white blazes

Every teacher of exegesis has guidelines of methods for students, some complicated and exacting… First, I ask students to do a rhetorical analysis of the text, to notice what words are where, how they function together to create a ‘world’… Second, students are asked to do a word study, to focus on the freight carried by particular words that emerge as important in rhetorical analysis. The outcome is to situate the text in a network of other texts, so that while the text is the point of singular attention, it is not isolated. Third, when rhetorical analysis has noticed the artistic imagination in the text and its generative work, and when word study has uncovered the text’s intertextual relations, I ask students to ponder the question, What vested interest is operative in this text? The answer may be a truth claim offered in good faith, or it might be a theological conviction stated with passion, or it might be a bad-faith assertion serving political, economic interest. The purpose of the question is to help students consider the ways in which ideological forces are at work in our best theological claims and in our most faithful interpretation.