Rev. Robert Imbelli at the independent, lay Catholic Commonweal Magazine blog discusses a review of Harold Bloom's Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine by James Wood at The New Republic (online).

It might have been for a history of Christianity class that I was assigned to read excerpts from Bloom's The American Religion. I became so enthralled with his take and style that I bought a keeper copy secondhand from Amazon.

Bloom's ability to accentuate the positive aspects of the less mainstream side of non-Catholic Christianity helped me to foster some degree of tolerance towards variation of belief and expression within the Christian faith at a time when I had very, very little charity. His chapter on Mormonism was especially effective in encouraging a personal respect for its founder and its early history as a movement.

At the same time, I gloried in Bloom's seemingly dispassionate and clearly disparaging comments of fringe Protestantism, summarized accurately in Wood's current assessment:

In it [The American Religion (1992)], Bloom argues that American Christianity is neither very biblical nor very theological. He focuses particularly on Mormonism and on the Southern Baptists, though he also discusses Pentecostalism and Fundamentalism and Christian Scientism. He finds that American Christians emphasize what he calls "a Gnostic knowing of Jesus through direct acquaintance," and that they characterize the self that gets to know Jesus thus as essentially solitary. Like most extreme off-shoots of Protestantism, the American sects and churches have shucked off Yahweh as a theological and literary inconvenience (too Jewish, too unpleasant and disobliging, too absent), and have rapturously taken possession of a now strangely Fatherless Jesus Christ, best approached through the Holy Spirit, and most emblematically seen as the Risen Christ. This solitary "knowing" of Jesus--through conversion, salvation, and prayer--is combined, so Bloom argues, with a characteristic American self-love, a belief that the human self possesses elements of the divine.

Wood quotes from Bloom's book: "Even if Mark were as powerful a writer as the Yahwist, there could be no contest, since Torah (like the Qur'an) is God, whereas the entire argument of the Belated Testament is that a man has replaced Scripture."

I would suggest that, in some Christian circles, the Scripture is still God, over against the Man.

I hope these links work --

Robert Imbelli's post about Wood's review at the blog for Commonweal Magazine

James Wood's review of Harold Bloom's book at The New Republic online