It has been remarked with wry hauteur that literary criticism is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. This conclusion was presumably the product of observing that for someone who is clever and has time on his or her hands, a piece of writing is fair game. So literary criticism is implicitly viewed as an enterprise both democratic and aristocratic: democratic because in fact the discipline does not make excessively serious demands; aristocratic because the guild of critics requires that others take its gnostic expertise excessively seriously. Such allegations may or may not be ill-deserved, but the fact that they ring a bell with those who know little enough about it— and who might not recognize good literary criticism if they saw it—at least tells us something about perceptions. You only have to be clever at talking to talk cleverly about literature.

Possibly this attitude extends to literary theory, regarded as something vaguely akin to literary criticism, their intellectual fates intertwined if not inseparable. If so, exemplifiers of the attitude might do well to peruse a substantial essay on "Christian Identity and Literary Culture," namely David Jeffrey's People of the Book, to the end that they might think again. The range of questions the author wants to pose and to address, as listed in the preface, signals clearly enough the nature of the chapters that follow, whose contents are diffuse. We have something of a tour of the land of Western literary culture through the ages; a tour that is not meant to take in everything, not even everything important; a tour whose guide is explicitly Christian with an explicitly Christian interest and agenda; a tour where the reader's attention is designed to be arrested as much by the particulars of the sites visited as by the detailed plan of the journey. But of course there is a unifying theme and unifying threads. What are they?

"Logocentrism" is the idea under scrutiny. It is associated especially with Jacques Derrida. Jeffrey's interest is not in particular themes such as the relation of speech to writing, but in the wider characterization of the Western literary tradition, largely inspired or influenced by Christianity, as "logocentric." On this view of things, words embody truth and rationality, and truth and rationality are objective and normative. Derrida repudiates this philosophy.

Here we must stop for a moment to forestall a misunderstanding. When Jeffrey was writing People of the Book, "logocentrism" was a fashionable term to deploy in seminar rooms or literary journals. Today that's not so much the case; newer fashions have replaced it, while Derrida himself, ever elusive, has simply left it behind. But if the term has lost some of its cachet, the underlying notion is if anything more fashionable than ever, turning up in many guises—as when the authors of a recent Native American theology propose to deconstruct the Euro-American understanding of "truth" via the Trickster figure that appears in many Native traditions.

Jeffrey's mission in any case is not to rescue logocentricity; it is to rescue the tradition from the charge of logocentricity. The literary word has not functioned as Derrida and many others have assumed. This thesis is fleshed out in a number of investigations which take in Scripture, Augustine, medievals, Puritans, moderns, and other scenes and figures. It is defended by drawing attention principally to three things.

The first is the relation of words to extralinguistic realities as this is understood from the very beginnings of seminal Christian writing both in Scripture and Augustine. Minds are not to be stayed upon the words that convey truth. They are to be stayed on the truth conveyed. And it may be brokenly conveyed. Indeed, it is never adequately conveyed. For truth lies in the transcendent signified and it is incarnate, moreover, not first in words but in flesh.

The second is the ethical dimension in reading. Here, if anywhere, Jeffrey puts greatest emphasis although his theses are profoundly interrelated. The literary tradition which is inspired by the Book, the Bible, commits the serious reader to be serious ethically, for its spring is the ethical seriousness of the gospel. One is not meant to treat literature with formalistic dispassion; the attempt to support the objectivity of textual meaning by downgrading the role of the reader's interest is misguided, even if the intention is to safeguard truth and rationality. For this is to abandon precisely the historical and theological roots of a literary tradition bent on engaging the reader.

The third is the locus of authority, which lies not in the text but that to which it witnesses. I mention this third and not second, though it naturally follows the first point, because its formulation is generally less prominent than the two others, its importance coming particularly (though not only) to light toward the end of the volume, in the discussion of the Puritans. On these characters, Jeffrey is none too keen; they foreshorten their sights to concentrate on text at the expense of the world disclosed by it.

Under these headings a great amount of expository argument takes place. The announcement of the logocentric issue in chapter 1 is succeeded by an account of "Scripture upon Scripture" that leads to a statement of Jesus' typological reading. Jerome, along with Augustine, is then called in to witness to the ethics of reading before a chapter on "Evangelization and Literacy" tells stories from Anglo-Saxon England. This is powerful material and leaves us with a sober impression of barbarian cruelty against which the humane beauty of the Christian gospel stands out in sharp relief. Chaucer and Wycliffe occupy the next space as they press home their understanding of committed reading and then the world of symbolism is opened out to us, both in its medieval integrative force, bringing reader and world together through the evangel, and in its haunting crisis as represented by Goethe. (A number of illustrations enrich the written account.) From the Puritans to Matthew Arnold, this world is then lost either by contracting one's preoccupations or by sloughing off the serious challenge offered to the reader by the contents of the Bible in the atmosphere of post-Enlightenment biblical criticism.

The scene finally shifts across the pond for the tale of "the Bible and the American Myth," a tale of how the Book had force, no doubt about it, and was anything but frozen text, but unfortunately was too often read and vigorously deployed against its grain in the service of the New World. Jeffrey's concluding appeal is different from those of many an American evangelist and politician, but no less passionate: come repentantly to read repentantly and there will be deep rest for our souls. Derrida and his kin should think about that, not about logocentrism.

What an account of Jeffrey's work cannot easily do is to convey the author's extremely wide range of reading in investigating the nooks and crannies as well as the broad pastures of history. It is a very interesting, as well as broadly spanned, volume. Further, there is a sense of urgency allied to the intellectual cause: it is edifying scholarship. The documentation of the tradition's grave summons to serious ethical reading and engagement is helpful and important. Augustine gives us a strong launch. Kierkegaard inimitably reminds us of what is at stake, but he is just the incisive representative of centuries of conviction on the matter. Jeffrey has told us what a Christian literary culture has looked and should look alike.

Suppose the central proposition in the volume be reduced to the stark claim that Christian literary theory is theologically bound to think of the text as mediator between reader and res, crafted to promote their union, and that it has historically exemplified this. Then the contention is right, and importantly so. But more is contended than just this. And here, assessment finds us on what is in some respects difficult terrain. Those expert in this or that particular area will undoubtedly disagree with this or that interpretation offered by the author. It could hardly be otherwise in a book of such ambition. One is duty bound also to apostrophize: a number of errors occur in the text, involving, for example, the spelling of non-English words (including biblical languages, transliterated and untransliterated) and factually wrong statements (Charles Simeon of Cambridge is granted a Professorship of Chemistry … or was there more than one noteworthy Simeon in that day?).

Still, this is obviously not what makes our terrain difficult nor is it just the sheer variety of particular historical judgments that are made. What is problematic is the way Jeffrey makes connections in the argument. Sometimes they are on the surface. Sometimes they are below it. Sometimes they are explicit. Sometimes they are implicit. Sometimes the large steps are taken with the apparent and perhaps unimpeachable intention that the reader should take the smaller ones that hook up arguments. Sometimes the large steps are taken so as to put the reader at a disadvantage, not knowing whether a particular construction is one's own or the author's. It would be unfair not to allow for authors' divergent ways of presenting a case and to that extent there must surely be a latitude of judgment on cogency. So the above description is not meant to be uniformly evaluative. But if we take segments from the pivotal treatment of medieval reading, the problem can be fairly laid bare.

In two important chapters (5 and 6) Jeffrey asks, first: "How does authority lead the intelligence?" and then "How does the reader resist (or not) the authority of the text?" In order, he says "to pursue these questions in their medieval context, we need to regard each as a question with distinct ethical overtones." So in the first of the two chapters he wants "to suggest that the question about authority is answered less by proposition than by analogy or trope," while in the second he wants to consider "the much more slippery question of the resistant reader."

But one needs to adduce far more evidence than Jeffrey does in the first of those chapters in order to establish his conclusion. At most, what is demonstrated is that "analogy or trope" could be used in lieu of what we familiarly think of as the "proposition," but generalization to the medieval period is impossible on the evidence supplied. One really needs evidence from Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham, for example, to establish this conclusion. On the other hand, if we put a lot of weight on Jeffrey's description of what he is doing as a "suggestion," our expectations must accordingly be modified.

The discussion of Wycliffe in the next chapter introduces another type of difficulty. Its place in the overall argument of the book is important. Driven by an "obtrusively ethical approach to questions of meaning in biblical narrative," Wycliffe concludes that the very grammar and logic of Scripture must be understood out of canons intrinsic to itself, not extrinsic (e.g., Aristotelian) ones. This leads to creative syntactical and grammatical interpretation theologically directed by a belief in Christ, the divine Logos, as the content of Scripture. The religious facts of creation and incarnation generate a hermeneutic whereby the meaning of a text does not lie in just what the text temporally, in its own time, says. The temporal is by grace the place of divine power and incarnate presence, and the very meaning of a text ultimately authored by God is therefore not susceptible of a purely grammatical analysis derived from syntactical rules in general hermeneutics, but is intelligible only in terms of the peculiar reality and truth divinity wants to convey. This summary does less than justice to the nuance and detail of Jeffrey's statement of the point, but is adequate for present purposes. We may enumerate just three difficulties here.

