"The Rise and Fall of the Bible"

[patrick457]

I’ve been reading this book by Timothy Beal (Well okay, it’s another book I’ve been reading. ) If anyone here has read the book, what do you think of it?

 

[Nita]

Your link connects to Copland 3’s profile.

 

[patrick457]

Your link connects to Copland 3’s profile.

Ack, sorry 'bout that. (Apologies to Mr. Copland ) Here you go.

 

[TimothyH]

I’ve been reading this book by Timothy Beal (Well okay, it’s another book I’ve been reading. ) If anyone here has read the book, what do you think of it?

It’s not scriptural.

Actually, I value your opinion and after reading the publisher’s blurb, I wonder what the author’s point is? Is it just an historical account or does he draw conclusions based on his research?

-Tim-

 

[patrick457]

It’s not scriptural.

Actually, I value your opinion and after reading the publisher’s blurb, I wonder what the author’s point is? Is it just an historical account or does he draw conclusions based on his research?

I think the best way is to approach this in stages (since I’m still reading it). It’d be best if I begin at the beginning.

Beal first describes his conservative Evangelical upbringing, how the Bible formed the core of his family’s beliefs and daily life: he describes his parents’ biblical faith as “by no means sentimental and simplistic. It was as seriously intellectual as it was devout.” He contrasts this with his own “considerably less sophisticated” version of biblical faith as a child: treating the Bible as some sort of Magic 8 Ball. (Just learn to flip off far enough to avoid all those bits about skin diseases and cut-off private parts. )

The biblical Magic 8 Ball game revealed more about me, about my hopes and wishes for the Bible, and especially my idea of the Bible, than it did about biblical literature itself. I conceived of the Bible as God’s book of answers, which if opened and read rightly would speak directly to me with concrete, divinely authored advice about my life and how to live it.
This way of thinking about the Bible was not just my own private notion. It was, and still is, the most common understanding of the Bible: the literal Word of God, God’s own book, The Book of all books, plainly revealing who God is and what God want me to do and believe, from everyday things like dating and diet to ultimate things like heaven and hell.

Beal dubs this idea the cultural understanding of the Bible: he points out how pervasive this understanding is, to the point that hundreds of books and instruction manuals are dubbed ‘Bibles’, implying them to be ‘authoritative’, ‘univocal’, ‘practical’, ‘accessible’, ‘comprehensive’, and ‘exclusive’. He then goes on to point out something rather curiously interesting:

This idea of the Bible as a divine manual for finding happiness with God in this world and salvation in the next is so familiar to us today that we might well assume it’s been around forever, that it’s as old as Christianity itself. It’s not. In fact, its genesis was in nineteenth-century Protestantism, where the Reformation ideal of sola scriptura, “Scripture alone,” combined with a popular Protestant evangelistic movement, sometimes described as a new Puritanic Biblicalism because of its romantic idealization of that earlier, seemingly simpler form of Puritan Christianity, to promote the Bible as the key to solving all of America’s problems. The Bible, it was believed, could integrate immigrant populations in the new big cities. It could heal factions among Protestant churches and denominations. It could keep husbands sober and hold nuclear families together, even under new stresses of urban poverty and isolation. Rooted in nostalgia for the mythical, romanticized image of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritan piety, this movement believed that the Bible was the solution for all modern social, familial, and individual ills.

He then quotes what theologian John W. Nevin wrote in 1861, which pretty much sums up the ideology behind this movement:

In this sacred volume, we are told, God has been pleased to place his word in full, by special inspiration, as a supernatural directory for the use of the world to the end of time; for the very purpose of providing a sufficient authority for faith, that might be independent of all human judgment and will … The great matter accordingly is to place the bible in every man’s hands, and to have him able to read it, that he may then follow it in his own way. The idea seems to be, that the bible was published in the first place as a sort of divine formulary or text book for the world to follow … so that the dissemination of its printed text throughout the world, without note or comment, is the one thing specially needful and specially to be relied upon for the full victory of Christianity, from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth.

Beal notes that Nevin’s statement about “the dissemination of its printed text throughout the world, without note or comment” was alluding here to the American Bible Society, founded in 1816, the sole objective of which was “to encourage a wider circulation of the Holy Scriptures without note or comment,” believing that getting the Word out in public was the only way to save American society.

BTW, Google Books has a preview of the book. Anyone interested can check it out.

 

[mackbrislawn]

I think the best way is to approach this in stages (since I’m still reading it). It’d be best if I begin at the beginning.

