The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible ed. by Michael Lieb, Emma Mason, and Jonathan Roberts (review)

288 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE to be a master interpreter. The poems themselves are invariably excellent, but I found myself moved, time after time, with the interpretations. Guites expositions and analyses are themselves poetic; they can bring about that "felt change of consciousness" which Owen Barfield famously claimed for poetic diction in its truest forms. Readers will find their own favorite examples; mine would include the reflection on Heaney's "The Rain Stick" in the introduction (17-20); the words on Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" (146-54); Guites meditation on Philip Larkin's "Church-Going" (187-92); and the poems of Heaney again, virtually all of them but especially the triptych "Seeing Things" (231-42), in the closing chapter. A side note: for someone who works far more these days with theology than he does with literature, I was pleased to make the acquaintance of two new names: Sir John Davies and Geoffrey Hill. So who might wish to use this work and how? Apart from personal reading (which I highly recommend), I can see a strong use for Faith, Hope and Poetry as a teaching resource. A paperbound edition is now available at a much more affordable price, making it easier for the book to be assigned as a required text. Otherwise, select chapters could be read from a reserved copy. I would urge that the introduction receive special, careful attention and other chapters be brought in according to the character of a particular course. For myself, I could happily build a "theology and poetry" course around the entire text, confining myselfpretty much to the poetry readings therein. I am used to teaching in an institution in which instruction is entirely in small seminars. Working patiently through these selections in seminar fashion with alert students would be a dream. Charles C. Twombly Sandersville, Georgia The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible. Edited by Michael Lieb,Emma Mason, and Jonathan Roberts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN978-0-19-920454-0. Pp. xv + 725. $150.00. According to the editors of the Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible, biblical reception history, an enterprise grounded in the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and the contextual hermeneutics of Ulrich Luz, is to be distinguished by its attention to "the situated nature of all interpretive acts" (1). From the innumerable receptions of portions of the Bible over now millennia, the would-be reception historian collects and frames some subset, seeking to understand both the reception in its historical specificity and his or her own specificity as a historian. It goes without saying that there can be no unitary reception history of the Bible,only partial reception histories-effective histories- BOOK REVIEWS 289 and thus the overarching achievement of reception history of the Bible will be to "put the question of who owns the Bible centre stage" (6). Diversity, then, is of the essence, and the contributors, though largely of British affiliation (as would be expected), "are of any or no religious position, and write from many countries around the globe"; they were commissioned to produce "a highly diverse set of responses to the Bible" (6). The handbook is divided into two parts. Part I (approximately one-quarter of the hefty tome) offers an "overview of scholarly post-Enlightenment readings of the form and content" of twelve of the biblical books (seven from the Hebrew Bible, five from the New Testament), while part II "offers a series of in-depth case studies of particular key passages or books with due regard for the specificity of their socio-historical context" (7). Although the rationale for the arrangement of parts is clear enough, the essays in part I tend toward the cursory-they are indeed "overviews"-and tend to normalize rather than challenge the historical-critical paradigm-which is fine, of course, except that reception history as defined in the "Introduction" wants to be more plural, "a recognition of the dynamic, living relationship between texts and readers, rather than an attempt to isolate and stabilize textual meanings" (8). Nevertheless, the volume does ultimately achieve its aim of providing a structure in which the dialogue between the traditional and the...