The book is structured in two parts. The first portion explores the postmodern condition in a way that takes the concerns of postmodernism seriously—in particular, the postmodern resistance to metanarratives (the 'grand stories' or overarching systems of thought that seek to be universal, as well as the concept of the 'decentered self'.) There are some other references to Critical Theory as well. I was pleased to see that this section is not unsympathetic to the concerns of postmodernism, and does not dismiss it out of hand, even while still holding it up to criticial scrutiny. I appreciate this intellectual honesty on the part of the Christian authors.

The second half of the book seeks to take up the way Christian faith responds to those concerns and strives to present an intellectually compelling argument for that response. The book seeks to create a dialogue between postmodern thought and the Christian perspective, and may be of interest to scholars of Composition Theory who wish to explore the connections between faith and theory.

Cameron’s definition of Christian discourse is broad; by this term she means “all the rhetorical strategies and manners of expression that I take to be particularly characteristic of Christian writing” (5). Among the various specific kinds of Christian discourse, she concentrates on the speeches, sermons, apocryphal stories, and saints’ lives that Christians living in the Empire produced. Her goal is to show how these kinds of discourse aided the spread of Christianity by resonating with characteristics deeply embedded within the dominant culture.

In working toward this goal, she examines how the challenge of expressing truths about the transcendent led Christian writers of the second century to use figural elements-metaphors, images, and typologies—and how these elements struck responsive chords in people accustomed to epideictic speeches that usually relied heavily on symbolic evocation. Further, Cameron investigates how Christian narratives—especially narratives about the acts of the Apostles and the life of Mary—began to flourish in the second and third centuries, and how these stories cut across boundaries of class and genre in ways that classical literary works could not.

From the authors of these narratives, Cameron moves to the great Christian speakers and writers of the fourth century. She examines how they were able to transform the techniques and themes of classical rhetoric to produce a rhetoric of personal appeal and political power. As these Christians appropriated elements of classical rhetoric, however, they also incorporated paradoxical elements within their works, particularly paradoxical elements associated with the virginity of Mary and the Incarnation. Cameron argues that these elements helped to preserve the mystery at the center of Christianity. Cameron concludes her investigation by showing how several of the rhetorical elements that she examines, especially the figural and the paradoxical elements, led to a theology of the visual image. And she traces how this theology had significant effects on the Christian discourse produced as the Byzantine world began to be established.

Cameron’s tracing of the interactions between Christian discourse and the dominant culture of the Roman Empire is enlightening. And as she proceeds, she raises issues that should be of great interest to contemporary Christians. For example, Cameron makes clear that much early Christian discourse appealed to both mind and heart. I wonder whether the kinds of discourse that various groups of Christians depend on now do the same. Cameron shows that much early Christian discourse relied on metaphors to describe God. I wonder whether contemporary Christian discourse depends on metaphors to a similar degree; I also wonder which characteristics of God the metaphors we do use lead us to concentrate on and which characteristics those same metaphors lead us to ignore. Cameron points out that the mystery of the Incarnation was critically important to the life of faith for early Christians. I wonder how comfortable many contemporary Christians are with confronting this mystery and related ones. Finally, Cameron shows how the early Christians tried to solve the most significant problem of representation they faced—having to describe the indescribable—by resorting first to the figural, then to the paradoxical, and finally to the visual. I wonder how any one or more of these approaches would be judged by contemporary Christians.

Even as readers will likely be grateful to Cameron for raising issues such as those noted above, they will also wish, I suspect, that she had explored some of these and other issues further. Occasionally I found myself wishing that she had extended claims as far as she suggests she might have, that she had provided more evidence for various claims, that she had considered more potential implications of some claims, and that she had used a greater number of specific examples in order to vivify and clarify general claims.
But this book is essentially a printed series of lectures, and, as Cameron herself points out, in the lectures she could try to do little more than “to make a series of suggestions . . . [which] attempt to present a coherent, if partial, view of the whole” (6). As I noted above, these suggestions are enlightening and intriguing, and Cameron buttresses them with a most helpful range of notes and references. In this book, then, Cameron reconstructs much of the story of how various kinds of discourse contributed to the nature and spread of Christianity. She also invites others to help reconstruct the rest of that story.