—Wendell Berry
In Defense of Literacy (2023)

—John Saward
Cradle of Redeeming Love: The Theology of the Christmas Mystery (2002)

When we reflect that “sentence” means, literally, “a way of thinking” (Latin: sententia) and that it comes from the Latin sentire, to feel, we realize that the concepts of sentence and sentence structure are not merely grammatical or merely academic—not negligible in any sense. A sentence is both the opportunity and the limit of thought—what we have to think with, and what we have to think in. It is, moreover, feelable thought, a thought that impresses its sense not just on our understanding, but on our hearing, our sense of rhythm and proportion. It is a pattern of felt sense.

—Wendell Berry
Standing by Words (1982)

• Today’s biblical readers stand within a long tradition of readers who have been shaped by the Scriptures; and it is the Wirkungsgeschichte—the powerful impact of the Scriptures on the faith and life of the church—that prevents a subjective free-for-all in the way that individual readers interpret the Bible and maintain its authoritative role within the church. Familiarity with the way the Scriptures have fruitfully been read throughout the church’s history is not an obstacle to proper interpretation but is rather its sine qua non. In biblical interpretation, familiarity doesn’t breed contempt; it breeds insight and understanding.

• Over and over again, it has struck me how often the patristic interpretations are so similar to one another. . . . Compared to the bewildering variety of exegetical choices among modern and postmodern interpreters, patristic exegesis comes across as remarkably homogeneous, and this is noteworthy considering that the emphasis on “method” in modern biblical scholarship was supposed to lead to greater certainty and unanimity with regard to the one true meaning of the text—such in contrast with the allegedly arbitrary (and therefore, one would think, wildly varying) readings of the church fathers.

—Hans Boersma
Scripture as Real Presence (2018)