We, as Christians revere the Bible because it is the authoritative history, and it is the witness to the life laid out in the Gospels, and provides a place of dialogue with God’s revelation.

Hauerwas’ Unleashing the Scriptures has a lot of Sociology of Theology embedded in it. This is the study of how culture and tradtion and the various mixes of the two are present in the learning of interpretive processes, and assumpti ons which underwrite and to some degree “predetermine what is read”.

When I hear people say “the pure unadlutrated word of God”, I wonder how they can miss the fact that they are assuming that the word they receive is pure in the act of being received, or that it remains untouched by their own tradtion, and the assumptions we have been taught to carry into our reading. It cannot be PURE even upon reception, since our capacity to handle truth is, as David Dark liked to put it in his The Gospel According to America, not “undarkly”; (reference to the Apostle Paul’s “we see through a glass darkly, but THEN we shall see face to face”). Our receptors are not innately “untinted”. We have filters. The first task is to recognize them as often and as quickly as possible. But not to stop and give up , reasoning, “why bother if we are so polluted and hopelessly stained by the world?” Hauerwas might say that the Church is called to be a tranformative community; one which , because of the Resurrection, become a community of liberation from “the darkness”.

“NO ‘text’ can be substituted for the People of God.” (p.28)