allow ourselves to be moved by it, trusting that it is the one reliable guide to a life that is not, in the last analysis, desperate. Reading the Bible confessionally means reading it as the church’s Scripture, and the meeting I have described was the origin of the Scripture Project. This essay summarizes my own goals as a teacher of Bible in a seminary context; it is at the same time intended to provide guidelines for the kind of teaching that would in my judgment be most effective in congregational