Book Briefs: September 16, 1988

The Literary Guide to the Bible, edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Belknap Press, 678 pp.; $29.95, cloth). Reviewed by D. Bruce Lockerbie, Staley Foundation scholar in residence, the Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York.

In an era of feel-good theology and relational homiletics, biblical exposition by textual analysis—the old-fashioned, verse-by-verse teaching once standard in evangelical churches—has become the pulpit’s dodo. Few preachers today know how to open a passage of Scripture and bring it to life.

Furthermore, in most Christian schools, colleges, and seminaries, Bible teaching generally means talking about the Bible rather than studying the text itself. As a teacher of English and Bible at the Stony Brook School, I’m often asked, “What textbook do you use?” Naïvely I reply, “The NIV.” The question, I know, refers not to the translation of the Bible but to whatever adjunct handbooks are supposed necessary to assist teenagers in reading the Scriptures.

We don’t need additional textbooks; we do need to learn how to read and comprehend, read and interpret, read and apply the language, poetry, narratives, and arguments of the Bible. Perhaps The Literary Guide to the Bible will help us reacquire these long-absent skills.

Thoughtful Readers

The book is a “literary guide”; its editors and 26 contributing essayists are literary critics—that is, thoughtful, careful, and critical readers of and commentators on the art of literature. Some of them also possess biblical credentials. For example, Robert Alter, one of the general editors, has written widely respected biblical studies.

However, as Wallace Alcorn pointed out in a letter to the New York Times Book Review in regard to its review of Literary Guide, none of the contributors is a recognized evangelical. And in some instances, the authors would hardly confess to being even traditionally orthodox.

Yet what each contributor brings to this compelling volume is a capacity to read the text as it stands: Not the form critic’s assumed “proto-text,” labeled with some arbitrary letter of the alphabet to give it added mystery, but the standard textus receptus for all English-speaking and literary-minded readers of the Bible, the King James Version.

Alter makes the point, reiterated by Kermode and others, that biblical scholarship has for too long ignored its own greatest asset, “the texts as they actually exist.” Forsaking the “largely disintegrative commentary” of biblical debunkers for a more sympathetic approach, these writers bring to the Bible the same integrity and intellectual rigor they have otherwise applied to the canon of Shakespeare, Dickens, James, or Eliot.

Peeling Away The Superficial

Even for evangelicals, whose view of Scripture is higher and more authoritative than these writers admit, the result is sometimes breathtaking exegesis, the kind of interpretation that peels away layers of superficial knowledge and unlocks a treasure chest beneath. In Alters “Introduction to the Old Testament,” his close reading of the Jephthah narrative may be worth the price of the entire book. Arguing against any presumed lack of literary sophistication among the ancient scribes, Alter uses the Jephthah tragedy to illustrate “the poised choreography of words” (what a phrase!) marking the great stories of the Old Testament. Mining the text for every nugget, Alter discovers the narrator’s “constant artful determinations” in telling his tale. The result is an exemplary disclosure of the text. J. P. Fokkelman’s unfolding of the Genesis narratives also stands out. The scintillating scholarly reasoning of the general essay by Sir Edmund Leach, “Finishing for Men on the Edge of the Wilderness,” cannot be questioned, even if one disagrees with its conclusions. Moshe Greenberg’s explication of Job sparkles in its clarity. John Drury’s revealing treatment of Luke achieves its climax as he shows the risen Christ opening up the Scriptures to the Emmaus-bound companions. “Good exegesis plucks from the mind a rooted sorrow and sets the heart aglow,” writes Drury. His essay is another model of the kind.

This book reminds me of a favorite moment in the history of biblical instruction, Ezra’s reading of the Law while the Levites interpreted it: “They read from the Book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people could understand what was being read” (Neh. 8:8, NIV).

If only every professing Bible teacher in schools, colleges, and especially seminaries would heed those words! If every preacher, instead of looking for a catchy topic for this week’s sermon, would practice the art of literary explication, the gift of biblical exposition—then perhaps those of us who sit in the pew would not be so biblically illiterate.

