Preface and Chapter 1 of David A. DeSilva's -An Introduction to the New Testament: Contexts, Methods & Ministry Formation-

In the preface to this book, David DeSilva contrasts two types of reading scripture: devotional reading, which focuses on hearing the voice of God, and a purely academic reading. DeSilva maintains that these modes of reading should not stand in opposition to each other but should, rather, compliment each other in their use by the church community. His two objectives in the writing of this book are 1) to allow people to more prayerfully and critically engage and interact with the New Testament, and 2) to enable people to better understand how the Spirit of God is moving through the texts to establish the church community in his image.

The approach used in the book is founded upon "socio-rhetorical interpretation" as a mode of exegesis. By this is meant one is to use a plethora of resources in order to fully understand how the text is able to persuade its audience on multiple levels of understanding for the purpose building up the church. To go about this, DeSilva notes that this will require textual analysis on four distinct levels. The first, the "inner texture," focus on the words that the author uses in order to craft a text that is meaningful. Second, the "intertexture". This requires examining how the author interacts with other texts. The third layer focuses on the social, cultural, and historical world of the author and his intended readers. The fourth "ideological texture" looks at how the text is used by the author to achieve certain goals.

The focus of the first chapter is a survey on the production and canonization of the 27 accepted books of the New Testament. Both processes, production and canonization, can be seen as pastoral response conducted to deal with issues and questions in the church. Three criteria are put forward that were essential to a text's being included among the canon: apostolicity, antiquity, and catholicity. In wrapping up the discussion of the first chapter, DeSilva states the following which I find quite interesting:

Although inspiration would later become linked with canonicity, the early church did not equate the two... The attempt to define a standard collection of inspired texts was not an attempt to distinguish between words that God had inspired and words that God had not inspired, but rather an attempt to gather together the resources that would continually and reliably point the churches back to the apostolic witness.