501 - The Bible and the Literary Critic

The Bible and the Literary Critic

By Amos N. Wilder

Minneapolis, Fortress, 1991. 186 Pp. $12.95.

Nonagenarian Amos Wilder, Hollis Professor of Divinity Emeritus at Harvard Divinity School, poet, scholar, and a marvelous human being, offers us eleven essays, most written in the 1980s. They lucidly display a profundity of insight gained as a young ambulance driver on the battlefields of Europe during World War I. The horrors of war and the imaginative attempts many made to cope with them disclosed to him "the true dynamics" of language, which he first explored in his study of the mythic imagination in biblical eschatology and ethics and, subsequently, in his work on metaphor, narrative, and parable. Wilder is the pioneer student of the poetics of biblical language, and the hallmark of his contribution is his unveiling of the indissoluble linkage between the modalities of language, meaning, and life in a world constructed and lived in through language. This volume is significant as much for his reminiscences of his interpenetrating experiences as soldier, student, and scholar as it is for its important reflective essay, "Between Reminiscence and History." But he also moves from reminiscing to debate with secular literary critics who have attended to biblical texts and with biblical scholars who deal with the poetics of parable. The nonagenarian concludes by addressing the issue of "Post-Modern Reality and the Problem of Meaning," an issue he first encountered on "Flanders Field."

For insights into where we have come from, where we are, where we might be going, and how we must do it, there is much wisdom to gain from The Bible and the Literary Critic, which is vastly more exciting and imaginative than its title suggests.

Norman R. Petersen, Williams College, Williamstown, Mass.