Christian Humanist Profiles 259: Katherine Dell

Christian Humanist Profiles

When I was a novice in Biblical Studies Hans Frei’s book The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative invited me to consider not only the world that gave us the Bible but also the world that the Bible gives us, to read the canonical text as world-generating as well as world-contingent. As I continued in the discipline, another world emerged, namely the world that teaches us to pose certain questions and attend to certain realities within the text. And so I learned to understand the interplay of Torah and creation and wisdom and prophecy in these texts not only as emerging from their moments of composition–that never goes away–but also from the intellectual and cultural and military struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The stories of the Bible’s readers stand just as important as the stories of the Bible’s writers. Katherine Dell’s book The Lord by Wisdom Founded the Earth: Creation and Covenant in Old Testament Theology renews our inquiries into all of these worlds, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome her to the show.