by Timothy Beal
Finally, I offer my heartfelt thanks to my mom, Geraldine Kandler Beal, to whom I gratefully dedicate this book. As I write, she is about to begin a Master of Theology program at her alma mater, Whitworth University (class of 1958). A source of much pride and joy, to be sure! Still, in my book, she has been a master of theology for as long as I can remember.
Notes
1. The End of the Word as We Know It: A Personal Introduction
Some scholars of religion may balk at my integration of personal religious history in this book, not to mention my explicit religious interest in its argument. Such admixtures may seem to them like a monstrous hybrid of religion and the academic study of it. For a nonspecialist introduction to scholarly debates about the relationship between religion and the study of it, see Charlotte Allen, “Is Nothing Sacred? Casting Out the Gods from Religious Studies,” Lingua Franca (November 1996), 30–40. The best scholarly treatment of it, in my opinion, is Russell T. McCutcheon, “A Default of Critical Intelligence? The Scholar of Religion as Public Intellectual,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65 (1997), 443–68, when taken along with the response by June O’Connor, “The Scholar of Religion as Public Intellectual: Expanding Critical Intelligence,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66 (1998), 897–909. Their central question is, What is the role of the scholar of religion in public life? McCutcheon’s answer is that she or he should be a “critical rhetor” who “exposes the mechanisms whereby [religious] truths and norms are constructed, demonstrating the contingency of seemingly necessary conditions and the historical character of ahistorical claims” (p. 453). I agree that such an approach is important, and I see my own efforts to historicize the cultural iconicity of the Bible, for example, to expose its constructedness and the processes of its deconstruction, now under way, as that kind of work. I include my own personal religious history in that context in part to expose and critically examine my own insider/outsider position in relation to this construction. Yet I also agree with O’Connor that McCutcheon’s approach, which sees religion strictly as a mode of authorization, is not the only one appropriate to scholars of religion. Other approaches, which operate from different theories of religion, call for different strategies in order to empower the public to think critically, and self-critically—“to open wide the drapes,” as O’Connor puts it, “giving viewers and readers access to the production of religions past and present but also to the production of theories about religions,” that is, exposing and contextualizing the different ways we as scholars understand and critically examine them (p. 904). In any case, I hope that the elements of religious autobiography in this book will serve those aims. One of my inspirations since graduate school has been Hélène Cixous, in her aptly titled Oxford Amnesty Lecture, “We Who Are We, Are We Free?” trans. Chris Miller, Critical Inquiry 19 (1993), 203, where she writes, “The prisons precede me. When I have escaped them, I discover them: when they have cracked and split open beneath my feet.”
For a critical assessment of the limits of theorizing religion strictly as a mode of authorization, that is, a kind of “locative social labor” that ignores its dislocative, disfiguring dimensions, see Tyler Roberts, “All Work and No Play: Chaos, Incongruity and Différence in the Study of Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 77 (2009), 84; and Mark C. Taylor, “Refiguring Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 77 (2009), 105–12. My own understanding of the unstable interdependence of order and chaos, orientation and disorientation, in biblical theology is best articulated in my Religion and Its Monsters (New York: Routledge, 2002), and in my introduction to Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies: Identity and The Book (New York: Routledge, 1996), 1–15.
The Pew Forum’s survey report, Many Americans Uneasy with Mix of Religion and Politics, released August 24, 2006 (http://pewforum.org/publications/surveys/ religion-politics-06.pdf), indicates that 35 percent of respondents agree with the statement “The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word”; another 43 percent agree with the statement “The Bible is the word of God, but not everything in it should be taken literally, word for word.” Thus 78 percent understand the Bible as, in some sense, the Word of God. The Gallup Poll data from 2007 correlate closely with the Pew data (see www .gallup.com/poll/1690/Religion.aspx). On the popular view that “the Bible is totally accurate in all of its teachings,” see www.barna.org. On the popular view that it contains “all or most of the basic questions of life,” see Alec Gallup and Wendy W Simmons, “Six in Ten Americans Read Bible at Least Occasionally,” October 20, 2000 (http://poll.gallup.com). The Pew Forum’s 2006 survey also asked, “Which should be the more important influence on the laws of the United States? Should it be the Bible or should it be the will of the American people, even when it conflicts with the Bible?” Thirty-two percent of all respondents said that the Bible should take precedence. Among white evangelicals, the number was 60 percent; among Catholics, 23 percent; and among white mainline Christians, 16 percent. Even 7 percent of those identifying themselves as secular said that the Bible should take precedence over the will of the people in this matter! The question itself presumes that the Bible is a book having a coherent position on matters of law and order.
