In 1941, a Philadelphia Presbyterian minister named C. E. Macartney conducted a poll to see whom his local fellow Christians thought to be "the ten greatest men in the Bible." Isaiah came eighth on this list—not, presumably, on account of any record of his life (there is none), but on the strength alone of the book that bears his name. The opinion of prewar Philadelphia Presbyterians, it turns out, was remarkably consonant with the opinion of earlier ages. Moreover, it tallies with that of the postwar generation in every Christian denomination from Catholics to the Salvation Army. But the Isaiah who loomed in the imagination of the Presbyterians, suggests John F. A. Sawyer, may bear surprisingly little relationship to the Isaiah cherished by either medieval or postmodern theologians. The "fifth Gospel," it appears, has been an unusually protean text, warm wax in the hands of many a maker of images.

Though Sawyer does not stress it, there is nonetheless a strong thread that binds most of the diversity together: messianism. Divergence among interpreters through the centuries is usually about what messianic deliverance might mean.

A quick overview helps establish the point. For Saint Jerome (A.D.. 342-420), Isaiah "should be called an evangelist rather than a prophet because he describes all the mysteries of Christ and the Church so clearly that you would think he is composing a history of what has already happened rather than prophesying about what is to come." Saint Ambrose and his star pupil, Saint Augustine (a.d. 354-430), echo this view, emphasizing additionally Isaiah's role in "the calling of the Gentiles." The Wycliffe Bible Prologue follows suit ("not only a profete but more, a Gospellere"), and so, with varying emphasis, do the Reformation writers Luther and Calvin, for whom, above all, "the word of God abides forever."

Jewish traditions also feature Isaiah centrally, not only in lectionaries—in which, at least, since the Middle Ages, about half of all haftaroth (weekly readings from the prophets) come from this book—but particularly in Zionist writings since the nineteenth century and visibly on Holocaust memorials such as the magnificently somber Yad v'shem in Jerusalem (cf. Isa. 56:5), where the emphasis is on the restoration of Israel. And for quite other purposes Isaiah is a staple of Catholic liberation theologians and "swords into plowshares" revolutionaries such as Daniel and Philip Berrigan, as well as of feminist theologians like Susanne Heine, Phyllis Trible, Rosemary Radford Reuther, and Dorothee Soelle.

Of the two works reviewed here, Sawyer's is the book most useful for reflection on these hermeneutical questions, simply because it is a history of Isaiah interpretation in Christianity. Sawyer believes that the myriad formal commentaries on Isaiah in our own time are often barren with respect to the affective power of this richly poetic part of Scripture; obsession with "the original meaning of the original text" has blinded the commentators to the value of a rich interpretative tradition found not only in earlier formal commentaries but in preaching down the centuries, in hymns and other music, and in art and literature. What Sawyer offers as antidote is a lively and cross-disciplinary Rezeptionsgeschichte, a review of how Isaiah has been understood and, especially, used by its Christian readers. As a variant on reader-response criticism, the primary source material for a contextualizing of Isaiah's text is these past readings "in preference to archaeology and ancient near-eastern parallels." The result is an impressive scholarly resource, sobering in its implications for exegetes, and at the same time an entertaining and culturally enriching survoler of the development of certain aspects of Christian theology.

Sawyer is less interested in theory than in what he calls the "empirical dimension" of textual interpretation. Consistently, he has attempted a descriptive (if selective) rather than evaluative study. While it is clear that he himself has been involved in feminist and interfaith appropriations of Isaiah, for the most part he steers commendably close to his stated attempt of an "objective" reporting. Sawyer's guiding conviction, however—that we ought to be free to select from the full range of interpretation history a "meaning" for the text "more effective in its context, or more beautiful, or more historically significant, or indeed more ethically acceptable than the original" (here he cites Elizabeth SchŸssler Fiorenza)—need not be shared in order for the reader to appreciate the value of his comparatist approach.

To wit: the early church, patristic writers, medieval church, and Reformation writers saw each, in their turn, elements in Isaiah's prophetic witness that to some degree were not noticed as forcefully by the others. We, in our turn, now have available to us a compendium of insight—a fuller, richer, and more complete appreciation of a text too polysemous to yield itself completely to any singular reading.

