Michael Edwards: A Poet’s Vision of the Untimely Message of God

Abstract

Michael Edwards, professor of English literature at the Collège de France in Paris, poet, critic, and the first British subject to be elected to the French Academy, has turned his attention in recent years to biblical literature. In 2016 he published Bible et poésie (Paris, Fallois). A translation of the sequel, Pour un christianisme intempestif (Paris, Fallois), was released in February of 2022 by Fortress Press under the title, Untimely Christianity. In the same year, the English translation of his 2016 volume, under the title The Bible and Poetry, will be published by New York Review Books. This study examines the poet-scholar’s perspective on scripture, on theology, on the art of translation and his opinions of various modern translations of the Bible and highlights the most useful insights he contributes. The notion of Christianity’s radical alterity is an important key to Edwards’s work. Christianity is foreign to us, it is strange, so the scriptures that reveal it are also radically other. We Christians have been so desensitized to that otherness by our familiarity with the text that we seldom are challenged by it with the force that energized it originally. Its immense countercultural potential for transforming us and our world is blunted so that we don’t truly hear the voice of God in it. Edwards’s essential purpose is to help us reawaken our ability to hear the Bible in its untimely, countercultural power.