Chapter Title: Postscript

Book Title: The Postmodern Bible

Book Subtitle: The Bible and Culture Collective
Book Author(s): George Aichele, Fred W. Burnett, Robert M. Fowler, David Jobling,
Tina Pippin and Wilhelm Wuellner
Book Editor(s): Elizabeth A. Castelli, Stephen D. Moore, Gary A. Phillips and Regina M.
Schwartz
Published by: Yale University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1dr3804.13

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 The Postmodern Bible emerges in a world of competing discourses and
global conflicts and connections. Readers of literary and cultural critical
theory on the Bible will continue to face a multitude of methodologies and
readings that give no promise of a coherent picture. When we first began to
imagine writing this book, we thought we could provide a guide to the ter-
rain of contemporary culture and criticism. What we now better understand
is that the ideological gesture of providing such a map communicates the
notion that somehow we know everything that is going on and can assess
and communicate it meaningfully for someone else. The sense of distancia-
tion and omniscience that the map metaphor suggests is the last thing we
would want to communicate; it also is the farthest thing from the truth about
what we are able to do. We do not have a totalizing vision of the field; it
is changing so rapidly that we don't think anyone knows the where, when,
why, who, and bows of its energizing forces. What we offer here is something
much more modest and truthful, and we hope helpful: a text that reflects
and reflects upon aspects of the world of biblical scholarship by ten women
and men whose individual and now collective voices have entered into that
cacophony (or heteroglossia) that is postmodern culture.
The voices of biblical scholarship in this book represent many possible

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 ~ I~ I Postscript
entry points into the biblical text: structuralist, poststructuralist, psycho-
analytic, reader-response, rhetorical, feminist, womanist, and ideological.
Ideological criticism's enabling function, if it has one at all, is that it pro-
vides one place where these and other methodologies, epistemologies, and
"lived relations" can stand in conflict as well as conversation. It also invites
a resistance to easy assessments and cheap understanding.

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