the ones we don’t.
This can be a temptation in our own reading of the Bible – it’s one of the dangers of not having an intentional plan for our Bible reading that will bring is through parts of the Bible we might not otherwise choose for ourselves.
It can also be a temptation for preachers and for congregations.
Robert Jensen makes an interesting point on this. He says that one way that you can tell that a preacher, and that a congregation, really believe in the authority of the Bible is if the congregation in the pews, witnesses, and is willing to tolerate, the preacher struggling to say what a particular text says, even if the preacher doesn’t really like that text. It is if the preacher is willing to preach from texts that might be difficult for him – and, Jensen writes, especially if the congregation witnesses the preacher trying to do this, and failing. That, he explains, is evidence that a church really believes in the authority of Scripture – in the authority of all Scripture. [Jensen, 2003, 36; Jensen, 1995, 94]
Why is that so significant?
Well, because it means that a church is willing to engage even with the parts of the Bible that make them uncomfortable – the parts that the preacher is uncomfortable preaching from, and the congregation is uncomfortable hearing from.
For that reason – to force the preacher and the congregation to engage with, and struggle to understand texts they would more often rather avoid – Jensen argues that it is best when the Scripture texts for sermons are not chosen by the preacher himself. [Jensen, 1995, 92]
And that is another good reason for our practice of preaching through whole books of the Bible, without skipping passages. Now, we have modified that some in the past year, by introducing a rotation that moves us through different portions of the Bible in different seasons of the year, but even in that rotation, within each book, we still continue through each book as a whole, without skipping a passage, from start to finish.
That is not such a common practice in most churches today. And it’s understandable. Because it means you will get more sermons that aren’t very good. Because sometimes there’s a text that I don’t know what to do with. And I cannot figure out how to preach well from it. And I’ll do my best. But it’s not going to be great. The truth is, we could have fewer dud sermons if we just skipped over some of those more difficult passages.
And so that’s what many churches do.
But Jensen’s point is that hearing a bad sermon on a text that we’d all like to avoid, is better for us than if we only heard good sermons on texts we already know and like. We need to wrestle with those texts that are off-putting to us, even if we do it badly. That is why our dominant practice here is to preach passage by passage through whole books of the Bible.
Now, there are exceptions to that approach – like tonight. We do, at times, hear topical sermons and topical series. But that is not the main diet of our congregation. The main diet comes from consistently preaching through books of the Bible and leaving in even the texts we struggle with.
In that way, we are against a picking and choosing approach to the Scriptures and for deep exegesis of the entirety of the Bible.
5. Against an Eisegetical Approach to Scripture
Fifth, we are against an eisegetical approach to Scripture.
Now, a quick refresher on terms: Exegesis is when we dig into a text to discover what it is saying. Eisegesis is when we interpret a passage of scriptures by reading our own ideas into it. We project onto the text what we already believe, rather than discover what the text itself says.
Eisegesis is a way of keeping the text from teaching us anything we don’t already know. [Leithart, Deep, 6]
We often worry about eisegesis as a source of heresy – reading unbiblical theology into passage of Scripture when it’s not really there.
But another form of eisegesis can be a way of avoiding the message of a text. Rather than facing an uncomfortable truth that a text confronts us with, we read another biblical truth into a text where it is not present.
The result of this is not rampant heresy but a muzzling of a text when it says something we don’t want to hear. We just treat the text as if it is about something else.
And so we need to beware of quickly thinking a text is about something we already know or are already comfortable with. It may be. But we need to dig deeper, and make sure the text might not be saying something more, or something different.
We must be against an eisegetical approach to Scripture, and for the deep exposition of Scripture.
6. Against a Historic Interpretive Minimalism Approach to Scripture
That brings us to our sixth and final tendency we want to avoid. Because in response to our last concern – in a desire to avoid eisegesis, many evangelicals have gone in the other direction. Afraid of seeing what is not in the text, they have gone to a historic interpretive minimalism approach to the Bible.
What I mean is that the text is treated as if it is only describing the concrete events in focus, and is not intended to point to any real spiritual types, or patterns, or symbols beyond itself.
The biggest problem with this approach is that it seems so foreign to how Jesus and the Apostles interpret the Bible in the New Testament.
