C. Seitz on Brevard Childs

But we can now list alternatives to Childs's subtle version of authorial intention: 1) The text has an intentionality that transcends and is not strictly derivative of any authorial intention; such intentionality is supple and pluriform (New Criticism).
2) The various intentionalities revealed by critical method must not be correlated in such a way as to give undue priority to the final form of the text, which is only one of many, either enriching or distorting, points of view (redaction criticism). 3) The search for intentionality is a deception—readers alone supply intentionality, not texts (deconstruction).
4) What intentionality we can discover in the Old Testament is culturally bound and must therefore be run through a critical sieve to determine its political usefulness; to do otherwise would be to distort the Bible's essentially political and materialist handling of God and reality (various forms of materialist demythologizing).