Unprotected Texts

Knust (religion, Boston Univ.), an American Baptist pastor, faces directly the diversity, even the self-contradiction, of biblical teachings about sex, sexuality, and desire and argues that biblical interpretations should be judged by their value, not by their validity, a perspective she finds practiced by Jesus Christ and by very important first- to fourth-century Christian leaders who creatively claimed "that the law and the prophets are, when read correctly, all about Jesus Christ." Christians, she writes, "are not passive recipients of what the Bible says, but active interpreters who make decisions about what we will believe and what we will affirm." Knust asserts that, rather than fixed, unmediated God-given meanings, Christians have been given the Holy Spirit, a community of disciples, and the Gospel of John; she cautions against interpretations which are "shallow and self-serving."