Beal first describes his conservative Evangelical upbringing, how the Bible formed the core of his family’s beliefs and daily life: he describes his parents’ biblical faith as “by no means sentimental and simplistic. It was as seriously intellectual as it was devout.” He contrasts this with his own “considerably less sophisticated” version of biblical faith as a child: treating the Bible as some sort of Magic 8 Ball. (Just learn to flip off far enough to avoid all those bits about skin diseases and cut-off private parts. )

The biblical Magic 8 Ball game revealed more about me, about my hopes and wishes for the Bible, and especially my idea of the Bible, than it did about biblical literature itself. I conceived of the Bible as God’s book of answers, which if opened and read rightly would speak directly to me with concrete, divinely authored advice about my life and how to live it.
This way of thinking about the Bible was not just my own private notion. It was, and still is, the most common understanding of the Bible: the literal Word of God, God’s own book, The Book of all books, plainly revealing who God is and what God want me to do and believe, from everyday things like dating and diet to ultimate things like heaven and hell.

Beal dubs this idea the cultural understanding of the Bible: he points out how pervasive this understanding is, to the point that hundreds of books and instruction manuals are dubbed ‘Bibles’, implying them to be ‘authoritative’, ‘univocal’, ‘practical’, ‘accessible’, ‘comprehensive’, and ‘exclusive’. He then goes on to point out something rather curiously interesting:

This idea of the Bible as a divine manual for finding happiness with God in this world and salvation in the next is so familiar to us today that we might well assume it’s been around forever, that it’s as old as Christianity itself. It’s not. In fact, its genesis was in nineteenth-century Protestantism, where the Reformation ideal of sola scriptura, “Scripture alone,” combined with a popular Protestant evangelistic movement, sometimes described as a new Puritanic Biblicalism because of its romantic idealization of that earlier, seemingly simpler form of Puritan Christianity, to promote the Bible as the key to solving all of America’s problems. The Bible, it was believed, could integrate immigrant populations in the new big cities. It could heal factions among Protestant churches and denominations. It could keep husbands sober and hold nuclear families together, even under new stresses of urban poverty and isolation. Rooted in nostalgia for the mythical, romanticized image of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritan piety, this movement believed that the Bible was the solution for all modern social, familial, and individual ills.

He then quotes what theologian John W. Nevin wrote in 1861, which pretty much sums up the ideology behind this movement:

In this sacred volume, we are told, God has been pleased to place his word in full, by special inspiration, as a supernatural directory for the use of the world to the end of time; for the very purpose of providing a sufficient authority for faith, that might be independent of all human judgment and will … The great matter accordingly is to place the bible in every man’s hands, and to have him able to read it, that he may then follow it in his own way. The idea seems to be, that the bible was published in the first place as a sort of divine formulary or text book for the world to follow … so that the dissemination of its printed text throughout the world, without note or comment, is the one thing specially needful and specially to be relied upon for the full victory of Christianity, from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth.

Beal notes that Nevin’s statement about “the dissemination of its printed text throughout the world, without note or comment” was alluding here to the American Bible Society, founded in 1816, the sole objective of which was “to encourage a wider circulation of the Holy Scriptures without note or comment,” believing that getting the Word out in public was the only way to save American society.

BTW, Google Books has a preview of the book. Anyone interested can check it out.

It is true, what you think the bible is, what it was written for, and whom it was written to, will control what you get out of the bible. For instance, is it even written to individuials? Many biblical discussions never get anywhere because of these different assumptions about scripture’s purpose.

 

[patrick457]

The ABS’s stipulation that Bibles be printed “without note or comment” was central. It was an expression of commitment to the Puritanic Biblicist ideal that the Bible was complete unto itself, spoke for itself, and required no supplemental explanations or interpretations.

Beal identifies (American) fundamentalism as “the theological heir of the Puritanic Biblicism championed by the ABS and others.” The one thing which distinguished this as a new movement was its reactionary and defensive character against two intellectual revolutions of the late 19th century, “both of which challenged any reading of the Bible that treated it as an empirical account of human history or as the literal word of God:” Darwin’s evolutionary theory and Biblical higher criticism (especially the type typified by Julius Wellhausen and his documentary hypothesis). Beal writes:

It was in reaction to this kind of dissecting and historicizing of the Bible that fundamentalism formed its doctrine of biblical inerrancy, which proclaims that the Bible is literally God’s inspired Word, entirely without error or contradiction, and therefore entirely authoritative. The Bible, it was asserted, must not be subjected to modern science or historical research. On the contrary, those disciplines must be subjected to it.

