Exegesis As Escape Route

“But all is not bliss in our new Arcadia. As the metanarrative emerges from our reading of the canonical literature, we find more than a few stones from the driveway in our narratival Cream of Wheat. The Bible, alas, contains some uncooperative, “angular” texts. Try as we might, we cannot get those puppies to fit with the contours of what we think the metanarrative would have looked like had we written it . . . It is not really your reviewer’s place to suggest that Christians who have serious ethical problems with the Bible may actually be Christians who have been smoking some imported vegetation. So he won’t. But nevertheless, this does present quite a theological problem. How can one submit to a text which won’t submit back? This calls for some scholarly exegesis!” (Contours of Post Maturity, pp. 22-23).