The title for the symposium represented in this volume of essays is derived from an important claim of the Second Vatican Council that marked, for Catholics, a recognition of a reality that had been largely obscured for us by the polemics of the Counter-Reformation, namely, that Scripture is indeed the soul of theology.' I say "for Catholics" because the churches of the Reformation retained a sense of the centrality of Scripture in Christian life, worship, and thought that the Catholic Church seemed to lose sight of during the four centuries that followed the Reformation. So, for Catholics, the Council's insistence that Scripture is the soul of theology as well as its proclamation that Scripture is the pure and perennial source of the spiritual life 2 constituted a reclaiming of our authentic heritage after a four-hundred-year period of biblical aridity if not drought.