Jeremy

“What does emerge, in any case, is an awareness that the elusive but dominating Subject of the Old Testament cannot be comprehended in any preconceived categories.1 The God of the Old Testament does not easily conform to the expectation of Christian dogmatic theology, nor to the categories of any Hellenistic perennial philosophy. As a result, most of our categories are unhelpful for the elucidation of this Subject, and we shall have to proceed concretely, a text at a time, a detail at a time. The Character who will emerge from such a patient study at the end will still be elusive and more than a little surprising.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy

“It is one thing to attempt to understand the Old Testament as the sacred scriptures of the church. It is quite another to understand the study of the Bible in history-of-religions categories. Both tasks are legitimate, but they are different in goal and procedure. The hermeneutical issue at stake does not lie in an alleged contrast between historical process and scripture's final form. To understand the Bible as scripture means to reflect on the witnesses of the text transmitted through the testimony of the prophets and apostles. It involves an understanding of biblical history as the activity of God testified to in scripture. In contrast, a history-of-religions approach attempts to reconstruct a history according to the widely accepted categories of the Enlightenment, as a scientifically objective analysis according to the rules of critical research prescribed by common human experience.”
― Brevard S. Childs, The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture

“The Christian canon consists of two different, separate voices, indeed of two different choirs of voices. The Old Testament is the voice of Israel, the New that of the church. But beyond this, the voice of the New Testament is largely that of a transformed Old Testament which is now understood in the light of the gospel.”
― Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible

“Milton S. Terry, for example, author of one of the most conservative textbooks on hermeneutics (1890), begins: “Hermeneutics is the science of interpretation.”4 Yet even Terry concedes that hermeneutics “is both a science and an art. As a science it enunciates principles . . . and classifies the facts and results. As an art, it teaches what application these principles should have . . . showing their practical value in the elucidation of more difficult scriptures.”
― Anthony C. Thiselton, Hermeneutics: An Introduction