“The Bible creates community,” wrote Timothy Beal in The Rise and Fall of the Bible, “by providing space for community to happen. It offers storied worlds and theological vocabularies around which people can come together in conversation about abiding questions. It calls for creative, collaborative participation.”11 This attitude stands in stark contrast to the winner-take-all posture in many fundamentalist Christian communities, which positions the solitary reader as objective arbiter of truth, his “straightforward” reading of the text final and exclusive. The refrain goes something like,
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