Christianity and Literature: Philosophical Foundations and Critical Practice by David Lyle Jeffrey, Gregory Maillet (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 145 Christianity and Literature: Philosophical Foundations and Critical Practice. By David Lyle Jeffrey and Gregory Maillet. Downers Grover, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0830828173. Pp. 336. $16.45. During a pivotal conversation in Stowe's Uncle Toms Cabin (1851), Augustine St. Clare remarks that "all [he wants] is that different things be kept in different boxes:' Though St.Clare speaks here of decoupling slavery'seconomic realities from then-popular Biblical defenses of the peculiar institution, it seems his pragmatic approach to ethics has flourished in the ivory tower as well. We have no shortage of disciplinary, theoretical, textual, and ideological boxes-particularly in English departments-and one result of this fragmentation has been to push Christianity to the sidelines in much literary scholarship. But as David LyleJeffreyand Gregory Maillet emphasize in their excellent and rigorous Christianity and Literature: Philosophical Foundations and Critical Practice, serious Christian scholarship can and must integrate those boxes, especially in the difficult and highly politicized arena of literary theory. In doing so, Jeffrey and Maillet offer both an ambitious theoretical framework for "a distinctly Christian approach to literary criticism" (69) and a "brieftraveler's guide to essential landmarks that no Christian student of literature should fail to encounter and seek to understand" (90). The two elements willperhaps appeal to slightly different audiences, but both are wellworth readingparticularly in conjunction with Jeffrey's dazzling Dictionary ofBiblical Tradition in English Literature (Eerdmans, 2008)-as a guide to crafting or assessing Christian literary scholarship. This volume is the fifth in IVP Academic's Christian Worldview Integration Series, edited by Francis Beckwith and J. P. Moreland, and as such includes a valuable and helpful introductory essay (common to all the volumes in the series, I believe) outlining the need for and task of "conceptual integration:' in which "our theological beliefs, especially those derived from careful study of the Bible, are blended and unified with important, reasonable ideas from our profession or college major into a coherent, intellectually satisfying Christian worldview" (7). Beckwith and Moreland go on to analyze integration from a variety of theological and vocational angles, giving several practical models to classify and undertake integrative tasks. To be honest, I wish I'dhad access to this essay as an undergrad; it clarifies many philosophically complex issues, significantly recognizing that there is no single best way to think or work Christianly. Against this backdrop, Jeffrey and Maillet similarly undertake to "suggesjt] ways that a Christian worldview can provide a pertinent and fruitful approach to literary study as an academic discipline ... a rough map and some possible strategies for negotiating the terrain" (27). Their initial three chapters, which elucidate the Christian foundations of literary study, contain the bulk of their theoretical model as wellas a briefsurvey (chapter 3) of "our literary Bible:' Alongside standard points about the relationship between worldview and literature, they argue that Christian 146 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE literature in particular "often requires of its readers not only an interpretive response that attempts to understand textual meaning accurately, but also an evaluative response that callsone, in the light of the gospel, to an aesthetic, moral or intellectual transformation-effectively a conversion of one sort or another. Evaluative response may lead the reader in turn to contemplate whether a particular work of art presents beauty, goodness and truth, or is in fact marked by their absence" (36). Within this model, which of course informs many of the readings presented in subsequent chapters, the authors most emphasize truth, and argue convincingly for fiction'sability to present that truth by analogy, such that, in a nice formulation, "to quest for truth by the means of fiction, as almost all serious literary readers come to appreciate, is to be engaged in the pursuit ofdiscernment and wisdom" (43). For Jeffreyand Maillet, then, "postrnodern pragmatism" represents "an antirealist view of what counts as truth;' a view that "ultimately prevents authentic appreciation of the beautiful and pursuit of the good ... reaching to the possibility of our gaining an understanding oflove and ultimately of being" (62-3). To countermand this tendency in postmodern literary criticism-though they do exempt Bakhtin from their complaint-Jeffreyand Maillet layout a "specifically Christian philosophy of literature" that "may...