Book Reviews Christianity & Literature 2019, Vol. 68(4) 691–726 ! The Conference on Christianity and Literature, 2018 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0148333118810827 journals.sagepub.com/home/cal The Parables after Jesus: Their Imaginative Receptions across Two Millennia. David B. Gowler. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017. ISBN 9780801049996. Pp. xv 1 301. $29.99 (pbk.). In The Parables after Jesus, biblical scholar David B. Gowler ambitiously attempts to present the imaginative receptions of Jesus’ parables from the second century AD into the current millennium. Gowler covers—largely successfully—a wide sweep of imaginative receptions, including how Jesus’ parables have been depicted in media as varied as sermons, poetry, fiction, drama, visual art, and hymn and blues lyrics. Golwer’s book offers in chronological order more than 50 entries that focus on the work of particular authors or artists. Throughout his coverage, Gowler emphasizes depictions of parables that emphasize the need for compassion and justice, taking pains to represent voices who represent traditionally marginalized groups. In this review, I will focus on those entries most germane to readers of Christianity and Literature. Chapter 1, “The Afterlives of Jesus’s Parables in Antiquity (to ca. 550 CE),” discusses several prominent church fathers. Gowler emphasizes their tendency to read Jesus’ parables allegorically, although he notes that some—including Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and sometimes Augustine—used allegory more elaborately, detailing that various characters, animals, and inanimate objects each signified deeper spiritual truths; while others—including Irenaeus, Tertullian, and John Chrysostom—were more restrained in their approach. Nonetheless, Gowler observes that all these fathers employed allegory to mine the hidden spiritual riches of the parables. Chapter 1 also discusses Macrina the Younger, the older sister of Gregory of Nyssa, who describes, in his On the Soul and the Resurrection, his conversation with Macrina on her deathbed. Gowler states that Gregory’s treatise “functions as a Christian Phaedrus,” with Gregory’s student role paralleling Plato’s and with Macrina resembling “Socrates on his deathbed arguing for the immortality of the soul” (44). Within the treatise, Macrina employs allegorical readings of the parable of the wheat and weeds and the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. Chapter 2, “The Afterlives of Jesus’s Parables in the Middle Ages (ca. 550–1500 CE),” discusses both the continuation of allegorical interpretations within the homilies of Pope Gregory the Great and of the visionary Benedictine nun Hildegard of Bingen, and the more cautious approach of Thomas Aquinas, who 692 Christianity & Literature 68(4) himself uses allegorical interpretations but argues that such interpretations must spring from the “literal” sense of the Scripture. Chapter 2 also introduces Gowler’s first analyses of literature per se, discussing the Confessio Amantis (“The Lover’s Confession”) of Chaucer’s contemporary John Gower. This lengthy poem, an allegory based on the sacrament of confession, addresses the seven deadly sins, with book 6 using the parable of the rich man and Lazarus to illustrate gluttony. In Gower’s poem, the “Confessor,” Genius, condemns the rich man’s attachment to “delicacy” (103). Genius adds to Luke’s account of the parable, narrating that Lazarus directly asks for food and receives nothing from the self-focused rich man who has a “fulle panche” and “deigneth noght to speke a word” to Lazaras (qtd. on 104). In the end, Lazarus is rewarded for his “gret penance” whereas the rich man “is deservedly punished with everlasting pain in hell for his sin of sating his bodily lusts” (105). Antonia Pulci’s late fifteenth-century play on the prodigal son also engages the seven deadly sins, and after the prodigal leaves home, these sins—led by Pride—become his new companions, with Avarice and Gluttony playing prominent roles. In Pulci’s drama, the repentant prodigal and his resentful older brother are reconciled, and audience members are urged to be reconciled with Christ and each other. Chapter 3, “The Afterlives of Jesus’s Parables in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” highlights Martin Luther’s and John Calvin’s rejections of elaborate allegorical parable interpretation but also discusses the Jesuit biblical exegete John Maldonatus, who used the parable of the sower, the parable of the net, and the parable of the laborers in the vineyard to combat the “errors” of Luther and Calvin and their followers, “modern heretics” who believe that salvation can be received by faith alone (129). In discussing Shakespeare, Gowler focuses on his use of the parable of the prodigal son, noting its complex and multifaceted manifestations in The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, King Lear, both parts of Henry IV, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and elsewhere. Discussing George Herbert’s collection of poems, The Temple, Gowler analyzes how the parable of the great dinner “serves as the foundation for ‘Love (III)’” (143) and how the parable of the pearl of great value “is the primary source” for “The Pearl” (145). Although Gowler’s discussion of Shakespeare is quite engaging, Gowler’s analysis of Herbert’s works reveals Gowler’s comparative weakness in poetic explication, a defect even more evident when he later discusses Emily Dickinson. Chapter 3 also strangely omits any discussion of John Milton, whose autobiographical speaker in Sonnet 19, “When I consider how my light is spent,” articulates in his anguished wrestling with the parable of the talents perhaps the best-known and most powerful first-person engagement with any parable in any piece of creative literature. Gowler’s passing over Milton is especially regrettable because two of Gowler’s most powerful entries—his discussions of Albrecht Durer in chapter 2 and of Thomas Hart Benton in chapter 5—each contain excellent analyses of these visual artists’ likely self-portraits in their respective depictions of the parable of the prodigal son. Book Reviews 693 Chapter 4, “The Afterlives of Jesus’s Parables in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” includes as its