The earliest Christian interpreters used Isaiah primarily to authorize their mission to the Gentiles. This is already evident in Romans 14-15, where Saint Paul cites the "root of Jesse" image from Isaiah 11:10 (rather than Isa. 11:1), presumably because in the context he is less concerned with the human ancestry of Jesus than he is with pointing to him "who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him shall the Gentiles hope" (Rom. 15:13). And such promises persist: Paul's evangelical emphasis returns in a refractory fashion in the nineteenth century, when a reference to the "land of Sinim" (Isa. 49:12) provided missionaries to China with a motto, and mission hymnody could refer to the overcoming of pagan bondage with Isaiah 45:2, 14, 23, "Lift up your heads, ye gates of brass," and "To Christ shall every nation bow."

Patristic writers emphasize (as later, for other reasons, did Northrop Frye) the counterintuitive literary unity of Isaiah, a unity grounded less in overt design than in an astonishingly accurate spiritual prefigurement of salvation history. Sawyer himself gives two pages of running excerpts from Isaiah that so perfectly outline the gospel narrative as to arrest the most jaded reader. He does not take up a related issue—the manner of the book's division into chapters in the thirteenth century. I have myself often wondered whether the chapter divisions introduced by Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton (d. 1228) were not calculated in such a fashion as to express this unity. Do Isaiah's 66 chapters, in a synechdoche of the 66 canonical books of the Bible, prefigure, in their central division, the two testaments—the first part ending on a dour note at the end of chapter 39 (with Hezekiah's witless invitation to Israel's destruction) and chapter 40 commencing the 27-chapter announcement of the Good News of consolation, restoration, and reconciliation? For a book that comprises so many genres and layers, Isaiah has, on so many counts, an astonishing capacity to project the unity of the larger biblical anthology.

The fathers, however, had no chapter divisions. Typology was their preoccupation. Exegetes such as Augustine and Jerome emphasized reference to the Virgin Birth (Isa. 7:14), the Sanctus (6:3), the Suffering Servant (52:13, chap. 53) or "Man of Sorrows" of later medieval art, certain elements of medieval angelology, such as the six-winged seraph (Isa. 6), and the messianic prophecies they found echoed in Virgil's Eclogue IV. They were the first to see the ox and the ass at the manger (Isa. 1:3) as prophetic of Jesus' birth—and to thus instaurate an iconographic tradition familiar to every Christian.

Later on, Isaiah also played a key role in the establishment and development of the cult of Mary. In late medieval and Renaissance Annunciation paintings, Mary is typically found reading Isaiah 7:14 (in Latin) at the moment Gabriel arrives to announce the Messiah's conception; it is not unusual, as in the Isenheim altarpiece of Matthias GrŸnewald, to show Isaiah hovering in the background (here he holds his text in the "original Hebrew" for comparison), and Isaiah often appears alongside Mary in early Christian art. In the Bible moralise (thirteenth century), Isaiah points to the Virgin Mary in a rocky wilderness holding a lamb in her arms (Isa. 51:1); the motif may have been adapted by Leonardo da Vinci in his Madonna of the Rocks in the Louvre. Much later, Isaiah 61:10 was prescribed as the introitus to the mass for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, instituted by Pope Pius IX in 1854. More problematically, Isaiah has been employed in the promotion of anti-Semitism.

Sawyer is properly concerned with the history of anti-Semitic Isaiah interpretation not only in the Middle Ages (e.g., Isidore of Seville's seventh-century De Fide Catholica ex Veteri et Novo Testamento contra Judaeos) but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well. While the "ox knows his owner, the ass his master's crib" invites a charming Christmas typology, the prophet's next line has been wielded in such a way as to undo the charm: "Israel, my people, knows nothing" (Isa. 1:3). Suddenly the image, like the veiled Synagoga that appears opposite Ecclesia in medieval church portals, can seem to have become polemical.

