Read an Excerpt

Systematic theology is always in need of careful and fresh study

of the biblical texts to free its own work from philosophical straitjackets

and hardened orthodoxies and to keep it faithful to its task of

reclaiming the gospel for ever-new times and places. Similarly, biblical

studies are in constant need of the reminder that these texts are

not merely of historical and literary interest but are the Scriptures

of a community of faith that returns to these texts again and again

for theological and spiritual sustenance and direction. John Calvin,

it should be recalled, wrote his Institutes of the Christian Religion as

a guide to the study of Scripture, and Karl Barth intended his multivolume

Church Dogmatics as a work of sustained attentiveness to the

scriptural witness as living word of God, an attentiveness necessarily

incomplete and always subject to correction by new and better

understandings of Scripture. —from the preface