People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture

Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: Jeffrey contends that Christianity has not historically embraced logocentrism, and his book is a brilliant survey of the ways that Christians have historically read texts. Beginning with the Bible and moving through the entire history of Western literature, he demonstrates that Christian readers have traditionally embraced polysemous meaning in both sacred and secular texts; it was not until very late that Westerners decided that words had absolute referents that could be fully understood. Jeffrey's final chapter and epilogue on the penitent reader is a serious challenge to both Enlightenment and postmodern hermeneutics.