Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Westminster-John Knox Press has published over a dozen books with the phrase “The Gospel According to…” in the title. Books examining popular music specifically include The Beatles (2006), Bruce Springsteen (2008), and U2 (2009). Recently WJK added Michael J. Gilmour's The Gospel According to Bob Dylan: That Old, Old Story for Modern Times (2011) to its catalogue. This is a noteworthy addition to the series. Since his eponymous first record appeared in 1962, Bob Dylan has officially produced a total of fifty-six albums. Dylan's songs have consistently explored such themes as faith, love, justice, civil rights, death, war, peace, apocalypse, and so on—all “variations of human longing,” as Dylan summarized the foci of his songs in the notes to his album World Gone Wrong (1993).

Gilmour offers his theoretical predilections in the book's brief preface. I would summarize the author's orientation to the person and music of Bob Dylan with the phrase “iPod the Revelator.” More specifically, the shuffle feature on the iPod serves as an apt analogy for the way the ensuing book unfolds. Gilmour promises a “subjective and idiosyncratic approach” to a commentary on “the spirituality of Bob Dylan's music” (viii). Consequently, this meditation on Dylan's gospel is guided by chance and casual juxtaposition. The author claims his license to wander in an “unsystematic and haphazard” way through the arcade of Dylan's collected works with reference to the early twentieth century essayist Walter Benjamin, whose approach to the world and to writing, Gilmour asserts, resembles Dylan's own artistic interests and habits. The image of Dylan as a Benjaminian flâneur and the justification for a book about Dylan as an ongoing act of flâneurie are developed subsequently. Thus both the songs the reader is invited to hear and the glimpses of Dylan's life one catches en passant—while shuffling, as it were, through this book-arcade—appear seemingly at random.

I say “seemingly” because there is a kind of ordering principle to this book, one anchored in the impressions and experiences of its author. “To interpret a song is a confessional act,” Gilmore insists in his introduction (xv). To illustrate this point, the author provides an extended meditation on Dylan's song “Brownsville Girl” from the 1986 album Knocked Out Loaded. This is a somewhat esoteric choice with which to inaugurate a Dylan study, given the overwhelmingly negative reception that album received from critics and the public alike. Rolling Stone reviewer Anthony DeCurtis damned the album with faint praise, calling it “less bad than pointless” (September 11, 1986). What a particular critic might think, however, is not relevant to the book's main point, namely: music fans “construct something out of songs we want or need” (xii). Thus Gilmour uses the song “Brownsville Girl” to reconstruct his own experiences during the 1986–87 school year, a transitional period when he travelled away from his parental home for the first time to explore undergraduate education. The personal, seemingly anecdotal, engagement with Dylan's work suggests what constitutes “religion” for the author: “private, idiosyncratic, and deeply felt” experiences whose emotional content is admittedly difficult to convey (xiv–xv).

The book's chapters wander through Dylan's career, touching upon various issues of scholarship, songcraft, and critical reception as they proceed. So, for example, already in the introduction Gilmour refers to a number of scholars who investigate “meaning” as it is transmitted through song. In one paragraph, the works of Simon Frith, Robin Sylvan, and Jeremy Begbie are acknowledged in quick succession. Frith equates a song's meaning with its lyrical content and popular reception. Sylvan privileges music over lyrics as conveyor of a song's “major religious impact.” Begbie argues that musical sounds are as capable as words of bearing religious, apparently Christian, content (xviii). All of these are important concerns. Any one of these scholars might serve as a methodological guide into the works of Dylan and, importantly, into the question of how “religion” is used, expressed, or contained in song (and what the term “religion” might refer to throughout the book).

But Gilmour as flâneur is on the move. After this brief brush with method he launches into a defense of his proposed focus on song lyrics as a kind of poetry worthy of investigation in its own right. Even this resolution is misleading, however, because the book actually considers surprisingly few of Dylan's lyrics. Instead, the first chapter offers a meditation upon a photograph of Dylan. In the second chapter, Stanley Fish's reader response approach to text is touted as a way to interpret Dylan's work apart from the author's intended meaning or the anchoring of meaning in the author's biography. “Religious meaning and insight—the gospel according to Bob Dylan—spring from the engagement of the individual fan with [Dylan's] art,” Gilmour insists (42).

While this approach would seem to render biography, or at least Dylan's biography, irrelevant, details about Dylan's life and commitments become the objects of inquiry in chapter four, entitled “He's the Property of Jesus.” This chapter considers Dylan's work from 1979 to 1981 and attempts to show that Dylan was wrestling with matters of Christian conviction both immediately before and immediately after his “gospel” period. Gilmour also posits an increased fascination on Dylan's part with apocalyptic themes during this period. But this line of inquiry undermines previously enunciated methodological commitments. It also seems unnecessary or even wrong, given Dylan's consistent use of Christian and apocalyptic themes in songs that span his entire career from, for example, “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall” (1963) all the way to “Spirit on the Water” (2004) and Dylan's recent Christmas album (2010).

It is certainly interesting to follow one person as he wanders into and out of the Dylan arcade, as it were. This book offers just such an expedition. Still, it left me unsatisfied in the end. One gains from The Gospel According to Bob Dylan a sense of the songs, films, and other Dylan enterprises the book's author values. But Dylan has managed to remain popular, at times exceedingly so, for fifty years. How does his use of religious imagery and rhetoric of religious conviction contribute to that success? And what does this success suggest about the cultures that have supported and sustained Dylan's musical adventures over time? These are questions for another book. As Dylan himself put it recently on the bobdylan.com webpage: