The heart of this book is a constructive theological proposal concerning the authority of scripture. The Bible is authoritative, Lee contends, not chiefly because it reliably reports what God said or did in the past, but rather because God uses such reports to speak directly to the people of God today. The meaning of a biblical text, therefore, is primarily a function of how God uses it to speak in the present, and not what it meant in its original historical or canonical setting.

Lee erects this account of biblical authority chiefly on the basis of his reading of the Letter to the Hebrews, and, in particular, on its method of handling citations from the Old Testament. The author of Hebrews describes the word of God as ‘living and active’ (4:12), and Lee demonstrates how this conviction informs the ancient writer's practices of interpreting scripture in light of Christ. For example, the author of Hebrews cites a passage from Psalm 95 that begins with the words, ‘Today when you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts’ (Heb 3:7–8). For the author of Hebrews, the admonition is a living word addressed directly by God to contemporary readers of his epistle; the original audience of the Psalm is scarcely in view. This contemporising perspective brings a host of consequences. It entails, for instance, a new understanding of the Psalm's reference to ‘my rest’ (Heb 3:11; cf. Ps 95:11), that is, the reward which God has promised his people. In its original context, the phrase refers to the Promised Land. For the author of Hebrews, in contrast, it refers to the inheritance of eternal life won by Christ, the mediator of the new covenant.

Setting aside the advisability of developing a model of scriptural authority on the basis of a single book, Lee is to be applauded for doing constructive theology in close conversation with biblical exegesis, and vice versa. That is not the limit of his ambition in this book, however. He also incorporates historical theology into his project. In fact, the whole first half of the book is given over to a detailed comparison of the views of Augustine and John Calvin on the relationship of the Old and New Testaments. Lee's chief interest in these chapters is announced by his book's subtitle, ‘Scripture, the Covenants, and the People of God’. In two densely detailed chapters, Lee argues that on the topics in question, the similarities between Augustine and Calvin are outweighed in the end by their differences. For Augustine, the Christian Bible is a story about two fundamentally different covenants and two fundamentally different peoples, Israel and the Church, of which the former exists only in order to point to the superiority of the latter. For Calvin, in contrast, the Bible is a story about one covenant and one people, which exists in salvation-historical continuity, first as Israel and then as the Church.

Lee argues that the Letter to the Hebrews offers yet a third perspective that falls midway, as it were, between the views of Augustine and Calvin. With Calvin, Hebrews conceives the biblical narrative as a story about a single people whose identity remains fundamentally constant from creation to new creation; with Augustine, Hebrews conceives God's history with this people as divided into two covenants of vastly different value. Thus Hebrews celebrates a single people in two radically asymmetric covenants, Old and New, and thereby offers an alternative to the views of both Augustine and Calvin. It is this distinctive vision of salvation history that undergirds the scriptural hermeneutics of Hebrews, and so, in turn, Lee's own proposal regarding the authority of scripture.

In the last two chapters of this six-chapter book, Lee develops the implications of his model of scriptural authority for a range of related topics. These include the necessity and limitations of interpretive freedom, the legitimacy of multiple senses of scripture, the place of historical criticism in the theological reading of scripture, the mode of God's self-revelation after the apostolic age and the relation of Scripture and tradition. Given the wide scope of topics addressed, it is not surprising that the level of discussion remains fairly abstract and concise.

In the end, this tantalising book would have accomplished more if it had attempted less. The organisation is unwieldy, and the central thesis strangely underdeveloped – indeed, hard to identify – amidst a proliferation of detail. Despite these shortcomings, the book gives ample evidence of a well-informed theologian with interesting things to say. It encourages us to hope for better things to come.