The opening of Unleashing Scripture is controversial and incendiary. “Most North American Christians assume that they have a right, if not an obligation, to read the Bible. I challenge that assumption. No task is more important than for the Church to take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America. Let us no longer give the Bible to all children ... Let us rather tell them and their parents that they are possessed by habits far too corrupt for them to be encouraged to read the Bible on their own” (15). In some sense this is a book about how to read the Bible, but it is not a book about interpretation. He writes, “I cannot pretend that this is another book that develops hermeneutical theory ... Indeed I suspect that hermeneutics becomes the preoccupation of theology when the text of Scripture is divorced from the particular practices of the Church that make it make sense in the first place” (18). In other words, if expertise in hermeneutics is all it takes to rightly understand the Bible then an expert in interpretation may read the Bible as well as any Christian, even if he is an unbeliever. This is just what Hauerwas rejects. As such, he rejects the doctrine of sola scriptura (as popularly understood). For him, there is no meaning contained in the text apart from the community which gives it meaning. Put another way, sola scriptura becomes “sola text” outside the community which acknowledges its authority as sacred scripture. “It assumes that the text of Scripture makes sense separate from a Church that gives it sense” (27). He argues that in order to hear the voice of God in scripture we must be transformed by the grace of God through the Church. “So Scripture will not be self-interpreting or plain in its meaning unless we have been transformed in order to be capable of reading it” (49). What a book! Highly recommended to all.