At the heart of the fundamentalist movement was the idea of Bible study meetings, which facilitated focused reading and discussion of the Scriptures beyond what people could get from a sermon. “The idea behind them…was the conviction that the Bible, as the infallible and literal Word of God, spoke in clear, unambiguous terms that any “plain man” can understand and apply directly to his life. The Bible-study movement thus brought together fundamentalism’s rather dry intellectual commitment to biblical inerrancy and revivalism’s emphasis on personal piety and moral uprightness.”

Fundamentalism began to lose public respect after the highly-publicised heresy trials against Presbyterian theologian Charles A. Briggs conducted in the 1890s and the 1925 Scopes Trial, which prompted it to withdraw from mainstream society and adopt a strongly separatist perspective against the “worldliness” of modern liberal American culture, reinventing itself as a nondenominational grassroots movement centered around Bible colleges and seminaries, radio broadcasts, and study groups, “many of which operated as parachurch organizations, that is, independent Christian organizations that operate outside the structure and governance of a particular church or denomination.”

The 1940s saw the rise of the highly-slick and contemporary neo-evangelicalism, which, while still rooted in biblical fundamentalism, eschewed the separatist stance associated with fundamentalists, preferring instead to see American popular culture as its mission field: its goal was to ‘restore Christian America’ by bringing it back to the Bible by whatever means possible. It was through the efforts of neo-evangelicalism that the so-called ‘Christian’ entertainment industry was born. Popular figures of this movement include the Youth for Christ (which had for a motto: “Geared to the times but anchored to the rock”), Billy Graham, and the Campus Crusade for Christ. By the 70s, the big-rally approach was being supplemented by local Bible study clubs in high schools (two examples are Young Life, and again Campus Crusade for Christ, who came to adopt the highly-successful Young Life model). Beal concludes this section:

Neo-evangelicalism reinvented fundamentalism by repackaging its fundamentals. It aimed to make its gospel popular - pop fundamentalism, if you will. It revised fundamentalism, but not its Bible. At the heart of this revival was the same iconic idea of the Bible as the literal Word of God that had been born in the Puritanic Biblicism of the early nineteenth century.

 

[patrick457]

1. 
   
   Moving along:
   
   The author continues to describe his involvement with neo-evangelicalism as a youth and its understanding of what the Bible is.
   
   Like my peers, I believed that the Bible was God’s Word written down for me, answering all my questions about who God is and what God wants for my life, from the mundane to the ultimate. Or at least I knew that was what I needed to believe. But that was not what I found when I actually opened the Bible up and looked around inside. The most famous biblical characters, so often lifted up as models of faith, seemed just the opposite: Abraham, who, unable to trust in God’s promise, twice passes off his wife, Sarah, as his sister in order to save his own skin; Rebekah, who plays favorites among her two sons, helping the younger, Jacob, steal the birthright of the elder, Esau; King David, who repeatedly exploits those who love him, who takes whatever he wants, including women (married or not), who shows no remorse until he gets caught, and whose alienated son dies trying to kill him and take his throne; and Jael, Rahab, Ehud, and many other lesser-known biblical heroes and heroines who achieve greatness through trickery and betrayal. Often, “biblical values” struck me as foreign, as if they had come from a radically unfamiliar time and place. Which in fact they had. But that made me anxious. It worried me that I couldn’t get beyond the Bible’s strangeness to discover its purportedly timeless relevance.
   Moreover. it didn’t seem like the Bible was always saying the same thing. One psalmist proclaims absolute confidence that all is right with the world and God is on his throne, while another cries out in despair, seeing nothing but chaos and divine absence (and that’s the kind Jesus quotes from the cross). One passage lays out a moral universe in which goodness is rewarded with blessing, while another asks why the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer. Indeed, the very image of God seemed to change from one passage to another: warrior, mother, father, husband, rock, whirlwind, rarely omniscient, often uncertain, frightening as often as comforting, mysterious more often than informative. Moreover, there appeared to be many inconsistencies: conflicting versions of key events in the Gospels, such as what happened at the empty tomb, for example, and different accounts of creation that were not easy to sync. I knew what Bible answers I was supposed to find. But actually opening and reading the Bible was undermining my belief in it.
   
   (For the record, I’m sure some of us can symphatize with young Beal here.)
   
   He then talks about the Bible really bonded with: The Way: The Living Bible Illustrated, first published in 1972, specially geared to 70s youth culture, with a cover showing “photos of hip stringy-haired teens smiling and hanging out.” (Anyone familiar with this Bible here?)
   
