To Each Its Own Meaning

This book assembles a wonderful list of scholars who give lucid overviews of a remarkable range of scholarly approaches to the Bible, such as historical, redaction and feminist criticism. The key benefit of the book is that most of the chapters gives a worked example from the Bible showing the hermeneutic applied to the exegesis of a specific passage. The passages are always from Genesis or Luke, although sadly there is no real overlap where different approaches are used on the same chapter of the Bible - which would be really intriguing to see in a single book! It is mostly useful for undergraduate students or very interested lay people who want to see a broad range of approaches in action. Another great thing is that most of the chapters also contain a section on the limitations and shortcomings of each approach, and there is a remarkable restraint and humility shown in these sections, which I guess is par for the course in these postmodern times. Perhaps inevitably, I felt a bit let down by the book due to its lack of coherence and depth. By 'coherence' I mean that it reads as a series of disparate tools and does not come together very well as a multi-faceted approach to the Bible (the book 'The Postmodern Bible' is better in this regard). By 'depth' I mean there is far too much recounting of the history of each approach and too little exposition of how they are applied to different aspects of the Bible. But nonetheless this is definitely an admirable and useful…