I didn’t mean to suggest that if the Bible does not perform well in the role so often assigned to it, it has no legitimate place at all in the religious community. My intentions were only to comment on the disconnect between what the Bible seems to say and our attitudes toward what it must say, or what it is assumed to say.

The other side of the question, which I think is what you’re raising, is how the Bible might then appropriately function in religious worship. I’ve tinkered for a long time with the idea of regarding scripture not as a codification of policy, but rather as a potential conduit to the divine.

What I think you’re saying about “genuine encounters with the text” is that encounters vary perhaps in degree but certainly not in type. But I think there actually are less genuine encounters with the text that it’s useful to think of as qualitatively different–specifically, when the text itself is not involved at all. As with any famous work, this may be the case more often than not, and is as true of biblical scholars as lay worshippers: we encounter someone’s secondhand ideas about the Bible rather than the text itself. (How many thinkers am I familiar with through secondary sources only???) This isn’t necessarily bad, but it sometimes makes it easy to perpetuate this sort of disconnect.

But I part ways with you when you suggest that the knotty hermeneutic problems of a text as various the Bible make it a poor candidate for religion-making. On the contrary, it seems to me, the Bible provides a glorious superabundance of evocative, malleable, suggestive, confusing, mysterious, ancient, exotic, terrifying, sublime religious raw materials—that is, it conveys the very substances of the sacred, and the sacred, above all and uniquely, is what religion offers to humans. Indeed, scripture itself, in making claims on the reader, invites the cultural overdetermination through which we make our own claims on scripture—and it’s precisely those layers of cultural overdetermination, so obfuscating in the seminar room, that stir the soul in the chapel. Handbooks and position papers can be put out by committees; the patina of holiness cannot.

(Obviously, I try to evaluate my students’ arguments on their merits–there’s no single interpretation of the Bible to which everyone is commanded to subscribe, on peril of their grades. But, old-fashioned that I am, if a student submitted a paper saying, “To me ‘thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk’ means ‘separate milk and meat,’” I would ask for more academic rigor.)

Maybe it is arrogantly attempting to impose one’s view of the Bible on others, but I have no problem with scholars arguing (civilly) for the reading of the text that makes the most sense to them (rather than retreating into relativist claims that no single interpretation can be privileged over any other, out of respect for the interpreter). At my own school I took separate courses in the history of Israelite religion and in biblical theology (a distinction that’s somewhat artificial), and I’m much more interested in the former. But I think the honest biblical theologian is obligated to account in some way for the scholarship the studies in Israelite religion produce, even if only to dismiss them.