I'm grateful for your open letter, your generous comments and the critical questions you raise. Two general concerns seem to emerge, and it is to these that I shall respond here. The first is that I am too dismissive of the real value of the historical-critical method. Rightly objecting to its ‘hegemony’ in modern biblical studies, I'm in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The second is that the theological orientation that I bring to biblical interpretation is too ‘cerebral’: this makes me insufficiently attentive to the provisionality of our knowledge of God and to the particularities of a place called ‘the real world’.