QUOTE : 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.