Transformations in Biblical Literary Traditions, livre ebook

For more than four decades, David Lyle Jeffrey has enriched the world of Christian scholarship. Throughout his work, Jeffrey has drawn attention to the ways in which imaginative engagements with biblical texts have been central to major shifts in Christian and post-Christian hermeneutics, ethics, and aesthetics. The purpose of this volume is to challenge and deepen that growing discourse by showing how English literature across varied traditions unfolds a central Christian interaction between divine Incarnation, invented narrative, and ethical praxis. In their essays, the authors demonstrate how an imaginative engagement with biblical narratives, in historical or contemporary writing, continues to provide a fruitful means to address the intellectual and ethical antinomies of the postmodern scene.

The articles in this collection form two groups: the first set of essays focuses on specific episodes or moments of historical change within European biblical literary traditions; the second group focuses on the dissemination of biblical literary engagements in areas outside of European contexts, ranging from North America to South Africa to China. Unique in the wide range of topics it covers—itself a reflection of Jeffrey’s own broad scope of scholarship—the collection functions as a working example of Jeffrey’s thesis that the biblical tradition has a far-reaching influence on the development of Western literature, even by those who are reluctant to acknowledge its present influence.

Among the appended list of Jeffrey’s publications one will find that he has and shares a love for Christ and his Kingdom—as the Wheaton College motto goes. This has taken the form of writing for Catholic and Protestant journals, as well as more broadly ecumenical ones. Accordingly, he has lectured in Israel and published in Jewish periodicals and essay collections. The bottom line in all this is love for the scriptures and for the people who love them. Any attempt to sketch Jeffrey’s work would not be complete were it to omit his expressed goal of fidelity, in word and deed, as a disciple of Christ. To spend any appreciable time in his company is to discover that there is nothing of the coy Christian demeanor that shapes the type of personality that characterizes many learned men. Jeffrey makes plain his Christian commitment, which has been the driving force of much his scholarship and of his engagement with China. But what strikes many of those who have participated with him in a project or a conference is that he wears his learning lightly. He does not assume that his opinions carry a special authority but draws others into a shared quest for wisdom. He participates in discussions with others vigorously—whether peers or undergraduates—but not to intimidate or overwhelm. The central importance of practicing the virtues in the Christian life is apparent in how Jeffrey has tempered his work, whether as a teacher, a scholar, or an administrator.

Nothing about this volume is meant to indicate that Jeffrey has reached the twilight of his career, since nothing could be further from the truth. Anyone who has worked with him will know of his boundless energy. At present, he is writing a new book about the theology in Western painting and an essay on Marc Chagall and the surprising Jewish interest in Jesus in the mid-twentieth century and directing Baylor’s participation in the translation and interpretation of manuscripts from the Green Collection—to name a few ventures that we know about. Rather, our hope for this collection is that it will be a timely expression of our shared appreciation for Jeffrey as a teacher, as a colleague, as a churchman, and, especially, as a friend. Ad Multos Annos!

The title of this volume, Transformations in Biblical Literary Traditions: Incarnation, Narrative, and Ethics, identifies some of the central cross-disciplinary concerns that run throughout Jeffrey’s work. All of the essays are concerned, in a variety of ways, with ongoing historical changes in the interpretive reception of biblical texts. Some of the essays are more strictly historical, emphasizing the “transformations” noted in the title, while others are more concerned with the literary or imaginative aspects of biblical reception at a given point in history. Still other essays are oriented toward the more directly ethical connections between biblical texts and literary interpretation. Despite the variety of disciplines that these essays represent, each engages some aspect of Jeffrey’s exemplary study of the historical interactions between biblical reception, verbal art, and ethical action.

