Bob Dylan and the Solid Rock

Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God by Jeffrey Edward Green (Oxford, 2024)

Reviewed by Michael Jimenez

Bob Dylan is unusual―that is why he remains a cultural fixture. Normal is boring, especially for a rock star. He is purposely enigmatic. Dylan has gone through different metamorphoses throughout his career: socially conscious folk singer-songwriter, rock legend, fire and brimstone gospel singer, and pessimistic truth teller in his later years. In Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God, Jeffrey Edward Green casts Dylan as a prophet to interpret these changes and the way he continues to speak to American culture as a non-conformist, prophet of diremption.

Green compares Dylan with the great individualist American tradition of figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Green even closes the book revisiting a comparison to Emerson declaring that “there is probably no one to whom Dylan bears a greater resemblance” (333). Probably the biggest shock in Dylan’s history was his departure from folk music, when he went electric at the 1965 Newport Festival, as seen in the recent movie A Complete Unknown. It was a moment of extreme non-conformity. However, as Green shows, instead of finding a balance between his duty to himself and his duty toward others like the great American Transcendentalists, Dylan dismisses such a harmony (65). Involved in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Dylan would ultimately step away from social activist circles. As Green points out, Dylan continues to give to various charities and occasionally writes a song with clear political critiques of American culture, but Dylan released himself from responsibility for social justice.

Green’s chief argument is that Dylan is a post-secular prophet. The term post-secular illustrates a shift in a progressive reading of history from a proposed less religious or fully non-religious reality to one that accepts that religion will still have a key role to play in society. Green explores Dylan’s post-secular philosophy using both philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, finding them important for articulating a shift in public responses to religion. However, the two professional philosophers are still missing a point about our post-secular time that Dylan’s fame as a rebellious, questioning figure helps to answer. Dylan helps us see the over-confidence in the way secularists and atheists dismiss religion (183).

Dylan as post-secular prophet helps maintain a sort of continuity with Dylan’s other moments and his acceptance and proselytizing of Christian beliefs through his three gospel albums (Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love). He was criticized by some fans and critics at the time, but this music is now seen as some of his best material. Green, for one, is a fan especially of Slow Train Coming. Obviously during Dylan’s gospel years, he espoused a conservative form of Christianity, but the main point, according to Green, is not the gospel itself but his openness to some form of “religiosity” (245). The gospel period seems confined to three albums in the early 1980s, followed by a more secular turn in Dylan’s music. For Green, Dylan is now a prophet without a god, but because of Dylan’s role as a post-secular poet/prophet he can reach a nonreligious audience “otherwise skeptical of prophecy” (332).

This is a unique book because the author takes Dylan’s role of poet and prophet seriously enough to place him in dialogue with other voices from the philosophical tradition. Green proposes that Dylan is a realist and pessimist throughout his work, but this position is more evident in his late compositions (98). Green spends much of one chapter comparing Dylan to figures from the political realist tradition like Reinhold Niebuhr. Dylan’s pessimism is at odds with an Augustinian pessimism since there does not seem to be room for a Christian hope in his worldview, at least in this later work. Moreover, Dylan’s realism is more grounded in the life of the everyday person rather than the machinations of the Machiavellian elites, whom political realist theorists tend to discuss. Since Dylan does not place much hope on institutions, or the future for that matter, he comes across as fatalistic.

When it comes to religion, does Green protest too much? Framing Dylan as a prophet minus God (sort of) makes it seem that he has completely abandoned Jewish-Christian lyrics in his songs. Scott M. Marshall has made the case in two books, Restless Pilgrim (2002) and Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life (2021), that a thread of biblical themes and terms continues in Dylan’s work. Even Green admits as much at times (262). However, it is illustrative that Green only cites Marshall once and only to point out that he fails to bring up Dylan’s drug use (232). Still, even Green states that Dylan “never has renounced his religiosity and there are many signs he remains devout” (248). Perhaps it is like the situation regarding social-political activism. Dylan isn’t directly or publicly evangelizing an overtly, exclusive religious platform anymore but he is also not attacking piety.

Dylan may write fewer religious songs, but one of the songs from the gospel years that Dylan continued to perform years later, the “Solid Rock” illustrates the Christian theological depth of his work:

For me He was chastised, for me He was hated

For me He was rejected by a world that He created

Nations are angry, cursed are some

People are expecting a false peace to come

Well, I’m hanging on to a solid rock

Made before the foundation of the world

And I won’t let go, and I can’t let go, won’t let go

And I can’t let go, won’t let go and I can’t let go no more

Green’s study might have spent a little more time further exploring the theological dimensions of Dylan’s work and probing whether or not Dylan ever really let go of his religious commitment and is really a prophet without God. Green’s account of Dylan and faith does not fully overtake Marshall’s two volumes, which assert something less post-secular about the artist.

The book’s format is three one-hundred-plus-page chapters. It contains oftentimes lengthy, probing analysis of songs throughout his corpus. It is fun for the reader to hold their place in the book, listen to the song on Spotify, and return to reading. Considering the breadth of the book, slow reading and listening is the key to getting the most out of it. Green deserves credit for making a solid case for Dylan as both poet and prophet, a literary voice that is also a Nobel Prize winner of literature.

Michael Jimenez is an Associate Professor of history at Vanguard University. He is the author of Remembering Lived Lives: A Historiography from the Underside of Modernity and Karl Barth and the Study of the Religious Enlightenment: Encountering the Task of History.