As part of the case against calling the Christian literary tradition "logocentric," a contrast has been drawn earlier in the book between a "formalistic" and "ethical" reading of texts. The point is, broadly, well made. But confusion threatens when Wycliffe's substitution of "a logic and theory of exegesis intrinsic to the foundational text of Scripture" for Aristotelian canons is described as "ethical". The "ethics" involved on this particular score is not identical with the ethics involved in a reader attending to the message of Holy Writ. Wycliffe's move can be fully supported by those who regard it as, quite generally, a principle of hermeneutics that you must attend to the peculiar grammar and logic of a text. In other words, there is a distinction between "ethical reading" in the sense that (a) one ought to read in accordance with the avowed logical and grammatical principles of a given text and (b) one ought to read with a will to hear and obey its religious meaning. Of course, the senses are deeply compatible, but they are not identical.

Jeffrey takes the Latin tempus as equivalent to the Greek kronos (sic: it should be chronos) and duratio as kairos. But what does he mean by the latter equivalence? Is, for example, duratio Vulgate for kairos and, if so, how felicitous is that rendering? Or are they judged broadly semantic equivalents? But, if so, on what grounds and in what contexts? And how is it concluded that kairos means "God's time, in which all being is eternally present"? Further, in the only sentence quoted from Wycliffe, we read of the "aeternitas" of God. How is this related to duratio or to kairos?

"As [Wycliffe's] work stands, his 'doctrine of possibilities' is richly suggestive of the direction of his mature thinking." The doctrine is explained: "By the 'doctrine of possibilities,' for something to be possible it simply must once have existed, must now exist, or else it must be going to exist at some time in the future, in its own time." That is, a possibility is an imagined form of an actuality, past, present, or future; the possibilities are not, for example, counterfactual conditionals or logical possibilities. Yet we are told a few sentences later that "intelligibility is synonymous with possibility. In other words, the principles of being and intellection are identical." If so, it seems as though intelligibles do not include counterfactual conditionals or logically possibles per se and that the principles of intellection extend no further than the principles of being and so also fail to include those. Is this what Wycliffe really held? And if so, does it not more hinder than advance his insights?

The context of the discussion in the book should show that all this provides a significant and not a relatively trivial example of what can go on. It instantiates why, quite in general, more conceptual work needs to be done on the relation of word to Word to deliver Jeffrey's thesis. In the important chapter on "The Symbolism of the Reader" the author speaks of faithful reading as "an incarnational activity and part of an incarnational process," but if one were to put all this in the context of Christian dogmatics through the ages, one would see why some are disposed to dispute the historical and theological propriety of using "incarnational" as a qualifying adjective in his way. Here what is needed is a discussion of the relative meanings of "indwelling," "ingestion," and "incarnation." In sum, then: Jeffrey successfully impresses on us the nature of the Western Christian tradition of reading, key features of the literary culture it creates and sustains, the ethical constraints on readership, and the shape that a debate on logocentrism would do well to take. However, more narrowly theological or doctrinal questions pertaining to the nature and hermeneutics of the biblical word and the nature and scope of incarnation remain to be sorted out.

There is a characteristically delightful sequence in Jerome K. Jerome's book, Three Men in a Boat, where the author describes the start of a dogfight between assorted representatives of the canine species in the lobby of a building. The big dogs engage in the serious stuff while the little ones fight among themselves and fill up their spare time by biting the legs of the bigger ones. A theologian like the reviewer who knows so much less about literature than does David Jeffrey fears the application. Actually, I am entering a plea for cooperation. Unlike the bellicose canine fraternity in Jerome's amusing account, let the collegial Christian one be marked by the intellectual cooperation of students of literature, theology, philosophy, and any other fields pertinent ad hoc so that together we may press for those values, in all their beauty, truth, and goodness, that Jeffrey has discovered in "the people of the book." The Book, books, and the values thereof are, after all, under serious threat. Stephen N. Williams is professor of systematic theology at Union Theological College in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is the author of Revelation and Reconciliation: A Window on Modernity (Cambridge Univ. Press).

Stephen N Williams is professor of systematic theology at Union Theological College in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is the author of Revelation and Reconciliation: A Window on Modernity (Cambridge Univ. Press)

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.