   I loved my The Way Bible. I took it to youth group meetings and read it in bed every night. By “read,” I mean I mostly looked at the pictures and read the introductory essays. These were the parts that appealed to me. They spoke to me in clear, engaging, contemporary terms. And they said the kind of things I thought the Bible was supposed to be saying. Reading these extrabiblical supplements, I felt like I was reading the Bible.
   Occasionally I would even dip into the biblical texts themselves, paraphrased in ways that made them much easier going than any of the English translations from Hebrew and Greek that I’d tried in the past. I realize now that they felt that way precisely because Taylor’s Living Bible not only down-converted the traditional American Standard translation to a junior high reading level, but also took pains to disambiguate biblical ambiguities and resolve biblical contradictions that are actually, literally present in the text.
   So for a time, The Way save me, or at least distracted me, from the growing doubts about my childhood faith in the Bible. That is, it saved my iconic idea of the Bible from the disillusion that came from literally reading it. Indeed, this was the true innovation of The Way: it offered a reading experience of the Bible that didn’t entail all the complexities and frustrations that came when I actually read the biblical text. It felt like what reading the Bible was supposed to feel like, even while it distracted me from the real ambiguities and uncertainties of the biblical text itself.

 

[patrick457]

He uses these experiences and subsequent ones as a launchpad for one of the main theses of his book: that the ‘iconic idea’ of the Bible, the same one which he held (and later struggled with) as a child growing up in an evangelical milieu, is in reality “a cultural construction, “the Word as we know it,” with a fairly short history and a less than promising future.” It explains the title of the book (‘The Rise and Fall of the Bible’), and its first section, which is entitled The End of the Word as We Know It (referencing that R.E.M. song).

Christian consumer culture and the Bible business have come a long way since The Way, as we’ll see. The Bible business burgeoned into one of the biggest and fastest-growing fields of publishing, selling many thousands of different Bibles in every imaginable form for many hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Within this brave new world of Christian consumerism, it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between spreading the Word and selling it.
But the flagship consumer product, the heart of the industry, remains this cultural icon of the Bible, shaped by nineteenth-century Puritanic Biblicism, refined by early-twentieth-century fundamentalism, and repackaged, again and again, by neo-evangelicalism. That’s what the Bible biz is selling in pop culture form. And that, I have come to believe, is a dead end.
The icon of the Bible as God’s textbook for the world is as bankrupt as the idea that it stands for, of religious faith as absolute black-and-white certainty. Just as the cultural icon of the Bible often becomes a substitute for patriotism, and just as the cultural icon of the four-wheel-drive-truck often becomes a substitute for manly independence and self-confidence, so the cultural icon of the Bible often becomes a substitute for a vital life of faith, which calls not for obedient adherence to clear answers but thoughtful engagement with ultimate questions. The Bible itself invites that kind of engagement. The iconic image of it as a book of answers discourages it.

The culture of biblical consumerism, according to him, ever hastens the death of the ‘cultural’ image of the Bible, and there’s no going back: “[a]s publishers race to reinvent the Bible in an ever-widening variety of forms, all competing in the marketplace of faith to be the ultimate realization of the cultural icon of the Bible, I argue that they are stretching the idea to its breaking point.” Beal argues that the ‘end of the Word as we know it’ is a good thing, since it prompts “an occasion to find an approach to the Bible that is truer not only to its content but also to its fascinating history:” its gives us a chance to rediscover the Bible after the Bible, as he calls it.

The next quote is probably no longer news to many folks here, but I’d include it here to end this post:

Many will be surprised to realize that there never has been a time when we could really talk about the Bible in the singular. There is no such thing as the Bible in that sense, and there never has been. The Bible has always been legion, a multiplicity of forms and contents, with no original to be found. In early Judaism and Christianity, there were many different scrolls and codices, variously collected and shared in many different versions, with no standard edition. Even in the early centuries of the printing era, after Gutenberg, we find a burgeoning Bible-publishing industry with literally thousands of different editions and versions. The difference between Bible publishing then and now is a matter of degree more than kind.
As we explore the cultural history of the Bible, beginning with earliest Christianity, before the Bible, and continuing through the print revolution into the present day, we come to realize how differently Christian Scriptures have been produced, understood, and used in different times and placed. In the process, we begin to question the received wisdom that the Bible as we know it today is the way it’s always been known. The closer we look at its history of development, the more richly complex the picture becomes. Here, then, is an opportunity to rediscover the Bible after the Bible. The end of the Word as we know it calls for another way of knowing.

