1 of 9
After undergoing a relative eclipse as a cultural force in the decades following World War II, the Bible is making a comeback in American culture, though more as an academic movement than a grassroots phenomenon. Bill Moyers's pbs discussion group on Genesis became a media event. Time magazine was so bold as to speak of an "unmistakable Genesis revival in American culture."
We must not overstate the extent of the revival. There was a time when the Bible was the central text of English and American culture, permeating its civil institutions, law, morality, and artistic expression. By contrast, the current scholarly ferment about the Bible is a coterie phenomenon. It is not on the verge of making the Bible the pervasive presence in American society that it once was.
C. S. Lewis, musing on the likely fate of the Bible after a majority of people have ceased to accept it as an inspired religious book, predicted that it would continue as a force in two spheres—in the specialist's study and among the believing minority who read it to be instructed. My focus in this article is on what is happening in the scholarly forum, with spillover effect at the local secular bookstore (though not at the community Christian bookstore). The chief importance of what is happening will be its eventual impact (or lack of it) on how the Bible is viewed by the segment of society that in the past has obeyed and believed the Bible as a sacred book.
The renewed prominence of the Bible in the academy has been mainly a literary phenomenon. Literary approaches to the Bible have become a fashion and even a fad among both literary critics and biblical scholars. The Bible is now part of the canon of works taught by professors in departments of English and comparative literature. Several years ago the president of the Modern Language Association claimed that all the needs of a core curriculum in literature could be accomplished through the teaching of just one text—the Bible.
Publishers include books on the Bible in their literature catalogs. Specimen book titles from scholarly presses include Literary Criticism and the Gospels; Reading the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory; The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory; and The Literary Guide to the Bible. In the initial exuberance of the Bible-as-literature movement in the early sixties, Northrop Frye advocated the view that "the Bible forms the lowest stratum in the teaching of literature. It should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything that comes along later can settle on it. … The Bible … should be the basis of literary training." While Frye's vision was never fully realized, in a modified sense it has been fulfilled.
The growth of interest in literary approaches to the Bible has been even more dramatic among biblical scholars. Book titles and subtitles tell the story: Matthew As Story; Irony in the Fourth Gospel; Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel; The Literary Genre of the Acts of the Apostles. Indeed, literary terms are often smuggled into book titles where their presence seems gratuitous: Call to Discipleship: A Literary Study of Mark's Gospel; The Christocentric Literary Structure of the Fourth Gospel; Revelation in the Fourth Gospel: Narrative Mode and Theological Claim. Even more telling than all of this are the blurbs that publishers put into their catalogs and on book covers. It is no exaggeration to say that publishers are falling over themselves to claim a stake in the brave new world of literary approaches to the Bible. Several presses now have Bible-as-literature series (e.g., Indiana University and Westminster John Knox), and Sheffield Press in England has made a virtual industry out of literary studies of the Old Testament.
share this page
RSS Feed
