How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart

Fee, Gordon D. & Douglas Stuart. How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982.

I pulled this book off my shelf while looking for resources to teach my teenage daughter some hermeneutics. I last looked at it in 1988. There's been a lot of water under the bridge since then. Fee and Stuart set out to write a basic introduction to biblical interpretation which is accessible to anyone. In this, they largely succeed. Yet there are several reasons I'm not going to use it with my daughter. First and foremost is the approach they seem to take to the Scriptures. While Fee and Stuart are excellent biblical scholars, they tend to approach interpretation of the Bible as if it exists in a vacuum, where other literature and the tools of literary interpretation don't exist. This seems to be as a first slippery slope toward treating the Scripture as immune to the type of analysis we would apply to other literature. I don't think that is appropriate. It's something I try to guard against.  Another reason I am staying clear of this text with my daughter is that Fee and Stuart seem to adhere to a sort of baptistic decision theology, a bias which shows in their almost offhand dismissal of any views which would take issue with that stance. While I will not hold their theological standpoint against them, I do think they should consider other points of view and interpretations seriously in a work of serious scholarship. For someone with no other literary training and no other good means for gaining familiarity with the general themes and interpretive processes typically used in different portions of Scripture, the book would doubtless be useful. But why not use a good study Bible with its wealth of introductory material? That is going to give the reader more tools than he will find in this volume. 

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Dave Spotts
blogging at http://capnsaltyslongvoyage.blogspot.com