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The Book of God: A Response to the Bible

By Gabriel Josipovici

New Haven, Yale University Press, 1988. 350 Pp. $29.95.

It is now unmistakably clear that we are witnessing an enormous change about how we read and interpret the Bible. The code phrase for this change is "from history to literature," or "from historical criticism to literary criticism." That code phrase, however, is hardly adequate for what is happening. It is more important than "history" or "literature" that the hearer- reader-interpreter of the text is finding himself or herself repositioned vis-à-vis the Bible. The reader is not so much in a posture of control, criticism, and explanation, as one of standing before an inscrutable mystery that insists upon being beard. The reader is on the receiving end of surprise that sometimes qualifies as revelation. The change is part of a larger crisis of scientific knowledge and the authority of modernity, which now carries much less weight than heretofore. It is not so much the case of preferring this approach to that as of attending to the modes of certitude that do and do not operate in our cultural context. Operative modes of authority in any cultural context are only partly chosen; in large part they are given and received. We are now being given and receiving modes of authority we would not have anticipated a generation ago.

This book is part of that remarkable shift in perspective. Josipovici is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He joins the list of critics, including Kermode, Frye, and Alter, who stand outside the biblical guild, who enable us to see old texts in fresh and startling ways. Josipovici, unknown to most of us in biblical studies in this country, is well published as a literary critic. His publications show that he is concerned with the larger issue of the authority of literature in the face of modernity. In this book, his first concerning the Bible so far as I can determine, he is primarily concerned with what it means to hear and read. He takes up many specific texts as case studies in the odd activity of hearing. At some points, his perspective is idiosyncratic, and some of his judgments will seem odd to Scripture scholars. That, however, does not deter him, nor should it deter us. His urbane style, shrewd discernment, subtle humor, and above all, his passion for words lead us to listen in fresh ways.

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The book begins with a general statement about the meaning of listening and reading. The author positions himself as a harsh critic of our conventional bad habits of misreading the Bible. On the one hand, the bad habit is practiced by theologians who insist on reading what they expected to be in the text, whether it is or not. On the other hand, the learned critics have robbed us of the text, so that nothing is left of its claim or power or gift. Both theology that imposes and criticism that dismisses must be overcome if we are to be in the presence of the text in ways that give the text a chance. The text will have a chance only when we are able to attend to its power, subtlety, polyvalence, and authority of a very different kind, a kind not easily accommodated to our conventional modes of certitude.

The bulk of the book consists in case studies to indicate what a re-reading might be like. The selection of case studies seems almost to be random, the author treating whatever attracts his fancy. The inventory includes reflection on Genesis 1:1 and a sense of beginning, the Joseph narrative, in which narrative triumphs over dream, the contrasting production of calf and tabernacle, genealogy and the power of memory to bind the generations, prayer as utterance and blackmail, and the inscrutable narrative of David. Alongside these Old Testament studies are pieces on Jesus, Paul, and the Epistle to the Hebrews. Josipovici advocates no particular conclusion, insists on nothing, requires nothing, pushes nothing. He only listens and reiterates what he hears. When we receive his interpretation of the hearing, we receive the freedom and gift of transformation, for we have been invited to play, imagination, and new possibility. We have been addressed and given permission ourselves to utter.

For generations of pastors and church folk schooled in flatter, more stable modes of Scripture reading, this reading is indeed odd and leaves one uncertain. We will, soon or later, have to linger over such an interpretation as this. Out of our settled patterns, we are compelled to notice that the Bible has become among us a battle ground, a moral club to attack or a social club to join, an answer book, an instrument of control, a tool for ideology. Our misreading of the Bible has serious social outcomes, tempting us to domination, ideology, and adversarial relations. I am not so naive as to think a new mode of reading could by itself evoke new modes of relationship; nonetheless, our reading and our patterns of relationship are related to each other. Josipovici offers us a step along the way, the way to a new hearing of the word. What is required is not more data, more technical information about texts, but different ears. "Scripture alone" is dangerous when separated from "grace alone." This book is not interested in formulated theology; the reading offered nonetheless is a reading from grace, which might recharacterize "Scripture alone" in its awesome gracefulness and graciousness. The reading purposed here suggests that the text be permitted as a mode of shattering and healing, of. dismantling, and

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surprising. Something like this must have been intended in the text from early on-and then lost. To learn again to read could be a pearl of great price, worth the farm! This book is a signpost on the way to that new reading.

WALTER BRUEGGEMANN

Columbia Theological Seminary
Decatur, Georgia