When you stand on the edge of the Klondike River in Canada's Yukon, it appears to act as a river should, heading downhill on its eventual trek to the Bering Sea. When you dip your canoe into the water, however, what seemed a steady and regular flow often becomes dancing and swirling, tossing and capsizing.

Today's tumultuous world of biblical studies is much like that river. I remember my initial entry into it. My peers and I blithely embarked on our first NT Introductory course, presuming a serene, methodical trip in pursuit of biblical truth. Competing currents, underwater obstacles and unexpected baptisms by postmodern fire proved more the order of the day once we entered the stream.

I would not trade in those experiences for anything. The past two decades have been a happy collision with the world of ideas, theology and Christian community. Few other generations of students have had the opportunity to confront such an interpretive plethora, from the historical, theological and literary to the more recent rhetorical, liberationist and feminist schools. The evolution is making methodological pluralists of us all, and that is only for the good of interpretation, I believe.

In the midst of such rapid change, another book may seem like an anachronism. The binding of a volume is even posed by some as antithetical to our global electronic information culture: books trap ideas and half-baked visions in static snapshots. But any trepidation we have at surrendering to print ideas that represent only part of our story is mostly false.