New Paradigms for Bible Study: The Bible in the Third Millennium. Edited by Robert M. Fowler, Edith Blumhofer, and Fernando F. Sergovia. Pp. xii + 287. London: T. & T. Clark (A Continuum Imprint), 2004. isbn 0 567 02660 4. Paper £16.99

Abstract

The essays in this book grew from a symposium held in New York City in 1999 entitled ‘Futuring the Scriptures: The Bible for Tomorrow's Publics’. As Martin Marty notes in his Afterword there are few references to the earlier generation of scholars or methodologies of biblical scholarship that still predominate in college and university courses. Continuities with these there certainly are, and they are not always acknowledged by the essayists, but on the whole these chapters are self-consciously contemporary, beginning with current cultural issues and questions, and, with some exceptions, not so much directly concerned with Bible study, as with the place of the Bible in the modern and postmodern world. If there is to be Bible study in the future it will not, it seems, be so much study of the biblical texts, as of how the conditions and preoccupations of the new global village can assimilate the Bible at all, at least in the way it has been traditionally understood within the Western Christian tradition, and that, in the main, North American. There is indeed continuity and discontinuity, but very little sense of attending to what is on the page and within the thorny grammar of word and narrative.