In order to expose ideologies that perpetuate closure and to encourage ideologies that nurture openness, therefore, a person can work carefully through inner textures to intertextures and ideologies that open to complexly interwoven social and cultural textures of signification. Since all of these aspects of the text are complexly interwoven into one another, an interpreter must weave in, out, and through them to provide a "thick description" that thwarts strategies that hide their own omissions and limitations, and that weakens a politics that makes people and issues marginal or invisible. Openly using the four arenas in view in socio-rhetorical criticism, we can develop approaches that celebrate dialogue, that show interplays of closure and openness, and that encourage us to announce our agendas in public forum and to listen as people show us the implications, limitations, and biases of these agendas.

This finally means that one of the major issues is the knowledge we attribute to the narrational voices in our texts. Do those voices know anything about the society and culture out of which they speak, or are they "naive"? One of the most distinctive aspects of Teacher is its "reading" of the text after analysis of inner texture, intertexture, social and cultural texture, and ideology. For this reason, it does not give a reading in which narrational voices in the text speak primarily out of Euro-American individualist society and culture. Instead, the reading equips the narrational voices with as much social, cultural, and ideological information about ancient Mediterranean culture that I could muster at that time. Hopefully, others will join in this endeavor and improve it in many ways. Since modern knowledge about ancient culture is informed by the issues of living in an international world of foreign societies and cultures, these narrational voices open the "foreign world of the text" in a manner that richly informs our faith and lives as we live in the midst of "foreign cultures" at the turn of the century, which is also the turn of a millenium.

I am grateful for the many reviewers who have supported the course of analysis I tried to chart in Teacher. It has been exciting to see the growing number of books and articles building on this initial work.⁹³ It seems certain now that the 90's are bringing more coherent and synthetic uses of adjacent disciplines to the study of the Gospels and Acts. I will be pleased if socio-rhetorical criticism as it began in Teacher can continue to nurture an environment of interpretation that encourages people to develop a genuine interest in people who live in foreign cultures with values, norms, and goals quite different from our own. Only if we can build a method of analysis like this within our Christianized culture can Western Christianity be a leader in the work of reconciliation and equitable distribution of food, wealth, and respect on the planet earth during the twenty-first century.