In Houses of the Interpreter David Lyle Jeffrey explores the terrain of the cultural history of biblical interpretation. Jeffrey's mapping does not merely rest content to chart biblical scholarship and how it has influenced cultural impulses. Instead, Jeffrey chooses to focus upon the 'art' of Biblical interpretation--how sculptors, musicians, poets, novelists, and painters have 'read' the Bible. By so doing, Jeffrey clearly demonstrates that such cultural interpretation has deepened the church's understanding of the Bible as Scripture and how, remarkably, this cultural reading even has contributed to theology and the practice of faith. Jeffrey's chapters effectively root theological issues germane to the hermeneutical enterprise (e.g., Scriptural authority, narrative, the Old Testament as Christian Scripture, and the role of the reader, gender, and postmodernism) in specific authors and artists (e.g., Chaucer, Bosch, C. S. Lewis) and he does this in constant conversation with literature, both eastern and western. In this book the Bible leaps to life in unprecedented ways as Jeffrey shows us how the best minds of the ages worked on texts--texts we thought we had already understood well--to produce readings as surprising as they are arresting.
David Lyle Jeffrey will probably surprise you. An erudite scholar and author of twelve other books, he earned his PhD from Princeton and currently teaches Literature and Humanities at Baylor -- all of which are academic distinctions worthy of note. But what's astonishing, even brilliant about Jeffrey's work is the way he marries the breadth of his knowledge with lucid and revelatory prose. What do we mean? As one reviewer put it, Jeffrey is ''robustly pithy'' and able to ''breathe a refreshing sanity as well as wisdom'' into the history and culture surrounding biblical interpretation. In these pages, Jeffrey means to direct us to ''manifold rooms of Christian instruction'' containing ''portraits and parchments in conversation with each other down through the ages, and that these several voices, in their own reflection of the Holy Spirit, are of great value to us.'' Theologically, he draws sensitively and accurately from the Church Fathers as well as Louis Bouyer, Pope John II, John Wyclif, Henri de Lubac, John Bunyan and Martin Luther. Quite a mix. On the literary side, he examines what Chaucer shows us about medieval biblical interpretation in The Canterbury Tales, how Hieronymus Bosch teaches us about parody and piety in his famed Haywain triptych, and why C.S. Lewis is the sine qua non of a fine reader. But the last sentence of the last essay is probably our best commendation of Mr. Jeffrey's work: ''Each of us must daily pray... that we may come to know him who is the ground of all Truth, and so to have, in such measure as is possible for us, more of his mind about all these things.''
David Lyle Jeffrey will probably surprise you. An erudite scholar and author of twelve other books, he earned his PhD from Princeton and currently teaches Literature and Humanities at Baylor -- all of which are academic distinctions worthy of note. But what's astonishing, even brilliant about Jeffrey's work is the way he marries the breadth of his knowledge with lucid and revelatory prose. What do we mean? As one reviewer put it, Jeffrey is ''robustly pithy'' and able to ''breathe a refreshing sanity as well as wisdom'' into the history and culture surrounding biblical interpretation. In these pages, Jeffrey means to direct us to ''manifold rooms of Christian instruction'' containing ''portraits and parchments in conversation with each other down through the ages, and that these several voices, in their own reflection of the Holy Spirit, are of great value to us.'' Theologically, he draws sensitively and accurately from the Church Fathers as well as Louis Bouyer, Pope John II, John Wyclif, Henri de Lubac, John Bunyan and Martin Luther. Quite a mix. On the literary side, he examines what Chaucer shows us about medieval biblical interpretation in The Canterbury Tales, how Hieronymus Bosch teaches us about parody and piety in his famed Haywain triptych, and why C.S. Lewis is the sine qua non of a fine reader. But the last sentence of the last essay is probably our best commendation of Mr. Jeffrey's work: ''Each of us must daily pray... that we may come to know him who is the ground of all Truth, and so to have, in such measure as is possible for us, more of his mind about all these things.''
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