The Poet As Prophet

T. S. Eliot: The Philosopher Poet, by Alzina Slone Dale (Harold. Shaw, 224 pp.; $17.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Pat Hargis, assistant professor of writing and literature, Judson College, Elgin, Illinois.

April is the crudest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

With these words, T. S. Eliot began The Waste Land, the poem that lamented the fragmentary and depressed condition of post-World War I Europe, revolutionized the writing of poetry in English, and expressed his own need for a sense of belonging and wholeness.

But during a spring more than 17 years later, Eliot published another poem, “East Coker,” which repeats the theme from an entirely different perspective:

The wounded surgeon plies the steel

That questions the distempered part;

Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

The sharp compassion of the healer’s art

Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Eliot still knows suffering, as he did throughout his life, but now it is the suffering, redeemed by “the wounded surgeon” with “the bleeding hands,” which must precede the hope of resurrection (Phil. 3:10–11).

September 26 of this year marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Eliot, the twentieth-century’s greatest English poet. Harold Shaw Publishers has joined the celebration by publishing T. S. Eliot: The Philosopher Poet, by Alzina Stone Dale. In this literary biography, which narrates the major events of Eliot’s life and discusses his major writings, Dale approaches Eliot, as her title suggests, as both poet and thinker. She gives equal weight to his poetry, his literary criticism, and his social criticism; and—in what is the strongest aspect of this book—she takes his Christianity seriously and understands what it means to his life and to his work.

Thin In The Middle

As biography, the book is particularly successful in its early and late chapters. Here the narrative is at its best, and the portrait of Eliot its clearest. Dale gives a strong sense of Eliot’s family and the cities of his youth—late nineteenth-century St. Louis and early twentieth-century Boston. The later chapters offer a well-paced telling of post-World War II events in Eliot’s life: the successful plays produced in London, the social criticism of the postwar world, the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize, and his happy marriage to Valerie Fletcher.

The middle portion of the book is not as satisfying, essentially because it covers too much ground in too little space. So many events have to be noted, so many significant people introduced that one never has time to settle into and assimilate any particular topic. (Dale’s style in this section exacerbates the problem; often the text reads like a series of note cards strung together without transitions.) Many things happen to and around Eliot, but a clear picture of him as poet, banker, and editor never develops. The significant people of the period between the wars—his wife, Vivien Haigh-Wood; Ezra Pound; Bertrand Russell; Virginia Woolf; and many others—never take on any depth, and remain only names.

Eliot’s books, however, are treated much better in this middle section, where they are given their proper contexts in Eliot’s life and thinking. Dale shows herself particularly perceptive in noting that, while Eliot’s poetry was being pushed by Pound in the late 1910s, it was the publication of Eliot’s first volume of literary criticism, The Sacred Wood (1920), that actually paved the way for the reception of The Waste Land (1922).

Dale also does a fine job with Eliot’s conversion and the events surrounding his entry into the Anglican church. But still, this middle section would have been much better had it been half again as long and developed in more detail.

Tenuous Connections

Incomplete development also hurts the author’s efforts to tie Eliot to other prominent literary Christians of his time, such as G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. Unfortunately, most of Dale’s comments are only surface allusions: Chesterton once did something similar; Sayers once said something like this. Perhaps her desire to make this a brief, introductory volume caused her to leave these connections underdeveloped.

Dale’s impulse is correct—the relationships between Eliot and his Christian contemporaries have not been explored fully. For decades he has been easily tied to Modernism and to the artistic/philosophical circle of the Bloomsbury Group; however, his more subtle ties to Fleet Street, St. Anne’s, Canterbury, and Oxford will require more than study of the letters and other biographical records. In fact, a thorough treatment of this question may well require a larger volume than this one. But Dale’s work along these lines makes some significant observations and does well to make students of Eliot consider these relationships.

