"The salient importance of this incisive work lies in its cogent attempt, amid the modern crisis of all theological authority, to rehabilitate the Bible's wholistic and pre-critical normativity for the Christian community of faith. Vander Goot exposes compellingly the prevailing usurpation of biblical scholarship, and derivatively much constructive doctrinal statement, by unbiblical premises supposedly entailed by scientific historiography. Skillfully marshalling the insights of, among others, Auerbach and Gadamer, Ricoeur and Frei, Childs and Wood, Vander Goot argues suasively for a believing hermeneutics grounded in the primary canonical givenness of the scriptural worldview from creation and fall to redemption and consummation. The authentic service of critical scholarship arises within this worldview of biblical commitment as fides quaerens intellectum, rather than being imposed from without as a Procrustean bed upon which the allegedly 'literal' sense of scripture must conform to alien frames of reference. Within the heated current interaction of biblical interpretation and systematic theology, wherever one may stand in the spectrum of liberalism or orthodoxy, Professor Vander Goot's forceful case for the directly accessible integrity of the scriptural witness cannot rightly or wisely be ignored." -A. Durwood Foster, Professor of Christian Theology. Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley

"This is a bold book. It leaves no routines unchallenged, no altars unturned, no theologies unscathed. Against all self-centered hermeneutics, the author advocates a reading (of the Bible) from God's perspective, a simple, wholistic exposure to the message up front with its powerful claim to interpret rather than be interpreted, to speak rather than be questioned. This is, of course, a challenge to much of our modern theological professionalism. It calls for a reversal of the dominant hermeneutics of suspicion to a hermeneutics of trust. It asserts the priority of text over context, of "listening in' over analysis, of literal sense over all kinds of hidden senses, of the canonical sense of Scripture in its natural habitat, the Church." -Karlfried Froehlich,
Benjamin B. Warfield Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Princeton Theological Seminary