[Excerpt] Richard Briggs’s paper, “A Test Case in Ascriptive Realism: The Quest of the Historical Daniel and Its Complex Relationship to the Practices of Scriptural Interpretation,” shrewdly resists typical dichotomies between history and theology. Briggs declines to think of the Bible as essentially about the past, seeing it neither as a record of past events, one that is either accurate or inaccurate as such, nor as an event of past but not ongoing communication—a text that spoke but that no longer speaks in the present. As Briggs sees it, the Bible is not in its essence about the past, but there is still a great deal to be learned, even for the sake of an interpretation that is theologically substantive, from historical investigation of ...