Elmer Dyck and Regent College faculty members combine insights and expertise to offer a multidisciplinary approach for studying and applying the Bible. Contributors: Gordon Fee, J. I. Packer, Craig Gay, Loren Wilkinson, James Houston and Eugene Peterson.

Reading Scripture is a spiritual practice at the very heart of the Christian faith. But how is it possible to encounter God in reading the words of the Bible? Does reading the Christian Bible require a different approach from how one may read other texts or writings? What is required of the spiritual reader to read well? Seeking to answer such questions, Angela Lou Harvey provides a theological exploration of the idea of "spiritual reading" in the context of the Western church today. Drawing upon insights of theologians such as Karl Barth, Henri de Lubac, and Ellen F. Davis, the author suggests that the particulars of Christian belief profoundly shape the distinctive practice of the spiritual reading of the Bible.

In many places in the Western world, churchgoing is in decline and it cannot be assumed that people have a good grasp of the Bible's content. In this evolving situation, how would "the person on the street" read the Bible? Reading the Bible Outside the Church begins to answer this question. David Ford spent ten months at a chemical industrial plant providing non-churchgoing men with the opportunity to read and respond to five different biblical texts. Using an in-depth qualitative methodology, he charts how their prior experiences of religion, sense of (non)religious identity, attitudes towards the Bible, and beliefs about the Bible all shaped the readings that occurred.

This book explains and illustrates a variety of semiotic issues in the study of biblical law. Commencing with a review of relevant literature in linguistics, philosophy, semiotics and psychology, it examines biblical law in terms of its users, its medium and its message. It criticizes our use of the notion of 'literal meaning', at the level of both words and sentences, preferring to see meaning constructed by the narrative images that the language evokes. These images may come from either social experience or cultural narratives. Speech performance is important, both in the negotiation of the law and the narratives of its communication. Non-linguistic semiotic phenomena, utilizing other senses and involving such notions as space and time, also need to be taken into account. For the early biblical period, at least, conceptions of law based upon modern models need to be replaced by the notion of 'wisdom-laws'. Amongst the issues addressed in the course of the argument are the structure of the Decalogue, the role in the law of (Greenberg's) 'postulates', 'covenant renewal' and 'talionic punishment'.

This book considers the relationship between biblical readings and literary writings in early modern England and it explores the impact of how the Bible was read across a variety of writers and genres.