On the whole, The Philosopher Poet is a solid introduction to Eliot’s life and work, written from a long-needed, distinctly Christian point of view. Though Eliot cannot be called an evangelical, we do well to explore the work of this profoundly Christian man who lived in a profoundly unchristian time. As Dale notes in her “Postscript”:

Eliot has become a prophet without honor in his own century, a major poet whose preaching is ignored. But seen as a philosopher poet, Eliot’s vision of a Christian life has something to say to our late twentieth-century world. Today theology has become so secular that the intersection of time and the timeless, of the everyday and the mysterious, has lost any sense of the holy. In this age of anxiety, Eliot speaks to that condition. He describes our modern alienation and despair, then offers us the hope of his own “turning.”

Executive Faithfulness

In Search of Faithfulness, by William E. Diehl (Fortress, 127 pp.; $5.95, paper). Reviewed by John A. Baird, Jr., vice-president, Eastern College, St. Davids, Pennsylvania.

When a retired Bethlehem Steel executive decided to search contemporary society for Christian faithfulness (“a characteristic that acknowledges God’s graceful relationship with us by striving to grow more charitable in our daily lives”), he began by looking where faithfulness appeared not to be—in the business community. What he found, surprisingly, said more about the church and its failure to nurture faith than about the world of business.

William Diehl’s quest took the form of a survey of corporate management, similar to that used by Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman in their bestselling book In Search of Excellence. In interviews and questionnaires, 244 Christian business executives were asked how they looked at their faith and what factors shaped their corporate decisions. They were queried about experiences that helped form their religious convictions, their degree of practice of religious disciplines, and to whom they would turn in time of trouble.

Faithful Christians, the author’s search revealed, enjoy a sense of identity with God; they strive to grow as believers. They pray and meditate on a regular basis, and they find satisfaction in religious-community participation. They give to others, possess a keen sense of justice, and “have no other gods.” In other words, they put God first in their lives. The author adds two disclaimers: Not all persons cited as models of faithfulness possessed all seven qualities, and possessing these qualities does not assure salvation, nor does lacking them confirm an unregenerate nature.

Diehl, however, does more than tabulate the answers to questions. He flavors In Search of Faithfulness with chatty, personal observations based on more than 30 years of experience as a corporate officer and Christian layman. He quotes Scripture, refers to contemporary theologians, and includes a few maxims of the American Management Association. Diehl also comes down hard on the church, an emphasis that provides the essential thrust of the book.

Is The Church To Blame?

The author examines deficiencies of the church in connection with each of the seven attributes of faithfulness. For example, in the chapter on a sense of identity, Diehl notes that more than 60 percent of the respondents confirmed their work as a kind of ministry. Many even felt called by God to their occupations. But he also notes clerical resistance to the concept. Many ordained ministers believe a call is limited to professional church occupations.

In another chapter, dealing with Christian growth, Diehl finds the church again at fault for offering educational programs that emphasize content but lack connections with the experience of belief. America is a pragmatic how-to nation, but most churches fail adequately to link biblical truth with the complexities of the work place. Most preachers cannot relate religious teaching to labor-and-management decisions.

Churches are also blamed for doing too little to encourage the personal prayer life of their members. Clerics, the author charges, see prayer exclusively as a church activity. Likewise, the sense of Christian community is sequestered in the church, although it needs to go beyond the parish or congregation.

Separating Faith From Workplace

Such shortcomings encourage Christians in business to separate their secular lives from their sacred commitments, instead of enjoying a unified life.

The writer completes his provocative mission with a chapter about the barriers to faithfulness. Both business and the church are to blame, he says. The former considers Jesus Christ a threat and therefore ignores him. The latter has pulled God’s people away from engagement in the world. The result has been that the church has become increasingly irrelevant in American life and culture.

Some readers may feel the author is overly critical of the local church and its ministers. Indeed, he makes sweeping charges. Many believers do find nurture and solace in their congregational and parish life. Had Diehl acknowledged that fact, he would have strengthened his book.

Yet overall, In Search of Faithfulness represents an intelligent look at an elusive subject and contributes worthwhile discussion toward closing the false dichotomy of sacred and secular, church and business, faith and daily life.

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