THE BIBLE IN THE CHURCH

This is quite definitely a scholar's book written by a scholar -- for scholars. But it is not as formidable for the average reader as would be indicated by the preceding sentence or one which appears in the introduction: ""Our study is really an historical sketch of hermeneutics, the methodology of interpretation."" For really what concerns Professor Grant is the way the Bible has been interpreted at various stages in the development of church history. As he says: ""The interpretation of any written record of human thought is the exposition of its author's meaning in terms of our own thought forms."" Accordingly, there is traced in successive chapters the interpretation of the Bible given by Jesus, by Paul and the other New Testament writers, by the church fathers, by the Reformers, by the Rationalists, by the Catholic modernists and by Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Protestants. Such a review necessitates profound and comprehensive scholarship and this the author has at his command, for such a volume as this involves giving an outline of the development of Christian thought.