One thing that strikes me about Brueggemann (not having read any of his stuff) is that he seems very, very concerned that the reader’s interpretation - thus as you state, a near Barthian experience with the text - gets up to the front. He wants to stay rooted somewhere (thus the creed, I take it), but that rootedness doesn’t mean that the text is finally authoritative. This is something you hit in the paper. From my perspective he loses some of his (potential) power at this point, as the reader becomes primary, and the actual text (it seems to me) secondary. I would want to argue more along Wright’s line, using a critical-realist framework (cognizant both of the text’s and my limitations - well, some of them anyway), and hold to the integrity of the text. It’s true that we too sometimes update the Bible, in the sense that many interpret the role of women in ministry today in ways that were unthinkable before. Did the text change, did we get better historical/exegetical/hermeneutical tools? Did God finally bash some theological skulls? But I hope we have the integrity to let the text be the text, and at least explain the principles upon which we would revise interpretations (I get the feeling Breugemann would amen that).

In some ways I want to hold the text and the person (reader) as equals in the game. Not that I am as authoritative as the text, but that my opinion/experience counts too. The text is static in that can’t talk back, any interaction occurs in my brain and heart as I ponder it (and maybe God uses that process). If my opinion is to be respected, so should that of the text, but a text like the Bible shouldn’t be just tossed aside like an opinion off the street. I want somehow to accede authority to the text itself, and not simply reduce it to it’s “voice” as it speaks to me today. It has to mean something whether I experience that or not. I’m babbling. Anyway, I liked the paper. Maybe if you post it, it can be part of a platform for discussion. I notice that Andrew’s got some things in that direction already.