first entry a fascinating discussion of William Blake’s engraving The Parable of the Wise of Foolish Virgins. As with his other analyses of visual art throughout his book, Gowler here demonstrates keen attention to detail and skillfully articulates his observations to nonspecialists. But Gowler sadly does not mention references to parables in Blake’s poetry. In the chapter’s strongest entry, Gowler effectively analyzes how Frederick Douglass, in various speeches, incorporates the parable of the sheep and the goats, the parable of the good Samaritan, the parable of the great dinner, and the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, all of which Douglass uses to illustrate the just and unjust sides in the American slavery controversy of his era. Particularly memorable is Douglass’s connection between Abraham Lincoln and Father Abraham in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. Conversely, Gowler’s disappointing analysis of Emily Dickinson demonstrates within her poetry only a glancing usage of Jesus’ parables, and his choice to include Dickinson becomes especially perplexing in light of his neglect of Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose The Scarlet Letter famously contains, though the character of Pearl, an extended engagement with the parable of the pearl of great value. Even so, Gowler’s discussion of Leo Tolstoy’s short story “Where Love Is, God Is” and its retelling of the parable of the sheep and the goats effectively represents a work whose author’s commitment to social justice parallels Gowler’s own. The chapter’s final entry, on the German biblical scholar Adolf Jülicher, whose supremely influential and enduringly controversial writings on Jesus’ parables effectively overturned allegory as the dominant mode of parable interpretation, is particularly valuable, exhibiting Gowler’s expertise in the history of scholarly interpretation of the parables. In chapter 5, “The Afterlives of Jesus’s Parables in the Twentieth and TwentyFirst Centuries,” Gowler covers even more diverse media, including blues songs by the Rev. Robert Wilkins, the film Godspell, the recorded insights of Father Ernesto Cardenal’s largely peasant Solentiname Catholic community in Nicaragua, and the writings of Costa Rican feminist liberation theologian Elsa Tamez. Gowler resonates deeply with Martin Luther King, Jr., who in his sermons uses the parable of the rich fool and the parable of the sheep and the goats to criticize the United States for storing up treasures for itself without redistributing wealth to needier nations; and the parable of the good Samaritan to inspire American compassion for enemies, specifically calling for reparations to Vietnam. Gowler also discusses Flannery O’Connor, who throughout her novel The Violent Bear It Away uses the parable of the sower to demonstrate the spiritual conditions of her book’s characters. The same parable is also used extensively by the African American science fiction writer Octavia Butler in her novel The Parable of the Sower, whose protagonist is Lauren Oya Olamina, a teenage girl who, though the daughter of a Baptist minister, creates a new religion that advocates “the concept of God as change” and has written “a holy text” entitled “Earthseed: The Books of the Living” (244). Gowler writes, “Lauren’s long-term plan for the God-is-change Earthseed religion is to bear fruit like the seed of the sower parable that fell on good soil. Lauren’s 694 Christianity & Literature 68(4) good soil, however, is ultimately to be found on other planets” (245). Chapter 5 concludes by discussing the writings of Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Gowler is clearly intrigued by Nhat Hanh’s engagement with elements of Christianity and his dedication to social justice, but he gives little evidence that Nhat Hanh’s work significantly engages Jesus’ parables; rather, Gowler suggests that Nhat Hanh’s teachings articulate the spirit of certain parables. Gowler’s forced attempt to include Nhat Hanh as someone significant to the imaginative reception history of Jesus’ parables demonstrates the book’s greatest weakness: that Gowler’s commitment to inclusion and social justice seems to motivate him to include entries on writers who do not substantially engage Jesus’ parables even as he neglects authors like Milton and Hawthorne whose work offers some of the most important engagement of Jesus’ parables in all of literature. This concern notwithstanding, The Parables after Jesus succeeds notably at educating its readers concerning its subject. And although Gowler lacks expertise in analyzing poetry and fiction, his discussions of the early church’s engagement with Jesus’ parables and his analysis of visual art portraying the parables are especially praiseworthy, as is his compelling entry on Douglass. David V. Urban Calvin College Approaching Jonathan Edwards: The Evolution of a Persona. By Carol Ball. New York: Routledge, 2016. Hardback: ISBN 9781472447029. Pp. 212. $96.00. Paperback: ISBN 9781138053069. Pp. 212. $43.96. Ebook: ISBN 9781315567457. Pp. 212. $27.48. For Christian teachers of American literature, the question remains of what to do with Jonathan Edwards. Recent theological studies and religious history scholarship have recovered Edwards’s profound trinitarianism—a rarity in the historical flow of Congregationalism in the USA; and yet, one wonders what then to make of Perry Miller’s infamous “Edwards to Emerson” thesis, the Edwards who fused his writings with the insights and methods of Locke and Berkeley and consequently seems to compromise on Christian rigor. At the same time, while we might hope to affirm Edwards as one of America’s first serious Christian theologians, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is usually all most readers of American literature (especially students) know or remember of him. Carol Ball attempts to recover an Edwards somewhere between the intellectual theologian and the stylist of well-known sermons. In Approaching Jonathan Edwards: The Evolution of a Persona, Stephen Greenblatt plays a role at the level of theory: Ball contends that Greenblatt’s notion of “self-fashioning” in the Renaissance applies to Edwards’s crafting of self in response to the controversies of Connecticut Valley Congregationalism. This means that Ball looks beyond