 

[patrick457]

Bumping this thread…anyone?

 

[Crumpy]

The Catholic Church put the Christian Bible together and teaches us its meaning and significance.

Of course it’s been used for political purposes of all sorts, including infighting among Christians.

I’m too old to venture into the politics anymore, including the controversies about the Bible. Actually, we’re ALL too old for that (we ALL may simply not realize it, though).

What is the real outcome of all the squabbling? Is it anything else but what is stated already in the bible? There are scoffers (atheists) – check! Got that.

We are here to know God, to love God, and to serve him in this world.

I’m 63 and since I was 12, I realized that the whole world needs the Bible. the more people there are, the more they need the Bible and to follow Christ. I don’t see anyway for us to survive without Christianity. Certainly marxism, communism, islam, etc. are philosophies of death. Their “fruits” are obvious. The truth and legitimacy of Christianity is obvious. Why wouldn’t everyone WANT to be Christian?

 

[fisherman_carl]

I’ve been reading this book by Timothy Beal (Well okay, it’s another book I’ve been reading. ) If anyone here has read the book, what do you think of it?

I read the title and the editorial note and disagree with the assertions. To quote the editor:

"Christianity thrived for centuries without any Bible—there was no official canon of scriptures, much less a book big enough to hold them all. Congregations used various collections of scrolls and codices. "

This is not exactly true. The books of the bible started to be written much sooner than centuries after. The first book was about 20 years after Jesus Ascended. While it is true the canon was not finalized until the 4th and 5th centuries, the books existed since the 1st centuries and were used in the Liturgy. In the writings of the early Church Fathers we see them accepted various lists of books in the second century including the 4 gospels which were elevated above the rest.

“There is no “original” Bible, no single source text behind the thousands of different Bibles on the market today. The farther we go back in the Bible’s history, the more versions we find.”

Just because we no longer have the originals does not mean there weren’t any. Obviously there were. Even if it was all a lie there would be an original document that the lie was written on. The Letters that Paul wrote were copied and sent to different Churches to be read in front of the congregation, just like how the Jews would read the scriptures. The very early Church read the OT scriptures and in the book of Acts we see Paul visiting different Synagogues in many cities arguing the scriptures and proving that Jesus was the Christ.

Not having the original bible does not cripple Christianity since historical Christianity has never relied on the bible alone, but rather the Holy Spirit inspires the Church as well.

Much of the differences in the bibles are due to either copiest errors or differences in translation from one language to another. However, the interpretation of the bible has always been through Apostolic authority and Tradition.

"The idea of the Bible as the literal Word of God is relatively new—only about a century old. "

That is also not true. The Protestants may have divided the Word of God to be the bible alone. However, Catholics have always believed the Word of God came to us through Scripture and Tradition. And, the scripture has always been considered to be inspired by God. And, you can read that in many different Church Father’s writings. As, I have gone through some of them specifically looking for that.

 

[fisherman_carl]

“Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture make up a single sacred deposit of the Word of God” (DV 10) in which, as in a mirror, the pilgrim Church contemplates God, the source of all her riches.
(CCC 97)

“Brethren, be contentious and zealous for the things which lead to salvation! You have studied the Holy Scriptures, which are true and are of the Holy Spirit. You well know that nothing unjust or fraudulent is written in them.”
(St. Clement, Letter to the Corinthians, [AD 80], [45,1])

“…So too all divine Scripture is called …[divinely inspired], because of the fact that God inspires what the Spirit has spoken.”
(St. Ambrose of Milan, The Holy Spirit, [AD 381], [3, 6, 112])

"“Besides the canonical Scriptures, nothing shall be read, in the church under the title of divine writings.’. The canonical books are:—Genesis, … Concerning the confirmation of this canon, the transmarine Church shall be consulted.”

• Council of Hippo, Canon 36 (A.D. 393).

“[It has been decided] that nothing except the Canonical Scriptures should be read in the church under the name of the Divine Scriptures. But the Canonical Scriptures are: Genesis, Exodus, …”

• Council of Carthage III, Canon 47 (A.D. 397).

“The authority of our books [Scriptures], which is confirmed by agreement of so many nations, supported by a succession of apostles, bishops, and councils, is against you.”

• Augustine, Reply to Faustus the Manichean, 13:5 (c. A.D. 400).

“If any one shall say, or shall believe, that other Scriptures, besides those which the Catholic Church has received, are to be esteemed of authority, or to be venerated, let him be anathema.”

• Council of Toledo, Canon 12 (A.D. 400).

