Revisiting Rollins: A Brief Consideration of Wayne G. Rollins’s Work on Psychological Biblical Criticism

Abstract Thirteen years after a Festschrift in his honor, it is time to revisit the work of Wayne G. Rollins. Rollins is the foremost scholar of a recently developed discipline within biblical studies known as psychological biblical criticism (PBC). He advocated for and created a program unit within the Society of Biblical Literature in the early 1990s; in the span of 10 years (2004–2014), PBC sparked close to 200 works by other scholars. The task I’ve set in this paper is to summarize and evaluate an abridged version of his seminal work, Soul and Psyche: The Bible in Psychological Perspective (1999) , which he summarized in a journal article in Pastoral Psychology (Rollins, 2002). I offer a summary overview of Rollins’s scholarship in PBC by focusing on the genesis of his work, his apologetic for the discipline itself, and his vision for the future of PBC. I then offer a brief consideration of his strengths and weaknesses, and I propose a new course of action for PBC: instead of attempting to formulate a methodological theory, practitioners of PBC should embrace David Tracy’s pluralistic attitude and a hermeneutic of love.