Leading Biblical Scholar and CTI Member Beverly Gaventa Featured on CTI Podcast
While a member of CTI’s Inquiry on the Future of Theology, Beverly Gaventa recently spoke with Joshua Mauldin about biblical interpretation for a new episode of CTI’s Theology Matters podcast.
In this episode, Gaventa reflects on how Scripture is not a static text to be mastered but a living word that summons and shapes its readers. She starts by noting that biblical interpretation is often misunderstood as an attempt to extract specific lessons or historical facts for the text. According to Gaventa, however, the text resists being fully controlled by the interpreter. Gaventa therefore maintains that reading the Bible well involves allowing it to “read us” in return—a dynamic relationship that requires humility, patience, and attentiveness to how the text speaks across time.
Given this transtemporal reality, Gaventa emphasizes the importance of context. To understand Scripture soundly, readers must account for both the world in which it was originally written and the world in which it is now received. Gaventa encourages readers to hold these two worlds together, resisting the temptation to flatten ancient texts into modern soundbites. She observes that biblical authors wrote within specific cultural and political contexts, and that these contexts illuminate the meaning of their words. Yet the power of the text is not confined to these contexts, since it continues to address new audiences in fresh ways.
Gaventa concludes by commending a posture of openness in interpretation. Rather than approach the Bible primarily to confirm our own assumptions, she invites readers to be surprised, even unsettled, by what they find. Interpretation, she argues, is ultimately about transformation: encountering a text that can shape our imaginations, challenge our certainties, and draw us into deeper participation in God’s story. For Gaventa, this is what makes biblical interpretation both demanding and profoundly rewarding.
Beverly Gaventa is the Helen H.P. Manson Professor of New Testament Literature and Exegesis Emerita at Princeton Theological Seminary and Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Baylor University.