Yet in the book I also try to "de-throne" the exclusivistic claims of the guild that remove the biblical text from its concrete location within the church as a witness to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ by providing a narrative context to understand Jesus. Often the polemic against the reading of the church of the text as a witness to Christ masks the western liberal colonial purposes that such "professional biblical scholarship" serves. At least in preaching in so far preachers maintain the contemporaneous personal, social, and political end of their preaching to the formation of those who interact with their readings.

I think this has become apparent to me in the past several months. I have worked hard as a "professional biblical scholar". The past several weeks I have been working through the interpretations of Khirbet Qumran -- is there a wide-spread ash layer found at the site to distinguish between Phase Ib and Phase II of the site? Inquiring minds want to know!! It is fun but mind numbing, and often frustrating work because of the strength of claims made by contrasting interpretations and the difficulty of working through the rhetoric to what actually is the data upon which such claims are based. Ultimately, without a greater end outside itself and professional careerism, it is interesting to experience the underlying nihilism of such study.

I've spent some of my time today reading instead on Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas by Paul McPartlan called The Eucharist Makes the Church amid the stifling heat and humidity of southern California today. The biblical text underlies much of the discussion in language of "the image of God", "Christ in you the hope of glory" amid talk of the human being, nature and the supernatural, mysticism. The text is placed into a different framework, a framework formed by the world of the text itself rather than a mere "pure nature" that professional biblical scholarship presupposes. The biblical text becomes reduced to something less than it really is, just as reading human beings as "pure nature" reduces human beings to something less, for it separates us from the image of God in which God constantly creates and calls us as human beings.

"Professional biblical scholarship" is a good, but in its imperialistic claims, it seeks to make itself the good that it cannot sustain rationally or even existentially. The guild places heavy pressures to socialize its graduate students into the absolutist claims of the guild. Yet the academic institutions that have the greatest reason to the academic study of the biblical text as part of their general education, church-based universities, must ask because of their very different presuppositions from which they run. Such institutions serve a different polity, the church catholic, than the liberal nation-state that the guild serves in return for the state's patronage.

Thus, while I have engaged in "professional biblical scholarship", I have moved away from reading and thought related to the audience of the blog that I had conceived. With other demands, blog entries have dried up. I hope to do better.