Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation.

This text presents a fresh and persuasive reading of the work of John Bunyan framed by a controversial and sometimes unconvincing explanation of Protestantism's rejection of allegory. In his study of hermeneutics, Luxon identifies Bunyan's work as the culmination of a "crisis in representation" anticipated by the Protestant reformers' championing of a literalism that disguised their commitment to allegory. Their typological hermeneutics, he argues, served as a "euphemism" (40) for their allegorical interpretation of the Scripture and the world. Luxon commends that instead of preserving the historicity and literalism so integral to Protestantism, typology "emptied out" (51) the category of history, designating it as fiction. This argument controverts the conventional understanding of Protestant typology in which the Old Testament biblical type is both a sign pointing to its fulfillment in the New Testament, and also a thing signified and therefore endowed with historicity. I was fascinated by Luxon's comparison of exegetical passages in which Protestant reformers, applying their credo of literalism, struggle with Paul's own allegorical reading of the Old Testament. However, Luxon's rejection of the reformers' own account of their hermeneutic practices seems questionable. Most problematic is his politicizing of their motives. His contention that the reformers' desire to preserve religion explains their equivocating deferral of reality to the next world, a deferral evidenced by Puritan rejection of seventeenth-century sectarian millenarianism, discounts their conviction that their hermeneutic practices - themselves derived from Scripture - uncovered "the truth" of God's word.

In a second argument, Luxon maintains that typology reveals the dissonance between Protestantism's rejection of allegory and its ontological allegorization of the world. Leaning heavily on Pauline texts that discuss the new birth, he contends that Protestants or Puritans interpreted this world as a shadow of the next, locating reality outside of time and space and reducing history to the status of the unreal. Thus to be reborn is to become real; to be unregenerate is to be a mere figure of the real. Luxon's Platonic account of Calvinist ontology, on which he bases his arguments, misstates reformed theology by ignoring related Christian doctrines that comprise what reformers might have called "the whole counsel of God" - doctrines (like sanctification) that invest history with meaning and so complicate bipolarity. I also found Luxon's claim, that Christian ontology - its universalism - led to discrimination against Jews and women and rendered them "unreal," unpersuasive, for these conclusions seem derived less from historical analysis than from the writer's postmodern devaluation of the universal.

Despite these reservations, I found Luxon's interpretation of Bunyan's work compelling. Luxon argues that Grace A bounding and The Pilgrim's Progress articulate an "anti-hermeneutic theology" (168) adopted by radical sectarians, a theology implicit in Protestant logocentrism. Transformed by the millenarian zeal shared by seventeenth-century parliamentarians, Puritan sectarians rejected both the world and the Word as mere signs, doubting their capacity to represent the real. This iconoclastic dismissal of representation explains Bunyan's own longing for an unmediated, pre-linguistic revelation that bypassed "other mens word's" (133), Scripture included. In The Pilgrim's Progress Bunyan chooses an allegorical representation "because allegory is a mode particularly suited to finessing the issue of the real" (159). Bunyan's "fall" back into allegory signals a containment by Protestantism's two-world ontology of the chiliasm he would embrace. Luxon's version of Protestant ontology seems closer to Bunyan's radically Puritan allegorical reading of the Word and the world than to the ontology of Protestant reformers of the previous century. Although this study points out some significant connections between Reformation Protestantism and a later Puritanism, it also minimizes differences in doctrinal emphasis that divide the reformers from their seventeenth-century successors.

MARSHA S. ROBINSON Kean College