ABSTRACT
Reader-response criticism in its hard form is essentially solipsistic, even if the reader is a corporate entity such as the Church rather than an individual. Hard reader-response criticism should thus carry a Health Warning, especially for Protestants who like to appeal to the Bible to undergird what they teach. A theory of scriptural authority in which everyone can choose what the scriptural texts are to mean is so weak a theory that there seems little point in bothering with it. It does indeed remove one embarrassing feature of most actual Christian reading of the Bible. This chapter argues that reader-response approaches are a mixture of good and bad, and that should be discriminating in using them when studying the Bible. Of course there are many good, non-biblical reasons for not being a Nazi. But whether or not the Bible supports these reasons is essentially an empirical question.
