I would like to thank President Gillespie and the faculty of the Princeton Theological Seminary for the invitation to deliver the 1992 Frederick Neumann Memorial Lecture. It is a privilege to join Dr. Edith Neumann, who is with us this evening, in honoring the memory of her scholar-husband. Although Dr. Neumann died a year before I began my biblical studies I think that, had I had the privilege of knowing him, we would have had much in common. His passion, which I share, was to make Scripture be word of God for its hearers. This was expressed in a lecture he gave in 1962 at the Hartford Theological Seminary Foundation. In that lecture he said, "In order to hear God speak to us through the ancient documents, we must give ourselves to [God) with the total surrender of faith. The personal decision of faith and the critical analysis of ancient records are two quite different things. But they arc neither incompatible nor are they unrelated."1