Encore!

Just a week after Joel Green gave a guardedly appreciative review of Faithful Interpretation in the Review of Biblical Literature, he reviews Reading Scripture With the Church this week and gives it, also, a favorable mark (he’s ambivalent about one of the essays, but positive about the other three, including mine).

The review inclines more to summary than to analysis (as is customary for multi-authored works), but Joel gives a lovely one-sentence characterization of my “Poaching On Zion” essay: “Knowing the Bible well and studying it faithfully and steadily in community, [Adam] writes, we encounter and embody the ways of God.” That sounds pretty fair to me; I’d want to expand on it, but then I wrote a whole essay, and another book, that provide some of what that single sentence simplifies.


Joel answers,

Hi, AKMA,
Just found your blogged responses to my reviews of your two latest. I was
delighted to see that you regarded my comments as ‘thinking along with
you.’ As I often suggest to critics who wonder what it means “to do
theological interpretation,” “We don’t know. We’re working it out.” I have
always regarded you as an important conversation partner, even if we have
never had the kinds of conversations over a strong cup of coffee for which
I would have wished.
All the best,
Joel

[Hi, Joel! Thanks for this very wonderful response. A strong dup of coffee sounds very good to me — I’ll be looking forward to it, since it will surely be accompanied by an illuminating, exciting, provocative, friendly conversation with you.]

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