Canter Bridge

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When I first picked up Interpretation many years ago prior to my own graduate studies in the field, I was working with a stingy book budget. An alert colleague warned me away from making my investment in that journal. ‘Not really a first-rate forum for biblical studies’, he commented, or something along those lines.

He was right, of course. ‘Gene was always right’, we still say to ourselves with several layers of irony.

Yet these many years later, Interpretation has become one of my favorite periodicals. It’s true you find the cutting-edge biblical work in JBL, CBQ, VT, and the like. Yet Interpretation, an organ of one of those Presbyterian seminaries that still leaves me wistful with its astonishing, somewhat weatherbeaten potential, brings together biblical scholarship, exegesis on behalf of the church, and preaching in a way that is close to unique.

It’s true that ink that could have been more wisely spilt is too often spent declaring ecumenical sympathies lest anyone think author too narrow. It’s a fact that texts are sometimes bent to decidely trendy ends.

Yet at the end of each quarterly issue of this venerable publication, I come away with the heart strangely warmed, as my Methodist friends might say (though seldom of a Presbyterian journal).

Good stuff all in all, once you blow a thin layer of dust off it. Very good stuff.