The Return to Scripture in Judaism and Christianity: Essays in Postcritical Scriptural Interpretation

The scholars who have contributed to this volume of essays are Jewish and Christian thinkers who without melding their different religious traditions and scholarly methods have developed complementary responses to what they believe is wrong with contemporary biblical scholarship in Judaism and Christianity. The purpose of this collection is to draw attention to the similarities among these responses and to the possibility that they may contribute to a family of postcritical methods for interpreting the scriptural traditions. The postcritical scholars employ current methods of critical scientific inquiry to clarify the language the historical contexts and the didactic messages of the biblical traditions. They do not however find these methods sufficient. They argue that the biblical traditions communicate to their practitioners some rules of action that cannot be deciphered within the terms set by canons of critical reason that emerged in the European Renaissance and Enlightenment. Rather among the Bibles unique rules of action are the principles for interpreting the traditions themselves. Postcritical scholars attempt to identify these rules of interpretation producing what editor Peter Ochs has come to term postcritical Scriptural interpretation. It is neither strictly modern nor premodern. This form of inquiry emerges in the dialogue that is now unfolding between a contemporary family of scholars and their scriptural traditions. The Return to Scripture in Judaism and Christianity shows how reading scripture itself has become self-conscious theologizing which is being done with all the tools of modern scholarship but for the sake of restoring sacred community something modernity largely lost. Peter Ochss introduction gives great coherence to the collection as a whole and is compelling in its challenge to the ongoing project of postmodern theology. --David Novak J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies University of Toronto Hermeneutically and religiously sophisticated these uncommonly insightful papers show that we are well on our way to creating a trans-denominational postcritical manner of reading scripture. --Eugene B. Borowitz Sigmund L. Falk Distinguished Professor of Education and Jewish Religious Thought Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion Peter Ochs is Edgar M. Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies at the University of Virginia. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from Yale University and an MA in Rabbinics from the Jewish Theological Seminary. He is author of over forty journal articles and reviews in theology and philosophy and has previously edited a volume enitled Understanding the Rabbinic Mind: Essays on the Hermeneutic of Max Kadushin.