Roger Lundin

Review: The Culture of Interpretation

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Cover image of "The Culture of Interpretation" by Roger Lundin

The Culture of Interpretation

The Culture of Interpretation, Roger Lundin. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (ISBN: 9780802806369) 1993.

Summary: A study of contemporary American culture, how we’ve come to this point, and its implications for Christians.

This is one of those books I came to thirty years too late. In the time since, the author has passed on (in 2015). But the matters he addresses, including the relevance of his analysis of the contemporary university has not. If anything, the crisis in the humanities outlined in this work has immeasurably deepened as academics in these fields struggle to justify what they do.

What Lundin does is engage in a study of the ideas shaping American culture and how they have developed. As a Christian, he weighs the implications of those developments for Christian scholars in the humanities and Christians more generally. After an introduction that defines key terms like culture, he begins with examining the arguments about the nature and purpose of universities between the liberal left and traditionalist right, one that has continued to play out over the last thirty years.

The following three chapters chronicle the historical developments leading to these present disputes. He traces the epistemological unraveling that occurred between Cartesian rationalism and the doubts raised about this project by Kant. He then traces the rise of Romanticism with its emphasis on reason. In the next chapter, he follows the rise of “postmodern gnosticism” that questions the truth project altogether.

Chapters five and six are case studies of two American authors, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Emerson’s life is a study of the turn from Christian orthodoxy to romantic expressivism. Hawthorne, particularly in The Scarlet Letter, shows how the church in New England substituted coercive authority for the gospel of grace, opening the way to Emerson’s “Self Reliance.”

From here, Lundin considers the advent of Marxist analysis and deconstruction in literary circles. Christians might sympathize with the emphasis on the marginalized overlooked by romanticism. Yet inevitably, its materialism will conflict with core Christian belief. Likewise, in the deconstruction of all truth claims, there is no hope of redemption other than the use of language to gain power. Lundin draws this out in contrasting Augustine and Derrida.

In concluding, Lundin, using the example of C.S. Lewis, argues that Christian scholars err in adopting modernist or post-modernist theories. For Lewis, it was a reliance on the lens of romantic expressivism. Lundin opposes the culture of therapy that seeks to manage experience for one’s well-being while ignoring ultimate questions. Instead, he contends for the recovery of the revelatory authority of God, neither subject to nor the antithesis of reason. He points to the journey of W. H. Auden into the embrace of Christian belief. He contends unapologetically for a faith that meets us at our worst on the cross, and through death and resurrection, offers restoration, a faith of both suffering and glory.

While things haven’t stood still in the last thirty years, this book remains of value as an analysis of currents of thought continuing to shape contemporary culture, particularly that of the university world. If anything, the disputes are more pronounced. And in his concluding chapters, Lundin gestures toward a third way beyond the hopeless binaries. For Christians frustrated by the contemporary culture wars, Lundin offers both insight and alternatives.

Review: Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief

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Cover image of "Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief" by Roger Lundin

Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, Revised Edition (Library of Religious Biography), Roger Lundin. Wm B. Eerdmans (ISBN: 9780802821270) 2004 (My review is based on the first edition, published in 1998).

Summary: A biography of Dickinson focused on her life and faith drawing upon poetry and letters.

I would describe Emily Dickinson as a “beloved enigma.” Her poetry is among the most loved of American poetry, celebrated for her unusual phrasing and keen insight. That is all the more the case considering that she lived the last three decades of her life as a virtual recluse and with only a few exceptions, refused publication of her work during her lifetime.

Roger Lundin’s biography explores that reclusive behavior without explaining it, apart from the poet’s choice. What is more significant, is that he explores her religious faith. Her life was lived in the intersection of a Calvinist-Puritan New England upbringing and the rise of enlightenment romanticism. Lundin writes of her father’s reading of serious books on sabbaths and Emily’s sense of the distance of God the Father while identifying more closely with Christ. She never entered into church membership, eventually ceasing to attend her parent’s church. While others went down the path of Unitarianism, she remained a Trinitarian, and had some sense of Christ giving away his life for us. And she grieved the loss of those close to her in her last years but clearly believed in an afterlife. Challenged by skepticism, she never gave way to it.

The closest Lundin gets to Dickinson’s inner turn is to explore the idea of her inner Preceptor. For Dickinson, her inner life, her perception of the world was of far greater interest than externals. This “romantic isolation of the self” was so powerful that it led to avoiding social contact outside her home for the last thirty years, apart from treatments for her eyes in Boston. It explains her decision to not publish, forgoing all the literary contacts this would necessitate.

This, however did not mean complete isolation. She and her sister Lavinia were close and, together they cared for her parents, in whose home Emily lived. She had a more difficult relationship with Sue, her brother Austin’s wife. Eventually, the social center of the Dickinson family shifted to their house, and Sue and Emily became more distant. Her rare visitors talked to her from a hallway near her room, separated by a partially open door. She was steeped in books, and missed her Shakespeare when forbidden to read due to an eye condition. And she carried on a significant correspondence, particularly with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was her frankest critic and eventually, a friend. He shared in editing the earliest posthumous edition of her work.

Lundin traces the chronology of her work, including her explosion of writing between 1858 and 1865. Then her production tailed off, particularly as affliction struck down members of her family and close friends, and finally Emily herself. She died at 58 of Bright’s disease, a kidney disease, passing into her “Rendezvous of Light.’