Luther best illustrates the special interest of the Reformation in Isaiah, not in any abandonment of anti-Semitism, but in his choosing three new emphases. These are: (1) "the Word of God abides forever" (Isa. 40:6-8), which for Luther (though not Calvin) means narrowly the text of Scripture ipsum; (2) a declamation against idolatry (Isa. 41:7; 44:9-10), here focusing especially on biblical art, especially art representing the Virgin Mary; and (3) the importance of education: "all thy children will be taught of the Lord (54:13)." The Reformer thus, like Jerome, sees Isaiah as privileged among the prophets, but for quite different reasons. Isaiah is no longer primarily the prophet of the nativity or of the Virgin Mary or of the Suffering Messiah, but preeminently the champion of truth in an unjust society. The principal text is 40:8; Luther encouraged his followers to embroider it upon their sleeves (cf. Deut. 6:8). Sawyer sees a clear link between Luther's emphasis and that of the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum, Nov. 18, 1965), though he notes that verses 6-8 are still omitted from the prescribed Catholic readings for the second Sunday in Advent, as well as from related Catholic hymns (not to mention all other modern lectionaries).

Evangelicals should find it a matter for careful reflection that Luther is inspirational for the kind of unranked interpretative pluralism Sawyer champions. The starting place is Scripture, but the platform is really one's own interpretation:

When one considers that for Luther "the word of God stands forever," one cannot help comparing this constant recourse to Isaiah 40:8 with his most famous axiom "Here I stand . …" 40:8 expresses his passionate belief that God has revealed to him the true meaning of the Bible.

Accordingly, Sawyer suggests, evangelicals have been idiosyncratic in their more individualistic use of Isaiah. John Wesley uses it hardly at all, while the great Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon makes a wide and imaginative use of Isaiah throughout his sermons. On the other hand, there are predictable hallmark affections: Isaiah figures as prominently in The Song Book of the Salvation Army (1986) as in the rhetoric of the liberation theologians.

Perhaps the most interesting cultural appropriations of Isaiah occur in art and literature, which get rather skimpy treatment here, despite Sawyer's proper insistence on their importance. Part of the value of this perspective, it seems to me, is revealed in the way art and literature in the modern period tend to highlight popular abuse of Scripture. One thinks, for example, of Melville's White Jacket, where midnineteenth-century Americans might too readily confirm a triumphalist (and secularizing) prejudice that Isaiah himself would most obviously have deplored:

[W]e Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. … The political Messiah has come. But he had come in us. … [Our] national selfishness is unbounded philanthropy; for we cannot do a good to America but we give alms to the world.

Yet on such points Sawyer is less steady than he might be. He thinks, for example, that Isaiah might have scrupled to find distorting the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier's removal of "justice" from Isaiah 45:8, substituting for it "quietness":

Drop thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of thy peace.

In fact, prophet and poet are both misrepresented in this instance. Neither the Hebrew text (tsedeq) nor the KJV translation used by Whittier ("righteousness") uses the word justice at all (nor do RSV, JPS, etc.). More pertinently, there is no plausible evocation of Isaiah anywhere in Whittier's lovely hymn: Whittier's work is a prayer for God's peace such as settled in the hearts of those who heard Jesus teach "beside the Syrian sea"; his line "Drop thy still dews of quietness" (not, as in Isaiah, "Drop down, ye heavens") invokes, in fact, a host of Old Testament references to the salubrious teaching of God (Deut. 32:2; 33:28), by whose knowledge "the clouds drop down the dew" (Prov. 3:20) and whose very presence with his people shall in the time of their return to him descend upon them in blessing "as the dew" (Hos. 14:5).

Such a double misrepresentation is not a good way for Sawyer to make his point about the value of literary interpretation of Isaiah, or to raise the query, valid in itself, that follows immediately upon this unfortunate example. What he wants to ask is: Are we entitled to pray for peace while we evade the question of justice? Undeniably this is a question with which the book of Isaiah is directly concerned from the very beginning (e.g., 1:1-20).

