Those who study the New testament often seek the answers to two difficult questions. First, how to find a unified principle, an access point, with which to approach this daunting collection of texts. Second, how to bring the message of those texts, written in a profoundly different time and place, into engagement with the needs of the contemporary world. They seek, in other words, for a way both to interpret the New Testament, and a way to appropriate its message today.Living Texts finds an answer to both those questions in religious experience. The writers of the New Testament had a powerful experience of the living, crucified, and resurrected Christ that required a complete reinterpretation of the world and their place in it. The worshiping community today has an ongoing experience of the spirit of Christ that leads it back, time and again, to the texts of the New Testament, seeking to understand the meaning of that experience.Written in honor of Luke Timothy Johnson, whose own work has centered around the interplay of religious experience and scriptural interpretation, this book will aid all who seek the meaning of the New Testament, and its meaning for the life of the church today.