Because Jesus and the Apostles call us to see typological patterns in the Old Testament that tell us about Christ – about what he has done in his first coming, what he is doing now as he works in our lives and in the Church, and what he will do when he comes again at the last day. That was what we saw this morning, and it was made especially clear in our text from Luke 24, as Luke tells us that Jesus was able to interpret for the disciples “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets […] in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” – the things concerning Jesus. Even though the Old Testament texts didn’t say explicitly that they were about Jesus, Jesus here shows his disciples that they actually were. And he rebukes them for not seeing that.
This is something that Jonathan Edwards reflects on in his notebook titled “Types.” In it, Edwards described what he saw as the mistake of limiting our interpretation of the Scriptures to the minimal historic events they described. Edwards contrasts that approach with the pattern that both the Apostles and Christ himself lay out for us as an example in the New Testament – an approach of seeing in the Scriptures many signs and types and patterns and symbols that point us beyond themselves – to pictures not only of Christ, but of how he would have us live.
This was not a reduction of the text to a moral fable or an abstract theological principle, but rather, an enriching of the text so that it was filled with many signs and symbols.
As an example, he points to one of our texts this evening: First Corinthians 9. In verse 9 the Apostle Paul reads Deuteronomy 25:4: “You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain.” And then Paul writes: “Is it for oxen that God is concerned? 10 Does he not certainly speak for our sake?” From there, Paul explains that this verse tells us that ministers should make their living from their ministry work. [See also 1 Timothy 5:18]
This is one example of many in the realm of Christian ethics. We find many as well in which events and patterns of the Old Testament are said to point to Christ – just as Jesus himself seems to have taught in Luke 24.
In several places, Jesus and the Apostles interpret the Scriptures typologically – as, through signs and patterns, signifying more than just the minimal historic meaning.
And this deeper exposition of the Scriptures – this typological approach – is not presented as just an added extra to the more literal and historically minimalistic approach. It is actually quite necessary.
Edwards points out that Christ blames both the Jews and his disciples for not understanding his parables, which are, in many ways, typological stories. But he also blames his disciples that they did not understand the typological and symbolic interpretations of the Old Testament without his help. [Edwards, 147]
Jesus, it seemed, expected the Jews to have interpreted the types and symbols in the Old Testament that pointed to him, even before he explained them. [Edwards, 150]
This means there is an obligation on the people of God, as we dig into the Scriptures, to see not only the historic minimalistic interpretation of what the text tells us, but to look for patterns, for symbols, for pictures and types of Christ, and his work, and what he calls us to in our lives.
Now, this then presents a tension. Because in our last point we said that we are against eisegesis – we are against reading our own preconceived ideas into the Scripture text. But now we learn that sticking to the historic minimum in our interpretation is not a safe ground either – for that is what some of the first-century Jews did, in a sense, and they missed the life-giving picture of the Messiah that they so desperately needed to see.
There is no safety in either extreme alone. Instead, as Pastor Rayburn has been reminding us in his Sunday school lessons, we must hold on to both.
We must resist the urge to read our own ideas into the text. And yet, we must use our knowledge of the whole of Scripture to explore the text for symbols and types and patterns that we can only see with our sanctified imaginations applying the whole counsel of God to each text.
Edwards, for one, refused to let the potential dangers of such deep exegesis keep him from seeing all that he could in a text. For he was confident that there was, in fact, much to be found in the details, the stories, and the symbols of Scripture – and, for that matter, of the whole world.
Edwards wrote this – he said: “I expect by very ridicule and contempt to be called a man of a very fruitful brain and copious fancy, but they are welcome to it. I am not ashamed to own that I believe that the whole universe, heaven and earth, air and seas, and the divine constitution and history of the holy Scriptures, be full of images of divine things, as full as a language is of words; and that the multitude of those things that I have mentioned [here] are but a very small part of what is really intended to be signified and typified by these things: but that there is room for persons to be learning more and more of this language and seeing more of all which is declared in it to the end of the world without discovering [it] all.” [Edwards, 152]
So we should ask ourselves: Is Jonathan Edwards just a man of, as he puts it, “a very fruitful brain and copious fancy” worthy of “ridicule and contempt”?
Actually, Edwards claims are not at all ridiculous, if we really believe that the Bible is the word of God.
Because first of all, if the Bible is the Word of God, then it really is a unified book. From a human point of view, the Bible is a collection of many books, written by a number of different human authors, and written for a number of different communities, spread across different geographies and different centuries.
