via Harbinger, some choice morsels from Stanley Hauerwas:
Harbinger: Stanley Hauerwas on Scripture
North American Christians are trained to believe that they are capable of reading the Bible without spiritual and moral transformation. They read the Bible not as Christians, not as a people set apart, but as democratic citizens who think their ‘common sense’ is sufficient for ‘understanding’ the Scripture. They feel no need to stand under the authority of a truthful community to be told how to read. Instead they assume that they have all the ‘religious experience’ necessary to know what the Bible is about. As a result the Bible inherently becomes the ideology for a politics quite different from the politics of the Church
Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. “”I Corinthians 1:22″“24
The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. “”I Corinthians 2:14
Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true. Many of the Jews believed, as did also a number of prominent Greek women and many Greek men. “”Acts17:11″“12
just a few passages i thought of immediately on this topic.
Great Hauerwas quotation. I haven’t read Unleashing the Scripture yet, but my pastor, who also is a professor of theology at the University from which I graduated, assigns that book to all of his students who take his Biblical Theology class.