“The Bible” as I discuss it in this book refers to the Christian Bible in its various forms, but not to the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, which I refer to as “Jewish Scriptures” (I also use this name for other translations, including Greek versions of the Septuagint). Jewish Scriptures have a very different literary and cultural history, from which Christians have much to learn. Even the idea of the Jewish “Bible” is a fairly recent development in the history of Judaism, in many ways responding to the growing centrality of the Christian Bible within Protestant culture. See esp. Abigail Gillman’s forthcoming history of the German Jewish Bible from the late eighteenth century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
A “cultural icon” is not the same as an icon per se. An icon is a particular material thing; a cultural icon is not. It does not, indeed cannot, have a particular visual or material form. It is, rather, an immaterial, amorphous, inarticulate condensation of cultural meaning and value, a symbol whose outline is vague, impossible to pin down to a particular image or thing. The image of the closed black leather book, for example, is a common one for the cultural icon of the Bible, but the Bible’s cultural iconicity is not inextricably tied to that image. It could be brown or red, zippered or clasped, indexed or plain, open or closed, and so on. Indeed, this visual-material vagueness is essential to a cultural icon’s power. It gives it a flexibility that allows more people to identify with it; it allows it to stretch farther before breaking. Therefore, I mean to distinguish between particular biblical icons, whose iconicities are tied to their particular material forms and are created and maintained by particular rituals, and what I am calling the cultural icon of the Bible. To be sure, many particular iconic Bibles help create and maintain the Bible’s cultural iconicity. Think, for example, of a monument to the Ten Commandments in a courthouse, or the Bible used at the swearing-in ceremony of Presidents Lincoln and Obama. Yet the Bible as a cultural icon cannot be reduced to any one of them.
My understanding of the Bible as a cultural icon, as distinct from the particular images of particular iconic Bibles, such as the Gutenberg Bible or Lincoln’s Bible, may be helpfully unpacked in dialogue with the excellent discussion by Dorina Miller Parmenter, “The Iconic Book: The Image of the Bible in Early Christian Rituals,” Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds 2, nos. 2–3 (2006), 160–89, which I discovered late in the writing of this book. Parmenter focuses on particular biblical icons, which she defines as visible material objects that mediate a transcendent reality. Their iconicity depends, moreover, on particular ritual performances that imbue and maintain their mediatory role between the material and spiritual realms (see also James W. Watts, “The Three Dimensions of Scriptures,” Postscripts 2, nos. 2–3 [2006],
135–59, which argues for three interrelated dimensions of Scriptures in particular cultural contexts: the semantic, the performative, and the iconic).
John W. Nevin, “Early Christianity,” Mercersburg Review 3, no. 6 (November 1851), 549. This passage is Nevin’s summary of the emerging consensus view of what he calls the “Puritanic Bible” movement, which was claiming to go back to earliest Christianity’s reliance on Scriptures. His argument, very like mine, was that the movement’s image of early Christianity is not historically accurate. It was a myth of an ideal, pristine origin.
Constitution and address “To the People of the United States” by the American Bible Society, May 8, 1816, courtesy of the American Bible Society archives.
My abbreviated history of the rise of the icon of the Bible vis-à-vis the Bible missionary movement and fundamentalism is especially indebted to Peter J. Wosh, Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), and Peter J. Thuesen, In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel, trans. A. Sutherland Black and Allen Menzies (Edinburgh: Allen and Charles Black, 1885), first published in German in 1878. William Robertson Smith popularized Wellhausen’s work among English readers through his article “Israel” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. A minister in the Free Church of Scotland, Smith, like Rev. Charles Briggs, was tried for heresy and accused of publishing “opinions which are in themselves of a dangerous and unsettling tendency in their bearing on the doctrines” of the church with regard to Scripture. See W. Robertson Smith, Additional Answer to the Libel with Some Account of the Evidence That Parts of the Pentateuchal Law Are Later Than the Time of Moses (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1878).
On the importance of small-group Bible study to the rise of American fundamentalism, see George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), which shows how the fundamentalist movement and its dispensational theology “did not develop in seminaries but in Bible conferences, Bible schools, and, perhaps most importantly, on the personal level of small Bible-study groups where the prophetic truths could be made plain” (pp. 61–62). See also the subsequent note on recent anthropological studies of evangelical Bible-study groups by Malley and Bielo (chapter 2).
My treatment of the rise of the parachurch evangelical movement and its consumerist orientation is especially indebted to Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
In his foreword to Harold Lindsell’s Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1976), Harold Ockenga, who was the first president of Fuller Theological Seminary, claimed to have coined the term “neo-evangelicalism” in a 1948 convocation address: “While reaffirming the theological view of fundamentalism, this address repudiated its ecclesiology and its social theory. The ringing call for a repudiation of separatism and the summons to social involvement received a hearty response from many Evangelicals.”
The Way: The Living Bible Illustrated (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1972). Sales data courtesy of Tyndale House Publishers. Tyndale House Foundation is a nonprofit organization created to support missionary efforts. All royalties for The Living Bible (over 41 million copies sold) and Tyndale’s more recent New Living Translation (over 15 million sold to date) have been donated to the foundation. In fact, Tyndale donates all royalties for all its Bibles.
On the evangelical Christian culture industry, see esp. Daniel Radosh’s insightful, thoughtful, and subtly sympathetic Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture (New York: Scribner, 2008).
Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1935), first published in Great Britain in 1927.
Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 19.
2. The Greatest Story Ever Sold
The NPR story is Barbara Bradley Hagerty, “Understanding the Gospel According to Huckabee,” February 8, 2008, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=l882l02l.
