God’s Last Words: Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism by David S. Katz (review)

187 his Epilogue—participated in a form of analysis that I would agree could be called paranoid in that it stressed the helplessness of the individual in the face of powerful and corrupt institutions. However, despite the evidence that each could offer in support of their position, those visions were not the last word for either thinker. Foucault in the last seven years of his career moved to consider conditions and modes of effective ethical and political agency apart from traditional Christian morality; in his two most recent novels, so has Pynchon. They thus declined the comforts of paranoia to which some like Rousseau have succumbed. Although we may approach these questions from different perspectives, Paranoia and Modernity is learned and ambitious. Frank Palmeri University of Miami DAVID S. KATZ. God’s Last Words: Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism. New Haven and London: Yale, 2004. Pp. xvi ⫹ 397. $38. Readers of the Scriblerian will be most interested in the five lively chapters of God’s Last Words that explore uses of Scripture during the English Civil War, in the later seventeenth century , and on through the middle of the eighteenth. Mr. Katz discusses the famous and also little known publishers , interpreters, editors, and significant events relating to biblical publication. He mainly provides personal portraits of individuals or narratives of important events or trends, favoring the oddball, off the beaten path person or event that makes the book original and interesting. If he occasionally defers to theory (Hans Robert Jauss, Wilhelm Dilthey, HansGeorg Gadamer), these animadversions never burden the style. Chapter 2 offers insight into the mind of a practitioner of Sola Scriptura as it yoked, often violently, Scripture to the political events of the 1640s and 1650s. In this context, the Old Testament provides types for contemporary antitypes. Comfortable in his own mission, Cromwell especially interpreted Scripture thus, as Mr. Katz explains. A number of figures are glanced at, especially Henry Jessey, who saw prodigies and signs of the end time as foretold by Scripture of English historical events; Joseph Mede, a millenarian; and Thomas Venner, the last leader of the Fifth Monarchists, so feared by the new government in 1660. A short study of Sabbath observance and of Quaker inner light concludes the chapter. Through this chapter and the following, description and analysis usually depend on careful work in primary sources. In Chapter 3, Mr. Katz helpfully summarizes Hobbes’s theory of scriptural interpretation, and also recognizes the importance of Brian Walton, editor of the Biblia Sacra Polyglotta (1657). He introduces William Nisbet and Thomas Allan, writers spanning the 1660 divide, who specialized in scriptural chronology . The chapter also describes Newton’s special interests in two important Trinitarian texts and, again, scriptural chronology . Two things seem amiss in this chapter . In ordering this material, Mr. Katz places Walton, because he enjoyed limited support from the Protector, among the practitioners of Cromwell’s theology . Yet as Walton’s interpretive essays appended to this polyglot bible make clear, he was a Laudian Anglican, who found time to edit only because he had 188 been deprived of his living by Cromwell ’s government. Second, Mr. Katz writes frequently about the ‘‘Newtonian Synthesis,’’ that is the subjection of the scripture to the same rigorous analysis as nature. While Newton’s doubt about the validity of two Trinitarian texts, which shows up in letters to Locke, must be noticed, his primary interest was in biblical chronology. In the mainstream European canon, present also in English latitudinarianism, a topic, such as chronology, was usually not central to faith. It is doubtful that Newton took a particularly scientific approach to what was central, like Jesus as Messiah, a main theme of Locke, or the truth of revelation or of divine providence. Anglican theologians around 1700 knew very well that if you applied this scientific method to the central doctrines of scripture there would not be much of them left. They professed to teach in terms of moral rather than mathematical , Cartesian certainty. Chapters 4, 5, and 6, on the demystification of the Bible, the occult Bible, and the apotheosis of authorship, contain excellent short essays on authors and topics. Though Mr. Katz...