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" What justifies specifically churchly exegesis of Scripture? Can church doctrine guide our reading? Why should it? Why should we interpret the story of Abraham and Isaac by the passion of Jesus? The answer is bluntly simple: What justifies churchly reading of Scripture is that there is no other way to read it, since “it” dissolves under other regimes. Thus a hermeneutical exhortation from this first perspective. Be entirely blatant and unabashed in reading Scripture for the church’s purposes and within the context of Christian faith and practice. Indeed, guide your reading by church doctrine. For if, say, the doctrine of Trinity and Matthew’s construal of the passion do not fit each other, then the church lost its diachronic self in the early fourth century at the latest, and the whole enterprise of Bible reading is moot. The question, after all, is not whether churchly reading of Scripture is justified; the question is, what could possibly justify any other? "
― Ellen F. Davis , The Art of Reading Scripture
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" if we are not outside the story told by Scripture, we have no leverage for a certain kind of modernist reading. This is the kind that tries to salvage something from Scripture, from what we are likely to call, when engaged in this archaeology, the “scriptural tradition.” Reading this way, we start with some antecedent body of convictions — liberating experience or some branch of “theory” or the demands der deutschen Stunde or “what science tells us” — and then look in Scripture for what can be construed as coherent with that set of convictions. If we stood outside the story told by Scripture, we could perhaps do this; but since we stand inside the scriptural story, we are bound instead to work just the other way around, to salvage from other bodies of convictions what can be made coherent with Scripture. Indeed, much of what we can plausibly mean by saying that Scripture is “authoritative” is that we are not to read Scripture in this particular modernist way or in any of its premodern analogues. "
― Ellen F. Davis , The Art of Reading Scripture