But from a divine perspective, the Bible is one book, with one divine author, and written to one community. It is one unified book, written by God, to his people across time and space. That is what we discussed this morning. And if that is so, then the idea that we can discover all sorts of clues, and connections, and symbols, and foreshadowing throughout the book should be no surprise at all. [Jensen, 1995, 97; Jensen, 2004, 395-396]
For we find that in other books that only have human authors. You know this if you have ever reread a good, well-written novel. The second time through you catch all sorts of new details, that on a first reading, had little or no significance. But once you have read the whole book, they take on new meaning. They may foreshadow something that has not yet happened. They may be symbolic of a dynamic you only learn more about later. They may shed new light on events that happen towards the end.
If a human author can do this, how much more can God himself? If a human author can have many such items in a book that deepen our understanding with every rereading, then how much more should we expect the omnipotent God, with his mind so far beyond ours, to make his book, as Edwards puts it, as “as full of images of divine things, […] as a language is of words” so that “there is room for persons to be learning more and more of [it] and seeing more of that which is declared in it to the end of the world without discovering [it] all.”
Since the Bible is one unified book, with one divine author, to the whole people of God, we will not limit any portion of it to the moment of history it comes from or the minimal historic events it may describe. We are against a historic interpretive minimalism approach to Scripture, and for deep exegesis.
Conclusion
There is, of course, more that we could say. There’s more that we could say about every point of this sermon, and more points we could add to them. But we’ll have to stop there.
Suffice it to say, we believe that the Scriptures are rich with meaning. And our hope – to grow in our faith, to be preserved in our faith, to share our faith with others – is to be a church that dives in deep into the Word of God, not wanting to neglect the Scriptures either in their breadth or in their depth.
I quoted Gregory the Great a couple weeks ago, who once wrote that “Scripture is like a river […], broad and deep, shallow enough here for the lamb to go wading, but deep enough there for the elephant to swim.” [Moralia I.4]
In all of this our goal is not to take away from the simplicity of the Scriptures – the fact that it is shallow enough for a little lamb to wade it. And, indeed, for our little ones, and for those new to the faith, we should teach, and we should focus on the shallows – the basic foundational truths of the Scriptures.
But we should not stop there. We should also desire the depths. And so, what we are against – what we want to avoid – is an approach that would let us be satisfied always with the shallows, rather than an approach that challenges us to venture out to the depths of God’s Word.
For God’s Word is deep. And there is much to discover. Let us not pass over it. Let us not ignore it.
Let us resist the temptations to shallow exegesis. And embrace together the deep exposition of Holy Scripture.
Amen.
—
This sermon draws on material from:
Boersma, Hans. Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011.
De Lubac, Henri. History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture According to Origen. Translated by Anne Englund Nash. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2007. (Written in French in 1950)
Edwards, Jonathan. “Types.” In Jonathan Edwards: Typological Writings. Edited by Mason I. Lowrance Jr. with David H. Watters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.
Jensen, Robert W. “Hermeneutics and the Life of the Church.” In Reclaiming the Bible for the Church. Edited by Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jensen. Pages 89-105. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995.
Jensen, Robert W. “The Word and the Icons.” In Systematic Theology: Volume II: The Works of God. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Jensen, Robert W. “Scripture’s Authority in the Church.” In The Art of Reading Scripture. Edited by Ellen F. Davis and Richard B. Hayes. Pages 27-37. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003.
Jensen, Robert W. “A Second Thought About Inspiration.” Pro Ecclesia. Vol 13, No. 4. November 2004. Pages 393-398. (This one is a good place to start with Jensen on this topic, I think.)
Jordan, James B. Through New Eyes: Developing a Biblical View of the World. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1988.
Leithart, Peter. Against Christianity. Moscow, ID: Canon, Press, 2003.
Leithart, Peter J. Deep Exegesis: They Mystery of Reading Scripture. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009.
Meyers, Jeffrey. A Table in the Mist: Ecclesiastes Through New Eyes. Monroe, LA: Athanasius Press, 2006.
O’Keefe, John J., and R.R. Reno. Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible. Baltimore, MA: John Hopkins University Press, 2005.
Smith, James K.A. Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works. Cultural Liturgies Volume 2. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2013.
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