Houses of the Interpreter: Reading Scripture, Reading Culture

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.