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Reader-response critics hold that, to understand the literary experience or the meaning of a text, one must look to the processes readers use to create that meaning and experience

In stressing the activity of the scholar, reader-response theory justifies such upsettings of traditional interpretations as, for example, deconstruction or cultural criticism.

Since reader-response critics focus on the strategies readers are taught to use, they address the teaching of reading and literature

During the late 1970s and 1980s, reader-response criticism, influenced in part by trends in other disciplines, especially psychology and psychoanalytical theories, expanded to include a study of the reader as subject, a combination of various social practices, defined and positioned socially by his or her environment. This shift from the relationship between reader and text, and their mutual impact, to a focus on self-knowledge and observation has been summarized in anthologies, including Jane Tompkins's Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Poststructuralism (1980).

All this hoop jumping an technique labeling, to get at the exegetical method Paul himself was explaining. "The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life." The idea that we must know the letter of the law was foundational for Paul, which is very much equivalent to the modern idea that we can have some kind of certain knowledge about a text's meaning. The postmodern claim is essentially that inherent meaning does not exist, that individuals invest reality with their own meaning (true enough), and so there is no concrete meaning to the Bible beyond what we say; this is like trying to start with the Spirit, and end with the Law, the reverse of the New Testament project. But, as one prophet put it, we must worship God "in Spirit, and in Truth." We must pay attention to what the text says, and what the author's themselves intended to communicate to their audiences, and we must also pay attention to the underlying Spirit, the principles and intentions that reveal themselves as relevant for all audiences at all times. In short, we must have both approaches, working in tandem, and preferably with a new label, if we are to have something resembling truly Biblical exegesis.