In keeping with the character of Jeffrey’s work, the scope and aims of this collection extend beyond the customary purview of scholars concerned with the discourse known as “religion and literature.” One of the recurring themes in Jeffrey’s work is the claim that biblical narratives, metaphors, and modes of inquiry (“reading”) continue to shape a wide variety of disparate intellectual traditions, including (and especially) the work of those scholars who disavow the explicit truth claims of biblical religion. As Jeffrey has shown, profound engagement with and indebtedness to biblical texts and their study is apparent not only in medieval and renaissance writers but also among the most characteristically modern and postmodern writers. For example, “the idea of literary criticism as cultural criticism, now commonplace [since Marx], gets much of its early momentum from Augustine’s method” of reading the Bible in relation to other texts. Nor is the ongoing character of literary criticism’s indebtedness to biblical hermeneutics limited to the likes of Matthew Arnold and his mirror image rejection of that Augustinian tradition. Rather, the engagement with biblical texts (whether interpretively or in reaction) turns out to be formative for many major Enlightenment writers. As Jeffrey points out, whether we consider Isaac Newton’s fascination with biblical prophecy or the political arguments of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, or Baruch Spinoza, an engagement with scripture is central to the development of their intellectual projects.3 In a similar manner, the arguments of a wide variety of postmodern critical theorists remain dependent, even in a mode of necessary rejection, upon traditions of biblical textual interpretation.

Such a condition of ironic reversal is not limited, however, to the ongoing tacit dependence of secular and postsecular discourse upon biblical narratives, metaphors, and modes of reading. Jeffrey’s scholarship also illuminates the ways in which explicit appeals to scripture have resulted, unwittingly or not, in undermining the authority of that very text. Most important, he has shown that the tendency to reduce faith to a “feeling” and to reduce scripture to an antiquarian “relic of culture” are two sides of a single dynamic that disables the genuinely receptive reading of any text, including scripture.6 In this sense, to narrate the transformations in biblical literary traditions is to illuminate both the obscured role of the Bible in Western culture and the obscured role of literary imagination in reading the Bible.

Rather than summarize the ensuing essays, our aim here is to draw attention to the implicit points of intersection between their respective arguments, suggesting the mutual illumination that this volume uniquely offers. Throughout his scholarship but especially in People of the Book, Jeffrey has drawn attention to the ways in which imaginative engagements with biblical texts have been central to larger shifts in Christian and postChristian hermeneutics, ethics, and aesthetics. In recent decades, literary studies have arguably taken what may be called a “turn to religion.” This volume challenges and deepens that growing discourse by showing how imaginative literature, across varied traditions, unfolds a central interaction between the understandings of biblical literature, imaginative narrative, and moral judgment. The essays in this volume form two groups: the first set of essays focuses on specific episodes or moments of historical change within the European biblical literary traditions; the second set focuses on the dissemination of biblical literary engagements in the places that lie beyond European contexts, ranging from North America to South Africa to China.

(Excerpted from Introduction)

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part 1. European Biblical Cultures: Interventions in Traditions

1. Latin Pedagogy and Ethical Ends in the “Royal Grammar” (1542) by Phillip J. Donnelly

2. “Propter nos” and Paradise Lost: Reading and Inhabiting “This Pendent World” by Dennis Danielson

3. Books and Their Readers: Visual Storytelling in the Copenhagen Ovide moralisé by K. Sarah-Jane Murray and Tyler F. Walton .
4. Backing into the Future: Romanticism, Secularization, and the Reinvention of Literature by Stephen Prickett

5. Did Napoleon Exist? An Episode in the Hist by John V. Fleming

6. The Nouvelle Humanism of Henri de Lubac and G. K. Chesterton by Ralph C. Wood

7. “A Brother Helped by a Brother”: Friendship and the City in the Fiction of the Inklings by Dominic Manganiello

Part 2. Dissemination of Biblical Traditions: West and East

8. Revelation of the Word: “What’s at Stake” in the Study of the Bible and English Literature by Gregory Maillet

9. The Bible in Canada and the United States by Mark A. Noll

10. Samson and Self-Destroying Evil by Eleonore Stump

11. Medieval Biblical Drama in Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Chester Plays in Afterlife by Theresa Coletti

12. Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and Religion in China by Yang Huilin

13. Friend and Guide: Professor David L. Jeffrey and China by Liu Yi-Qing

Bibliography of David Lyle Jeffrey’s Published Works

List of Contributors

Index