ROLAND BOER has an essay Against “Reception History” posted at Bible and Interpretation.
He makes some fair points, but there is a straw man in his argument as well. Historical-critical exegesis is not entirely unbiased and it cannot produce "one 'right' meaning" of the text, or even one original meaning. However, it does make a serious effort to look at the text the way the original author might have intended it or the original audience might have received it, drawing on philology, archaeology, and the like. This effort provides a narrower range of meanings than is found in the full history of interpretation to the present. Whether this range of meaning is somehow more primary than other, later ones, I leave to others to argue. Roland makes an interesting case against that view. But that range is valuable in itself as, for example, a resource for historians of the biblical period. Yes, the historical-critical method has its own limitations and biases, which constantly need to be interrogated by other methods and perspectives, but how interesting is this point really? It has been made endlessly already, and it applies to those other methods just as much. The hermeneutical spiral is a process, not a conclusion, but that doesn't mean no progress is possible in it. If every method is dismissed because it has inherent limitations, we stray from an asymptotic groping toward truth to a Gödelian infinite loop of prolegomena.
UPDATE (12 June): Chris Heard comments on the essay at the Blackwell Bible Commentaries website.