 

[TimothyH]

Bumping this thread…anyone?

Much of what you quoted and describe are things which I can tell you are reality here in the deep south.

The Bible as a cultural icon is real here, as is the amazing amount of material around the Bible “repackaged, again and again, by neo-evangelicalism.” The Bible as an inerrant and singularly authoritative guidebook for every aspect of our personal life is pervasive - prayerfully reading scripture will solve all problems.

*This idea of the Bible as a divine manual for finding happiness with God in this world and salvation in the next *

Many of my close personal friends would sum up the Bible this way.

so the cultural icon of the Bible often becomes a substitute for a vital life of faith, which calls not for obedient adherence to clear answers but thoughtful engagement with ultimate questions. The Bible itself invites that kind of engagement. The iconic image of it as a book of answers discourages it.

I’m not sure I understand this quote. Is the author saying that a vital life of faith calls for a “thoughful engagement with ultimate questions?” I"m not sure that we in the Catholich Church cannot know clear answers, what we would call “Objective truths” as taught by Christ’s authority on earth - the Church. Perhaps I need more context.

Is the author Catholic?

 

[patrick457]

Much of what you quoted and describe are things which I can tell you are reality here in the deep south.

The Bible as a cultural icon is real here, as is the amazing amount of material around the Bible “repackaged, again and again, by neo-evangelicalism.” The Bible as an inerrant and singularly authoritative guidebook for every aspect of our personal life is pervasive - prayerfully reading scripture will solve all problems.

*This idea of the Bible as a divine manual for finding happiness with God in this world and salvation in the next *

Many of my close personal friends would sum up the Bible this way.

so the cultural icon of the Bible often becomes a substitute for a vital life of faith, which calls not for obedient adherence to clear answers but thoughtful engagement with ultimate questions. The Bible itself invites that kind of engagement. The iconic image of it as a book of answers discourages it.

I’m not sure I understand this quote. Is the author saying that a vital life of faith calls for a “thoughful engagement with ultimate questions?” I"m not sure that we in the Catholich Church cannot know clear answers, what we would call “Objective truths” as taught by Christ’s authority on earth - the Church. Perhaps I need more context.

Is the author Catholic?

Nope. Timothy Beal, according to himself was raised evangelical. I’m a bit at a loss of terminologies to describe him now, though he still identifies himself as a ‘Christian’ (he once corrected someone who mistook him for an atheist) and is married to a Presbyterian (female) minister. It is really because of his background that the book seems to have this focus on the fundamentalist/evangelical perspective he grew up in: a sort of reply to it, actually.

 

[TimothyH]

Nope. Timothy Beal, according to himself was raised evangelical. I’m a bit at a loss of terminologies to describe him now, though he still identifies himself as a ‘Christian’ (he once corrected someone who mistook him for an atheist) and is married to a Presbyterian (female) minister. It is really because of his background that the book seems to have this focus on the fundamentalist/evangelical perspective he grew up in: a sort of reply to it, actually.

Interesting. So it may be an Evangelical talking to other Evangelicals.

The themes you quoted are all very familiar to me here in Cobb County, Georgia, home of the “Evolution is just a theory” stickers on high school science books. Remember that? I wouldn’t be surprised of some of my neighbors are doing a “Journey Group” study of that book before long.

I would love to read the book but reality is that I’m not going to get to it any time soon. I’m sorry I can’t engage further. Maybe someone else will read it and chime in.

-Tim-

 

[patrick457]

I read the title and the editorial note and disagree with the assertions. To quote the editor:

"Christianity thrived for centuries without any Bible—there was no official canon of scriptures, much less a book big enough to hold them all. Congregations used various collections of scrolls and codices. "

This is not exactly true. The books of the bible started to be written much sooner than centuries after. The first book was about 20 years after Jesus Ascended. While it is true the canon was not finalized until the 4th and 5th centuries, the books existed since the 1st centuries and were used in the Liturgy. In the writings of the early Church Fathers we see them accepted various lists of books in the second century including the 4 gospels which were elevated above the rest.

I think that what is meant here is ‘Bible’ in the sense that we think of it today: a single book containing a closed canon of books considered to be inspired. In which case Beal is somewhat right: the whole idea of having all the Scriptural books bound under one cover only came a bit later in history (he proposes that it came hand in hand with the closing of the canon), because frankly, a book of that size would have been obscenely time-consuming to make and very unwieldy to actually use.

“There is no “original” Bible, no single source text behind the thousands of different Bibles on the market today. The farther we go back in the Bible’s history, the more versions we find.”