It is also the question that prompts Daniel Berrigan in Isaiah: Spirit of Courage, Gift of Tears, and to it his answer is uncompromisingly negative. Berrigan's is not in the least an academic book. It is rather an extended sermon, and inasmuch as Isaiah provides his text, it is by way of highly idiosyncratic selection, editing, and imaginative translating (excerpts from the New Jerusalem Bible with alterations heavily subtended by Phyllis Trible). Berrigan chooses from amongst the prophet's concerns one above all to feature. He got his own "prophetic" start as a Jesuit antiwar protester. Unlike many activists from the Vietnam War era, he has (along with his brother Philip) stayed the course; his Plowshares community in the inner city of New York is characterized by social action against the "military industrial complex" in matters both of practical compassion and public disturbance. (No quietist he.) Berrigan's key text is that which also captivates liberation theologians of the ilk of Miranda, Gutierrez, and Lohfink: "They will beat their swords into plowshares, their spears into pruning knives. Nevermore war—never again!" (cf. 2:4).

Berrigan's Isaiah ranks much more highly than eighth among great personalities of the Bible. He is a kind of superhero—almost himself messianic—a visionary who "refused to separate public responsibility from the voice of God within." No mere na-vi-', simply a mouthpiece for the word of the Lord, he "becomes the measure of our own possibility of seeing, hearing, understanding with the heart, of being healed." For Berrigan, "the 'holy' lives in Isaiah and in those who, like him, take the word of God seriously."

In Berrigan's case, taking the word of God seriously means taking your own appropriation of it seriously enough to attack military hardware with hammers and, further, rejecting the Catholic church's ecclesiastical authority in the constraint of such actions. His troubled reflections on the theological and ethical complexity of such appropriations of authority may, however, seem eerily familiar to students of Reformation history (cf. Roland Bainton's biography of Luther). Berrigan muses about the consequences of going perhaps too far: "[A]n anathema is inevitable. You presume for yourself the word of God, immemorially entrusted to priesthood and temple. Dare you thus blaspheme?"

Well, for better or worse, he dares. "Do not imagine that some magic or other will beat the world's swords into plowshares," he writes. "You yourselves must act." He reviles the "just-war nonsense" of past and present moral theologians, and the dispiriting evasions of "preachers of an American pseudo-gospel and the tempests of secular culture, by turns enticing and brutal, [which] all but swamp us." In Berrigan's U.S.A.,

Sometime shortly after the Civil War, the strange gods of empire entered the land with a rush. It was the beginning of an apocalypse of power and dominion—and ruin. We have never succeeded in casting off that foreign spirit that holds us in tight bondage.

In consequence, America is for him no new Israel but "a Babylon become our native land," a society governed by "megamachinery of untruth":

In an election year the airwaves and video waves heat up. Promises, promises pollute the air; glib henchmen utter their foolishness, the media echo like a cave of bats—mewings, strokings, choler, anger, vituperation, verbal abuse and scufflings, much dust flung about, no clarity. Bread and circuses are expended broadside, money seduces and unsettles and buys and sells opinions and promises that are of absolutely no sense or worth.

Berrigan writes well, and much of his eloquent diatribe (more reminiscent of Amos or Jeremiah) is close enough on the mark to make an honest reader squirm. Surely our culture is indeed naked before the just judgment of God, and surely, as he says, "the nations will one day see" that "God is not the God of the big achievers and half-believers, but of the helpless, the needy, the victimized, the distressed" (24:4-5). Berrigan's experience in San Salvador lends pith to his passion. For him America is a land in which "Christians consider themselves justified by keeping the law"—the law, which exists, he believes, primarily to advantage the holding of property and the amassing of wealth: "Sanctity, righteousness … are spurious. 'Under God,' as they say. Under God, and unjust."

