At the suggestion of a friend, I'm reading Karen Armstrong's The Bible: A Biography, which is a very good foil for some of the other reading I'm doing these days as I'm reaching back into the fundamentalist library for a project I'm working on. It's interesting to cross-reference Armstrong's work with Charles Ryrie's book, A Survey of Bible Doctrine and to check to see what Wilkinson's Talk Thru the Bible flatly asserts about the authorship of various books compared to Armstrong's scholarship.
There's a paragraph in the introduction in which Armstrong talks about the guiding principles of exegesis for some of those who have shaped the selection and the composition of the canon that I liked a lot. It was actually one of the things that caught my ear when Bill was talking about the book. So I'm going to get off the page and let Armstrong's words speak for themselves, it's good stuff I think:
Some of the most important biblical authorities insisted that charity must be the guiding principle of exegesis: any interpretation that spread hatred or disdain was illegitimate. All the world faiths claim that compassion is not only the prime virtue and the test of true religiosity but that it actually introduces us to Nirvana, God or the Dao. But sadly the biography of the Bible represents the failures as well as the triumphs of the religious quest. The biblical authors and their interpreters have all too often succumbed to the violence, unkindness and exclusivity that is rife in their societies.