A feature of this work is that Lundin quotes frequently from her poems. By doing so, her underscores her perceptions of her inner world and the world beyond. And other quotes articulate her own surviving faith. He also uses her correspondence as well as the spiritual and intellectual backdrop of her life in Amherst to sketch her life and the influences that formed her.

The revised edition of this book (which I did not have access to) includes a standard bibliography, expanded notes, and more discussion of her poetry, something I would have liked to see in the first edition. The revision “has also keyed all poem citations to the recently updated standard edition of Dickinson’s poetry.” These enhance what was already an important biography of this quintessentially American poet.

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Review: From Nature to Experience

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From Nature to Experience

From Nature to Experience, Roger Lundin. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.

Summary: Using two essays by Emerson, “Nature” and “Experience,” traces the shift in American moral and cultural authority during the last two centuries.

Roger Lundin was an English professor at Wheaton College until his death in 2015. In this work, he left us with a masterful literary and intellectual history of 19th and 20th century America. He structures this treatment around two essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” and “Experience,” tracing the shift in authority from Nature, that is the external world ranging from physical reality to Christian revelation to Experience, the perceptions of the individual know-er.

Lundin traces this intellectual movement through the American pragmatism of Dewey to the post-modernism of Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish. Along the way he engages philosophers like Nietzsche and intellectuals like Henry Adams. He also traces this intellectual shift through the lives of literary figures like Emily Dickinson, of whom he wrote in a separate work, a short story of Stephen Crane, and William Faulkner. And he brings all these in dialogue with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth.

The movement he traces is one from a nature that is enchanted, connected to a transcendent God, to disenchantment, and from a reality and truth rooted outside oneself to subjective glimpses of reality and truth reduced to what works. I’ve probably stated this summary far more polemically, and with less nuance than does Lundin, who shows a deep acquaintance with and respect for the intellectual and artistic power of each of these figures, with whom most of us, including this reviewer have a passing acquaintance. For that reason, his invoking of Christian sources, and the transcendent vision of authority they represent, comes off as careful scholarship and rigorous argument rather than polemics or proselytizing.

What Lundin does instead is model Christian scholarship at its best, of engaging the minds of one’s discipline with a thoughtful Christian mind. He also offers more. In a culture suspicious both of science and anyone else’s claims of truth, and an academy witnessing the self-inflicted eclipse of the humanities, Lundin’s discussion offers hope for the retrieval of the sources of authority lost to academy and society alike. Sadly, this work, still in print, does not enjoy the circulation it deserves. My own search to find the book in our state’s libraries only turned up a single copy. Perhaps calling renewed attention to Lundin’s work may both serve as fitting tribute to his scholarship, and invite a new generation to take up his work.

Review: Beginning with the Word: Modern Literature and the Question of Belief

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Beginning with the Word: Modern Literature and the Question of Belief
Beginning with the Word: Modern Literature and the Question of Belief by Roger Lundin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The very fact that I am writing these words and you are reading them suggests some kind of belief about the function of language. Exactly what that function is has been called into question by recent literary theory. At one time if I said I was writing about a book by Roger Lundin titled Beginning with the Word, you would think that my words had reference to the actual (or virtual) book. Recent literary theory has separated word and thing such that any use of words is simply representing what they signify in my mind, my own subjective experience, and not the actual book.

Certainly there is warrant for this idea. One of the daunting tasks of reviewing is to attempt to do justice to an author’s ideas, whatever one’s critique of them may be. Actually, this is something I felt I struggled with more than usual in reading this book, reading it twice, and even then, not being sure I am doing the author’s ideas justice.

What Lundin seems to be doing in engaging 19th and 20th century writers like Emily Dickinson and William Faulkner as well as theologians like Karl Barth, as well as literary theorists like Ricoeur and Gadamer is to explore the skepticism of belief in both modern literature and literary theory that arises from this separation of word and thing. In so doing he explores the desire to believe in the midst of such skepticism, the desire for a storied existence in a literary culture suspicious of any metanarrative. He considers the power of words to awaken awareness using Frederick Douglass’s autobiography of how reading gave him an awareness of his personhood and the desirability of freedom.

Lundin would propose that there is even yet ground for belief because of the Word who became Flesh, the One who incarnated a union (reunion?) between word and object. This is a central tenet of Barth’s theology and provides a basis for a belief in the transcendent, in the possibility of grace, and for being part of a story that makes sense and gives meaning to life.

The author positions himself not as one proposing an “absolute” argument as a modernist writer might, but rather speaks as a “witness” weaving together a theology of the Word, his own experience, and themes in literature (story, making sense of time, a longing for home, and dreams of justice and deliverance) to affirm that it is possible to make statements of belief that aren’t simply polite fictions, personal sentiments, or statements about what we know isn’t so, but rather affirmations of ultimate, life-giving realities rooted in the One who brings Word and Thing together.

I confess that I struggled to follow the train of the author’s thought at points, particularly where he delves into literary theory. The thematic approach reflects less a linear argument than coming at an idea from several perspectives. Yet I suspect that for some these elements along with the humble yet forthright “witness” that affirms while leaving room for others might in the end prove winsome and more persuasive than any absolute, linear argument. Certainly for any student in literary studies who wrestles with critical theory and questions of belief, this is an important resource.

[This review is based on a complimentary e-galley version of this book provided by the publisher through Netgalley. I have not been in any other way compensated for the review of this book.]

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