It is easy to imagine how many have taken offense at Berrigan's accusations. He is no patriot, either, and that to some will be his least forgivable offense. On other grounds, his reflexive embrace of Trible's "Herself" renditions of the Servant Songs of Isaiah seems a defiance of orthodoxy more for the sake of defiance itself than out of concern for any kind of accountability to his text. Moreover, the targets of his own prophetic invective may seem a good deal more selective than the Book of Isaiah warrants. I for one do not see how any principled critique of violence in American culture can withhold criticism of television, cinema, and the pornographic Internet. And if one is to prophesy credibly against "the American culture of death" and be consistent with Isaiah, then abortion and euthanasia call for more than a phrase en passant. But all these reservations aside, I think contemporary Christians still need to reckon with Berrigan's criticism of the "faithful," in some of which, it seems to me, he is most faithful to Isaiah:

There flourishes at large a hyper-spiritualized version of salvation. It is intensely concerned with self, with "rapture" (and the devil take the hindmost). Such salvation ferments, to all appearances, in the head only, a kind of pseudo-ecstasy, without cost or empathy or a sense of the suffering of the innocent. It is little concerned with our culture of death, or a critique of same, and much concerned with something known as the "afterlife."

So understood, salvation also welcomes, without critique or second thought, assimilation into mainstream America (a polluted stream, if ever one flowed), into cultural attitudes toward women, money, success, ego, and, perhaps above all, violence . …

Implied in this view is a quite clear conviction, a cultural one to be sure, that there is nothing seriously wrong with America. Quite the contrary, America is God's finest triumph.

Sawyer's book lacks the passion of Berrigan's, even as it has over it a decisive advantage as scholarship. For all that, these books sit fairly comfortably side by side on the shelf. Both teach us important things about the witness of Scripture within and without the church; each is limited by a curiously common failure to see that, for all of the partiality in interpretation in every place and time, the common threads that run through the fabric of our historic understanding are not only many, but most are persistently visible and anchoring.

I think of the converted slave trader John Newton, for example, author of the now universal hymn "Amazing Grace." In a series of 38 sermons (1785-86) Newton took up, Sunday by Sunday, the texts featured in the libretto to Handel's Messiah (then enjoying a successful rerun at Westminster). Many of Handel's texts, of course, are from Isaiah, and in his treatment of them, Newton hits on almost all of the emphases that Sawyer places, reasonably, along a historical line of development. It is true that Newton does not anticipate the "immanentizing of God" so prominent among some of the liberation theologians (he would have regarded this as a hideous, blasphemous self-arrogation), but long before contemporary feminists, he corrects a mistranslation of Isaiah 40:9 to note that "the publisher of these good tidings is written with a feminine construction," and that it was customary in Israel "for the woman to publish and celebrate good news with songs and instruments," instancing Miriam's song, the women announcing David's victory, and Deborah's song of victory. "In my text," Newton writes, the prophet speaks proleptically the "Good News, glad tidings indeed! … The women are, therefore, called upon to proclaim his approach, on the tops of the hills and mountains, from whence they may be seen and heard to the greatest advantage, for the spreading of the tidings throughout the whole country" (Works 4.68-69).

I do not mean to suggest, of course, that Newton qualifies in Trible's sense (or Sawyer's or Berrigan's) as a feminist. He has a very different order of relationship to the authority of Scripture as revelation, for one thing. But his application of the text makes use of a legitimate textual meaning, even if inferential, to extend the good news without distorting it, and his sense of the social meaning of Isaiah for us all will bear firm company with Berrigan's. All of which suggests that there is more consistency in the church's interpretation of Isaiah through the ages than has met the eye of either of our contemporary commentators. Just for the sake of perspective, let me give the old evangelical the last word—the conclusion to one of his sermons on Isaiah:

We call ourselves the followers and servant of him who was despised of men, and encompassed with sorrows. And shall we then "seek great things for ourselves," as if we belonged to the present world, and expected no portion beyond it? Or shall we be tremblingly [sensitive] to the opinion of our fellow-creatures and think it a great hardship if it be our lot to suffer shame for his sake, who endured the cross, and despised the same for us?

(Newton, Works 4.208)

Well, these are after all the questions any honest reading of the gospel—including Isaiah's "gospel"—will have to conjure with, and to answer. They persist as Scripture persists, from age to age, our own preoccupations notwithstanding.

America is for Berrigan no new Israel but "a Babylon become our native land," a society governed by "megamachinery of untruth."

David Lyle Jeffrey is professor of English literature at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada. He is the author most recently of People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (Eerdmans).

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.