Letterism John Granville Woolley Civic Sermons 1911 The ignorant dogmatic letterist may groan over the apostate church and watch for the Lord to dishonor her and stultify Himself but there is no apostate church The crowd that puts on its best clothes on Sunday and goes to meeting the aggregate of the parish censuses is not the church But in that there is the old true church unscathed and undiscouraged She has held up Christ straight through the centuries and the crowd has come to her with many aims and many isms and many sins Ernst Hofer The Lariat 1923 Greek letterism Richard M Edwards Scriptural Perspicuity in the Early English Reformation in Historical Theology The Antiochenes literalist opposed the Alexandrian School s letterist interpretive methodology founded on the Greek Jewish allegorical interpretive methodology Mal Couch Russell Penney An introduction to classical evangelical hemeneutics a guide to the history Following the Babylonian captivity the Jewish rabbis fell into the quasi worship of even the letters of scripture adopting letterism as a springboard to allegorization and spiritualization They committed the sin about which Paul later wrote The letter kills but the spirit gives life 2 Cor 3 6 To their credit not all the rabbis fell into letterism or later allegory Erica W Townsend Papers for the V Congress of Southeast European Studies Belgrade Sep 1984