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In his book Knowing Christianity (Harold Shaw, 1995), J.I. Packer reminds us that "Calvin regularly referred to the Bible as 'the oracles of God,' a scriptural phrase in Romans 3:2, which the NIV renders as 'the very words of God.' Calvin took it and used it again and again to express the thought that what we have in Scripture is God's own witness to his work of salvation."
Later Packer quotes John Wesley:
I am a creature of a day hovering over the great gulf; till … I drop into an unchangeable eternity! I want to know one thing, the way to heaven. … God himself has … written it down in a great book. O give me that book! At any price, give me the book of God!
We have the book—many of us have it in multiple versions, Bibles upstairs and downstairs—and the promise of the Spirit to guide our reading. And what then? Do we read with passion and discernment, as members of the body, the Church? Do we use the book as a weapon? Do we chew it and swallow it so that the words of the Word become part of our very being?
A "section" on the Bible is hardly sufficient, but it may be enough to prompt to such questions, and more.
In 1925, the Jewish philosopher-theologian Franz Rosenzweig, whose physical ability to write was severely limited by Lou Gehrig's disease, published a memorable indictment of the debilities of written language and the limitations of the Bible as a printed text. In every Bible-reading culture, he believed, a point inevitably comes when the book becomes an end rather than a means: "The book no longer serves the word. It becomes the word's ruler and hindrance; it becomes Holy Scripture." In German society, that sacrosanct volume was the Luther Bible, a book whose glorification belied Luther's own vision of continually updated translation. Neither Rosenzweig nor Luther would have lamented the human progress wrought by the printing revolution, but both feared that the words of Scripture tended to lose their creative force when written rather than spoken. Indeed, as Heiko Oberman has argued, Luther regarded the written text of the Bible as a "necessary evil."1
In his fascinating new book, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777-1880, Paul C. Gutjahr invokes neither Rosenzweig nor Luther but takes their insight one step further by showing how Scripture is constrained not only by written language but by the very materiality of Bibles: their typography, format, marginalia, illustrations, bindings, and distribution. The upshot of all this for Protestants, he argues, is that there is no such thing as Sola Scriptura (Scripture alone): God's word never reaches readers in pure, unmediated form. In a "postmodern" context, this insight may seem prosaic, but Gutjahr actually draws profound implications for all those who cherish Holy Writ. The nineteenth-century publishing practices that made the Bible the most diversely presented book of all time may in reality have contributed to its downfall as the preeminent text of American print culture.
Gutjahr, who is assistant professor of English and American Studies at Indiana University, has produced an engagingly written, thoroughly re searched, and historiographically innovative contribution to the surprisingly small body of works on the Bible's place in American culture. His book follows a handful of studies in the past decade, including Philip L. Barlow on the Bible in Mormonism, Colleen McDannell on the Bible in the Victorian home, Theophus H. Smith on the Bible in African American culture, Stephen J. Stein on biblical canons in American history, and Peter J. Wosh on the American Bible Society. Along with the older essay collection edited by Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll (1982), and the six-volume series edited by Edwin S. Gaustad and Walter Harrelson (1982-85), these newer monographs and articles are beginning to bring critical perspective where a host of mostly uncritical nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century works once celebrated the English Bible as the crowning glory of American (Protestant) civilization.2
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