14But you must cling to the things which you have learnt and have been taught to believe, knowing who your teachers were, 15 and that from infancy you have known the sacred writings which are able to make you wise to obtain salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 Every Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for convincing, for correction of error, and for instruction in right doing; 17 so that the man of God may himself be complete and may be perfectly equipped for every good work.

I have been talking with a few people recently about their views on the reader response theories, and it is at that point I find that I depart from the traditional worldview of a Gen X’er and perhaps become a touch modernist? While I understand that we cannot help but bring our own experiences and context to the passage, and even this colours the questions that we ask of the text, to what point do we indulge this idea of meaning coming from the contemporary reader. (In school when looking at historical documents you are taught about the context it comes from, why then when it comes to scripture should we ignore this in preference to our own ideas?) One of the gifts of the bible is that we see the people of God growing in their understanding of who God is as He reveal’s himself. Are the reader response theories then, just an extension of the way in which we understand who God is, or are they merely anthrocentric (man-centered). If this is the case how do we deal with the reality of our fallen nature, and oftentimes our desire to read what we want to read? One of the amazing gifts of the bible is that through prayer and study I am challenged to change who I am. This is occurs through the work of God and my study of various Historical, contextual, literary, etc… criticism’s and what they have to say. (For the scholar who is pushing us forward in our thinking it is legitimate to isolate their use of the analytical tools, and thankfully since the discussions regarding bias or “context” of the scholar their presuppositions are more explicitly stated in their work.) What “controls” are in place to stop us from making the text say whatever we want. For the preacher and teacher it is dangerous to fall into one particular area of criticism and respond in mission, pastorally and preaching only out of this one framework. While I like Child’s canonical approach which seeks to reorient the critical tools in the context of biblical theology, I am hesitant to place too much emphasis on early church fathers interpretation of this. Which leaves me then, with the desire to engage with as many of the tools which seek to bring life to the passage being read, and not devise meaning for myself.

Is it enough that we acknowledge the context which colours and reading or should we then try to overcome our bias?