660 - Virtuoso Theology: The Bible and Interpretation

Virtuoso Theology: The Bible and Interpretation
By Frances Young
Cleveland, Pilgrim Press, 1993. 198 pp. $15.95.

Frances Young is a professor of theology at the University of Birmingham. She has written an uncommonly rich and suggestive book on issues of biblical interpretation. The book takes on its remarkable power because of the convergence of Young's two special competences. She exhibits easy utilization of the definitional theologians of the church, for example, Irenaeus, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Chrysostom, and she displays equal ease with the vocabulary and imagery of musical performance.

Young clears the ground quickly of

661 - Virtuoso Theology: The Bible and Interpretation

inadequate methods of interpretation, such as historical criticism, structuralism, and canonical criticism, all of which are too much defined by the categories of modern scholarship. The positive alternative she pursues is that the Bible is a musical score or dramatic script to be performed; each rendering is a performance that must attend to both fidelity to a consensus tradition and experimental freedom. I found most moving her treatment of the peculiarities of particular texts and interpretations, which she treats under the rubric of the "cadenza," which must be integrated to a given score and must engage the unity of the whole.

This is an important book, even though it gives the appearance of something simple and innocent. The book is not without problems, both because it staggers one with much that is suggested and assumed without being explicated, and because at many points it is awkwardly written and could benefit from another editing. It is, nonetheless, worth the trouble it demands. The book offers a sort of canonical perspective that avoids Childs's temptation to scholasticism, because it sees the Bible as too large, sweeping, grand, and comprehensive to engage in quibbling, scolding, or labelling. The book invites readers and interpreters too long in thrall to "history" to look differently at the richness of the script and the great potential in fresh performance. Both the book and the reader are thereby repositioned and reconstituted.

Walter Brueggemann
Columbia Theological Seminary
Decatur, GA.