Sometimes Wave,Sometimes Particle

Abstract

This article is a response to the ongoing, weighty and often caustic critique of my work by Robert Carroll. Over a lifetime of ‘ideology spotting’, Carroll has rejected any attempt to take the faith claims of the text with theological seriousness, and has targeted my work as a model for the failure of such an approach. My response is an insistence that every approach to the text, that of ‘ideology spotting’ as well as ‘theological seriousness’, moves from a faith claim and a ‘prejudice’, whether explicit or not. Thus, there is no ‘high ground’ in interpretation, as Carroll assumed about his own work in his dismissiveness of mine. Rather, interpretation that is generative is an act of playful imagination that allows, after Gadamer, for interpretation to move in and out of theological seriousness. Such a perspective seeks to shun very one-dimensional reductionism.