On declining biblical literacy, see research by the Barna Group (www.barna.org); the Bible Literacy Project (http://bibleliteracy.org); the Gallup Poll (www.gallup.com); and George Gallup Jr., The Role of the Bible in American Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). See also Gary M. Burge, “The Greatest Story Never Read: Recovering Biblical Literacy in the Church,” Christianity Today, August 9, 1999; David Gibson, “America’s Favorite Unopened Text: The Bible Is the Least-Read Best-Seller of All Time,” www.beliefnet.com/story/57/story_5746_I.html; and Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn’t (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007). Congressman Westmoreland appeared on The Colbert Report on June 14, 2006; the interview is available at www.colbertnation.com.
The Baylor University study is The Baylor Religion Survey (Waco, TX: Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion, 2005).
National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, June 2004 (www.nea.gov/pub/ReadingatRisk.pdf). The report is based on the literature segment of the Census Bureau’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (2002), which surveyed over seventeen thousand adults about literary reading over the previous twelve months. The decline in general literacy may not be quite so dramatic as this report suggests. Note that 9.2 percent of people reported that they used the Internet to learn about, read, or discuss novels, poetry, or plays. In much of the report, use of the Internet is associated with use of TV music, and video games, over literary reading. Also note the growing popularity in recent years of narrative nonfiction, memoirs, and histories that most would consider literary but that don’t fit into the survey’s categories of novels, poetry, and plays.
As noted, Bible sales data are closely guarded by publishers. The figure of $770 million for 2007 was first published in Stephanie Simon, “Selling the Good Book by Its Cover,” Los Angeles Times, December 25, 2007, and was derived from calculations by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA) in collaboration with a major Bible publisher. I presume that the number is based on that company’s sales data for 2007 and the ECPA’s estimate of its share of total Bible sales for the year. So, for example, if this company sold $231 million in Bibles and had 30 percent of the market, the total for that year would calculate to $770 million. The final numbers are accepted by the ECPA, which does its own extensive market research on Bible publishing. The report of $609 million in sales for 2005 was an estimate made by Zondervan in Cindy Crosby, “Not Your Mother’s Bible,” Publishers Weekly, October 30, 2006. The estimate for 2008 of $823.5 million is from the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), as reported in Sarah Skidmore, “Bible Publishers Go Niche in Hopes of Gaining Readers,” USA Today, October 7, 2008. Note that the BISG estimate for 2007 was $795.2 million, which is slightly higher than the ECPA estimate, but included sales of prayer books and hymnals as well as Bibles.
The larger publishing industry has not kept pace with the Bible business. Although general book sales continue to grow, there are signs of slowing. From 2002 to 2006, the Association of American Publishers estimated a compound growth rate in book sales of 2.4 percent, whereas it estimated an annual rate of 4.7 percent in the period from 1997 to 2004. This more recent estimate, moreover, includes dramatic growth in the area of electronic books. When nontraditional book formats (e-books, standardized test manuals, etc.) are removed, growth appears even more modest.
The Nelson sale is reported in “Thomas Nelson Board Votes to Take Company Private,” press release, February 21, 2006 (www.thomasnelson.com). Before its buyout, Thomas Nelson was a publicly traded Standard & Poor’s Small-Cap 600 company whose net revenues had grown every year for twenty-five years. At the time of the buyo
ut, its stock value was fifty-fold its original valuation. Nelson has been especially successful in creating and promoting its own proprietary translations of the Bible. These include the popular New Century Version (NCV) and the New King James Version (NKJV), which tries to retain some of the literary whiff of the King James Version of 1611. It has sold more than 25 million copies since its introduction in 1982. The NCV is used in most of Nelson’s more trendy Bibles.
Market share data on publishers is from ECPA research for 2005. Both Nelson and Zondervan claim slightly higher percentages than ECPA reported to me. Zondervan has held North American publishing rights to the New International Version (NIV) translation of the Bible since 1973. Created by the International Bible Society, the NIV is the most popular Bible translation since the King James Version. It has been published under nearly nine hundred different titles and has sold more than 215 million copies.
On religion and consumer culture, see esp. Vincent J. Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture (New York: Continuum, 2005).
Two recent anthropological studies of Bible-study groups are particularly helpful in revealing how such groups help shore up the iconic meaning of the Bible that I have been describing, even while they provide a space for negotiating and, at least temporarily, overcoming the sense of disconnection between that iconic idea and actual experiences of reading Bibles. Brian Malley, How the Bible Works: An Anthropological Study of Evangelical Biblicism (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004), argues that, among evangelicals, calling oneself a “literalist” is less about making a specific argument about the biblical text than it is about identifying with conservative evangelical Christianity over against “liberal” or “mainstream” forms. Thus, we might say, they are expressing adherence to a particular cultural iconicity of the Bible without necessarily working out a particular argument or position that supports it. James S. Bielo, Words upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Group Bible Study (New York: New York University Press, 2009), moves the discussion forward by exploring how presuppositions or “textual ideologies” about the Bible (e.g., as “literal Word of God” and practical guide to how one should conduct one’s life) are supported by particular “textual practices” in group Bible studies that discourage disagreement.
