A Darkened Reading: A Reception History of the Book of Isaiah in a Divided Church

The church in the West has subsisted for five hundred years in a state of ever-increasing multiple identities many of which claim to be the best representation of the church established by Christ. Often attending novel models of the church are new scriptural interpretive methods that support theological claims. Rarely however has an exploration been undertaken to test the impact of this ecclesiological division on the reading of the Bible. A Darkened Reading explores the specific case of the nineteenth-century Church of England and competing interpretations of the book of the prophet Isaiah--a book of great importance in theological history--as a kind of parable of the existential anguish the church has experienced as a consequence of being torn apart. Robert L. Knetschs account of nineteenth-century biblical interpretation forces us to attend to the ways that a divided church distorts our reading of holy Scripture. Even those who are not convinced by all of his arguments will find contemplating them time well spent. A Darkened Reading is a jeremiad that laments how a house divided turns the house of the interpreter into a bleak house. This is a haunting provocative book. --Timothy Larsen McManis Professor of Christian Thought Wheaton College Illinois Robert L. Knetsch is Adjunct Professor at Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto.