History of texts

One way to characterize the modern innovation in biblical interpretation is that it changes the Bible from a history of salvation into a history of documents. The Bible does not give access to history or the acts of God; it only gives us access to itself – the Bible as evidence of the formation of the Bible. Anyone who has suffered through a numbing self-referential OT seminar at SBL knows how true this is.

Gerard Bruns suggestively comments that the motive behind this shift is to “preserve alienation as a condition of freedom from the text.” So long as the text is only about itself, it doesn’t speak with any authority to the reader. It is a “dead letter, a purely analytical object.” The Bible is no more authoritative than a file of disconnected family letters and photographs; the authority is all with the interpreter who seeks to construct an intelligible mosaic from the fragments.