Just because we no longer have the originals does not mean there weren’t any. Obviously there were. Even if it was all a lie there would be an original document that the lie was written on. The Letters that Paul wrote were copied and sent to different Churches to be read in front of the congregation, just like how the Jews would read the scriptures. The very early Church read the OT scriptures and in the book of Acts we see Paul visiting different Synagogues in many cities arguing the scriptures and proving that Jesus was the Christ.

Not having the original bible does not cripple Christianity since historical Christianity has never relied on the bible alone, but rather the Holy Spirit inspires the Church as well.

Much of the differences in the bibles are due to either copiest errors or differences in translation from one language to another. However, the interpretation of the bible has always been through Apostolic authority and Tradition.

By that what is meant is, we don’t have the autographs, nor know for certain how they went (though we do have some clue, thanks to textual criticism). Beal is of the idea that when it comes to the genealogy of the Bible, we should not picture it like a family tree, with one original and copies branching off it, and copies of copies branching in turn off them. Rather, when we go back to the literary history of the Biblical books, the less uniformity there is: “Scriptural traditions are rooted, quite literally, in diversity.”

"The idea of the Bible as the literal Word of God is relatively new—only about a century old. "

That is also not true. The Protestants may have divided the Word of God to be the bible alone. However, Catholics have always believed the Word of God came to us through Scripture and Tradition. And, the scripture has always been considered to be inspired by God. And, you can read that in many different Church Father’s writings. As, I have gone through some of them specifically looking for that.

This Beal himself addresses in the first section. Again:

This idea of the Bible as a divine manual for finding happiness with God in this world and salvation in the next is so familiar to us today that we might well assume it’s been around forever, that it’s as old as Christianity itself. It’s not. In fact, its genesis was in nineteenth-century Protestantism, where the Reformation ideal of sola scriptura, “Scripture alone,” combined with a popular Protestant evangelistic movement, sometimes described as a new Puritanic Biblicalism because of its romantic idealization of that earlier, seemingly simpler form of Puritan Christianity, to promote the Bible as the key to solving all of America’s problems. The Bible, it was believed, could integrate immigrant populations in the new big cities. It could heal factions among Protestant churches and denominations. It could keep husbands sober and hold nuclear families together, even under new stresses of urban poverty and isolation. Rooted in nostalgia for the mythical, romanticized image of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritan piety, this movement believed that the Bible was the solution for all modern social, familial, and individual ills.

It’s not so much about the Bible being “inspired by God” per se, but the Bible being the literal word of God, in a sola scriptura sense: contains everything you need and is able to interpret itself on its own, something like that.

 

[patrick457]

Interesting. So it may be an Evangelical talking to other Evangelicals.

Or rather, an *ex-*conservative Evangelical.

The themes you quoted are all very familiar to me here in Cobb County, Georgia, home of the “Evolution is just a theory” stickers on high school science books. Remember that? I wouldn’t be surprised of some of my neighbors are doing a “Journey Group” study of that book before long.

No, I’m not American, so what you just described is purely unfamiliar to me.

I would love to read the book but reality is that I’m not going to get to it any time soon. I’m sorry I can’t engage further. Maybe someone else will read it and chime in.

-Tim-

That’s why I’m here: so y’all don’t have to do the dirty work.

 

[patrick457]

so the cultural icon of the Bible often becomes a substitute for a vital life of faith, which calls not for obedient adherence to clear answers but thoughtful engagement with ultimate questions. The Bible itself invites that kind of engagement. The iconic image of it as a book of answers discourages it.

I’m not sure I understand this quote. Is the author saying that a vital life of faith calls for a “thoughful engagement with ultimate questions?” I"m not sure that we in the Catholich Church cannot know clear answers, what we would call “Objective truths” as taught by Christ’s authority on earth - the Church. Perhaps I need more context.

Here is what the author wrote:

