My dissertation takes up questions at the heart of ongoing controversies in American churches over the nature of biblical authority. Namely, I consider the literary and theological significance of hermeneutic frictions in the Bible—narrative discrepancies, composite authorship, and divergent representations of characters and histories—and how these frictions came to be narrated as matters of “historical” interest—largely irrelevant to literary and theological engagements with these texts. To this end, I develop an intellectual history of literary approaches to the Bible in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, demonstrating how literary investments in Biblical texts came to prioritize an aesthetics of stylistic unity, conceived in explicit opposition to historical critical study. With this in view, I move to offer an alternative to this restrictive understanding of “literary” interpretation. Building from the way that hermeneutic frictions appear as key literary devices in classic works of nineteenth-century literature, I develop my own constructive proposal: a doctrine of scripture that finds in these frictions not exceptions to otherwise functional hermeneutic rules, but constitutive elements of divine revelation, and thereby as sites for constructive theological reflection.