Although I’ve drifted quite a distance from the familiar biblical waters of the conservative evangelical tradition in which I was raised and which my parents so admirably represent, I hold much respect for that tradition and gladly acknowledge my own enduring debt to it. Its emphasis on introspection in search of personal growth has challenged me always to dig deep within myself in order to examine critically my own presuppositions and vested interests. Its emphasis on working out one’s own salvation with fear and trembling has inspired in me a lifelong restlessness of mind and spirit. Above all, its biblical literalism and its supreme valuing of every iota of the Bible have instilled in me an abiding passion for biblical interpretation and a love for the smallest details of the text. All these gifts have served me well not only as a teacher and scholar of religious studies but also as a person of faith.
At the heart of the evangelical tradition, aptly captured in Chambers’s exhortation [in *My Utmost for His Highest], is struggle. There is no way to grow and mature in one’s faith without wrestling with the ideas and traditions that one has inherited. No one else can do it for you – not parents, not ministers, not youth group leaders, not professors, not Bible publishers. The iconic idea of the Bible as a book of black-and-white answers encourages us to remain in a state of spiritual immaturity. It discourages curiosity in the terra incognita of biblical literature, handing us a Magic 8 Ball Bible to play with instead. In turning readers away from the struggle, from wrestling with the rich complexity of biblical literature and its history, in which there are no easy answers, it perpetuates an adolescent faith. It keeps us out of the deep end, where we have to “ride these monsters down,” as Annie Dillard put it, trusting that it’s not about the end product but the process.

A little before this, he notes about that passage in My Utmost for December 15 (Beal’s birthday) about struggle, which his parents had read together yearly since he was born:

I’m ashamed to admit it, but at the time I didn’t fully appreciate this gift. Moved as I was, and always have been, by my parents’ steadfast, prayerful care for me, I was put off by the book and the biblical quotation in it. I’d never read My Utmost, but I had dismissed it as sentimental and moralistic. When it came in the mail, I immediately associated it with the kind of fundamentalist Biblicism that I had rejected.
Reading Chambers’s exhortation now, however, I can see what my parents must always have seen: not a command to submit to authority for approval, but a call to wrestle with what presents itself as authoritative in order to find my own voice in relation with it. “If you cannot express yourself on any subject,” Chambers begins, “struggle until you can.” He describes this struggle, this suffering for words, as going through the “winepress of God,” where inherited expressions of truth get crushed like ripe grapes. “You must struggle to get expression experimentally, then there will come a time when that expression will become the very wine of strengthening to someone else.” He concludes,

Always make a practice of provoking your own mind to think out what it accepts easily. Our position is not ours until we make it ours by suffering. The author who benefits you most is not the one who teaches you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance.​

 

[patrick457]

Going on:

In the next chapter, the author first comments on politician and Southern Baptist minister Mike Huckabee and his speeches loaded with Biblical references. He poses the question: “Just how broad was Huckabee’s base? How many actually had ears to hear? Probably not as many as he hoped.” Not too many understood what Huckabee was talking about.

National Public Radio’s Barbara Bradley Hagerty did a little Jay Leno-style research on the National Mall to see how many passersby recognized the candidate’s smooth stone and widow’s mite as biblical. One conjectured that the smooth stone might have something to do with war. Or maybe peace? None seemed to recognize it as biblical. What about the widow’s mite? A mite’s a bug, right? Maybe a spider?

Beal provides this as a concrete example of the Biblical illiteracy that plagues modern society (something that is no surprise to people like religious historian Stephen Prothero - who told Hagerty that Huckabee’s “[had] an exceedingly small target audience, about as small as the percentage of animals climbing on Noah’s ark” - and groups like the Bible Literacy Project). He provides a few revelations based on recent polls and surveys, and I quote:

• Less than half of all adult Americans can name the first book of the Bible (Genesis, in Hebrew Bereshit) or the four Gospels of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).
• More than 80 percent of born-again or evangelical Christians believe that “God helps those who help themselves” is a Bible verse. I suspect that many would also say that “The Serenity Prayer” and the “Footprints in the Sand” parable are in there somewhere.
• More than half of graduating high school seniors guess that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife, and one in ten adults believes that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. (Those two must’ve been multiple-choice questions.)
• Almost two-thirds of Americans can’t name at least five of the Ten Commandments. Some of these people, moreover, are outspoken promoters of them. Georgia representative Lynn Westmoreland, cosponsor of a bill to display the Ten Commandments in the chambers of the Houst of Representatives and Senate, could remember only three when Stephen Colbert asked him to recite them on The Colbert Report (Colbert, who I hear teaches Sunday school at his church, would have done considerably better).

To this Beal adds another (more or less anecdotal) datum, based on his own experience as a professor:

Among the few hundred students I’ve taught in college-level introductions to biblical literature over the past couple of years, I estimate that more than half came to class on the first day with more ideas about the Bible derived from Dan Brown’s 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code than from actual biblical texts. In the old days, biblical studies professors talked about demythologizing the Bible in order to, for example, sort out the “Jesus of history” from the “Christ of faith.” Nowadays we might want to add demythologizing Da Vinci to the learning objectives.

All I can say is, true life is stranger than fiction.